SHR

Out of all the vitamins and minerals essential to life, vitamin E is probably the hardest to come by. At least 90% of Americans don’t meet the Estimated Average Requirement (EAR; 12 mg/day) set by the Institute of Medicine, which is estimated to meet the nutrient requirement half of the healthy population. Considering that nuts and seeds and their oils are the best naturally occurring dietary sources, this isn’t too surprising. Only 6% of the US population eats nuts, and only 38% of these individuals don’t meet the EAR for vitamin E. To be fair, the government recommendations don’t exactly make obtaining vitamin E easy. Dietary modeling has shown that a 2000 kcal diet must contain 11 servings of fruit and vegetables and 0.6 servings of nuts and seeds to meet the vitamin E requirements while still adhering to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Of course, very few individuals follow these...

One of the amazing gut-heathy benefits of bone broth is bestowed by the content of glycine. Bone broth contains around 20% glycine by weight. Awareness about getting more glycine in the diet is becoming a growing trend. Many people feel angst about using artificial sweeteners to replace sugar in their diet confused about their safety. Even the natural non-nutritive sweetener Stevia has been called into question recently. Glycine is also a very sweet amino acid. So much so that I used it in the sweetener blend in Thrīv Protein. Glycine is a great sweetener. It also counts as non-nutritive since it contains zero carbohydrates, sugars, fats or protein. And it’s an important amino acid to get more of in your diet. As a sweetener it’s very comparable to table sugar in taste, not s sweet, but similar. It also measures similar to toable sugar. 1 teaspoon in a cup of coffee...

Fertility is a big issue today. Environmental insults cause lots of problems with the entire reproductive system. Men suffer from oxidative damage to testes that alters spermatogenesis as well as testosterone production. In this study linked below, ginger (Zingiber officinale) has been shown to protect our little buddies from a significant oxidative assault. We use lots of ginger in our home. As a spice, tea, in salad dressings, Kombucha and protein shakes (don't laugh it tastes good). . As the study points out ginger is also a mild androgen receptor activator. I’m not totally sure how I feel about this though. What I’ve learned about phytoestrogens that’s probably true of phytoandrogens is that they selectively activate parts of the receptor mosaic while not having any effect on others. If it were a pharma drugs we would call ginger a Selective Androgen Receptor Modulator. Everyone’s all gaga about SARM’s but me, not...

Thrīv Advance provides 350 million colony forming units of Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacterium longum, per serving. But these aren’t just any bacteria, they are lactic acid bacteria. Lactic acid bacteria are a diverse group of microbes that feed on carbohydrates and produce lactic acid as the major end product. It is thanks to this group of organisms that we are able to enjoy the sour taste of yogurt, cheese, sauerkraut, and kimchi, to name a few commonly eaten fermented foods. More importantly, these bacteria are also some of the first to populate the infant gut, as they are present on the breast skin and in the breast milk of breastfeeding mothers. In fact, women’s breasts harbor a unique set of microbes – their own microbiome, if you will. Although most people immediately think of the gut when the microbiome is mentioned, there are numerous microbiome communities on and within the body....

No one likes being sick, especially when that sickness causes diarrhea, nausea, and bloating. It is thus unfortunate for the 58 healthy young adults participating in Bruggencate et al’s latest study, as they had to be infected with a live, but attenuated, enterotoxigenic E. coli bug that mimics food poisoning. The participants had to undergo infection after 4-weeks of supplementing with milk concentrate rich in milk fat globule membrane (MFGM) phospholipids or a sodium caseinate placebo. To blind the participants to the intervention, the supplement powders were provided alongside 250 mL of soy milk that was consumed twice per day (125 mL with breakfast and again with dinner). The participants also had to abstain from all dairy products and products containing probiotics. On the first day after infection, the participants experienced a significant increase in fecal wet weight and significant decrease in fecal dry weight, which is the confusing way of...