NaturPro Scientific

01/10/2026

For anyone wondering how the new Dietary Guidelines compare to the old, here’s a chart from Marion Nestle at FoodPolitics.com.

A cogent thing I missed in my earlier brief review - the new guidelines are a lot less quantitative than before.

Cups of fruits and vegetables turned to servings — yet fruits and vegetables don’t come labeled with serving sizes.

Is a serving 100 grams or a handful? It all depends, and no one really knows.

No limits on fat intake - which at 9 calories per gram can add up to, well, unwanted fat.

Had there been a Registered Dietitian on the expert panel, perhaps these oversights wouldn’t have been made.

(Shout out to all the RD’s who have to now parse through this, and then educate your patients with another change to the guidelines!)

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Article “The MAHA 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines have arrived: Cheerful, Muddled, Contradictory, Ideological, Retro”.

Link: https://lnkd.in/e8qm-3DE

01/01/2026

In 2025, scientists in Naples, Italy figured out how to boil the perfect egg.

Boiled eggs are a cooking problem, because they have two parts (white and yolk) which cook at different temperatures.

Hard-boiled eggs are overcooked, resulting in rubbery whites and chalky yolk.

Soft-boiled results in a perfect white, but undercooked yolk.

And sous vide? Nice yolk with undercooked white.

To address the problem, Di Lorenzo and colleagues used complex math, and then proved the optimal conditions in practice.

Periodic cooking — cycling between hot and warm water — allows both white and yolk to reach their ideal state.

Cooking time? 32 minutes.

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Most scientific debates today are framed like cooking arguments. Turn the heat up on one variable and look for fast results.

But real systems — food, health, biology — don’t optimize under a single variable, but under constraints and cycles dictated by nature.

And complex systems don’t yield to shortcuts. The breakthrough is made when learning not to rush the process.

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This work has a practical lesson for scrambled eggs and omelettes too.

Experienced cooks already know that there’s an extremely short window between raw and overcooked eggs.

So you have to pay attention, and take the pan off the burner as needed to prevent those overcooked, browned, sulfurous, crusty eggs.

(That is, unless you’re taking 32 minutes on the lowest heat. And who wants to wait that long?)

——

Good eggs, like good things, don’t come to those who wait.

They come to those who understand when to wait, and when to turn on the heat.

Ref: Di Lorenzo, E., Romano, F., Ciriaco, L. et al. Periodic cooking of eggs. Commun Eng 4, 5 (2025). https://lnkd.in/eAx3JF9V

Open Access: https://lnkd.in/e5rMxJCZ

01/01/2026

This year, I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn parsing a seemingly endless bamboozle on food, supplements, and health.

It wasn’t about specific ingredients, villains, or easy fixes, but about the same uncomfortable idea.

That is, most of our debates are framed in a way that hides important truth.

Like — we argue about “ultrafied” food processing while ignoring portion size.

We argue about human behavior while ignoring systems and their incentives.

And we argue about science and regulations while ignoring the underlying realities.

——

Throughout 2025, my posts explored things like:

🚩Why food systems can’t be understood without economics.

🚩What toxicology actually measures (and what it doesn’t).

🚩Why supplements are misunderstood.

🚩And how history helps us see today more clearly.

I wasn’t trying to defend an industry or attack one.

I was trying to restore context, and hopefully, some semblance of sanity for my friends in this, the craziest of times.

Because real progress doesn’t come from outrage — it comes from understanding systems well enough to change them.

—-

If anything, this year reinforced that the most valuable work right now is in understanding and communicating the complexity of our world without flattening it.

So thanks to everyone who read, challenged, disagreed thoughtfully, or shared the conversation.

Now, onward to 2026, with better questions.

And hopefully, better answers.

Because we’re all in the same boat.

12/31/2025

The Boston Tea Party wasn’t about tea, just like today’s turmeric extract tariffs aren’t about turmeric.

In 1773, colonists weren’t protesting a luxury beverage.

They were protesting a system where a distant authority used tax income to oppress its citizens.

(The revenue went to support the British troops).

Sound familiar?

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Whole turmeric (as spice) now escapes tariffs. But turmeric extract — the standardized, clinically proven capsules used for health — do not.

Turmeric extracts are not just dried, milled roots.

They are the result of extensive and capital-intensive infrastructure located overseas.

Just like tea in the 1700s, turmeric extract is embedded in daily consumer products, and cannot be produced domestically.

This means higher costs, compressed margins, quieter innovation, and higher prices for everyone in the chain.

To steady retail prices, we are likely to see more turmeric supplements that are less effective because they are under-dosed.

There’s no redcoats in my world. But lots of red faces.

——-

The colonists eventually threw tea into the harbor because tariffs had become a symbol of disenfranchisement.

Today’s tariffs are also disenfranchising, but there’s a couple key differences:

First, they are effectively taxing prevention and wellness.

Second, they make the most effective forms of turmeric (extracts) far more expensive than the least effective ones (straight powder).

The Boston Tea Party was the moment people realized that uneven government control of trade equates to control of our daily lives.

We’re having a moment too. The only difference is that now we’re talking capsules, not teacups.

12/30/2025

I don’t set long-term goals or keep track of accomplishments.

Except for end-of-year, when I see everyone else posting theirs.

According to my memory, here’s a few things NaturPro Scientific LLC completed this year…

🥳 Sixty-twelve safety and regulatory assessments (plus or minus. I lost count).

🤓 Co-authored the most comprehensive review paper on dietary heme iron to date with Douglas Kalman PhD RD and Susan Hewlings.

🔥 Contributed to seven clinical studies (including design, analysis, writing/editing and/or review on behalf of sponsors).

😳 Led responses to nine FDA actions (including warning letters, 483’s, recalls)

🫣 116 free consultations. Dozens of mortgages/pensions/marriages saved.

🌎 Started the Food-Planet Web podcast with Judy Kim and David H. Nelson — check it out! https://lnkd.in/e4ab8sUn

🤭 Cleaned my office twice. (new record).

😁 Joined a USDA grant stakeholder committee supporting economic development of a drought-resistant food and medicinal crop (more to come soon).

🤯 282 LinkedIn posts and 1.1 trillion comments and likes.

🤗 Started Fearless Naturals USA — the first virtual supplier for fully traceable natural ingredients.

⚾️ Coach-cheerleader for 17 Little League baseball games.

🙂 Spoke truth in the face of anti-science fascist fearmongerers.

🥹Partnered with more of my favorite experts. (You know who you are).

🤟Put the final touches on a handful of publications due out in 2026.

And the best of all…

🐕 Took Scooby on 308 trips to the dog park /woods.

Scooby says woof (thank you) for a great year!

12/25/2025

12/19/2025

No fun like snow fun.

12/16/2025

The sound of winter ❄️❄️❄️

12/15/2025

I thought a banana was loaded with chemicals.

That’s until I found the ingredient list for human breast milk.

If you saw this list on a label, you might think it’s never been anywhere near a human.

And if you go by how they’re pronounced— you might be ready to starve an infant.

Good thing we don’t have anyone silly enough to believe that these chemicals are a bad thing…

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HUMAN MILK INGREDIENT LIST: Water, lactose, triacylglycerols [oleic acid, palmitic acid, linoleic acid, alpha-linolenic acid, stearic acid, lauric acid, myristic acid], phospholipids [sphingomyelin, phosphatidylcholine], cholesterol, free fatty acids [docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), arachidonic acid (ARA)]),

Oligosaccharides (2′-fucosyllactose, lacto-N-tetraose, lacto-N-neotetraose, 3′-sialyllactose, 6′-sialyllactose, fucosylated and sialylated oligosaccharides),

Milk Proteins (α-lactalbumin, lactoferrin, secretory immunoglobulin A, serum albumin, lysozyme, β-casein),

Minerals (potassium, calcium, chloride, phosphorus, sodium, magnesium, iron, zinc, iodine, copper, selenium, manganese),

Free Amino Acids (glutamic acid, glutamine, taurine, alanine, glycine, serine, threonine, valine, leucine, isoleucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, tyrosine, tryptophan, cysteine, histidine),

Vitamins (vitamin A [retinol], vitamin D, vitamin E [α-tocopherol], vitamin K, vitamin C [ascorbic acid], thiamin [B1], riboflavin [B2], niacin [B3], pantothenic acid [B5], vitamin B6, folate [B9], vitamin B12),

Enzymes (bile salt–stimulated lipase, amylase, proteases),

Proprietary Blend (nucleotides, choline, phosphocholine, carnitine, inositol, polyamines),

Hormones & Growth Factor Blend (insulin, leptin, adiponectin, epidermal growth factor, insulin-like growth factor-1, transforming growth factor-β),

Cytokines & Immune Factor Blend (MicroRNAs, Living Cells (leukocytes, epithelial cells, stem-like cells)).

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12/13/2025

Peaceful to feral at a moment’s notice.

12/12/2025

If you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it…

(…is the most ridiculous piece of diet advice.)

Because then you’re telling me not to eat quinoa (KEEN-wah) or kohlrabi (kole-RAH-bee).

And forget about the leafy greens filled with chlorophyll (KLOR-uh-fill).

And my traditional cup of green tea with healthy Epigallocatechin gallate (eh-pee-GAL-oh-KAT-uh-kin).

By the way — is that orange melon pronounced cant-a-lope, or like it’s actually spelled — cant-a-lowp.

Or is it cant-a-loop? I just can’t tell.

Is the protein in milk pronounced “way”, “hway” or “wee”?

Not sure which whey this goes.

Good thing is, you can always ask Google. You can even toggle it to “Slow”.

Moral of the story…don’t take diet advice from anyone who reads on the level of a 5th grader and doesn’t know how to use Google.