Entries by Chet Zelasko

What About Fiber?

Here’s one more thing you might want to add to your smoothie: fiber. In this case, it depends on the type of fiber more than anything else. Let me illustrate. My grandson Riley and I have something we call “soup” almost every night. It has two kinds of fiber as well as a probiotic mixed […]

Should You Put Probiotics in Your Smoothie?

Continuing with smoothies and shakes, another popular ingredient most people want to add are probiotics, either from yogurt or a supplement. Would there be any issue with adding probiotics to smoothies? No, as far as I could find. It’s the same idea as with the digestive enzymes: the probiotic will start to do its job, […]

What Do You Want to Know?

I’m back from a weekend in Louisville where I talked to many, many people about their nutrition questions. One of the great advantages of these trips is that I know which nutrition questions are most important to people right now. So let’s talk about shakes. I prefer chewing my food. I’ve tried shakes and smoothies, […]

Are Heart Meds Forever?

The prevailing thought on pharmacological treatment of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is that once you’re on a class of medications, you’re on them for life—new meds may be developed to replace some, but treatment continues forever. That contributes to the conspiracies about big pharma and the greed of the medical community. I’m not going to say […]

A Little Good News

On January 2, 2023, the Buffalo Bills were playing the Cincinnati Bengals on Monday night football. A Bengal caught a pass, was tackled and fell into one of the Bills, Damar Hamlin, hitting him in the chest as he fell. Both players got up, and then Hamlin fell down again. What we didn’t know for […]

The FFQ: Still Too Vague

I spent a long time examining validation and reliability studies on the Food Frequency Questionnaires (FFQ). It was interesting to compare the original validation studies with a new FFQ that was published in early 2024; researchers asked subjects in those studies that began decades ago to participate in this recent validation study. The Stats I […]

The Problem with the Food Frequency Questionnaire

I’ve made no secret that I don’t like Food Frequency Questionnaires. (FFQ). I understand why they are used; when a study may contain 500, 5,000, or 500,000 subjects, to do a dietary recall of the prior 24 hours, using a dietician to help determine portion sizes, would be close to impossible or very difficult at […]

Is Red Meat Linked to Type 2 Diabetes?

The next study actually precedes the heme iron paper, not only in time but in size—with close to 2 million subjects! This was an attempt to check on whether red meat, chicken, or processed red meat, such as bacon and sausage, are associated with type 2 diabetes. This was a Herculean task that would never […]

Iron from Meat and Type 2 Diabetes

The abstract begins simply enough: “Dietary Haem iron intake is linked to an increased risk of Type 2 Diabetes.” Haem iron is another word for heme iron, iron sourced from animal meat. But let’s get back to the statement. The first question that pops into my mind is this: how did they measure iron intake […]

Nutrition Research: Incomplete

In July and August, I wrote about recently published studies on multivitamins and mortality and fish oil and atrial fibrillation. My criticism of those observational studies was because the analyses of the data were incomplete, in my opinion. Here’s how the study we just finished on quercetin and irritable bowel did the correct analysis. Researchers […]