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Glycation is not a marketing invention: it is textbook chemistry. The sugars in your blood attach themselves to your proteins without any enzyme telling them to, and that bond, when it stays, changes the properties of the tissue. It is the same family of reactions that browns bread in the oven, only..

Rice is probably the only everyday food for which EU law sets six different limits for the same contaminant, one per format: 0.15 mg/kg for white rice, 0.25 for brown rice and rice flour, 0.30 for rice cakes and puffed rice, 0.10 for rice destined for infant food and 0.030 for rice drinks. When a re..

Coenzyme Q10 is one of the supplements that brings the most questions into the shop, and it is almost always the same one: «I was told that if I take a statin I need to take CoQ10». It is a reasonable question, because there is a real mechanism behind it: statins lower the Q10 circulating in the blo..

On our shelves there are thirty vitamin C products to swallow and two cosmetics with vitamin C in the name, out of the 396 in personal care. That is fifteen to one. If vitamin C were mainly a skin matter, the shelf would be the other way round, because the clinical evidence in skin is almost entirel..

The question that comes up at the counter is not whether pulses are healthy. Everyone knows that already. The question is how many you should eat and how much a serving actually is, because there is an awkward gap between what the authorities recommend and what people really buy: AESAN, the Spanish ..

If you have ever looked at the cholesterol shelf in a health shop, you will have seen red yeast rice bottles labelled “2.9 mg of monacolin K”. That odd figure is not a manufacturer's decision: it is the ceiling the law allows. And the law has gone further. In July 2024 the European Commission withdr..

Collagen is by far the supplement we get asked about most at the counter of our Barcelona shops, and the question almost always starts the same way: “does this actually do anything?”. The honest answer does not fit into a yes or a no. There are clinical trials that measure improvements, there are me..

Every October the same thing happens: the brush brings back more hair than it did in July, someone mentions it in the queue at the shop, and a week later there is a pot of biotin in the basket. The awkward part is that the number printed on that pot — 5,000 or 10,000 micrograms — has nothing to do w..

Spain gets through 3.03 kg of chocolate and cocoa per person per year, around 8 grams a day on average, according to the 2024 food consumption report from the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. That happens to be close to the amount that appears in the European scientific opinion b..

Creatine has left the gym. In 2026 the press treats it as a general wellbeing supplement rather than a bodybuilding product, and the searches that reach a shop like ours no longer ask about sets and reps: they ask about memory, brain fog and the menopause. The problem is that European regulation has..

Oats have had the best press of any grain for ten years and are among the least eaten foods in Spain, which is where our three shops are, in Barcelona and Sant Cugat. The ANIBES study, run on the Spanish population, measured an average intake of 0.6 grams per person per day, because only 3.3 % of pe..

Since 2019 not a year has gone by without a food safety agency ruling on turmeric supplements. Italy made a warning on the label compulsory, the French agency set a maximum dose, the UK toxicity committee published a dedicated assessment, Canada imposed mandatory warning text and, in April 2026, th..