Health

"How much olive oil per day" is one of those questions that sounds like common sense and that almost nobody answers with a number. The striking part is that the number exists, it sits in a European regulation and no brand invented it: 20 grams a day. It is not a dietary recommendation. It is the am..

Every autumn it goes the same way. The light changes, the holidays end, the first week of rain arrives and half the country wakes up with no battery. We have a name for the feeling — autumn fatigue — and a name for the fix too: a bottle. This season the most searched-for bottle is iron, because iron..

The bottle says «supports digestion» and contains twelve enzymes with names ending in -ase. The intuition is flawless: if digestion is hard work, adding enzymes should help. The problem is that digestion almost never fails for lack of enzymes, and a good part of this market rests on that intuition r..

Every October the sacks of chestnuts come back to the market stalls, and with them the same question: if it's a nut, does it pile on the calories like a handful of walnuts? The short answer is no, and the reason has nothing to do with calories: it's that a chestnut contains almost no fat. A hundred ..

On the shelf there are bottles with 5 billion bacteria and bottles with 100 billion. The second one costs considerably more, the number on the lid is twenty times bigger and almost everyone draws the same conclusion: that it must be twenty times better. It is the only large, easily comparable figure..

Cortisol has become the culprit for everything: the belly, the puffy face, the five o'clock slump and the broken nights. And with the culprit came the remedy: ashwagandha, the ayurvedic root that now takes up half a shelf of supplements in any shop in Europe and turns up in almost every wellness vid..

September is when the walnut harvest starts here in Catalonia, and the same question comes back across the counter: how many should you eat a day. The answer has something rare in nutrition going for it — there is an official number. In 2012 the European Union authorised a health claim for walnuts, ..

Every September the same thing happens. School starts again, the office air conditioning comes back on, and the "immunity" shelf fills up with tubs of zinc and vitamin C. This year the question arrived earlier than usual, because the health press has spent days comparing the two nutrients as though ..

On the chilled shelf, two jars of cabbage look like the same product. One holds millions of live bacteria; the other, none at all. The front of the label does not say so — the small print does, and the difference between them is exactly why anyone buys sauerkraut in the first place. This article is..

It is the question we get asked most at the counter this past year: how much protein do I need a day? Right behind it comes the second one, which already has its answer built in: which tub should I take? The official European figure, the one used as a reference for the whole adult population, is low..

Pick up a bottle of omega 3 and read the front: "1,000 mg". Turn it around and find the small print: "EPA 180 mg, DHA 120 mg". Both numbers are true, but only one of them matters, and it isn't the one on the lid. That gap explains why two bottles that look identical can cost the same and give you th..

In September, sleep goes off track. The holidays end, the usual schedule returns, it gets dark earlier and the body takes a few days to reset its clock. It is the time of year when most people buy melatonin, and also when most people buy it badly: the 10-milligram bottle, taken at any old time, in t..