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Good morning. It’s Tuesday, October 21st.

In today’s email:

• Learn: The Real Superfoods 🥩🐟🌿

• Try: How to Eat to Be 100 🧠

• Cook: Luscious Liver Pate

• In the News: The Battle Over Saturated Fat

• Brain: Kyudoku

Stat of the Day

The number of compounds found in our food - it’s how all these nutrients, vitamins, and molecules come together that give us our health. That’s why taking a single multivitamin won’t have the same effect on our health. (NIH)

Learn

The Real Superfoods 🥩🐟🌿

How many franchises are out there touting their superfood açai bowl? Think eating that for breakfast is going to be what gets to you 100 and beyond?

Let’s take a minute to think about what the definition of a superfood should be.

Real superfoods come from a massive research study that looked at how many calories it takes to get one-third of our daily needs for six critical nutrients - Vitamin A, Folate, Vitamin B12, Calcium, Iron, and Zinc. These are the nutrients most of us are missing and the ones that actually impact how we age.

Here’s a quick summary of these nutrients and why we need them:

• Vitamin A: Keeps our heart, lungs, and vision strong.

• Folate: Powers DNA repair (super important!) and cell growth.

• Vitamin B12: Fuels our brain, mood, and hormones (like serotonin).

• Calcium: Builds bones, flexes muscles, keeps our heart in rhythm.

• Iron: Produces hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from our lungs to the rest of our body.

• Zinc: Supports over 100 enzymes for metabolism (energy), digestion, nerve function, and brain health.

Drum roll…what do we need to eat?

These aren’t powders or supplements - they are the foods that matter the most to give us the nutrients we need to power our health…

🥇 The most nutrient-dense foods per calorie:

• Liver & other organ meats (the undisputed kings of nutrition)

• Small fish (especially those eaten whole, like sardines or anchovies)

• Dark leafy greens (kale, spinach, bok choy)

• Bivalves & crustaceans (oysters, mussels, clams)

• Goat, beef, and eggs

• Dairy (especially cheese and milk)

This list probably isn’t that surprising - but it’s also not filled with a bunch of food you’re going to race out and buy at the store or order on your next dinner out.

But before you dismiss it - let’s look at the context of just how good these foods really are.

For example - we should eat carrots for Vitamin A, right?

Well a serving of carrots has 124 micrograms (mcg), but a serving of goat liver - 18,000 mcg of Vitamin A. Plus, plant-based Vitamin A is beta-carotene. We need to convert this into retinol - the active form of Vitamin A. And we typically convert 12 mcg of beta-carotene into 1 mcg of retinol.

Basically - you need to eat a TON of carrots (145 to be exact) for the same Vitamin A as one serving of liver.

How about bivalves? BTW, that’s not too appetizing a term - let’s go with Oyster Bar.

Check out the Oyster Bar next time out because oysters and mussels are the only foods to score significant nutrient scores for ALL SIX nutrients!

Foods vs. Vitamins

You might be thinking there’s got to be an easier way than eating these foods - I’ll just take some vitamins.

But adding a multivitamin or even eating foods artificially “fortified” with these nutrients doesn’t create the same effect.

The magic is in how all these 70,000 compounds and nutrients work together from a real food (see Stat). That’s where we improve our health. That’s the fuel we need to maximize our longevity.

Simply adding “folic acid” to some cereal or taking a Centrum isn’t going to do it.

Now you know what to do - but how can we actually do it? (like really do it - we’re not just going to eat goat liver with a side of mussels and spinach for dinner every night).

If you want to read more on the study - check it out HERE.

Try

How to Eat to be 100 🧠

We’re not here to recommend liver smoothies or adding mussels to every meal.

Instead - take just one of these categories and make it a focus for the rest of the year.

See how you do - then try another category in January. Even small shifts can have a huge impact on your health and before you know it you’re eating more of this list without even thinking about it.

Here are a few Thrive25 “superfood upgrades” to put the science to work:

🥩 Liver Upgrade
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald has a “luscious liver pâté” recipe that we’ve done in my house a few times and it’s not bad - even kinda good (see below).

But I also have this tip from the farmers who supply organ meats - buy the liver, freeze it and then when you’re making burgers or meatballs or whatever, use a cheese grater to grate 1-2 tablespoons of liver into the beef. You won’t even notice it’s there, but you get the benefits of eating liver.

🐟 Small Fish Upgrade
If sardines and anchovies aren’t your favorite - at least add smoked salmon on your avocado toast or in your omelet for breakfast and then baked salmon 1-3 nights a week for dinner.

🌿 Green Upgrade
This seems harder than it really should be - but we gotta get 1–2 servings of greens per day. Our recommendation is to start with spinach in your smoothie or eggs in the morning, have some kale in your salad, and then bok choy in your stir-fry for dinner. Mix and match all the greens you like best.

🦪 Bivalve Bonus
Splurge on ordering oysters for your next date night. Whole Foods also sells them at a reasonable price to have at home. Or toss mussels into a few soups or curries this winter.

🥛 Dairy Done Right:
Choose grass-fed milk, cheese, or yogurt for a calcium + B12 boost.

Again, the goal isn’t to overhaul your diet overnight - just pick one upgrade to try for the rest of the year, then build from there.

Because the real “superfoods” for longevity aren’t found in the supplement aisle (or that chia bowl chain).

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Cook

Luscious Liver Pâté

Trust me - I get it. I didn’t want to try this the first time I read it in the book “Younger You” by Dr. Kara Fitzgerald either.

But honestly - it’s pretty decent on a piece of sourdough and not a bad way to get some liver in your diet.

The data is too strong to ignore that liver is good for us…so give it a go and let us know what you think!

H&L in the News

The Battle over Saturated Fat: The cholesterol we eat isn’t a problem, but the science around saturated fat isn’t so clear. Studies suggest that if we have high Apo B, then saturated fat might be a problem. But the media headlines (and the government) are only making it more confusing. (WSJ)

Late Night Tweets = Bad Mental Health: I’m not sure we needed a study to confirm this for us, but posting on X between 11pm and 5am is bad for our health. Seems pretty obvious, but the data proves it’s true. (The Independent)

A Fertility Game-Changer?: The government is negotiating to get IVF costs down significantly. With more couples struggling with reproductive health, this is something that could open up the opportunity for more families. (ABC News)

Brain Games

Kyudoku

This one is a 4/5 on the difficulty scale, so block a few minutes for this puzzle!

Kyudoku is a 6x6 grid where you need to use logic to find nine unique numbers (1 to 9) so that each row and column has a sum of 9 or less. The 9 highlighted in yellow is given.

Here’s a little help to get started. Because we know 9 is given, we can’t use 9 again (gray boxes) and we can also eliminate any numbers that would make the sum of the row or column with the given 1 more than 9 (blue boxes). Again, this is a little tougher - good luck!

Credit: Brainzilla

** For answer, scroll to the bottom of the email

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Brain Games Answer

We’re 40-something dads that felt our bodies and minds start to slow down and we’re not ready for that. We found too much information on every subject. So we started Thrive25 to transform what we’ve learned into something useful for the rest of us to spend just 5 min a day to optimize our health & longevity.

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To health!