Nutrition & Health Magazine
Tryptophan keeps popping up in your social media feed right now, sometimes as an insider tip for poor sleep, sometimes as the explanation for feeling tired after Christmas dinner. But what actually is tryptophan? Tryptophan is an essential amino acid, meaning a protein building block from your food that your body can't make itself. Among other things, it is turned into serotonin, a messenger substance in the nervous system, and later into melatonin, which signals evening to your body. In this blog post, we show you which foods give you a tryptophan-rich diet and how to make sure some of it actually reaches your brain.
Sometimes it's just hard to concentrate: your head feels heavy, your thoughts wander, and everything around you suddenly seems to bother you. Then the question quickly comes up whether a nutrient might be missing, and whether a vitamin or mineral can really change anything about it.
Which vitamins really count for concentration and memory is officially regulated in the EU. B vitamins, vitamin C, magnesium, zinc, iodine, and iron have an authorized role for the nerves, the mind, and cognitive performance. If you know which ones they are, you can decide much more calmly whether anything needs to be supplemented at all.
In this article, you'll learn which vitamins officially count for concentration and memory, how to get them through a vegan diet, and when a supplement makes sense at all.
Nutrition during menopause is one of the few levers you have in your own hands when your weight, sleep and energy suddenly feel different. It's about a few targeted changes to your protein, your bone nutrients and your dinner, with no diet and without giving up everything that tastes good.
Weight gain during menopause is partly down to hormones: when estrogen drops, your jeans get tighter around the belly even though you eat and move the same as always. It feels unfair, but it is easy to explain, and there is quite a lot you can do yourself.
Many women report that their weight changes during menopause. Not all of them, but it can genuinely happen, and when it does, you quickly start wondering what you are doing wrong. The honest answer: often nothing. It is rather a completely normal hormonal shift in the body. In this blog post you will learn how it comes about and what you can do about it.
You're standing in front of two supplement bottles in the morning, magnesium in one hand, zinc in the other, and you wonder: Can I just swallow them together, or do they block each other? The short answer: Yes, you can take magnesium and zinc together; at the usual supplement amounts this is unproblematic. More important than the perfect timing is that you stick with it at all.
The fact is that the two minerals perform different tasks in the body. Magnesium is involved in muscles and nerves, whereas zinc keeps your immune system going. Only for a few other combinations is it worth spacing them out over time, and those are exactly the ones we take a closer look at in this blog post.
Sound familiar? Eight hours of sleep, the alarm goes off, and your head still feels like it's wrapped in cotton wool? Most of the time, this isn't about how much you slept, but about how undisturbed your deep sleep and REM sleep actually were during that time.
Constant tiredness despite plenty of sleep is an everyday issue that hardly anyone talks about openly, because it feels like you're making a fuss. Yet behind it there are often very concrete, well-studied mechanisms, from afternoon caffeine and screen light in the evening to undetected nutrient deficiencies.
In this article, I'll take you through the most common causes, show you what sleep medicine and nutrition science say about them, and what you can change as early as tonight, before a supplement even comes into question.
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