👉This week, we’re talking about: the role that manganese plays in bone and joint health; ground ginger as an easy way to meet your manganese daily requirements; the best way to store carrots when you buy them in bulk (and how to revive them if they go limp in your fridge); a fun study that showed that giving veggie dishes a taste-focused name increases how much of it we eat; and I’m sharing my recipe Carrot Ginger Turmeric Soup!
Key Takeaways
✅ Manganese is a cofactor for enzymes involved in cartilage and collagen formation, which is why it’s important for bone and joint health.
✅ Carrots can keep for several months when stored in a plastic bag in a crisper drawer in the fridge.
✅ A fun science-backed way to enjoy your veggies: give them a snazzy name!
✅ For paid subscribers, your companion downloads this week are: Top 10 Manganese Foods Fridge List and Carrot Ginger Turmeric Soup. Check your inbox; they’ll be arriving in a separate email (or if you use the Substack app, they’ll be in their own post).
Manganese for Bone and Joint Health
🧬Manganese plays a particularly vital role in skeletal health and wound healing, due to serving as a cofactor for enzymes involved in cartilage and collagen formation. Though evidence and studies are lacking, getting enough of this nutrient may help protect against osteoporosis, and osteoarthritis. Manganese is one of those interesting minerals where both too little and too much can be problematic: while a deficiency can cause skeletal abnormalities, impaired growth, and alterations in carbohydrate tolerance and metabolism, too much can be toxic to the nervous system (although it takes extremely high exposures to get there!).
Some research has linked manganese with osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease. A 1999 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover trial tested the effects of a combination of glucosamine HCl, chondroitin sulfate, and manganese ascorbate in patients with osteoarthritis of the knee or low back. The results showed that this mixture significantly improved knee osteoarthritis symptoms. Another 2000 randomized placebo-controlled study of patients with osteoarthritis of the knee found similar results with a supplemental mixture of three compounds.
More research is needed to test the independent effects of manganese on osteoarthritis!
Want to know the top 25 best food sources of manganese? Learn them here.
Get 75% DV Manganese with Ground Ginger
🫚Ginger is very useful for treating nausea and other gastrointestinal symptoms, thanks to a unique polyphenol group called gingerols. Plus, a tablespoon of ground ginger offers 75% the daily value of manganese!
Ginger is particularly delicious when used with other aromatics such as garlic in many different dishes like stir fry, winter soups, and paired with other warm spices like cinnamon, allspice, and cloves in seasonal baking recipes (like in the recipe below!). And of course, you can enjoy ginger pickled, candied, or as a warming tea!
Ground ginger is the 188th most nutrient-dense food! Learn the Top 500 Nutrivore Foods here.
Carrot Ginger Turmeric Soup Recipe
🍲Soup season is finally here! This recipe is not only nutrilicious, but is filled with the comforting flavors of the fall harvest. Gather sweet carrots, fresh ginger and turmeric, all the warming spices, and a hearty chicken broth to craft this aromatic and warming soup for your heart and body. This recipe lends itself well to variations; you can amp up the autumnal vibes of this soup by subbing some of the carrots for sweet potatoes or butternut squash, and this soup also works well with a can of cannellini or Great Northern beans blended in, too. My favorite way to enjoy this soup is to serve with crusty bread and fresh mint.
Add this recipe to your meal plan this week with Real Plans, the official Nutrivore meal planning app!
Nutrivore Mindset Corner
🧠If you’re struggling to eat more veggies, try changing the language you use to describe your veggie dishes—instead of thinking about the health benefits, focus on the flavor!
One of my favorite studies (this one) looked at how looked how taste-focused labels compared with health-focused labels influenced how much vegetables college cafeteria diners ate at five university dining halls throughout the United States. Taste-focused labels (e.g., “Herb n’ Honey Balsamic Glazed Turnips,” “Sizzlin’ Szechuan Green Beans with Toasted Garlic”) were designed to elevate diners’ expectations of a positive taste experience with vegetable dishes. Health-focused labels (e.g., “Healthy Choice Turnips,” “Nutritious Green Beans”) were constructed using words that communicated nutritional qualities and health benefits of vegetables matching how restaurants and promotional programs describe their healthiest foods. And of course, they also compared basic, non-descriptive labels (like simply “Turnips,” or “Green Beans”) as a control.
Across 137,842 diner decisions, 185 days, and 24 vegetable types, taste-focused labels increased vegetable selection by 29% compared with health-focused labels and by 14% compared with basic labels. Yes, that means that focusing on the health benefits decreased how much students served themselves compared to a basic description. Oof.
But here’s the even cooler finding from this study: expecting a positive taste experience increased how much vegetables students served themselves and it also increased how much they ate! Diners served themselves more vegetables when they were presented with taste-focused labels versus health-focused labels, and there was no difference in how much vegetables they left unfinished on their plates. So, they ate 39% more vegetables, which translated to 1.78 kilograms more vegetables per day when they were given taste-focused labels compared to when they were given health-focused labels.
Yes, a secondary finding of this study was that we eat more vegetables when they are prepared in ways that we enjoy the flavor! I mean, I don’t think that’s very surprising, but it’s super cool that scientific studies back up the logical deduction that we’ll eat more vegetables if we like how they taste!
Learn everything you need to know about the Nutrivore philosophy in my book, Nutrivore: Eat Any Food, Get Every Nutrient, and Transform Your Health!
Helpful Tip of the Week
💡Carrots are a great example of a budget-friendly vegetable that’s packed with nutrition, keeps for ages (so you can buy them in bulk), and is super versatile in the kitchen.
Carrots can keep up to a week when stored at room temperature, but can stay fresh for at least a month (and up to several months) if you store them in a sealed plastic bag or airtight container (add a damp paper towel to the container to add some humidity) in a crisper drawer in your fridge. If you buy carrots with the tops, cut off the greens when you get home and store them separately (yes, they’re edible and taste very similar to parsley).
If your carrots go a little limp on you (don’t worry, it’s perfectly normal), you can usually revive their crunch by soaking them in cold water for a few hours. Even if they don’t crisp up completely, they’re still safe to cook with or you could chop them up and freeze them for future casseroles and stews. They’re also safe to eat if the tops start to sprout, or they start growing stringy little roots during storage—so go ahead and grab that 5-pound bag!
This Week’s Companion Downloads
📥For paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:
Top 10 Manganese Foods Fridge List - This 1-pager PDF guide lists the top 10 common whole food sources of manganese, how much manganese you get per serving (and how much a serving is!), while highlighting a few other valuable nutrients each food provides.
Carrot Ginger Turmeric Soup Recipe - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.
Check your inbox for the Companion Downloads arriving in a separate email (or if you use the Substack app, they’ll be in their own post). You can also find them in the archive here. Thank you so much for supporting my work and Nutrivore!
Sincerely,
Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, PhD
Founder of Nutrivore