Wondering what to cook for dinner? In our classroom we have a section with recipes for you to try! Let us know what you think! Do you have some go-to recipes? Comment some of your favorites below :)

Eating nutritious food is only half the equation; how you prepare it determines how much your body actually absorbs. Fat-soluble nutrients, including vitamins A, D, E, and K, along with carotenoids like lutein, beta-carotene, and lycopene, require dietary fat to be absorbed, and without it, a meaningful portion of these compounds passes through the digestive system largely unused. A 2025 study from the University of Missouri, published in Food Nutrition, found that raw kale alone produced very low carotenoid absorption, and cooking it slightly further reduced bioavailability. The significant increase came when researchers added an oil-based sauce, and crucially, it didn't matter whether the oil was present before or after cooking. The presence of fat was the critical variable, not the timing. Supporting research from Iowa State, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found a roughly dose-dependent relationship, with two tablespoons of oil producing meaningfully greater absorption than smaller amounts. In my kitchen, I cook vegetables on medium or low heat with extra-virgin olive oil and use avocado oil, ghee, or tallow for higher-heat applications. All of these fats appear to support the absorption of fat-soluble nutrients. Sautéing greens, roasting vegetables with a drizzle of oil, or using an olive oil-based salad dressing are all effective approaches. The principle is simple, and it's one of the easiest ways to get more nutritional value out of the meals you're already making.

Lion’s mane is one of the most popular functional mushrooms among health-conscious consumers and researchers alike. With its long history of use in traditional medicine, this edible fungus holds an impressive record of supporting health and wellness, not only as an herbal remedy but also as a medicinal food. Today, decades of research back its documented health benefits. Packed with nutrients essential to the human diet, lion’s mane mushrooms’ nutrient density rivals that of many celebrated nutritional powerhouses. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) states that functional mushrooms like lion’s mane can be used as a substitute for vegetables at a 1:1 ratio. This, combined with its high concentrations of health-supporting phytonutrients, makes lion’s mane an indispensable ally in anyone’s wellness journey. 1. provides a wide array of essential nutrients 2. abundant source of potent antioxidants 3. contains health-supporting bioactive polysaccharides 4. supports gut microbial balance 5. helps uplift mood naturally 6. primary sources of hericenones and erinacines which are molecules that protect brain cells

Stevia comes from the leaves of Stevia rebaudiana, a plant native to South America. Its leaves are packed with compounds called steviol glycosides — the most abundant being rebaudioside A and stevioside — which are about 200–300 times sweeter than table sugar. The stevia you’ll find in foods and drinks today isn’t the same form as the crushed leaves people used for centuries to sweeten tea. The FDA only allows the use of high-purity stevia extracts containing 95% or more steviol glycosides, compounds that don’t raise blood sugar, provide calories, or have the same metabolic and hormonal impacts as sugar. So why the scrutiny? For starters, when stevia hit the U.S. market in 2008, it followed decades of backlash against artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose and got inaccurately lumped into the same category. How Is Stevia Metabolized in the Body? Stevia moves through your body like a widget on a factory line: - Your small intestine passes it to your colon - In the colon, workers (your gut bacteria) break it down into parts.  - Then it rolls down the conveyor belt to your liver, which repackages it into a harmless form — steviol glucuronide— and ships it off to your kidneys.  - They prep it for delivery and send it out to be excreted in urine, no scraps left behind. Here’s how that process works in a bit more detail. 1. Digestion and absorption The chemical structure of steviol glycosides includes a steviol backbone with sugar molecules that your digestive enzymes can’t break apart.

If you've been avoiding the gym because you think you need to lift heavy weights to build muscle, new research in The Journal of Physiology has liberating news. When researchers had participants perform resistance training with either heavy loads (70-80% of their one-rep max) or light loads (30-40% of their one-rep max) for 10 weeks, they found identical muscle growth in both groups, provided that both groups trained to failure. The study tracked multiple measures of hypertrophy, from whole-body lean mass to individual muscle fiber size, and consistently found no advantage to lifting heavier weights. Even more interesting, the hypertrophic response was relatively conserved within individuals regardless of which load they used, suggesting your inherent biology matters more than the specific weight on the bar. This debunks the persistent myth that you must lift heavy to gain significant muscle. The keys are: lift loads you can tolerate, train close to failure, accumulate volume over time, progress consistently, and stop obsessing over finding the "optimal load." For many people, lighter weights mean lower injury risk and better exercise adherence, which ultimately matters more than any theoretical advantage of heavier loading. Pick weights that allow you to train hard, safely, and consistently.