Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Diet Essentials for Healthy Living [The Knowledge Project Ep. #191]

Shane Parrish: I think the best place to start is to give people practical frameworks for approaching topics that we come across every day. Why don’t we start with a practical framework for approaching nutrition and decisions about the food that we consume?

Rhonda Patrick: I kind of have my own framework for approaching nutrition. I did my postdoc training in nutrition and in specifically looking at micronutrients. These are about 40 or so essential vitamins and minerals, fatty acids, and amino acids that we have to get from our diet. Those are in a variety of foods, and different foods have different levels and quantities of them. And these micronutrients are running our metabolism. They’re running everything—our neurotransmitters that we’re producing, so our cognition—just absolutely everything that is going on in our bodies.