Here’s a full day of meals that comes in at around 1,600 calories and 130g of protein, with a mix of sweet and savoury options, plenty of variety, and meals that actually feel like something you’d want to eat.

A quick note before we get into it: the calories and macros are based on the brands I have chosen to use in each recipe, these numbers can vary depending on the specific brands and quantities you use. I’ve included the details below so you can easily recreate the day for yourself.

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Breakfast — Smoked Salmon & Cottage Cheese Toast

• 2 slices Burgen High Protein Sunflower & Linseed Bread

• 100g Bulla High Protein Cottage Cheese

• 50g Tassal Smoked Salmon

• 25g sliced pickled red onion

• Fresh dill

Method:

1. Toast the slices of high-protein bread until golden and crisp.

2. Spread the cottage cheese evenly over both slices of toast.

3. Top with the smoked salmon and sliced pickled red onion.

4. Finish with fresh dill and serve immediately.

425 calories | 40g protein | 24g carbs | 18g fat

Lunch — Beef & Pumpkin Bowl

• 125g extra lean beef mince

• 200g pumpkin

• 5ml extra virgin olive oil

• 5g Mexican/taco seasoning

• 50ml water

• 50g protein cottage cheese

• 50g avocado

• 10ml hot chilli honey

• Garlic powder, smoked paprika, salt & pepper

• Fresh coriander & lime

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C.

2. Cut the pumpkin into small cubes and place on a lined baking tray. Season with salt, pepper and smoked paprika, then roast for 20–25 minutes, or until tender and lightly caramelised.

3. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a pan over medium-high heat.

4. Add the beef mince and cook until browned, breaking it up as it cooks.

5. Add the Mexican/taco seasoning and water, then stir to combine. Cook for another 2–3 minutes, or until the liquid has reduced.

6. Add the cooked pumpkin to a bowl and top with the seasoned beef.

7. Add the cottage cheese and avocado.

8. Drizzle over the hot chilli honey and finish with fresh coriander and a squeeze of lime.

449 calories | 41g protein | 33g carbs | 16g fat

Dinner — Moroccan Lamb Pizza

• 1 high-protein pizza base

• 125g lamb mince

• 20g Birch & Waite Greek Yoghurt Dressing

• 5g MasterFoods Moroccan Seasoning

• 10g Leggo’s Tomato Paste

• Fresh coriander

Method:

1. Preheat the oven according to the instructions on your pizza base.

2. Heat a non-stick pan over medium-high heat and add the lamb mince.

3. Cook for 5–7 minutes, breaking the mince apart as it cooks, until browned and cooked through.

4. Add the Moroccan seasoning and stir well to coat the lamb.

5. Spread the tomato paste evenly over the pizza base.

6. Top with the cooked Moroccan lamb.

7. Place the pizza in the oven and cook according to the base instructions, until the base is crisp and golden.

8. Remove from the oven, drizzle over the Greek yoghurt dressing and finish with fresh coriander.

540 calories | 42g protein | 46g carbs | 24g fat

Snack — Dark Chocolate Pecan Energy Slice

1 slice from a batch of 12

• Pecans

• Chia seeds

• Ground flaxseed

• Shredded coconut

• Natural nut butter

• Coconut oil

• Medjool dates

• Cacao

• Dark chocolate

193 calories | 4g protein | 16g carbs | 14g fat

Daily Total

1,606 calories

127g protein | 122g carbs | 74g fat

Enjoy x

YES You can eat a burger 🍔, a pizza 🍕 and chocolate 🍫 in the same day and still stay on track. That’s today’s full day of eating. Every meal tastes like the real thing while stacking up the protein.

The whole day lands around 1,780 calories and 148g of protein. High-protein McMuffins for breakfast, a burger bowl with chips for lunch, a 60g protein pizza for dinner, and a chocolate peanut butter stuffed date to finish.

One note before you start. This is my day, built for my goals. On higher calories? Add a second snack or bigger portions. Want it lower? Skip the snack or split that pizza like I did. Adjust it to suit you.

🍳 Breakfast - High Protein Chicken & Egg White McMuffins

The perfect meal prep breakfast for busy mornings. High in protein, freezer-friendly, and ready in minutes.

Makes: 4 McMuffins

Ingredients

• 400g liquid egg whites

• 1 x 219g Mt Barker Roast Chicken Breast, sliced

• 4 wholemeal English muffins

• 4 slices Dairyworks Natural Cheddar Cheese

• Olive oil spray

• 20g of spinach

Method

1. Lightly spray a baking dish or fry pan with olive oil spray.

2. Cook the egg whites until set, then cut into 4 equal portions (or bake them in a lined baking dish at 180°C for 15–20 minutes before slicing).

3. Toast the wholemeal English muffins.

4. Layer each muffin with: 1 portion of egg whites, roast chicken, 1 slice of cheddar cheese, and spinach.

5. Grill or air fry for 2–3 minutes until the cheese has melted.

6. Enjoy immediately, or wrap individually and store in the fridge for up to 4 days or freeze for up to 2 months. Reheat in the microwave or air fryer.

Macros (per McMuffin):

345 cal

36.3g protein

29.9g carbs

10.9g fat

💡 Batch these on a Sunday and you’ve got breakfast sorted for half the week.

🍔 Lunch - Deconstructed Burger Bowl

All the flavour of a burger and chips, none of the food coma. This one’s a weekly staple in my house.

Serves: 4 (all raw weights)

Ingredients

Beef

• 500g beef mince

• 100g brown onion, finely diced

• 3g garlic, minced

• 2g onion powder

• 2g garlic powder

• 2g paprika

• 2g salt

• 2g black pepper

Chips

• 1000g Carisma potatoes (250g per serve)

• 3g salt

• 2g black pepper

Burger sauce

• 180g low-fat Greek yoghurt (e.g. Chobani Fit)

• 30g tomato sauce (e.g. Mingle Better Tangy Tomato Sauce)

• 5g Dijon mustard

• 2g onion powder

• 2g garlic powder

• 15g pickle juice

• 1g salt

• 1g black pepper

For the bowls

• 240g iceberg lettuce, shredded

• 150g cherry tomatoes, halved

• 80g sliced pickles

• 100g shredded tasty cheese

Method

1. Wash the potatoes and cut them into chip shapes. Place them in a bowl, season with the salt and pepper and toss well so everything is evenly coated.

2. Place the chips into the air fryer basket in a single layer and cook at 200°C for 15–18 minutes, shaking the basket halfway through.

3. Heat a large non-stick frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the diced onion and cook for about 2–3 minutes until softened.

4. Add the minced garlic and cook for about 30 seconds until fragrant.

5. Add the beef mince and break it up with a spatula. Cook for 6–8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until browned and fully cooked.

6. Season the beef with onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, salt and pepper. Stir well so the spices coat the mince evenly and cook for another minute.

7. In a small bowl combine the burger sauce ingredients. Mix until smooth and creamy, then season with salt and pepper to taste.

8. Divide the shredded iceberg lettuce between four bowls. Top each bowl with the cooked beef mince, cherry tomatoes, pickles and shredded tasty cheese.

9. Drizzle the burger sauce over the top and serve with the crispy air-fried chips (or add the chips directly into the bowl if you prefer).

Macros (per serve):

550 cal

48g protein

50g carbs

21g fat

💡 The burger sauce is the hero here — double the batch and keep it in the fridge for the week.

🍕 Dinner - 60g Protein Pizza… yes please

A crispy, cheesy pizza with a whopping 60g of protein in the whole thing. This one always feels like a treat.

Serves: 1 · Prep: 10 min · Cook: 25–30 min

Ingredients

Base

• 200g Bulla Cottage Cheese

• 60g Caputo 00 Flour

• 2 eggs

Toppings

• 10g Mutti Tomato Paste

• 20g Organic Milk Co. Melt & Bake Shredded Cheese

• 25g Prosciutto

• 25g Meredith Dairy Whipped Goat’s Cheese

• 10g Rocket

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 200°C and line a baking tray with baking paper.

2. In a bowl, combine the cottage cheese, flour and eggs until a smooth batter forms.

3. Pour the mixture onto the baking paper and spread it into a thin, round pizza base (around 25–28cm in diameter).

4. Bake for 20–25 minutes, or until the base is golden and firm.

5. Remove from the oven and spread over the tomato paste. Sprinkle with the shredded cheese.

6. Return to the oven for 5 minutes, or until the cheese has melted.

7. Finish by topping with the prosciutto, rocket, and dollops of whipped goat’s cheese.

8. Slice and enjoy immediately.

Macros (per pizza):

701 cal

59.4g protein

59.8g carbs

25.8g fat

💡 This is a generous serve — I’ve shared half with my sister-in-law before and we were both stuffed! Reduce the serving to bring the calories down if you’re on lower macros.

🍫 Snack - Chocolate Peanut Butter Stuffed Dates

The perfect little something sweet to round out the day — and a weekly make in my household.

Makes: 8 · Serving size: 1 stuffed date

Ingredients

• 8 Medjool dates (pitted)

• 80g peanut butter (about 1 tbsp per date)

• 100g dark chocolate (70% cocoa recommended)

• Salt

Method

1. Slice each date lengthwise (if not already pitted) and remove the pit.

2. Fill each date with about 10g of peanut butter. Gently press closed.

3. Break the dark chocolate into pieces and melt in a heatproof bowl over simmering water (double boiler method) or microwave in 20–30 second bursts, stirring between each, until smooth.

4. Dip each stuffed date into the melted chocolate, ensuring it is fully coated. Use a fork to lift out and let excess chocolate drip off. Top with a little salt.

5. Place coated dates on a lined tray and refrigerate overnight, or until the chocolate is firm.

Macros (per stuffed date):

185 cal

4g protein

20g carbs

11g fat

💡 Make a batch on Sunday and you’ve got a grab-and-go treat all week.

That’s a wrap

A full day of eating that hits 1,780 cal / 148g protein / 160g carbs / 69g fat, with a burger bowl, a pizza AND chocolate along the way. Eating for your goals is never about eating less food, it’s about eating smart food.

If you give any of these a go this week, I’d love to hear how you found them — reply and let me know! 💛

Isabella x

The Observation

She had her phone propped against her water bottle, front camera on, pressing two fingers along her jaw. Puffy, she decided. She showed me the video that had taught her the word. A woman with excellent lighting, tilting her chin, explaining that the softness under her own jaw was “cortisol face,” and that cortisol was the reason none of us could sleep past 4am or lose the last three kilos or stop feeling like a phone at eight percent battery.

She was trying to decide whether to quit coffee and replace it with matcha. She'd even ordered one of those at-home saliva tests, you know, the "spit in a tube" kind to check her cortisol levels. Then she turned to me and, half-jokingly, asked, "Do you think my cortisol is high?" The way she said it was almost as casual as asking whether the milk had gone off.

I run a online coaching company, so I’ve seen this fear before. This one was different, because it wasn’t a fear of a food or a workout. It was a fear of her own body chemistry, a hormone recast as an intruder, and she’d started rearranging her mornings to fight it before anyone had told her whether it was doing anything wrong.

The Question

Is cortisol something to be afraid of, and could this lady even find out what hers was doing?

I Thought I Had the Answer

Of course cortisol is the problem. It’s the stress hormone. Modern life floods you with it, it’s why you’re tired and puffy and wired at midnight, and the job is to get it down by whatever means possible. That’s the version I walked in with, and it took about one afternoon of reading to take it apart.

Because the endocrinologists don’t talk about cortisol like a toxin. They talk about it like plumbing you can’t live without. “Without cortisol, we would die,” is how one of them put it. And that single sentence made me realise the panic and I had been asking the wrong question the whole time.

The Statistic I Couldn’t Ignore

Close to 800 million views.

That’s the reach of the hashtag #cortisoldetox, counted by UC Davis psychology professor Cam Hostinar for a July 2026 trade report. Eight hundred million views for a detox aimed at a hormone that, when it does go wrong at the high end, produces a disease so uncommon that most GPs will see only a handful of real cases in a career.

I kept turning that mismatch over. A fear at the scale of a small country, aimed at a disorder that medical testing rarely confirms. The video that taught my client the word came with a filter and a checkout link. The disease it was borrowing its symptoms from was sitting in an endocrinology textbook, rare, serious, and almost entirely absent from the comment section.

Where This Actually Started

The scariest image in this whole trend was borrowed from a real illness.

A full, rounded “moon face” is a textbook sign of Cushing syndrome, a condition caused by prolonged pathological cortisol excess. The most common cause is long-term corticosteroid medication. A puffy face after a late night, a salty dinner, or poor sleep isn’t the same thing and it isn’t evidence of Cushing’s syndrome.

Then, in July 2024, that clinical sign got a makeover. Women’s Wear Daily named “cortisol face” a beauty trend, and the algorithm did what it does with anything that makes you distrust the mirror. An image once associated with a serious endocrine disorder was flattened into a cosmetic flaw you could fail on the morning commute. Every puffy selfie became a symptom, and every symptom pointed, helpfully, towards a purchase.

My 6am friend wasn’t being silly. She was standing exactly where a very large machine had decided to put her.

Follow the Money

Fear this specific needs three things to keep spinning, and each one sells the next.

It needs a symptom you can see, which the “cortisol face” trend supplied. It needs a product to fix it, and the adaptogen shelf was ready: that category sat around 11.1 billion US dollars globally in 2024 by one market estimate, and it runs on selling you calm by the jar. And it needs proof you’re a valid customer, which is where the at-home cortisol test walked in, a little tube you spit into so a number can confirm the fear the video planted.

That last one is the clever part, because the test manufactures its own demand. You take it because you’re worried, it returns a figure with no context, the figure looks alarming because you don’t know what normal even is at that hour, and now you need the tonic. One endocrinologist told TIME it’s “very easy to go down a rabbit hole with home cortisol testing,” and I laughed, because that is exactly the shape of the machine. Worry sells the test, the test sells the worry, and somewhere a supplement brand sends a thank-you card. I’ll show you what those tests can and can’t tell you behind the wall.

Where the Science Gets Messy

I want to steelman both sides here, because the truth is annoyingly in the middle.

The worriers are not wrong that cortisol can go bad. Chronic, grinding stress is real, and one neuroendocrinologist put the honest version cleanly: cortisol itself isn’t the villain, but chronic dysregulation of it can be. And at the extreme ends there are two genuine diseases that matter enormously. Too much over a long time is Cushing’s. Too little is Addison’s, and an Addisonian crisis can kill you in an afternoon. These are not TikTok inventions. They are the reason “just check your cortisol” isn’t a stupid instinct.

The dismissers have a point too. A puffy face after a bad week of sleep and salt is not Cushing’s, which develops over months, and a single high reading on a stressful morning is close to meaningless. The dietitian Annamaria Acquaviva gave me the line I keep coming back to: cortisol is “more like a fire alarm than a fire itself.” You don’t rip the alarm off the wall because it went off during cooking.

And then there’s the thing sitting between the two camps, the one the internet loves most: “adrenal fatigue,” the idea that everyday stress has left your glands limping. The same TIME experts are blunt that it “is not recognised by endocrine societies and lacks scientific validation.” So the honest map has real disease at both far edges, ordinary stress in the vast middle, and a popular diagnosis in between them that medicine doesn’t recognise. Panic and total dismissal are both wrong, which is the least shareable conclusion imaginable.

What Changed My Mind

I stopped asking whether my cortisol was high, because I realised I had no way to know and no reason to assume it. I started asking two colder questions instead. Would I even know if something were wrong, and what would tell me, as opposed to a spit tube and a fright?

That flipped the whole thing. There is a real list of symptoms that should send you to a GP, and it looks nothing like “my jaw looks soft today.” There is a real way doctors measure this hormone, and it’s built entirely around the one fact the trend ignores: cortisol runs on a daily clock, so the time of the test matters more than the number. And there are a handful of free, unglamorous levers that move your cortisol rhythm more than anything you can pour into a glass.

I put all of it in order. What’s worth worrying about, what’s worth ignoring, how it’s tested, and when a symptom stops being a bad week and becomes a doctor’s appointment.

The next part is where all the value is…

Below this line is the part that could matter for your health, not your shopping.

You’ll get the simple guide to how cortisol is measured and why the tube you spit in at 7pm tells you close to nothing, the red-flag symptom checklist that separates high cortisol from low cortisol from an ordinary stressful month, the specific signs that mean book a GP and the ones that mean call 000, and the free daily levers that move the hormone more than any tonic.

Skip it, and here’s the risk in both directions. You spend money and worry chasing a “high cortisol” that a proper test would never confirm, or, worse, you wave away weight loss, deep fatigue and dizziness as “just stress” when those can be the quiet early signs of a condition that turns into an emergency. The panic gets one thing backwards: it makes you afraid of the common, harmless version and blind to the rare, serious one. Let me fix that.

Paid subscribers, this is the part I’d want my own family to read.

Read more

I’m a nutritionist and fat loss coach, and I’ve now worked with over 1,000 women. Different ages, different bodies, but nearly all of them walked in with the same story. They were eating like a bird and training like an athlete. Living on 1,200 calories, a black coffee and a fistful of almonds, terrified of carbs, and baffled as to why they were exhausted, starving by 3pm, and not losing a single kilo.

A few years of watching this taught me the same thing every time: under-eating isn’t a fat loss strategy, it’s a burnout one. You can’t build strength, protect your muscle or enjoy your life on scraps. And the second these women started eating more, everything changed. Their energy came back, the cravings settled, and the scale finally moved in the direction they’d been chasing for months.

So no lecture today. I’ll just show you. This is a real full day of eating: around 1,700 calories and 125g of protein and 25g of fibre. It keeps you full, fuels your training, and still leaves room for dessert, because a way of eating you dread is a way of eating you’ll quit.

Screenshot it. Steal it. Or use it as a template and swap in the foods you love. The whole day’s below and every Sunday I’ll be posting a new day as inspiration for the week ahead!

Pre-Breakfast

Manuka Honey

Manuka honey is rich in antioxidants with antibacterial properties that can support immunity, gut health, and soothe sore throats. I have this daily before coffee and breakfast!

Serves: 1

Ingredients

• 10g Manuka Health Manuka Honey

Nutrition

• Calories: 32 kcal

• Protein: 0g

• Carbohydrates: 8g

• Fat: 0g

Breakfast

Vanilla Protein Oats

Creamy and packed with protein, this is the perfect way to start your day.

Serves: 1

Ingredients

• 34g Uncle Tobys Oats

• 160g Paul’s Plus Protein Vanilla Yogurt

• 80ml Pure Harvest Organic Almond Milk

• 5ml Steeves Natural Canadian Maple Syrup

• ¼ tsp ground cinnamon

• Pinch of ground nutmeg

Method

1. Add the oats and almond milk to a microwave-safe bowl.

2. Microwave for 1–2 minutes, stirring halfway through until creamy.

3. Stir through the cinnamon and nutmeg.

4. Top with the vanilla protein yogurt.

5. Finish with a drizzle of maple syrup and enjoy warm.

Nutrition

• Calories: 313 kcal

• Protein: 21g

• Carbohydrates: 42g

• Fat: 5g

Lunch

Greek Inspired Chicken Wrap

Everything you love about a Greek salad wrapped up into one delicious, high protein lunch.

Serves: 1

Ingredients

• 1 high-protein wrap

• 120g grilled chicken breast, sliced

• 30g reduced-fat feta

• 50g cucumber, diced

• 80g tomato, diced

• Handful of baby spinach

• 20g red onion, finely sliced

• 1 tbsp tzatziki

• Lemon wedge

• Salt and pepper

Method

1. Warm the wrap for 20–30 seconds.

2. Spread the tzatziki evenly over the wrap.

3. Layer with the spinach, chicken, tomato, cucumber, red onion and feta.

4. Finish with a squeeze of fresh lemon and season to taste.

5. Roll tightly, slice in half and enjoy.

Nutrition

• Calories: 470 kcal

• Protein: 46g

• Carbohydrates: 28g

• Fat: 18g

Snack

Packed Yogurt Bowl

A refreshing afternoon snack packed with protein, fibre and antioxidants.

Serves: 1

Ingredients

• 100g Chobani Greek Yogurt

• 100g papaya, diced

• 100g blueberries

• 10g flaxseed meal

• 10g Mayver’s Peanut Butter

Method

1. Spoon the Greek yogurt into a bowl.

2. Top with the papaya and blueberries.

3. Sprinkle over the flaxseed meal.

4. Drizzle the peanut butter over the top.

5. Enjoy immediately.

Nutrition

• Calories: 313 kcal

• Protein: 18g

• Carbohydrates: 29g

• Fat: 14g

Dinner

You Can’t Go Wrong Chicken Thighs with Roasted Carrots

Serves: 5

A simple, nourishing family dinner that is packed with protein, full of flavour, and easy to prepare. This recipe is perfect for busy nights when you want a wholesome meal the whole family will enjoy.

Ingredients

• 900g skinless chicken thighs

• 1kg carrots, peeled and cut into batons

• 5 tsp olive oil

• 5 tsp garlic powder

• 5 tsp smoked paprika

• 5 tsp Italian herbs

• Salt and pepper, to taste

• Fresh parsley, to serve

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C.

2. Toss the carrots with half the olive oil, half the garlic powder, half the smoked paprika and a pinch of salt.

3. Spread the carrots onto a lined baking tray and roast for 35–40 minutes, turning halfway through until golden and tender.

4. Season the chicken thighs with the remaining olive oil, garlic powder, smoked paprika, Italian herbs, salt and pepper.

5. Add the chicken to a separate tray or the same tray as the carrots and roast for 25–30 minutes, or until golden and cooked through.

6. Garnish with fresh parsley and serve alongside the roasted carrots.

Nutrition per serve:

Calories: 525 kcal
Protein: 40g
Carbohydrates: 22g
Fat: 29g

Dessert

Bomberry’s

Serves: 1

Ingredients

• 30g Bomberries

Nutrition

• Calories: 114 kcal

• Protein: 1.4g

• Carbohydrates: 12.3g

• Fat: 6.7g

Daily Nutrition

Nutrients

Total Calories: 1,767

Protein: 126g

Carbohydrates: 140g

Fat: 73g

Bella’s Tip

Healthy eating doesn’t need to be complicated. Build each meal around a quality source of protein, fill your plate with colourful fruit and vegetables, and choose foods you genuinely enjoy. Consistency will always outperform perfection, and creating meals you look forward to is what makes healthy eating sustainable for life.

Collagen was everywhere.

Then greens powders.

Then AG1.

Now it’s creatine.

Except this time something feels different. The people asking me about it aren’t bodybuilders or twenty-year-old gym junkies. They’re teachers. Nurses. Mums. Women who exercise three times a week because they want to age well, not compete on stage.

Somewhere along the way, the supplement once reserved for “gym bros” became something everyone was talking about. I wanted to know whether that shift was backed by science or just really good marketing.

The Question

When did creatine stop being the stuff teenage boys hid at the bottom of their gym bags, and become a supplement everyone wanted?

I Thought I Had the Answer

The obvious story goes like this.

Creatine was always good for us. The science was always there. Women were told for decades that lifting would make them bulky and that anything from the supplement aisle was for men who grunt at mirrors, so they stayed away. Then the research finally reached them, the old myths fell over, and a whole generation of women caught up to what the gym-bro’s knew all along. A happy ending. Science wins, everyone gets stronger bones, roll credits.

I believed a version of this, but it wasn’t necessarily the whole story.

The Statistic I Couldn’t Ignore

Look at what the boom is built on. Muscle and bone were never the hook; those benefits are real, old, and frankly a bit boring, and no woman is reaching for a pastel jar to add a few kilos to her deadlift. The promise doing the selling is aimed higher up: sharper focus, steadier memory, a lift for the mental fog that rolls in around menopause. That is the line on the reels, and it is why the product keep turning up in my clients’ handbags.

So I went looking for the science behind that claim, and the first thing I found was a verdict against it. In November 2024, the European Food Safety Authority, the regulator that decides what a supplement is legally allowed to claim across the EU, reviewed the evidence on creatine and cognition and concluded that a cause-and-effect relationship “could not be established”.

Sit with the timing. The single biggest selling point behind the women’s creatine boom, the “it’s for your brain, your focus, your menopause fog” pitch that has half my clients reaching for a jar, was rejected by Europe’s food regulator in the very season it was being sold to them hardest. The science didn’t catch up to the trend. The trend sprinted off and left the science behind.

Where This Started

The turn didn’t begin in a lab. It began in 2022, in a pitch deck.

That year, a couple named Dan and Sienna McCormick started a company called Create Wellness. Their insight had nothing to do with new chemistry. Creatine monohydrate is the same molecule it has been since the 1990s, one of the cheapest and most-studied compounds in the entire supplement cabinet. The McCormicks noticed something else. Nobody had bothered to make it feel nice. Dan put it plainly: “We didn’t see any brands treating creatine like a hero product. It was always an add-on product.” So they made it the hero. They turned a flavourless white powder that dissolves badly in water into a chewable pastel gummy you could photograph.

Around the same time, the podcast machine handed them a headline. In February 2024 a small German study landed in the journal Scientific Reports. Researchers gave sleep-deprived people a single enormous dose of creatine and watched their memory scores climb about ten percent at three in the morning. It was an intriguing result. It was also fifteen people, tested once, on a dose I will come back to in a moment. That nuance did not survive contact with the internet. The finding got compressed, on podcast after podcast and reel after reel, into three words: creatine, for focus. The Instagram girl my clients quote back to me was standing on the shoulders of fifteen exhausted German volunteers, and she had no idea.

The pitch wrote itself from there. Muscle, for the women terrified of frailty. Bones, for the ones dreading osteoporosis. Mood and focus, for anyone in the fog of perimenopause. A single grey powder, rebranded as an answer to almost everything a woman over forty lies awake worrying about.

Follow the Money

The pastel jar starts to look expensive up close.

In March 2026, Create Wellness raised twenty million dollars in a single funding round led by Alliance Consumer Growth, bringing the total poured into the company to $27.3 million. One of its earlier backers was Unilever Ventures, the investment arm of the conglomerate behind Dove and Hellmann’s. Soap money and mayonnaise money, betting on gummies. When a company that sells you deodorant starts funding your supplement, the product being sold is not the molecule. It is the feeling around the molecule.

The molecule itself costs almost nothing. Plain creatine monohydrate works out to roughly five cents per daily dose. The gummies I see online run closer to forty-five cents a dose. That is a markup of nine or ten times, for the same compound, and often for a worse version of it.

Because in June 2025, an independent lab accredited to the ISO 17025 standard tested six of the best-selling creatine gummies on Amazon. Four of the six failed. One brand, sold under the cheerful name Happyummmm, contained 0.09 percent of a standard dose. To get the five grams on the label, you would need to eat roughly two thousand gummies. Two others, EcoWise and Vidabotan, contained no detectable creatine whatsoever. Not a trace. Between them, the four failing products had sold about fifty thousand units on Amazon in a single month. An earlier round of testing by the supplement maker NOW Foods had already found three gummy brands with no meaningful creatine at all, the active ingredient having degraded into a useless byproduct on the shelf.

So a portion of women paying a tenfold premium for the nice version were buying, in the most literal sense, expensive lollies.

The endorsements arrived to match the valuations. Thorne signed the Grammy winner Ciara to front a creatine campaign that ran through late 2025. MOSH, the protein bar brand co-founded by Maria Shriver and Patrick Schwarzenegger, started folding creatine into its bars in 2026. A boutique brand began selling it in a glass apothecary jar with dried blueberry stirred through, because nothing says clinical dosing like artisanal fruit. The gym-bag powder had become a lifestyle, and lifestyles carry a margin that molecules never could.

Where the Science Gets Messy

Now the part where I argue against myself, because the honest version of this has an inconvenient twist.

The boring powder is one of the best things in the entire supplement aisle. I need to say that clearly, because it would be easy to read everything above and conclude creatine is a con. It is not. The International Society of Sports Nutrition’s position stand, the closest thing this field has to a consensus document, calls creatine monohydrate the most effective supplement available for building strength and lean muscle, with high-intensity performance improving by ten to twenty percent. It has been used safely at up to thirty grams a day for five years. The old rumour that it wrecks your kidneys has been chased down and debunked so many times that repeating it now is a tell that someone hasn’t read past a 2004 forum post. For an ageing woman worried about losing muscle and bone, three to five grams a day of plain monohydrate is a rare thing in wellness: cheap, safe, and backed by decades of trials.

The trouble is the brain, which is exactly what the women’s marketing leans on hardest.

The problem is physical. Your muscles soak creatine up eagerly, raising their stores by around twenty percent. Your brain, protected by the blood-brain barrier and busy making its own creatine, barely lets the stuff in, with studies showing brain levels rising only three to ten percent even under heavy dosing. And that heavy dosing is the catch nobody mentions in the reels. Remember those fifteen sleep-deprived Germans? Their memory-boosting dose was 0.35 grams per kilo of bodyweight. For an average woman that is roughly twenty-five grams in one sitting, five times the amount in a daily gummy, an amount that would send most people sprinting for a bathroom. The dose that lit up the headlines is not the dose in the jar.

The mental-health claims are shakier still. A 2025 review pooling the depression trials found a benefit so small, and so dependent on low-quality studies, that the authors judged the true effect might be “trivial or null”.

The cognition claim, the one doing the heaviest lifting in the ads, has had a worse year than the marketing lets on. In late 2024 the European Food Safety Authority reviewed the evidence a manufacturer put forward and refused to let anyone claim creatine sharpens the mind, pointing out that even a flicker of an effect turned up only at twenty grams a day, four times the dose in your tub. Then the memory studies the reels love began to wobble. A 2026 commentary showed that when one of those research teams re-ran its own data with a stricter method, the memory benefit vanished in everyone except a single group. Even Darren Candow, a scientist who has spent his career studying creatine and has every reason to sell it, sided with the regulator: the research is “very small,” he said, and “it’s way too early to conclude that creatine improves cognition overall.” When the sport’s biggest believer is the one reaching for the brakes, you listen.

That single surviving group was older adults, and it fits everything else the science keeps pointing at. Creatine seems to help the brain most where its fuel is already low: in the elderly, in vegetarians who eat none of it, in the sleep-deprived. In one well-known 2003 trial, vegetarians given five grams a day for six weeks improved their working memory and their scores on an intelligence test, and later work found the same lift in vegetarians and none in the meat-eaters beside them. A 2026 review of older adults found most studies leaning the same hopeful way on memory and attention, then in the same breath called the evidence limited and asked for proper trials before anyone gets excited. So the fair reading is narrow. For a busy forty-year-old chasing focus, the case is thin. For her seventy-year-old mother worried about losing her memory, there is a real, cautious maybe. Both are a long way from the one thing everyone over fifty should be on.

What Changed My Mind

I went into this expecting to catch creatine out. I came out having caught out something else.

The scam, if there is one, is not the ingredient. The ingredient is excellent and costs about as much as a bag of rice. The sleight of hand is that the industry took the least glamorous, best-evidenced part of the picture, muscle and bone in ageing bodies, wrapped it in the most glamorous and least-proven part, the brain, and then charged a tenfold premium to deliver it in a format that sometimes contains none of it. The women I see buying into this are being sold a memory pill, but the real thing they need, and the thing that works, was sitting on a supermarket shelf the whole time for the price of a coffee.

That was the moment I stopped researching and started shopping. Because if the powder is the real deal and the pretty jar is the markup, then the only questions left are the practical ones: which Australian products are honest, which are candy, and how to get the thing that works for five cents a day instead of forty-five.

That is where this goes next.

Behind the paywall

I pulled every creatine product I could find on Australian shelves, from the Woolworths aisle to the direct-to-consumer gummy brands with the prettiest ads, and worked out the price per gram of actual creatine for each one. The results are not subtle. One supermarket option, currently sitting there unglamorously, costs less per dose than almost anything online. Two of the “women’s wellness” brands charge you a fortune for the identical molecule with a nicer label. And at least one heavily advertised format I would not let a client waste money on, no matter how good the packaging looks in a bathroom cabinet.

Below the paywall:

• Bella’s Verdict: the single product I’d put in my own trolley, and why.

• The best-buy per gram, ranked, with live Australian prices and direct links.

• The gummy question, settled: which ones are worth it, which are lollies, and the one testing result that decided it.

• The “women’s creatine” premium brands, decoded: what you’re paying for versus what’s in the jar.

• How to take it: the dose, the timing, the loading myth, and the one group who should bother.

• The Creapure trap: the branded-creatine claim to look for, and the popular brand that quietly dropped it.

• For the time-poor, the parents, and the perimenopausal: who this is worth it for, and who can skip it.

If you take creatine, or you’re about to be talked into it by an Instagram girl and a pastel jar, this is the part that saves you a few hundred dollars a year.

Read more

I ordered one, drank it, and then went looking for how much curcumin, the active compound in turmeric, was doing anything in my body. The answer was almost none of it. Curcumin is notoriously badly absorbed when you swallow it, which is a problem the drink on the specials board is not built to solve.

Once you notice one anti-inflammatory product, you start seeing all of them. Turmeric shots in the fridge by the register. Celery juice. Collagen sachets promising to calm your joints. A whole shelf of the supplement aisle, and a 59ml turmeric-and-ginger shot the size of a perfume sample, priced like one too.

Something had turned “inflammation” into a shopping category. I wanted to know whether the category was selling me anything real.

The Question

Is the anti-inflammatory diet worth doing, or is “anti-inflammatory” a wellness buzzword with nothing behind it?

Initially, I Thought I Had the Answer

The anti-inflammatory diet is a fad, move on.

Except that wasn’t the story at all.

The diet has a real paper trail. Dr Andrew Weil, an American doctor, built an “anti-inflammatory food pyramid” around twenty years ago and updated it for the first time in January 2026, two decades later. Look at what the pyramid recommends and it reads like a familiar shopping list: vegetables, olive oil, oily fish, whole grains, legumes, a little dark chocolate. Weil drew the whole thing from Mediterranean and Asian eating traditions that predate the word “inflammation” being on any menu.

That’s the twist I didn’t expect. The eating pattern is old, sensible, and well studied. The marketing is what’s new. Somewhere between the pyramid and the specials board, “anti-inflammatory” stopped describing a way of eating and started describing things you buy one at a time.

The obvious explanation is that food companies noticed the science and cashed in. Tidy story. Then I found the number that made me sit with it longer.

The Statistic I Couldn’t Ignore

In 2019, a group of scientists from 22 institutions, including UCLA, Harvard Medical School, Stanford and the NIH, published a perspective in Nature Medicine and pinned chronic inflammation to a figure I couldn’t wave away: inflammation-related diseases are the cause of 50 percent of all deaths worldwide.

Half. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, fatty liver, the slow ones that take most of us in the end, all share a thread of persistent, low-grade inflammation running underneath them.

Read that number in a cafe and the $7 latte suddenly looks less silly and more like a rational response to a real fear. If half of what kills people traces back to inflammation, of course a drink that promises to fight it sells. The fear is legitimate. The question is whether the drink does anything about it.

That’s the gap the whole industry lives inside. A frightening health problem on one side, and a scattering of supplements, shots and powders claiming to solve it on the other, with very little checking whether any of them reach the problem at all.

Where This Actually Started

The fear didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a real shift in how medicine thinks about disease.

For most of the last century, inflammation meant something you could see, a swollen ankle, a hot red cut, a fever. Sometime in the last two decades, researchers started describing a quieter version, a smouldering, body-wide, low-grade inflammation that you can’t feel and that seems to sit underneath ageing itself. They gave it names. “Inflammaging” is my favourite, an ugly word for the idea that getting older is partly an inflammatory process.

Then came a way to measure a sliver of it. C-reactive protein, or CRP, is a marker in your blood that rises when inflammation is present, and a simple blood test can read it. Doctors have used CRP for years. What changed is that the test escaped the clinic. You can now order your own inflammation panel online, prick your finger at your kitchen table, and get a number back that tells you almost nothing on its own and worries you all the same.

A measurable number is catnip for wellness marketing. Give people a metric they can move, and someone will sell them a product that promises to move it. Protein had grams on the front of the packet. Inflammation got CRP, “inflammaging,” and a fog of dietary advice, and the products followed the fog in.

Follow The Money

Turmeric earns its own paragraph, because it is the story of this entire category in one root.

Turmeric contains curcumin, which does have measurable anti-inflammatory activity in a test tube. The problem is your gut. Swallow curcumin and very little of it makes it into your bloodstream, which is exactly why that latte and most turmeric capsules are closer to decoration than medicine. The supplement industry knows this, and it came up with a fix: add piperine, the active compound in black pepper, which can increase curcumin’s bioavailability roughly twentyfold.

That fix is where the story turns dark. The US Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network, which tracks supplements that land people in hospital, reported ten cases of turmeric-associated liver injury, all since 2011 and six of them since 2017. One person died of acute liver failure. Several of the implicated products contained added piperine, the same absorption trick sold as a feature on the label. Dina Halegoua-DeMarzio, the hepatologist who led the case series, and her colleagues concluded that liver injury from turmeric “appears to be increasing,” and pointed at the black-pepper combination as a likely reason.

Sit with the shape of that. A spice that doesn’t absorb gets sold as a health product. To justify the health claim, the industry makes it absorb better. And the better it absorbs, the more it turns up in a small number of hospital cases. The flaw and the fix are the same molecule.

Keep the scale honest, though. These are rare reactions to concentrated, high-dose capsules, most of them spiked with black pepper to force absorption. The turmeric in your curry, or a spoon in a latte, is not the concern and has a long, safe history in cooking. This is a caution about supplements, not a reason to fear a spice.

This was never a supermarket takeover the way high protein was. You won’t find “anti-inflammatory” stamped across the cereal, the bread and the yoghurt. The claim lives in a narrow lane: the supplement shelf, a handful of turmeric-latte powders and wellness shots, and the cafe chalkboard. That lane is smaller, but it isn’t small. Around eight in ten Australians take some form of complementary medicine, and the Australian dietary supplements market was worth an estimated US$3.9 billion in 2025. A slice of that is people trying to buy their way out of an inflammatory process that a plate of food would handle more cheaply, and more safely.

Where The Science Gets Messy

So I went looking for the part where the diet falls apart, half-expecting the eating pattern to be as hollow as the latte.

It held up better than I wanted it to, and not in a vague way. The strongest single piece of evidence is a Spanish trial called PREDIMED, which fed more than 7,400 high-risk adults either a Mediterranean diet topped up with extra virgin olive oil, the same diet topped up with nuts, or a low-fat control diet, then followed them for years. The two Mediterranean groups had around 30 percent fewer heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular deaths than the low-fat group. That is a drug-sized result from a way of eating, and it is the largest trial of its kind ever run.

The heart is not the only place it shows up. In Melbourne, researchers ran a study called SMILES on adults with moderate to severe depression, giving one group support to shift onto a Mediterranean-style diet and the other group friendly social contact. After twelve weeks, about a third of the diet group had reached remission from their depression, compared with 8 percent of the control group. Food is not a replacement for treatment, and the trial was small, but watching a diet move a mental-health outcome at all reframed how deep this goes.

Then there are the joints. In people with rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune condition that runs on inflammation, Mediterranean-diet trials have reported less pain, better physical function, and drops in inflammatory markers like IL-6 and CRP. This is where you can watch the mechanism instead of inferring it, the same blood markers that define inflammation moving in the right direction on the plate.

There is even a plausible reason at the molecular level. Extra virgin olive oil contains a compound called oleocanthal, which blocks the same COX enzymes that ibuprofen blocks. A good glug of it carries a mild, ibuprofen-like anti-inflammatory action, which is part of why olive oil, and not just “healthy fat” in the abstract, keeps coming up.

One complication reframes the whole topic. Line up the foods that lower inflammation in these studies, vegetables, fruit, oily fish, olive oil, whole grains, legumes, nuts, next to the Mediterranean diet, and you are looking at close to the same list. Musculoskeletal Health Australia says it plainly: “whether you call it an anti-inflammatory diet, a Mediterranean diet or a DASH diet, it doesn’t really matter.”

That is the steelman and the deflation in one sentence. The anti-inflammatory diet works. It works because it is a rebranding of the most heavily evidenced way of eating we have. There is no secret anti-inflammatory food doing the heavy lifting, no root or berry or powder that carries the effect. The benefit lives in the whole pattern, eaten for years, and the pattern already had a name before the wellness industry gave it a shinier one.

That pulls the diet and the products it spawned in opposite directions. The pattern is broad, cheap, and boring. The products are narrow, expensive, and exciting, a single shot, a single capsule, a single latte, each promising to stand in for the whole plate. The plate works. Most of the stand-ins don’t.

What Changed My Mind

I stopped asking whether the anti-inflammatory diet works, because the trials answered that, and started asking a sharper question: what am I being sold when the word “anti-inflammatory” is on the label.

Almost every time, the answer was one of two things. Either a whole-food pattern I could build for the price of vegetables and tinned fish, or a product betting that I’ll pay a premium for one ingredient to do a job that only the whole pattern can do. Once I could tell those two apart in the aisle, the entire category got easier to read.

So the verdict comes down to the questions I get asked most, and I wanted to answer all of them properly: what the diet is and which foods build it, who has benefited and why, whether there’s a real downside nobody mentions, and how to do it as a way of living rather than a snack you buy on a bad day. I built two full days of eating around the answer.

Everything above explains why “anti-inflammatory” is on the specials board. Everything below is the education: exactly what the diet is and the foods that build it, who has benefited and the mechanism behind it, the downsides nobody prints on the label, the narrow lane where the marketing shows up, and two full days of eating the way the research supports.

Continue Reading as a Rabbit Hole Member

I’ve done the reading, checked the science against the marketing, and pulled it into the guide I wish someone had handed me before I ordered that latte.

Below:

✓ My honest review: Is the anti-inflammatory diet actually worth the hype?

✓ The complete anti-inflammatory food guide, what to eat more of and why.

✓ The exact supermarket shopping list I use (Woolworths, Coles, Aldi & Harris Farm).

✓ The common foods that may be driving inflammation without you realising.

✓ 2 full days of simple, balanced meal plans using everyday ingredients.

✓ 10 easy anti-inflammatory recipes that are high in protein, satisfying and full of flavour.

If you’ve ever paid extra for something with “anti-inflammatory” on the front, this is where you find out whether it was worth it.

Read more

I stood in that aisle longer than I’d like to admit, because once you notice one absurd protein product, you start seeing all of them. Protein bread. Protein water. Protein cereal. The list goes on.

Something had shifted, and it wasn’t the nutrient.

I assumed this was the next wellness trend. Collagen with better marketing.

I was wrong.

The Question

When did everything in the supermarket become high protein, and why did it happen all at once, across brands that have nothing to do with each other?

I Thought I Had the Answer

Protein got popular, companies followed the demand, end of story.

Except that wasn’t the story at all.

Protein has had moments before, but this time felt different. This time protein didn’t stay in gyms or supplement stores. It moved out, and ended up next to the pork buns in a freezer aisle.

One obvious explanation is Ozempic. Close to 500,000 Australians are now using GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy, with sales here rising nearly tenfold since 2020. Rapid weight loss carries a real risk of muscle loss, and that risk is enough to make protein feel urgent.

At the same time, protein for older adults is one of the nutrients under active reconsideration as NHMRC works through its first review of Australia’s Nutrient Reference Values since 2006, with researchers increasingly questioning whether the decades-old recommendation still holds up for an ageing population.

That felt like a tidy explanation: science shifted, doctors talked about protein more, food companies followed. Case closed.

Then I found one statistic that changed how I thought about all of it.

The Statistic I Couldn’t Ignore

In 2022, Cargill found that 54% of shoppers actively looked for high-protein labels. By 2025, that number was 68%.

Fourteen percentage points, in three years. People didn’t suddenly need more protein. They wanted it.

Most people have never read an official protein guideline and couldn’t tell you the recommended intake if you asked. Yet millions had decided protein mattered anyway.

That’s what changed the investigation for me. Supermarkets were responding to shoppers, not to government guidelines. Shoppers changed first. The shelves followed.

Standing there in that freezer aisle, that’s what made everything else make sense. Nobody bought a high-protein dumpling because they’d read a nutrition policy. They bought it because it made them feel like they were looking after themselves. Protein had stopped being a nutrient. It had become a signal. And once millions of shoppers started looking for that signal, companies had an enormous opportunity in front of them.

Where This Actually Started

That fourteen-point jump didn’t come from one place. It came from two things happening in the same feeds at the same time.

“What I eat in a day” videos, one of TikTok’s most reliable genres, had been leaning toward meticulous high-protein grocery hauls (lean meats, tofu, protein pasta, cottage cheese by the tub) for a couple of years before Ozempic became a household name. The algorithm, not taste, drove that lean. It rewards a specific kind of content, a measurable number, a visible transformation, a hook in the first three seconds, and protein happens to be well-suited to all three. It’s easy to quantify, and it makes a good before-and-after photo.

Then, in 2023, Ozempic exploded into those same feeds. #OzempicWeightLoss had racked up 170 million views on TikTok by February that year, and a diabetes drug turned into the biggest weight-loss story in a generation. It landed on an audience the algorithm had already spent years training to associate protein with discipline and looking after your body. From there, the two trends didn’t take turns, they fed each other: rapid weight loss raised the stakes on muscle loss, protein got a second, more clinical-sounding reason to matter, and the algorithm kept rewarding whichever video promised both.

Follow The Money

Bulla is about as unglamorous as Australian dairy gets, a family-run brand best known for ice cream and cream cheese. Its cottage cheese sales had been going backwards for years, until TikTok happened. Within months, Bulla was running its Colac factory round the clock and hiring extra cottage cheese makers to keep up, and CEO Allan Hood put the shift down to a single cause: the platform, not the science. Coles and Woolworths both reported empty cottage cheese shelves as demand outpaced supply, something that hadn’t happened to this product in years, if ever.

It hasn’t stopped. Earlier this year, a Japanese-style baked cheesecake recipe (Biscoff biscuits mixed into Greek yoghurt) went viral on TikTok, and Greek yoghurt vanished from Coles, Woolworths, and Aldi within weeks. Dr Fiona Willer, president of Dietitians Australia, called it two trends colliding: a viral recipe format meeting the broader “protein-maxxing” push, and said the shortage was “a social media phenomenon rather than one driven by science.”

This is real Australian production lines and real empty shelves at three different supermarket chains, all downstream of a recipe filmed in someone’s kitchen. It’s also the scale of the opportunity behind that demand: the Australian protein supplement market alone is now worth an estimated $540 million, and that’s before counting anything in the snack or dairy aisles.

That number is also why I wanted to know how many of my own regular purchases would survive a closer look. If companies could sell that much protein off the back of a label, I wanted to know exactly what that label was and wasn’t telling me about the products already in my trolley.

Where The Science Gets Messy

None of that, the empty shelves, the factory overtime, the half-billion-dollar market, tells you whether protein deserves the attention it’s getting. I went looking for the science next, half-expecting the whole thing to be hype.

It wasn’t. Protein deserves the hype it’s getting. The research on satiety, muscle maintenance, and healthy ageing is strong, and social media didn’t invent this conversation, scientists have been questioning whether the old recommendation (0.8g/kg) was enough for years. The food industry was selling us something we already value.

This was never about whether protein is good. It is. Not every product wearing a “high protein” badge deserves the health halo that comes with it though.

A protein yoghurt makes sense. A protein shake helps plenty of people. A protein bar is a fair convenience when life gets busy. Protein water, protein chips, and protein dumplings ask a different question. Adding protein doesn’t automatically make a food healthier.

The number on the front of the packet doesn’t tell you whether the product is high in calories, low in fibre, packed with ingredients you’ve never heard of, or getting much of its “protein” from collagen, which isn’t even a complete protein. Protein on a label isn’t measured directly either. It’s estimated from a nitrogen test, and a product can raise that number without improving its nutritional quality at all. CSIRO’s own protein research still points to whole foods as the benchmark, and Dietitians Australia says most of us get plenty from food, quality matters as much as quantity.

None of the actual food changed. Eggs, Greek yoghurt, and chicken are exactly what they always were. What changed sat on the label, not in the food.

That’s the question I carried into three supermarkets with a spreadsheet: which products on these shelves earn their label, and which ones are trading on it. One supermarket’s own home brand ended up beating products backed by sponsorship deals and gym influencers. I’ll get to which one.

What Changed My Mind

I stopped looking at protein. I started looking at what the word “protein” was asking me to believe.

Instead of asking “is this high in protein,” I started asking “would I still buy this if the word protein wasn’t printed on the front.” That turned out to be a better question.

Looking back at that aisle now, the dumplings weren’t lying, but they weren’t telling me everything either.

I ran that question against every product I could get my hands on afterward: yoghurt, bars, powders, drinks, ready meals, the lot. Some passed. Most didn’t, and the results changed what’s actually sitting in my trolley now.

Continue Reading as a Rabbit Hole Member

I ran every major yoghurt, bar, powder, drink, and other ‘high protein’ products sold at Coles, Woolworths, and Aldi against an independent scoring system, one that doesn’t let a brand pay for a better result. Most “high protein” products on the shelf haven’t been checked against anything except their own marketing. These have.

Below: the specific products that passed, the ones that didn’t, the supermarket home brand that beat every product with a sponsorship deal behind it, and my full Top 10 Protein Picks with the reasoning behind each one. If you’ve bought a “high protein” anything in the last month, this is where you find out whether it was worth it.

Read more

When I started this Substack, I thought I was creating a nutrition newsletter.

But the more I’ve written, the more I’ve realised that’s not actually what Rabbit Hole is.

There are already thousands of people explaining protein, calories, supplements etc.

The internet doesn’t need another person telling you to eat more Greek yoghurt.

What it needs is someone asking better questions.

This week I investigated why protein suddenly seems to be everywhere.

I thought I’d end up exposing another wellness scam… I didn’t.

Instead, I found something far more interesting.

The science around protein is strong. The marketing around it is even stronger.

That distinction changed everything for me.

I realised Rabbit Hole isn’t about proving health trends wrong.

It’s about understanding why we believe them in the first place.

Why did collagen become a movement?

Why did gut health explode?

Why is every second product suddenly “high protein”?

Who benefits?

What does the science say?

And what should we do with that information?

Those are the questions I want to spend the next few years answering.

I’ve also realised something else.

People don’t pay for information anymore.

Information is free.

People pay for someone to do the thinking.

To connect the dots.

To spend hours reading the research, looking through ingredient lists, finding the best products, and then turning all of that into something useful.

That’s what I want Rabbit Hole to become.

A place that helps you become a smarter health consumer.

A place where every Thursday we take one health trend, one ingredient, one product or one headline...

...and investigate it. Properly.

Sometimes the hype will be justified.

Sometimes it’ll fall apart.

Either way, we’ll end the week understanding the wellness industry a little better than we did before.

I’m not here to tell you what to think.

I hope together, we can simply think a little better.

I have a feeling this is just the beginning.

See you down the Rabbit Hole.

Bella 🐇

Subscribe now

Why I Started Investigating the Wellness Industry

For years, I thought my job was helping women lose fat.

The longer I’ve worked in nutrition, the more I’ve realised that was only part of the story.

Because the hardest part about eating well isn’t usually knowing what to do.

It’s knowing who to believe.

One week we’re told to avoid fat.

The next, it’s carbs.

Now everything is high protein.

Every month there’s a new supplement.

A new superfood.

A new ingredient to fear.

A new one to obsess over.

Some of it is backed by incredible science.

Some of it is brilliant marketing.

Most of us are left trying to figure out the difference.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking, “What’s the healthiest choice?”

And started asking,

“Who benefits if I believe this?”

That question changed everything.

It’s also why Rabbit Hole exists.

Why Rabbit Hole?

This isn’t another nutrition newsletter.

There are already enough people telling you what to eat.

Rabbit Hole is where we investigate why we believe what we believe about health.

Every week, I’ll pick one topic and go down the rabbit hole.

We’ll unpack:

• The science.

• The history.

• The psychology.

• The marketing.

• The money.

• And what it actually means for you.

Sometimes we’ll discover the hype is justified.

Sometimes we’ll discover it’s mostly clever marketing.

Either way, the goal is the same:

To help you become a smarter health consumer.

What kind of community am I trying to build?

I don’t want this to be another place where people argue over seed oils or the “perfect” diet.

I want it to be a place for curious people, like me!

People who enjoy asking questions.

People who aren’t afraid to change their mind when the evidence changes.

People who care more about understanding than being right.

Because I think that’s something the wellness industry could use a little more of.

What you can expect

Every Thursday, I’ll publish a brand new Rabbit Hole.

Some weeks we’ll investigate a product.

Some weeks it’ll be a supplement.

Some weeks it’ll be a health headline everyone seems to be talking about.

Some weeks it’ll be something you’ve probably never questioned before.

Topics like:

• Why did protein take over the supermarket?

• Is collagen actually worth the money?

• Why does everyone suddenly think they have hormonal issues?

• How do supermarkets influence what we buy?

• What supplements are actually worth your money?

Free Subscribers

🐇 Weekly Rabbit Hole investigations

📰 Health headlines, decoded

🧠 Evidence explained

Paid Members

🛒 Bella’s Weekly Supermarket Edit - my go to supermarket finds for the week

⭐ Worth Your Money – my honest product recommendations

💊 The Supplement Edit – brands I’d actually spend my own money on

📖 The Rabbit Hole Archive

🗳️ Vote on future investigations

Coming first...

🐇 Rabbit Hole #001

When Did Protein Take Over the Supermarket?

I started noticing protein cereal.

Then protein bread.

Then protein water.

Then protein chocolate.

At first, I thought it was just another health trend.

It wasn’t.

What I discovered had surprisingly little to do with protein...

...and everything to do with how the wellness industry sells us health.

Rabbit Hole #001 drops Thursday, July 9.

If you’ve ever stood in the supermarket wondering,

“How do I know what’s actually worth buying?”

I think you’ll feel right at home here.

See you down the rabbit hole. 🐇