In partnership with
|
The Reset Series™
Vitae Weekly Reset — Issue #45
|
|
What Your Liver Needs, and What It Doesn’t
|
|
No organ has a bigger industry attached to it than the liver. Teas, juices, cleanses, support formulas, milk thistle, a fortnight of something green in January. Almost none of it does anything, and the premise underneath it — that the liver clogs up and needs unclogging — is wrong about how the organ works in the first place.
What changes liver fat is a much shorter list, and none of it comes in a bottle. We’ve spent this week rebuilding The Liver Reset around it. The research pieces below come at the same subject from three directions: a popular habit that helps but not for the reason people think, a category of products that can cause the harm they claim to prevent, and the one item on the short list where the evidence is strongest and the public messaging is still contested.
— The Vitae Team
|
|
|
|
This week on the Vitae blog
|
|
Can Supplements Damage Your Liver?
Green tea extract, turmeric and ashwagandha have all been linked to liver injury, and in one US series of 839 liver injury cases, 130 were attributed to herbal and dietary supplements. What the registries show, what the regulators have said, and why these products reach the shelf without the testing a medicine needs.
Read →
|
|
|
Does Intermittent Fasting Help a Fatty Liver? What the Trials Show
In a 337-person trial, an eight-hour eating window reduced liver fat by 25.8% over sixteen weeks, against 24.7% for simply eating less — a difference that wasn’t statistically significant. Fasting helps. The question the trials answer is whether it beats eating less, and so far it doesn’t.
Read →
|
|
|
Does Alcohol Cause Cancer? Why the Genetic Evidence Disagrees
Alcohol is an established carcinogen and warning labels are coming. But a December 2025 study across four biobanks couldn’t detect the breast cancer link, while a review of 88 genetic studies calls that evidence robust. Worth understanding why two methods disagree.
Read →
|
|
The Mineral Everyone Forgets Until Their Driveway Freezes Over
Most people couldn't tell you what scandium is for, but everyone knows what happens when roads go unsalted. North America keeps running short, and Atlas Salt (TSXV: SALT) is building a shovel-ready mine in Newfoundland, three days by ship from Boston, with C$188 million in projected yearly free cash flow.
This week’s deep dive
The Liver Reset, rebuilt — and the three habits that carry most of the benefit
The old guide assumed you wanted help clearing something out. The rebuilt one starts by saying there’s nothing to clear: detoxification is a set of continuous processes, not a filter that fills up, and no product makes them run better. What builds up instead is fat inside liver cells, which for most people now matters more than alcohol does — though the two overlap more often than the labels suggest. And it’s silent, which is the part most liver content gets backwards. Across 11.7 million English primary-care records, just 2.42% carried a diagnosis, against an estimated one in four adults in Western Europe. You can’t tell from how you feel, and a normal blood test doesn’t settle it either, which is why this is a conversation to have with your GP rather than something to work out for yourself.
The three the guide builds around are alcohol, ultra-processed food and sitting still — and it won’t rank them universally, because which matters most depends on you. A 2026 trial put 173 people on Mediterranean, low-carbohydrate or standard advice for six months and found no significant difference between the groups; when the researchers modelled the pathways, the diet pattern itself had no effect on liver fat. What predicted improvement was losing weight and eating less ultra-processed food, though nobody was assigned to do the latter. Movement earns its place separately: pooling three trials, people doing aerobic exercise had five times the odds of a meaningful reduction in liver fat with under 3% change in body weight. The guide is also honest about the ceiling — a trial published this month found neither an eight-hour window nor supervised exercise beat ordinary Mediterranean diet and activity advice over twelve weeks.
Read the full piece →
|
|
|
|
Quick wins for this week
|
|
Look at what’s in the food, not just the calories
Eating less ultra-processed food was independently associated with improvement in this year’s trial, with the caveat that nobody was assigned to do it. The practical version is narrower than a diet overhaul: pick one ultra-processed thing you eat most weeks and swap it for a less processed version of the same thing.
|
|
Say what you’re taking before a liver test, not after
Supplement-related liver injury is easy to miss when nobody is looking for it, and multi-ingredient products make the culprit hard to trace. Two have explicit regulator warnings for anyone who has had liver problems: turmeric and curcumin supplements, flagged in 2023 after 18 reported cases, and ashwagandha, flagged in July this year. Serious reactions are very rare in both.
|
|
If a fasting window helps you eat less, keep it
Just keep the reason straight. Time-restricted eating reduced liver fat about as much as plain calorie restriction and no more. The window is a tool for eating less, which is useful. It isn’t doing something to your liver that eating less wouldn’t.
|
|
Why Overseas Producers Can't Undercut Atlas Salt, Even for Free
Cities are already running short on road salt, and winter hasn't even started. Some supply bids are going unanswered, prices have nearly doubled in parts of the market, and the backup plan is two weeks away by boat. Here's why Atlas Salt (TSXV: SALT | OTCQX: SALQF) can get salt to the people who need it most, faster and cheaper than anyone shipping from overseas:
• Three days by ship to Boston, not fourteen
• Shallow deposit that's cheaper and faster to mine
• Projected C$188M a year in free cash flow
• Export Development Canada interested in lending C$150M
• Early supply deal with top U.S. salt distributor
|
The Reset Companion
Your first 30 messages are free. Ask it anything you’ve read here — whether a supplement you’re taking has case reports behind it, what the weight-loss thresholds mean if you aren’t overweight, whether your risk factors are worth raising with your GP. It answers from Vitae’s own evidence base rather than the open internet.
Try the Companion →
|
|
|
|
There’s a reason the cleanse survives despite having nothing behind it. It offers a thing you can buy and finish. The short list offers neither: drink less, eat less food that arrives ready-made, move — none of which has an end date, a receipt, or a feeling of completion at the end of the week. A fortnight of lemon water gives you the sense of having dealt with something. Eighteen months of slightly better ordinary meals gives you no such moment, which is why it’s the harder sell and the one that works.
The supplement piece this week is the sharp end of that. People reach for green tea extract or turmeric precisely because they want to do something active for an organ they can’t feel, and in that US series the share of liver injury cases traced to supplements rose from 7% to 20% over the study period. The products aren’t marketed as inert — they’re marketed as liver support — and nothing requires a manufacturer to test one in people before it goes on sale. The instinct is sound. The aisle it leads to is not.
So the thing worth taking from all of this is slightly deflating and quite freeing: there is much less to do than the shelf implies, and the few things that matter are ordinary. The guide is free, there’s nothing to sign up for, and the four-week tracker at the end asks you to count four things, none of which you need to buy.
— The Vitae Team
|
|
NVIDIA's Founder Says Farmers Should Absolutely Use AI
“If I were a farmer, I would absolutely use AI.”
That’s Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.
He’s pointing to one of AI’s biggest untapped opportunities: farming.
DIT AgTech is already putting AI to work with 500+ units deployed and 370,000 head on-platform.
𝘐𝘯 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘶𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘬𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘥. 𝘋𝘐𝘛 𝘈𝘨𝘛𝘦𝘤𝘩 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘢 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘮 𝘊 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘌𝘹𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘱𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘮𝘢𝘺 𝘣𝘦 𝘰𝘣𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦: https://bit.ly/4bzuWCi
