Gut health
🍝 Pimp My Pasta
Picture the scene: you’re back home after a hard day’s work and sorely tempted to order a takeout.
Instead, you make the effort to cook dinner knowing it's going to be better for you than anything that comes via Uber Eats.
The only problem is you’re starving and exhausted.
The result?
Tired + hungry + going to cook something at home = pasta
Now, don’t get me wrong, pasta can be the base of a great meal. For 150g of cooked durum wheat pasta, you’ll get around 8g of protein and 2-3g of fiber for 230 calories.
But a few simple swaps and additions can turn a humble plate of pasta into a fiber powerhouse. Here are my top 4 pasta hacks:
1️⃣ Swap Durum Wheat For Whole Wheat Or Lentil Pasta
While the calories and protein in wholewheat pasta are about the same as its durum wheat cousin, there's more than double the fiber with up to 6g per 150g serving. Wholewheat also contains more magnesium, iron, zinc and B vitamins.
Alternatively, you could try lentil pasta, which packs up to 9g of fiber and 15g of protein for a similar portion size.
It’s true that these pasta alternatives do have a different taste and texture from the regular stuff, so you might want to start off using a 50/50 split until you get used to the change.
Of course, plain cooked pasta is nothing without a sauce. Instead of defaulting to a shop-bought tomato sauce, try one of these fiber-packed alternatives.
2️⃣ Cashew & Roasted Garlic "Alfredo"
Blend 100g cashews soaked in hot water, 1 roasted garlic clove (if you’ve never tried roasted garlic, it’s delicious), the juice of half a lemon, 3 tablespoons (45g) of olive oil and a tablespoon (13g) of chia seeds. Result? A delicious, creamy sauce that packs 8g of fiber.
3️⃣ Broad Bean and Lemon Pesto
240g shelled broad beans, the zest and juice of 1 lemon, 1 garlic clove, 3 tablespoons (45g) of olive oil and 10g parsley blended together creates a tasty pesto that brings 7g of fibre along for the ride.
4️⃣ Smokey Kidney Bean and Chipotle
You guessed it: 1 tin of kidney beans (drained), 1 tbsp (20g) chipotle, 1 garlic clove, the juice of 1 lime and 2 tbsp (30g) olive combined produce the smoothest and smokiest sauce you can imagine, all with 8g of fiber to boot.
So make one of the swaps to your pasta above and pair it with one of these sauces and you're looking at a meal that provides 13-17g of fiber, that’s nearly 2/3 of the recommended daily minimum amount.
Of course, the real move here would be to add a sachet of LOAM to any of these sauces for an additional 10g of fibre that you won’t even notice. LOAM makes no difference to the taste or texture of what you add it to so even if the kids won’t eat anything other than regular white pasta with tomato sauce, you could always sneak some extra fibre in under the radar with LOAM.
GENERAL health
⌚The Problem With Wearable Technology
As a medical doctor and statistics nerd, health wearables were made for me.
However, I worry sometimes whether the advances in health technology have accidentally given us a new medical condition: data indigestion.
With all the gadgets and tracking available, you can have essentially all the data you want, with very few actionables or ideas about what to do with it.
And at 36, I really don't want more health data than is absolutely necessary.
So here are the few things I do track, that you might also want to track too.
1️⃣ Heart rate (pre-sleep)
Falling asleep isn't your brain just pressing an off switch. Physiologically it's more like changing gears. Heart rate naturally falls as we transition to sleep. It's a sign that your nervous system is winding down and the cardiovascular demands on your heart will reduce. There's even research showing people who struggle to fall asleep can have a less pronounced reduction in heart rate around sleep onset.
Actionable: avoid the stimulation of screens for the last 30 minutes before sleep (or more is possible) and practice slow, deep breathing before you hit the hay.
2️⃣ Step count
There's nothing remotely sexy about tracking your steps, but my God, is it worth doing. Step counter apps are plentiful, accurate and usually free. And you don't need to stress about hitting 10,000. A huge 2025 systematic review found meaningful health outcomes kick in around 7,000 per day (PMID 40713949), but even lower counts have been shown to be beneficial (PMID 37595090).
Actionable: know your baseline (track for at least a few days) and if you decide you want to increase it, focus on getting to just 1,000 more than your existing number.
3️⃣ Blood pressure
This one's personal given my own cholesterol history. But there's a caveat. I'm not trusting this number to my watch 100%. Every month, I calibrate my watch to the medical gold-standard - an upper-arm cuff reading -because I know the watch is reporting a trend, not giving me a diagnosis.
Actionable: track with a wearable by all means, but get your blood pressure tested with a medical-grade monitor at least once per year if you're healthy, more if you have any related conditions.
4️⃣ Heart rate variability
Now this is one I track, but certainly not every day. All I'm interested in here is whether there are any significant deviations from my long-term baseline. HRV varies enormously between people and can be affected by so many things:- sleep, stress, illness, training, alcohol and even how you measure it.
Important nuance: I only really track it while I'm asleep. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life there's simply too much noise for it be useful during the day.
Actionable: if you do have a wearable that tracks HRV, don't make it a competition between anyone other than yourself.
REFLECTIONS
⏳ My Favourite Waste Of Time
As a self-confessed workaholic, here’s a real “physician-heal-thyself” reflection.
In our hyper-connected world, there’s a tendency to make every single moment of the day "productive".
It starts as soon as you wake up with the morning routine.
Hydration! Meditation! Gratitude! Exercise!
Then you can be writing and answering email on your commute, using a voice-activated app to write your to-do list all while listening to an audiobook at double speed.
It goes on.
While there’s a time and place for everything, lately, I've come to appreciate the importance of, for want of a better phrase, time-wasting.
- Staring out into in the garden for 10 minutes
- Playing an online game
- Creating an elaborate to-do list instead of actually doing what you need to do
and…dare I say it…
I actually don't think any of these activities are necessarily a waste of time now.
In fact, I think they can be good examples of “down time” - valuable precisely because we’re not being productive.
But go back to the last example and notice I didn’t write “mindlessly scrolling social media.”
For time-wasting to be…well, productive time-wasting, it has to be intentional.
What actually is wrong with saying, “I’ll scroll Inst for 10 minutes before I go out” as long as it really is 10 minutes and crucially, when you’re done, you can say truthfully you DON’T wish you hadn’t done it?
So, by deliberately choosing to waste time and making sure you “waste” it on things that you won’t regret afterwards, I think there’s real value in doing things that aren’t productive.
I’m already imagining my son coming back to me with this when he’s fifteen.
👋 Who are you again? I’m Karan Rajan - a doctor and curious explorer of all things health and wellness. I'm the founder of LOAM Science, a microbiome company aiming to create the best fiber product in the world! I host the Dr Karan Explores Podcast, where I talk to experts in science and medicine to cut through the BS of modern health advice. If you'd like an easy way to dig through the archive, you can ask me any questions about the podcast and talk to my digital librarian here. I've also written two books "This Book May Save Your Life" and "This Is Vital Information".
If you feel strongly about some health things or just want to say hi? Hit reply... I’d love to hear it and hear from you! (yes I read every reply!!!)
