Form Nutrition

As a former professional ballet dancer for the Bavarian State Ballet and the National Ballet of Portugal, Ruben De Monte (@rubendemonte) knows what it’s like to push the human body to extreme limits.

In the UK, we have reached peak testosterone. 2026 has already seen online searches for ‘low testosterone’ hit a five-year high.

Walk into any gym and you will find strong opinions on pre-workout nutrition. Some people swear by a bowl of oats an hour beforehand. Others train fasted and would not have it any other way. The supplement aisle adds another layer of noise: powders, gels, and energy drinks all competing to be the thing that unlocks your best session. The truth, as ever, is more nuanced.

You finish work, pour something cold, sit down and open your phone. An hour later, you feel vaguely restless. Not tired exactly, not refreshed either: just slightly flat, like you’ve been doing something without actually doing anything. Sound familiar? This particular brand of modern malaise has a name, and it’s all over your feeds: overstimulated but unfulfilled. And the response that seems to be gaining the most traction isn’t a digital detox or a screen time limit.

There is a small but significant ritual that has become standard in the kit bags of serious endurance athletes: the pre-race beetroot shot. Concentrated, slightly earthy, often consumed with the grim focus of someone taking medicine, it has become shorthand for serious sports nutrition.

If you spend any time on wellness-adjacent corners of the internet, you will have encountered the clip by now. A prominent entrepreneur and podcaster describes how two glasses of wine essentially derailed several days of his life: worse sleep, worse output, worse everything. He knew this, he explained, because his wearable device told him so. The clip went viral, and not entirely in the way its subject might have hoped. The pile-on was swift.

The sleep conversation has a blindspot. For all the attention lavished on what happens in the bedroom: the temperature, the darkness, the screen habits, the winding-down rituals, there’s a quieter and arguably more interesting question that rarely gets the same airtime. What if the quality of your sleep tonight is being shaped by decisions you make before 9am?

Fitness culture has spent the better part of three decades telling us to push harder. More intensity. More sweat. More discomfort. If your workout doesn’t feel difficult, the thinking went, it probably isn’t working. That framing suited a certain kind of person in a certain kind of season. But something is shifting. The trend that fitness researchers and gyms are calling zone zero is, essentially, the opposite of all that. And it has a surprisingly robust scientific case behind it.

Carbohydrates have had a complicated few decades in the world of nutrition. From the low-fat mania of the nineties to the keto boom of the last ten years, carbs have cycled in and out of nutritional villain status with remarkable consistency. Right now, what you might call “carbophobia” is arguably at a peak: the fear, guilt, or deliberate avoidance of carbohydrates, driven by the belief that they are solely responsible for weight gain and metabolic disease.

Leading gut health expert Dr Emily Prpa (@thenutritionreporter) cut her teeth in the world of dietetics back in 2014, qualifying as a nutritionist during a time when the influencer-led clean eating movement was fuelling widespread fears around everything from gluten in bread to sugar in fruit.