The thirty-minute braise that does more than the supplement aisle
One pot, pantry ingredients, about 17 grams of fiber a serving, and a method flexible enough that you will still be making it in a year.
Elias Vondracek
3 min read
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The practice
Elias Vondracek
Dietitian — Performance & Corporate Programs at Copperleaf.
Lipids and cardiovascular riskProtein needs across the lifespanWorkplace and group programsPractical cooking and batch strategy
- 3
- 9 min
- BS, Nutrition & Dietetics — University of Connecticut
- Dietetic internship — Boston Medical Center
- CSSD (Board Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics) since 2018
Background
Elias came to Copperleaf from collegiate athletics, where he spent six years fuelling rowers and distance runners and gradually noticed that the principles that made a 21-year-old faster — protein distribution, fiber, carbohydrate placed around activity rather than banished — were the same principles that would help a 54-year-old warehouse supervisor with a triglyceride ratio of 4.8. The population changed; the physiology did not.
He runs the practice's corporate work, which means he has taught nutrition in break rooms, on loading docks, at 5am, and once in a walk-in cooler. He is firmly of the view that workplace wellness fails when it is delivered as a lunchtime webinar for the people who least need it, and that the only honest measure of a program is whether the people on the night shift got the same thing as the people in the office.
He also writes most of what appears under The Kitchen, on the grounds that a recommendation nobody knows how to cook is not a recommendation. He is a board-certified specialist in sports dietetics and still coaches a masters rowing squad on the Seekonk on Saturday mornings.
Keeps a sourdough starter named after a former head coach, which he says is a compliment and which the coach does not.
What Elias actually delivers.
Author pages on Harbor route into the services their writing supports — which is how a reader who arrived from a search result ends up somewhere useful.
Eight weeks, eight people, one dietitian, and a kitchen session that is not optional.
Metabolic health programs for employers who want a number to move, delivered on every shift.
Everything Elias has written.
How much protein you actually need (the number moves, and here's why)
The RDA is a floor for preventing deficiency, not a target for thriving. What changes it: your age, your training, your weight loss, and your kidneys — maybe.
Elias Vondracek
3 min read
Your cholesterol panel has a number nobody reads out to you
Total, LDL, HDL, triglycerides — and then the ratio between the last two, which is often the most informative line on the page and never gets mentioned.
Elias Vondracek
3 min read
Get Elias's next piece by email.
The Second Helping goes out fortnightly and carries everything the three of us publish — not just one author's.
Fortnightly. Double opt-in. Demo note: try an address ending in @example.com to see the failure state.
The other two
Naomi Okonjo-Bell
Founder of Copperleaf. Eight years in hospital diabetes education before deciding eleven minutes per patient was not enough.
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Margo Ilesanmi
Built the practice's GLP-1 support line after watching too many people lose muscle nobody warned them about.
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Work with Elias.
Say so in your enquiry and we will put you on Elias's list specifically. If the wait is longer than a fortnight we will tell you that up front rather than after you have booked.