Food and circulation

Eating for Circulation: What This Section Covers and How We Check It

Why a cooking site for two has a section on food and blood flow, what gets written about here, and the checklist every claim goes through before a recipe gets published.

By Wes Hadley · Oct. 15, 2026

I didn't plan to write about circulation. Most of the people who read this site are men past forty who cook for themselves and a partner, and over the last couple of years a steady share of the mail I get has been recipes with a promise attached. A juice that "opens up the arteries." A salad that "does what the pills do." Some of them came from friends, some from forwarded videos, a few from people who were clearly selling something. When I worked the line, nobody fired a plate until they had read the ticket twice. This section is me reading the ticket before I cook what's on it.

What this section covers

This is a corner of the site about foods and drinks that have been studied for their effect on blood flow and heart health: beets, leafy greens, cocoa, pomegranate, garlic, olive oil, fish and the like. For each one I try to answer three plain questions. How do you cook it so it tastes good on a weeknight? What does the research actually say, and how strong is it? And what does a normal portion for two look like next to the amounts used in the studies?

What this section does not do is treat anything. No recipe here is a substitute for medicine, and none of these pages will tell you a food fixes a condition. The honest version of most of these stories is smaller than the headline: a food that fits into heart-healthy cooking, with some interesting research behind it and a lot of open questions.

The checklist

Every claim that shows up in this section goes through the same checks before the recipe is published. If a claim fails one, it either gets rewritten to match what is known or it gets cut.

1. What exactly is being claimed? I write the claim down in one sentence. "Helps blood flow" is not specific enough; "raised blood nitrate levels in healthy adults for a few hours" is something you can check.
2. What kind of evidence is behind it? I sort it into one of four bins: hearsay (someone said so), lab bench (cells or animals), population data (people who eat more of something tend to have some outcome), or clinical trial (people were assigned to eat it and measured). Only the last two get much weight here, and I say which one it is.
3. Was it the food, or a concentrated extract? A lot of studies use a powder, a capsule or a concentrated shot. That tells you something, but it is not the same as a glass of juice or a plate of greens, and I don't pretend it is.
4. Is the amount realistic in a home portion? If the study used the equivalent of two pounds of something a day, I say so, and I write the recipe around what two people would actually eat.
5. Who is it not for? Some of these foods interact with medicine or are a poor fit for certain people, such as those watching potassium, oxalates or sugar. Those notes go on the page, near the top, not in fine print.
6. Is there money behind the claim? I look at who funded the research and who is repeating it. On this site, anything paid for is labeled Advertisement, and the editorial pages are not paid for.
7. When was it checked? Each page carries the date I checked it. I go back to the research periodically and update the page, with a note, when something changes.

Read in this section

• Beet Cocoa Smoothie with Spinach and Pomegranate — the recipe itself, a thick, cold drink for two that I make most weeks.
• Building the Beet Cocoa Smoothie, Step by Step — how I shop for it, prep it and load the blender, with the mistakes I made along the way.
• Beets, Greens, Cocoa and Pomegranate: The Blood Pressure Claims, Checked — the claims that travel with this drink, run through the checklist above, one by one.

Paid pages

If you have a claim you would like me to run through the checklist, send it through the contact page, along with where you saw it. If you find something on these pages that is wrong or out of date, the corrections page explains how I handle fixes, and I would rather hear about it than not.