Nutrition in Space!


Space, the final frontier!

Have you ever wondered how the nutrition needs of an astronaut change when they enter space? Or whether or not Matt Damon really could survive on potatoes grown in Martian soil? How about making cricket bread and cultured meat in space? Well join us, two Registered Dietitians and NASA Nutritionist Dr. Scott M. Smith as we answer these questions (and more!) and learn all about how nutrition in space actually works. 

And just a quick reminder, this is our last new main feed episode until September, but don’t worry, we’ll be back in the fall!

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Dr. Scott M. Smith’s book

For feedback or to suggest a show topic email us at nutritionformortals@gmail.com

**This podcast is for information purposes only, is not a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice, and does not constitute a patient-provider relationship**


Episode Transcript

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Welcome to Nutrition For Mortals, the podcast that says life is too damn short to spend your time and attention worrying about your food choices.

So let's take a deep breath and then join us, two registered dietitians and friends, as we explore the world of nutrition with a special focus on cultivating a healthy and peaceful relationship with food.

My name is Matt Priven, and I am joined as always by my co-host and the best dietitian on planet Earth, Jen Baum.

Hey, Jen.

Hey, Matt, and just a quick reminder, if you would like to support the show, we do have a Patreon, where we do an extra bonus episode every month.

As always, a portion of our Patreon goes to support The Hunger Project, which is a fabulous organization.

And we're real live dietitians in private practice, and we love working with folks.

And so if you or anyone you know has ever thought about working with a dietitian, you can always reach out to us.

Miraculously, you could still work with Jen Baum.

How about that?

I mean, so crazy.

And Matt, we have another piece of housekeeping today.

We have another announcement.

That's right.

So we are gonna take a little break here on Nutrition For Mortals for the summer months, for July and August.

But we will be making bonus episodes for our Patreon folks.

However, if you don't see us in your main feed with new content over the summer, we will get back at you in September.

Yeah, and we say break.

It's not really gonna be a break.

We are gonna be recording.

We are gonna be researching.

We have lots of amazing ideas for episodes that will be coming out in the fall.

It's just that I think we've been doing this podcast for what, a year and a half, maybe a little bit more at this point.

And we decided to just have more of a chill summer.

I'm gonna chill so hard.

But you know what?

I will also just say, we have the best listeners ever.

And so, yeah, well, this is our first break and we will definitely be back.

But I guess I just wanna acknowledge all of the listeners that have helped us grow the show and say thank you so much.

And so don't forget about us.

We'll be back in September.

Well said.

I have already met in real life, IRL, a lot of listeners who are amazing people.

So yeah, shout out to everybody.

And now, Matt, we need to go to the International Space Station.

That's right, yes.

We got to talk to NASA's head nutritionist, Dr. Scott Smith, all about nutrition in space.

How cool is that?

Well, I would just like to point out that other podcasts may just make a little quick announcement about how they're going on summer break.

Nutrition For Mortals decides to go out talking to NASA.

Yeah, that's right.

Come at me, other podcasts.

No, we had the incredible honor of talking with Dr. Scott Smith.

He taught us so much.

The nerd in both of us was incredibly excited.

And we hope that you enjoy our conversation about nutrition in space.

As much as we did.

And yes, I asked him about Matt Damon growing potatoes on Mars.

So just wait for it.

All right, everyone, we will see you after the summer break.

Have a great summer and thank you so much for listening.

So we are here with Dr. Scott Smith, who leads the Nutritional Biochemistry Lab at NASA's Johnson Space Center, which is the lab that's charged with keeping crews nutritionally healthy.

That includes nutrition to optimize astronaut health and safety. His work includes both ground-based and spaceflight research to understand how nutrition can mitigate the risks of spaceflight.

That is quite a job description.

Dr. Scott Smith, welcome to Nutrition For Mortals.

Thanks, it's a pleasure to be here.

So we are so excited to talk to you today about your work.

Hopefully pick your brain about a number of topics.

Hopefully we can touch on both more sciency topics, but also some fun and futuristic ones as well.

And if it's okay with you, we can jump in by talking about space food.

I know you are a doctor of nutritional biochemistry, but you also work closely with NASA's food lab quite a bit.

So I'd love to give our listeners a sense of where we are with space food now.

And I think a lot of people think about the early iterations on early NASA missions with cubes and tubes of food.

And could you give us a glimpse into how space food has evolved from earlier missions to how the crews are eating on the International Space Station now?

Indeed, the space food system is better than most people think it is.

It has come an awful long way from indeed the cubes and tubes of back in the Apollo days.

Really, at this point, the processing is the primary difference in that the foods that we have are generally one of two categories.

There are foods that are rehydratable.

So there are things that have been dehydrated that you add water to and you can eat, or they're what we call thermostabilized, which we put it in a pouch, like a metal pouch, like the meals ready to eat, or the MREs that the military uses.

Same technology, we pack our own foods, though.

And that really is a soft version of a can.

The types of foods and the foods that we fly are pretty what I'm called, quote unquote, normal.

It looks like food you would eat.

A couple of fish items, we've got a lasagna, we've got fajitas, we've got a beef patty, a lot of different egg dishes for breakfast, cereals for breakfast, instant breakfast drinks, you name it.

It all is, again, is much better than you would think.

Is it what you would expect to get in a restaurant?

Probably not.

The texture tends to be a bit challenging, like canned vegetables are always a little soggier than real vegetables or fresh vegetables, but they still taste like vegetables.

My colleagues over in the food lab have done a phenomenal job of not only developing the food system, but evolving the food system.

And we've worked with them over the last two or three years to improve the quality of the food system.

And we've had the ability to look at some very detailed dietary intake data that we get on our side to drill down into the foods to see literally what are crews eating most, what are crews not eating, and then taking things out and putting other things in to help with the variety and help with the, I suppose, the likability of the foods.

Well, it definitely sounds like food has come a long way.

In preparation for this episode, I was reading about the history of food and how it's evolved in space.

And I think I read that the first thing ever consumed in space was two tubes of pureed meat.

And so it sounds like things have come a long way if astronauts are up there eating fajitas.

Indeed, when we first started flying people in the 60s, the thinking was that you needed everything contained.

And that was, you know, when you have people eating some really gross things out of what were essentially toothpaste tubes.

And what we've come to realize several fold.

One is that the surface tension of any liquid in the food will hold it together.

So you can open up the lid on a package and it won't all go floating out if you make it properly.

There's a story about a crew member back in the 80s on one of the shuttle missions who flew tortillas.

It was then that they realized that the tortilla was a perfect way to make a sandwich on orbit where in weightlessness, you don't have enough hands to hold everything down, but you could put whatever you wanted inside the tortilla, roll it up and you were good to go.

Less crumbs, you can pack a ton of them, whereas bread takes up too much space.

Exactly, exactly.

And they've also got the packaging down and the processing down where you can reduce the water activity.

And I think they can get at least six months shelf life on those tortillas at room temperature.

Is part of your job tasting the food?

Have you tried some of these meals?

And I guess I'm curious to know, does the food taste pretty good?

I have tried the food, but I'm a horrible example because I have some really nasty sinus issues.

So most days I can't taste anything.

So, but as they're testing foods, as they're developing foods, I know some of the folks in my group here will go across the street, will taste whatever it is they're offering up that day.

And the food tastes like food.

Well, and you said earlier that it sounds like you do a lot with getting feedback from astronauts in terms of preferences, and then you really try to work or rework what they preferred, what they liked best, maybe what they didn't like as much.

Collectively we do, yes.

It's very hard to do that on an individual basis, as with any group of humans, a group of astronauts all have different opinions of what their favorite food is or what we should throw out.

The foods on Space Station are provided to the crew in what we call a standard menu.

And what that means is that for a period of about eight days, they get a set of containers that hold all the food for the crew for, again, about seven or eight days.

And then that repeats.

And each crew member on Space Station is given a number, I think it's nine containers in a six month mission, that they can put stuff in just for them, that is things that they want.

So one example I always give is, the standard menu is packed for variety.

It's packed to have as many different things than there's possible, because one of the comments we hear a lot is that it gets very boring.

You know, I would say that in eight days, there's three packs of Broccoli au Gratin.

If you like Broccoli au Gratin, there's three packages of Broccoli au Gratin.

If you hate Broccoli au Gratin, there's three packages of Broccoli au Gratin.

If you like it and your crew-mates like it, there's still only three packages.

So if you want to have something more often, breakfast is a good example.

If somebody, you know, we had crew-members who wanted to eat oatmeal every day, then you need to pack oatmeal in your crew specific menu containers to make sure you have that option.

So does food become a sort of currency?

Is there a lot of astronaut food training going down on the ISS?

There is a fair amount of trading indeed.

And especially the international crew-members will pack foods from their home countries, oftentimes by design to share with the rest of the crew.

So it becomes a very social event at mealtimes and is really part of the team building and morale building part of a mission, is food and nutrition.

So sending food to restock the ISS seems a bit different than a mission elsewhere with a live crew, I'm assuming.

So, you know, in thinking about the Artemis program planning to send humans back to the moon in just a few short years, how does NASA, how do you think about the food available on a mission like that?

Like, do you pack just enough for the projected length of the mission or do you want to make sure there's abundance of food?

You know, God forbid they had to spend more time there than planned.

That's a great question.

And indeed, as hard as it is to get food to Space Station, it's looking like Space Station is quite the spa you'd want to go to to choose the wrong words.

And we are working those challenges on Artemis missions, and we have been for years now.

The Artemis 2 mission, which is coming up next, will be what I would call a contained mission, meaning they're going to launch in the Orion capsule, they're going to fly to the moon, they're going to stay there for a few days and then they're going to come back.

So we're going to pack the food, they're going to take it for the missions further down where they're going to spend time on the Gateway Space Station and orbiting the moon.

They're going to spend some time on the moon.

We have some real challenges with how much food we can provide, what food we're going to provide, and what the implications of that are going to be.

Spacecraft are notoriously overbooked when it comes to things that constrain us, like power and mass and volume.

And we've spent a lot of time working with the engineers in recent years over literally, how many calories do we need to provide for that crew?

Because we're not going to have the space to provide extra food.

NASA spent a lot of time working on contingencies.

So there are engineers off thinking about, okay, if you're on the backside of the moon and the vehicle is punctured by a micro-meteroid, and you need to put on your spacesuit, and one of the rockets isn't working right, it could take you six days to get back to Earth.

How would we deal with that?

And we have contingency rations that the crew would be able to get into the suit.

We know what the mission lengths are going to be.

We know there may be weather delays or maybe some other delays.

So we will pack foods for literally exactly what is required, plus a little for contingencies.

But it's not going to be a case of, boy, there's going to be plenty of food.

You can just eat whatever you want.

Can you, in a spacesuit, sneak your hand up to your mouth and feed yourself?

No.

So how are you going to eat over the course of six days?

Very carefully.

Those suits are going to be built, so there will be a port in the helmet that you'll be able to get a straw through, and you'll drink some sort of nutrition mixture that you'll probably get three bags of those a day.

I think what we're providing at this point is a thousand calories a day, which is less than we wanted, but was all everybody could agree to when push came to shove, because it is a contingency that we don't expect to happen, and balancing the realities of you now have a separate box of contingency food that's got to fit, so how big do you want that box to be?

You have issues of not only can you not get your hand in your mouth, that spacesuit is your spacecraft, meaning it's your kitchen, it's your bathroom, it's your HVAC system to keep you cool.

And we had crews that said, look, if that happens, I'm not going to eat anything for six days because I don't want to go to the bathroom.

So don't send anything.

And we said, well, that's fine for you, but your crew-mate may want some food, and we've maintained that there's a need to provide that for them.

Wow, that's fascinating.

All right, let's talk nutrition.

So to start, can you maybe give us a glimpse into the environment of spaceflight and how it makes nutrition concerns for astronauts different from what we're experiencing down here on Earth?

The first thing I'll say is that spaceflight is very challenging on the human body.

We've evolved to live in unit gravity, and you now put your body in an environment where you're in a very confined space, you're very far from home, you're weightless, your nervous system doesn't like that much.

So in your early days, motion sickness is a problem.

Your bones realize that you don't need the same skeleton you did on Earth, because your skeleton evolved to carry you around.

And your body starts to break down your skeleton, realizing, hey, I don't need this thing, or I don't need the same skeleton I did on Earth, so let's break that down.

Your muscles do the same thing.

You're using them differently, so they will start to atrophy.

Your heart works differently, your immune system works differently, and nutrition is the underpinning of all of those systems.

One of the questions that always comes up is, well, you're floating around a space, you're not doing the same amount of work, you probably need fewer calories, and the reality is, no, that's not true, that you either need the same number of calories, or depending on how much exercise you're doing, a lot of times crew members need more calories on orbit than they do on Earth.

We think that satiety signals change during flight and that your stomach tells your brain that you're full before you really are.

So we spend a lot of our time haranguing crews that, look, you got to eat more, you're not getting enough calories, you're losing body mass, and we know that when you're losing body mass and flight, that you're losing more bone you need to, you're losing more muscle than you need to, your cardiovascular system doesn't like it, your oxidative stress goes up, and that you've got to eat either, you've got to push more in at meal times, even though you think you're full, you need to snack more, whatever it is, you've got to get calories in you.

Wow, it's such an interesting task you have here to make sure that nutrition is not getting in the way of health and is supporting health in such a strange and unique environment.

And I understand you and your team at NASA have done a lot of research into vitamin D needs that I find fascinating.

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Well, with vitamin D, we've known for some time that the crews obviously are not exposed to all dry light.

The spacecraft are shielded to protect them for that reason.

And the other thing is that the food system typically does not have a lot of sources of vitamin D.

So we're always looking for ways to do research on Earth that we can simulate different elements of spaceflight.

So when we want to look at people that aren't using the muscles of their bones, we put people in bedrest for a month or two or three.

When we want to look at people that don't see the sunlight for six months, we went to Antarctica and did a few studies down there in people wintering over in Antarctica where the sun doesn't come up for six months.

One of the things we showed was that if you supplemented with what I would call a modest amount of vitamin D, you could maintain vitamin D status at what is generally considered an optimal level in people that don't see the sunlight.

For us, that has informed the amount of vitamin D that we provide to crews on orbit.

And we were very proud that ours is one of the many papers cited when the National Academy of Medicine redefined vitamin D requirements for North Americans because our study was unique in that not many people go to Antarctica to study vitamin D.

And sunlight is always a confounding factor when you do vitamin D research.

That's so interesting.

And it makes me want to ask you the question, is there a standard supplement protocol that you've determined astronauts need to have on a daily basis?

Like, I'm curious to know if there are other supplements that astronauts are taking daily.

The only supplement we recommend programmatically is vitamin D.

I love it.

That's so cool.

Whenever I get asked 30 times a day about all the 80 supplements people should be taking, I'm going to say NASA only recommends a modest dose of vitamin D.

So can you do better than that?

I love that.

Exactly.

Occasionally, crews will take a multibyte or something like that, and we typically tell them that if you want to do that, that's fine.

If you want to take something else or anything else, we're happy to look at it.

We can probably digress into it later, but we're actually doing an experiment right now, which is a little more nuanced, where we're giving crew members some B vitamins to mitigate a problem that we see in astronauts' eyes.

But that's more what I would call a personalized nutrition approach, trying to fix the genetic influence and not give everybody that.

Well, can you speak more about that?

Because it's interesting.

Matt and I just did a whole series on personalized nutrition, and it's such a big buzzword in the space right now.

So I would love to hear more about how you're trying to personalize nutrition for astronauts in space.

And for our audience, maybe don't go too deep into the homocysteine pathway, if you could.

That's my favorite thing.

Well, I would say we stumbled down this path of personalized nutrition.

That wasn't our goal at the time.

About 10 or 15 years ago, probably closer to 15 years ago, there was a realization at NASA that some astronauts were coming back from space with changes in the back of their eyes.

One of the things they were seeing was what they call optic disc edema, which is swelling at the optic disc, which is the point that the optic nerve comes into the back of the eye.

As of this minute, we do not know what causes it.

At this point, they think about 20% of crew members developed this problem.

And there's a lot of people out there with theories, and they all think they're right.

What we stumbled on about 13 years ago was the realization that we were seeing differences in blood chemistry of the astronauts that had these issues.

And what we were seeing was higher concentrations of a chemical called homocysteine, which is at the heart of B vitamin metabolism.

That if you're B6 deficient or B12 deficient or fully deficient, your homocysteine levels go through the roof.

We weren't seeing levels that high, but the blood concentrations were higher in affected astronauts, and they were higher before flight.

And that led us to do a genetic study looking at the genetics of homocysteine, if you will.

And what we showed there was that there appeared to be a genetic predisposition for some astronauts to develop these eye problems.

We then did a couple of bedrest studies.

People that we put in bed for 30 days or 60 days, if they had the genetics that affected their B vitamin metabolism, they developed these changes in their eyes.

Long story short, that led us to hypothesize that we might be able to give those individuals B vitamin supplements to mitigate that problem.

And that experiment is happening on Space Station right now, and we're incredibly excited about the possibility there that we may have a countermeasure for this problem that is what we call one of our red risks.

That is, vision issues are one of the reasons why, if we had a rocket on the pad right now to go to Mars, the life sciences people would say we're not ready to go because we don't understand how to fix this vision thing.

Yeah, well, and how promising that this could potentially be remedied with a B vitamin complex, or I'm not sure which B vitamins they are, but it sounds like it would be a pretty straightforward treatment to prevent the development of what sounds like to be a potentially lifelong impairment.

Absolutely.

So you mentioned earlier the early satiety and the digestion changes that can occur in microgravity.

Is that because food is just like floating around your stomach?

I think so.

For the number of crew members that we've said, look, you're not eating enough, you're losing weight.

And they've said, Bob, I'm eating until I'm full, I feel fine.

It seems to me, it makes a lot of sense.

You don't have gravity itself helping you out.

Right.

And so you have to really encourage astronauts to nourish themselves and focus on that.

And I guess I'm curious, like, are astronauts the type to, you know, when you give them a recommendation, do they universally go like, 10-4, I got this?

Or is food a place where they're pushing back because it's maybe their one comfort in a pretty stressful environment?

Any group of astronauts is a group of humans.

And, you know, you're not going to find 10 or 20 or 40 people that all like the same thing or eat the same thing or all think about nutrition the same way.

We have some crew members that are very interested in nutrition, very in tune with it, very, you know, focused on it.

We have other crew members that don't want to talk about nutrition at all.

Some astronauts eat to live, some live to eat.

They've got incredibly busy schedules.

They've got incredible pressure on them to do their jobs in a very stressful environment.

You know, they're away from their families, they're away from their homes, and life on Earth goes on.

So you've got kids' birthdays going by, and the anniversaries going by, and holidays going by, all those things that we pause and celebrate here on Earth, and they're literally stuck at the office working pretty hard.

Yeah, I've never really thought about being in space as being in the office, but I imagine it must really feel like that when you're missing your kids' birthdays and all these events down on Earth and feeling like, yeah, you're just doing your job around the clock for many months on end.

And we started to talk about the massive sacrifices associated with going to Mars.

We're talking about if a crew were to go to Mars, we're talking about years, multiple years away from Earth.

So how do you think about providing food and essential nutrition and water on a mission of Mars?

Yeah, that's a great question.

A Mars mission will have tremendous challenges.

Among them, the logistics of providing the amount of food that is required to be provided.

The sketch of what that might look like is that we will likely send the food to Mars before the crew leaves Earth.

So we need foods that will be able to sit on Mars for a few years before it's consumed that will sustain the crew literally five years after we launch it.

I talked about how on station, crews get to bring a container of things that they want.

That's not going to be possible on a Mars mission.

We're going to send food, and the crew that's selected to go is going to have to eat that food, whether they like Brock Black Rotten or not.

And those are serious challenges.

Menu fatigue is one of our bigger concerns, and we are actually in the middle of a ground-based mission right now where we are testing those questions and others in what we're calling a Mars Surface Analog.

This is called CHPEA.

Everything at NASA has to have an acronym, and that is the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog.

We've got a crew of four in a habitat here at the Johnson Space Center.

We 3D printed a 1,700-square-foot habitat out of cement.

There's a 1,200-square-foot red sandbox next door, and they are living in there for what will end up being 378 days.

They're eating space food.

They're limited on the amount of water they have.

They've got communication delays, as on a large mission.

So when they type an email, it takes 22 minutes for Mission Control to get it.

If Mission Control types the answer immediately and sends it back, it takes 22 minutes to get back.

They're growing some pick-and-eat crops.

And for our first mission, today is day 330 of that mission.

Wow, that's amazing.

I just wanted to ask, you mentioned 3D.

It sounds like you 3D printed the actual structure for this mission.

And I had wanted to ask you about 3D printing of food or even cell-grown, lab-grown meat.

I was curious about any new or novel technologies that you may be thinking about utilizing for these really, really long missions.

Indeed.

In terms of future food options, everything is on the table.

So there's been some work looking at 3D printing foods, 3D printing supplements.

We've talked to folks who are looking at using cell culture as a way to grow meat.

We've heard almost everything, maybe everything.

My opinion is that someday, any or all those things might happen, but to me, those are a long way down the road.

When you think again about the logistics of what it's going to take to get us to Mars, when you talk about things like, OK, let's build a box that will hold the cell culture that you can grow a steak in.

How big is that box?

What are the supplies you need for that?

What are the supplies you need to keep that clean?

What sort of waste does that generate?

And how often can you do that?

So you've got a box that's going to make a steak.

We haven't even talked about how you're going to cook it.

And then the reality is that's one food item.

How often can you eat steak before you get bored of it?

So now you've got a steak box, and then you need a box next to that for your 3D printer to print a piece of pizza.

And then you've got a box next to that where you're going to grow tomatoes to eat.

And then you get a box next to that where you're going to grow crickets that you're going to grind up to make flour, to make cricket bread out of.

And pretty soon, you're out of space.

Right.

Although a pizza box sounds pretty great, though.

That sounds like a good one to have.

And you might be able to eat that every day.

So in a nutshell, that gives you a view of the sort of challenges there.

I think it's fair to say the first couple of years, we're going to send all the food, because the next question you need to ask is, if your 3D printer breaks, is the crew going to die?

And that's when the conversation gets pretty serious of, at what point can we stop sending all the food to swap in with, okay, we're going to grow a crop of soybeans, we're going to grow something.

At what point are we going to be confident enough in those systems that we don't need to worry about one crop failure being the end of the mission?

Well, since we're so close to it, I have to bring up the Martian.

Have you seen the movie or read the book?

I'm sure you have.

Okay, so in the movie, to remind our listeners, Matt Damon, stranded on Mars, doesn't have enough food to sustain himself for the length of time it would take for a rescue mission.

His solution is to create a greenhouse within the station, where he not only, I think, turns Martian soil into fertile soil and make water by burning hydrogen, he then plants his remaining potatoes and grows enough potatoes to sustain himself.

I guess I just want to ask, generally, when you saw the movie, as a NASA nutritionist, what was going through your head when you watched that?

Well, you know, I will tell you, I waited several years before I saw the movie so I could avoid questions like this.

I go into each of these movies as a moviegoer.

Myself and my fellow NASA nerds are quick to sit through movies and pick on all the things that are wrong with the way that was done.

You need to suspend belief for a while just to appreciate the film for the film.

We did at one point look at that, and I think there were 12 different nutrients that you would be deficient in if you ate nothing but baked potatoes.

There's that concern in and of itself.

But in a situation like that, you do what you got to do.

And is one of the concerns just total energy?

Like, did you do the math on could he feed himself enough calories?

Yeah, I don't remember the numbers, but yes, we've taken off a lot of potatoes, especially for all the work he was doing while he was trying to figure out how to get home.

Well, thank you for entertaining the question, Scott.

I appreciate you.

Before we wrap up, I'm curious, how long have you worked at NASA?

What is your trajectory here?

I've been here just over 32 years.

May 1st was 32 years for me.

So you've seen a lot of missions, probably amazing ones, but also tragedies as well.

I'm sure this is a job that really impacted you on a personal level.

To say the least, yeah.

I tell people all the time that working here appears very glamorous.

I imagine it's a lot like working at Disney World, which you need to realize that there's a lot of hard work that goes on underneath those streets to make it the happiest place on Earth.

It's a challenging place to work.

It's a hard place to work.

But at the end of the day, when you step back and can think about what we do in the big picture, it's just incredible.

Yeah, I know I have learned so much in our conversation today.

I knew I was going to, but I can't thank you enough, Dr.

Smith, for taking the time out to have this conversation with us.

I know also that both of my kids highly requested this as a topic.

When I first started a podcast, they kept asking me, why don't you talk about nutrition and space?

Because that really is the coolest topic out there.

And so I have two little fans that I know are going to be so excited to hear this conversation.

That's awesome.

That's great to hear.

I don't know if you've seen it, but on one of the NASA websites, there are PDFs of our books.

And we actually wrote a book for kids several years ago, and you can download that for free from that website.

We are actually right now working on the second edition of that book.

We hope to have that out by the end of the year.

That's great.

No, I have learned a ton.

I can't thank you enough for this conversation.

Thank you guys.

Nutrition For Mortals is a production of Oceanside Nutrition, a real life nutrition counseling practice in beautiful Newburyport, Massachusetts, where we provide individual nutrition counseling, both in person and online via telehealth.

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100 Years of Diet Food