What a 10-year, 125,000-person study reveals about plant-based diets

Costa Rica Series, Episode 3 · By Dr. Sean Wells, PT

You've heard it a hundred times, maybe even said it to your patients yourself: "Avoid ultra-processed foods." It's become one of the most repeated rules in nutrition, and even on our website material. But a large new study suggests the story is more nuanced, especially when it comes to plant-based eating.

For the third video in our Costa Rica series, we dug into research showing that people who ate a mostly plant-based diet had a lower risk of death and type 2 diabetes, even when some of those foods were ultra-processed. What mattered most wasn't the processing. It was the quality of the food.

PTs: want CEUs on this? See our nutrition series.

The study

Thompson and colleagues published this prospective cohort study in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe in 2026. The researchers followed 124,836 adults from the UK Biobank, aged 40 to 70 at the start, for rough...

Dr. Wells here from Nutritional Physical Therapy, and today we're going to talk about magnesium. Magnesium is definitely a supplement of huge interest right now, and I see it a lot on different social media platforms, and I hear a lot of my clients asking things like:

• Should I take magnesium?
• Will it help me with sleep?
• Will it help me with my digestive system?
• And the long and the short of it is, it depends, right? So magnesium serves many different roles in the body.

Enjoy the video (transcript below). Also, here's the article reference in our video, and if you like what you see here then know there is more in our 3 board-approved continuing education courses on Nutrition specific for Physical Therapists. Enroll today in our new bundled course offering and save 20%, a value of $60!

Here is the Video Transcript: I think there's something like 300 different enzymatic reactions that is reliant on magnesium. Just because there's that many doesn't necessarily mean that we...