Popular Conditions & Diets
In 2025, our readers were looking for something different: not quick fixes, not sweeping trends, but real explanations. Our top features of the year reflect that shift. They’re the stories where we slowed things down, asked better questions, challenged assumptions, and made sense of topics that were often confusing, polarizing, or overlooked.
Some pieces explored emerging health conversations. Others unpacked long-standing debates. And a few simply offered the kind of grounded, research-informed clarity people are hungry for in a world crowded with noise.
What ties them together is the Rily approach — curious, honest, practical, and rooted in helping readers understand their bodies and their choices a little better.
Below, you’ll find the standout features of the year, distilled into easily-digestible recaps. Enjoy!
By Damien Zielinski
Raw milk has surged back into the spotlight, fuelled by wellness influencers, nostalgic food culture, and a growing distrust of large institutions. Supporters argue that skipping pasteurization preserves flavour, enzymes, heat-sensitive vitamins, beneficial proteins, and naturally occurring bacteria — all reasons they claim raw milk is easier to digest and potentially protective against allergies, asthma, and inflammation. Some even point to epidemiological research showing lower rates of atopy in children who grow up drinking unpasteurized dairy.
But public health officials remain unequivocal: raw milk carries real risks. Pathogens like E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, and even avian flu are well-documented in unpasteurized dairy, and outbreaks continue to occur across North America. Children, pregnant people, older adults, and those who are immunocompromised are especially vulnerable. While pasteurization does slightly reduce some nutrients, most remain intact — and the safety trade-off is considered non-negotiable by regulators.
The article ultimately highlights a philosophical divide as much as a nutritional one. Raw milk represents autonomy, tradition, and a desire for food transparency; pasteurization represents public health protection at scale. The safest option remains high-quality pasteurized milk, but for those who choose raw dairy, knowing the source, ensuring strict hygiene, and consuming it immediately are essential.
By Damien Zielinski
This feature unpacks why meal replacement drinks, despite their wellness-y branding, often fall short as everyday “food.” Framed through the lens of nutritionism — the idea that food can be reduced to isolated nutrients — it argues that many shakes are the logical but deeply flawed end point of that mindset.
Damien walks through six major problems: synthetic vitamins and minerals that don’t behave like nutrients from whole foods; a reliance on sugars and artificial sweeteners that can spike blood sugar, disrupt the microbiome, and affect mood; and chronically low fibre and phytonutrients, which leaves digestion, satiety, and gut health under-supported. He also highlights issues with highly processed, lower-quality protein sources (especially some plant isolates), and the under-discussed problem of contaminants like heavy metals and BPA, which show up in testing of popular powders and ready-to-drink products.
Beyond the label, the article makes a bigger point: food is chemically and culturally richer than anything that comes in a bottle. While medically supervised use of meal replacements can be clinically helpful for short-term weight loss, diabetes management, and surgical recovery, relying on them in daily life risks both nutritional gaps and a growing disconnection from real meals.
By Damien Zielinski
This feature traces how meal replacement drinks evolved from niche medical tools to lifestyle products with almost sci-fi levels of ambition. Damien starts in mid-20th century hospitals, where early liquid formulas were designed for patients who couldn’t chew, swallow, or tolerate solid food. These medically driven drinks helped prevent malnutrition, support recovery, and meet very specific clinical needs.
By the late 1950s and 1960s, the same technology was repackaged for the mass market. Metrecal – followed by SlimFast, Ensure, Boost and others – promised effortless weight loss or easy nutrition in a bottle. At the same time, science fiction was imagining pills, pastes, and “food of the future,” shaping how culture fantasized (and worried) about replacing meals altogether.
The article then jumps to the modern era of Soylent, Huel, and similar brands, where meal replacements are sold less as a last resort and more as an efficiency upgrade: “human fuel” for productivity, optimization, and time-strapped living. Damien connects this shift to broader distrust of the modern food system, rising chronic disease, and the appeal of outsourcing eating to something simple, controlled, and engineered.
Ultimately, the piece shows that while the branding has changed, the core question hasn’t: can manufactured nutrition ever really replace food, or just imitate it?
By Damien Zielinski
This feature dives into allulose, a rare sugar that tastes like regular sugar but behaves very differently in the body. Chemically, it’s almost a twin of fructose — same formula, slightly different structure — yet that tiny shift means it’s absorbed but not meaningfully metabolized. Unlike fructose, allulose doesn’t spike blood sugar, burden the liver, or raise uric acid, and it contributes virtually no calories.
Damien walks through why researchers are so interested in it: allulose appears to improve insulin sensitivity, blunt post-meal blood sugar rises (even when eaten with other sugars), and meaningfully boost GLP-1, the hormone targeted by popular injectable diabetes and weight-loss drugs. Early human and animal studies suggest potential benefits for weight management, inflammation, and gut microbiome balance, with none of the known dental risks of regular sugar.
On the practical side, allulose behaves a lot like sugar in the kitchen — you can bake and cook with it, and it comes in granulated, powdered, and liquid forms, making it especially attractive for low-carb and ketogenic eaters. The catch? It’s still not approved in Canada or the EU, even as it’s gaining traction elsewhere. The article frames allulose as a genuinely promising, but still emerging, “non-sugar sugar” to watch.
By Damien Zielinski
This guide breaks down a confusing, often overlooked issue: histamine intolerance and how it might be behind a messy mix of symptoms like headaches, skin flares, gut issues, anxiety, and sleep trouble. Damien starts by explaining what histamine actually is — a normal, important chemical for immunity, digestion, and brain function — and then shows how problems arise when your body can’t clear it efficiently.
He walks through key drivers, including low activity of the enzymes DAO and HNMT (especially when the gut lining is damaged), microbiome imbalances that generate extra histamine, and common medications that block histamine breakdown. Because histamine receptors are everywhere, the symptom list is wide-ranging, which is part of why this intolerance is so often missed.
The heart of the piece is a practical, structured low-histamine approach: which foods tend to be highest in histamine (fermented foods, aged cheeses, cured meats, leftovers, certain fruits and vegetables) and what to eat instead, with clear swap ideas across categories. There’s also guidance on lifestyle and gut-healing strategies, like prioritizing freshness, freezing leftovers quickly, managing stress, and considering DAO support with a clinician. The tone stays hopeful: for many people, a low-histamine diet is temporary, highly clarifying, and genuinely life-changing.
Photo by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash.
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