4 Critical Things Female Runners Should Know
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When it comes to keeping up performance in the face of menopause, Shona Hendricks has advice:
Don’t let menopause run you down
- Prioritize recovery! Overtraining without adequate recovery just leads to decreased performance in the long term, and remember, you may not recover as quickly as you used to. If you’re still achey from your previous run, give it another day, or at least make it a lighter run.
- Slow down in easy and long runs! This isn’t “taking the easy way out”; it will improve your overall performance, reducing muscle damage, allowing for quicker recovery and ultimately better fitness gains.
- Focus on nutrition! And that means carbs too. A lot of people fighting menopausal weight gain reduce their intake of food, but without sufficient energy availability, you will not be able to run well. In particular, carbohydrates are vital for energy. Consume them sensibly and with fiber and proteins and fats rather than alone, but do consume them.
- Incorporate strength training! Your run is not “leg day” by itself. Furthermore, do whole-body strength training, to prevent injuries and improve overall performance. A strong core is particularly important.
For more on each of these (and some bonus comments about mobility training for runners), enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
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Crispy Tempeh & Warming Mixed Grains In Harissa Dressing
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Comfort food that packs a nutritional punch! Lots of protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats, and more polyphenols than you can shake a fork at.
You will need
- 1 lb cooked mixed whole grains (your choice what kind; gluten-free options include buckwheat, quinoa, millet)
- 7 oz tempeh, cut into ½” cubes
- 2 red peppers, cut into strips
- 10 baby plum tomatoes, halved
- 1 avocado, pitted, peeled, and diced
- 1 bulb garlic, paperwork done but cloves left whole
- 1 oz black olives, pitted and halved
- 4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 2 tbsp harissa paste
- 2 tbsp soy sauce (ideally tamari)
- 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
- 1 tbsp chia seeds
- 2 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
- 1 tsp red chili flakes
- 1 handful chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Preheat the oven to 400℉ / 200℃.
2) Combine the red pepper strips with the tomatoes, garlic, 2 tbsp of the olive oil, and the MSG/salt, tossing thoroughly to ensure an even coating. Spread them on a lined baking tray, and roast for about 25 minutes. Remove when done, and allow to cool a little.
3) Combine the tempeh with the soy sauce and nutritional yeast flakes, tossing thoroughly to ensure an even coating. Spread them on a lined baking tray, and roast for about 25 minutes, tossing regularly to ensure it is crispy on all sides. If you get started on the tempeh as soon as the vegetables are in the oven, these should be ready only a few minutes after the vegetables.
4) Whisk together the remaining olive oil and harissa paste in a small bowl, to make the dressing,
5) Mix everything in a big serving bowl. By “everything” we mean the roasted vegetables, the crispy tempeh, the mixed grains, the dressing, the chia seeds, the black pepper, the red chili flakes, and the flat leaf parsley.
6) Serve warm.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Grains: Bread Of Life, Or Cereal Killer?
- Tempeh vs Tofu – Which is Healthier?
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
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Invigorating Sabzi Khordan
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Have you ever looked at the nutritional values and phytochemical properties of herbs, and thought “well that’s all well and good, but we only use a tiny amount”? Sabzi khordan is a herb-centric traditional Levantine sharing platter served most commonly as an appetizer, and it is indeed appetizing! Never again will “start your meal with a green salad to ensure a gentle blood sugar curve” seem like a chore:
You will need
- Large bunch of parsley
- Small bunch of tarragon leaves
- Small bunch of basil leaves
- Small bunch of mint
- Small bunch of sorrel leaves
- 7 oz block of feta cheese (if vegan, a plant-based substitution is fine in culinary terms, but won’t have the same gut-healthy benefits, as plant-based cheeses are not fermented)
- 9 oz labneh-stuffed vine leaves in olive oil (if vegan, same deal as the above, except it’s harder to find plant-based substitutes for labneh (strained yogurt cheese), so you might want to use our Plant-Based Healthy Cream Cheese recipe instead and make your own)
- 2 tbsp za’atar (you can make your own by blending dried hyssop, dried sumac berries, sesame seeds, dried thyme, and salt—but if you haven’t had za’atar before, we recommend first buying some like the one that we linked, so that next time you know what you’re aiming for)
- 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 10 radishes
- 6 scallions
- 9 oz walnuts, soaked in water overnight and drained
- 1 cucumber, cut into batons
- Warm flatbreads (you can use our Healthy Homemade Flatbreads recipe)
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Arrange the feta, labneh, za’atar, and olive oil in separate little serving dishes.
2) Arrange everything else around them on a platter.
3) Serve! You may be thinking: did we really need a recipe to tell us “put the things on a plate”? The answer here is that this one today was shared mostly as a matter of inspiration, because when was the last time you thought to serve herbs as the star of the dish? Plus, it’s an excuse to try za’atar, not something so commonly seen outside of the Levant.
An alternative presentation
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Herbs for Evidence-Based Health & Healing
- Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
- 10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars
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10 Ways To Delay Aging
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This is Dr. Colin Rose; he is a Senior Associate of the Royal Society of Medicine. He’s also a main contributor to EduScience, a program funded by the E.U. which is designed to enhance the teaching and learning of science in schools in Europe.
His most recent work has been about aging—and how to delay it. We also reviewed his latest book, here:
Delay Ageing – by Dr. Colin Rose
So, what does he want us to know? The key lies in his compilation of ten ways in which we age on a cellular level, and what we can to do slow each one of those:
Damage to DNA accumulates
While DNA can get damaged without any external stimulus to cause that, there are a lot of modifiable factors that we can do to reduce DNA damage. The list is easy: if it causes cancer, it causes aging.
Thus, check out: Stop Cancer 20 Years Ago
Cells become senescent
Our cells are replaced all the time; some sooner than others, but all of them at some point. The problem occurs when cells are outliving their usefulness. If a cell becomes completely immortal, that is cancer, but happily most don’t. Nevertheless, having senescent (aging) cells in the body means that those senescent cells are what get copied forwards by mitosis, and our DNA becomes like a photocopy of a tattered old photocopy of a tattered old photocopy. Which, needless to say, is not good for our health. So, the best thing to do is to kill them earlier:
Yes, really: Fisetin: The Anti-Aging Assassin
Mitochondria become dysfunctional
Without properly functional mitochondria, no living human cell can do its job properly.
Options: 7 Ways To Boost Mitochondrial Health To Fight Disease
Beneficial genes are switched off, harmful genes are on
It’s easy to think of our genes as being immutable, but epigenetics means that our environment (amongst other factors) can mean that our gene expression changes.
Imagine it this way: your genes are a set of instructions for your body. However, your body will act or not on those instructions, depending on other factors. Hormones often play a big part in this; for example sex hormones tell the body which set of genetic instructions to read (and thus what kind of body to build/rebuild), and cortisol or oxytocin can tell the body which set of contingency plans to activate or suppress (respectively). A milder example is gray hair; genes have the program for it, but many other factors inform the body when, if, and how to do it.
Of more concern when it comes to aging is what goes on with more critical systems, such as the brain, in which the aforementioned DNA damage can cause unhelpful instructions to get interpreted, resulting in epigenetic changes that in turn facilitate age-related degeneration.
As to what can be done, see : Klotho: Unzipping The Genes Of Aging?
Stem cells become exhausted
Stem cells can become different kinds of cells, and thus they’re very useful for maintaining a healthy body. However, they get depleted with age. We can slow down the rate of loss, though; for example, intermittent fasting can help:
Per Dr. Li’s 5 Ways To Beat Cancer (And Other Diseases)
And for more detail, see:
Doctor’s Tip: Regeneration (stem cells) — one of your body’s five defense systems
(complete with lists of foods to eat or avoid for stem cell health)
Cells fail to communicate properly
Cells need to talk to each other constantly, to continue doing their jobs. We are one big organism, after all, and not a haphazard colony of the countless cells that constitute such. However, cell signalling gets worse with age, which in turn precipitates others age-related problems. Fortunately, there are nutrients that can improve cellular communication.
For example: PS, We Love You ← this is about phosphatidylserine, also called “PS”
Telomeres become shorter
These protective caps on our DNA suffer the wear-and-tear so that our DNA doesn’t have to. However, as they get shorter, the DNA can start suffering damage. For this reason, telomere length is considered one of the most “Gold Standard” markers of cellular aging.
Here’s what can be done for that: The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)
The body fails to sense nutritional intake properly
This is mostly about insulin signalling (though problems can occur in other systems too, but we only have so much room here), so it’s important to take care of that.
See: Turn Back The Clock On Insulin Resistance
Proteins accumulate errors
This is due to DNA damage, of course, but there are specific things that can reduce protein error accumulation; see for example:
A quick fix – preventing protein errors extends lifespan
See also: Rapamycin Can Slow Aging By 20% (But Watch Out)
The microbiome becomes unbalanced
We at 10almonds often mention that gut health affects pretty much every other kind of health, and it’s true for aging as well. So, take care of that microbiome!
Here’s a primer: Gut Health 101
Want to know more about delaying aging beyond the cellular level?
Check out: Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?
Take care!
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Winter Wellness & The Pills That Increase Your Alzheimer’s Risk
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This week in health news…
Do not go gentle into that good night
As wildfires rage in California, snow is falling from Texas to Georgia, meaning that a lot of people are facing weather they’re not accustomed to, in houses that were not built for it. And that’s the lucky ones; there are many thousands of people who are homeless, of whom many will die.
Hopefully all our readers are safe, but it pays to watch out for the signs of hypothermia as it is a condition that really sneaks up on people and, in the process, takes away their ability to notice the hypothermia. You and your loved ones are not immune to this, so it’s good to keep an eye on each other, looking out for:
- Shivering, first ← when this stops, assuming it’s not because the temperature has risen, it is often a sign of hypothermia entering a later stage, in which the body is no longer responding appropriately to the cold
- Slurred speech or mumbling
- Slow, shallow breathing
- A weak pulse
- Clumsiness or lack of coordination
- Drowsiness or very low energy
- Confusion or memory loss
- Loss of consciousness
- In infants, bright red, cold skin
How cold is too cold? It doesn’t even have to be sub-zero. According to the CDC, temperatures of 4℃ (40℉) can be low enough to cause hypothermia.
Read in full: The warning signs to notice if someone has hypothermia
Related: Cold Weather Health Risks
Lethal lottery of pathogens
In Minnesota, hospital emergency room waiting times have skyrocketed since yesterday (at time of writing), with 40% of Minnesota’s 1,763 flu-related hospitalizations this fall and winter occurring in the same week, according to yesterday’s report. To put it further into perspective, 17 out of 20 of this season’s flu outbreaks have occurred in the past two weeks.
And that’s just the flu, without considering COVID, RSV, and Norovirus, which are also all running rampant in MN right now.
The advice presently is:
❝Go to the ER if you are super-sick. If you are not super-sick, go to urgent care, go to your clinic, schedule a virtual appointment.❞
And if you’re not in Minneapolis? These stats won’t apply, but definitely consider, before going to the hospital, whether you might leave sicker than you arrived, and plan accordingly, making use of telehealth where reasonably possible.
Read in full: Minnesota ERs stressed by “quad-demic” of COVID, flu, RSV, norovirus
Related: Move over, COVID and Flu! We Have “Hybrid Viruses” To Contend With Now
Sleep, but at what cost?
This was a study looking at the effects of sleeping pills on the brain, specifically zolpidem (most well-known by its brand name of Ambien).
What they found is that while it does indeed effectively induce sleep, part of how it does that is suppressing norepinephrine oscillations (which might otherwise potentially wake you up, though in healthy people these oscillations and the micro-arousals that they cause shouldn’t disrupt sleep at all, and are just considered part of our normal sleep cycles), which oscillations are necessary to generate the pumping action required to move cerebrospinal fluid through the glymphatic system while asleep.
This is a big problem, because the glymphatic system is almost entirely responsible for keeping the brain free from waste products such as beta-amyloids (whose build-up is associated with Alzheimer’s disease and is considered to be a significant part of Alzheimer’s pathogensesis) and alpha-synuclein (same but for Parkinson’s disease), amongst others:
Read in full: Common sleeping pill may pave way for disorders like Alzheimer’s
Related: How To Clean Your Brain (Glymphatic Health Primer)
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Gut Health 2.0
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Gene Expression & Gut Health
This is Dr. Tim Spector. After training in medicine and becoming a consultant rheumatologist, he’s turned his attention to medical research, and is these days a specialist in twin studies, genetics, epigenetics, microbiome, and diet.
What does he want us to know?
For one thing: epigenetics are for more than just getting your grandparents’ trauma.
More usefully: there are things we can do to improve epigenetic factors in our body
DNA is often seen as the script by which our body does whatever it’s going to do, but it’s only part of the story. Thinking of DNA as some kind of “magical immutable law of reality” overlooks (to labor the metaphor) script revisions, notes made in the margins, directorial choices, and ad-lib improvizations, as well as the quality of the audience’s hearing and comprehension.
Hence the premise of one of Dr. Spector’s older books, “Identically Different: Why We Can Change Our Genes”
(*in fact, it was his first, from all the way back in 2013, when he’d only been a doctor for 34 years)
Gene expression will trump genes every time, and gene expression is something that can often be changed without getting in there with CRISPR / a big pair of scissors and some craft glue.
How this happens on the micro level is beyond the scope of today’s article; part of it has to do with enzymes that get involved in the DNA transcription process, and those enzymes in turn are despatched or not depending on hormonal messaging—in the broadest sense of “hormonal”; all the body’s hormonal chemical messengers, not just the ones people think of as hormones.
However, hormonal messaging (of many kinds) is strongly influenced by something we can control relatively easily with a little good (science-based) knowledge: the gut.
The gut, the SAD, and the easy
In broad strokes: we know what is good for the gut. We’ve written about it before at 10almonds:
Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
This is very much in contrast with what in scientific literature is often abbreviated “SAD”, the Standard American Diet, which is very bad for the gut.
However, Dr. Spector (while fully encouraging everyone to enjoy an evidence-based gut-healthy diet) wanted to do one better than just a sweeping one-size-fits-all advice, so he set up a big study with 15,000 identical twins; you can read about it here: TwinsUK
The information that came out of that was about a lot more than just gene expression and gut health, but it did provide the foundation for Dr. Spector’s next project, ZOE.
ZOE crowdsources huge amounts of data including individual metabolic responses to standardized meals in order to predict personalized food responses based on individual biology and unique microbiome profile.
In other words, it takes the guesswork out of a) knowing what your genes mean for your food responses b) tailoring your food choices with your genetic expression in mind, and c) ultimately creating a positive feedback loop to much better health on all levels.
Now, this is not an ad for ZOE, but if you so wish, you can…
- Get the free ZOE gut health guide (this is good, but generic, gut health information)
- Take the ZOE home gut health test (quiz followed by offers of lab tests)
- Browse the ZOE Health Academy, its education wing
Want to know more?
Dr. Spector has a bunch of books out, including some that we’ve reviewed previously:
- Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food Is Wrong
- The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat
- Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well
You can also check out our own previous main feature, which wasn’t about Dr. Spector’s work but was very adjacent:
The Brain-Gut Highway: A Two-Way Street
Enjoy!
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Healing Cracked Fingers
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝Question. Suffer from cracked (split) finger tips in the cold weather. Very painful, is there something I can take to ward off this off. Appreciate your daily email.❞
Ouch, painful indeed! Aside from good hydration (which is something we easily forget in cold weather), there’s no known internal guard against this*, but from the outside, oil-based moisturizers are the way to go.
Olive oil, coconut oil, jojoba oil, and shea butter are all fine options.
If the skin is broken such that infection is possible, then starting with an antiseptic ointment/cream is sensible. A good example product is Savlon, unless you are allergic to its active ingredient chlorhexidine.
*However, if perchance you are also suffering from peripheral neuropathy (a common comorbidity of cracked skin in the extremities), then lion’s main mushroom can help with that.
Writer’s anecdote: I myself started suffering from peripheral neuropathy in my hands earlier this year, doubtlessly due to some old injuries of mine.
However, upon researching for the above articles, I was inspired to try lion’s mane mushroom for myself. I take it daily, and have now been free of symptoms of peripheral neuropathy for several months.
Here’s an example product on Amazon, by the way
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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