7 Steps to Get Off Sugar and Carbohydrates – by Susan Neal
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We will not keep the steps a mystery; abbreviated, they are:
- decide to really do this thing
- get knowledge and support
- clean out that pantry/fridge/etc and put those things behind you
- buy in healthy foods while starving your candida
- plan for an official start date, so that everything is ready
- change the way you eat (prep methods, timings, etc)
- keep on finding small ways to improve, without turning back
Particularly important amongst those are starving the candida (the fungus in your gut that is responsible for a lot of carb cravings, especially sugar and alcohol—which latter can be broken down easily into sugar), and changing the “how” of eating as well as the “what”; those are both things that are often overlooked in a lot of guides, but this one delivers well.
Walking the reader by the hand through things like that is probably the book’s greatest strength.
In the category of subjective criticism, the author does go off-piste a little at the end, to take a moment while she has our attention to talk about other things.
For example, you may not need “Appendix 7: How to Become A Christian and Disciple of Jesus Christ”.
Of course if that calls to you, then by all means, follow your heart, but it certainly isn’t a necessary step of quitting sugar. Nevertheless, the diversion doesn’t detract from the good dietary change advice that she has just spent a book delivering.
Bottom line: there’s no deep science here, but there’s a lot of very good, very practical advice, that’s consistent with good science.
Click here to check out 7 Steps to Get Off Sugar, and watch your health improve!
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Sweet Cinnamon vs Regular Cinnamon – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing sweet cinnamon to regular cinnamon, we picked the sweet.
Why?
In this case, it’s not close. One of them is health-giving and the other is poisonous (but still widely sold in supermarkets, especially in the US and Canada, because it is cheaper).
It’s worth noting that “regular cinnamon” is a bit of a misnomer, since sweet cinnamon is also called “true cinnamon”. The other cinnamon’s name is formally “cassia cinnamon”, but marketers don’t tend to call it that, preferring to calling it simply “cinnamon” and hope consumers won’t ask questions about what kind, because it’s cheaper.
Note: this too is especially true in the US and Canada, where for whatever reason sweet cinnamon seems to be more difficult to obtain than in the rest of the world.
In short, both cinnamons contain cinnamaldehyde and coumarin, but:
- Sweet/True cinnamon contains only trace amounts of coumarin
- Regular/Cassia cinnamon contains about 250x more coumarin
Coumarin is heptatotoxic, meaning it poisons the liver, and the recommended safe amount is 0.1mg/kg, so it’s easy to go over that with just a couple of teaspoons of cassia cinnamon.
You might be wondering: how can they get away with selling something that poisons the liver? In which case, see also: the alcohol aisle. Selling toxic things is very common; it just gets normalized a lot.
Cinnamaldehyde is responsible for cinnamon’s healthier properties, and is found in reasonable amounts in both cinnamons. There is about 50% more of it in the regular/cassia than in the sweet/true, but that doesn’t come close to offsetting the potential harm of its higher coumarin content.
Want to learn more?
You may like to read:
- A Tale Of Two Cinnamons ← this one has more of the science of coumarin toxicity, as well as discussing (and evidencing) cinnamaldehyde’s many healthful properties against inflammation, cancer, heart disease, neurodegeneration, etc
Enjoy!
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Survival of the Prettiest – by Dr. Nancy Etcoff
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? And what does it matter, in this modern world, especially if we are already in a happy stable partnership?
The science of it, as it turns out, is less poetic. Not only is evolutionary psychology still the foundation of our perception of human beauty (yes, even if we have zero possibility of further procreation personally), but also, its effects are far, far wider than partner selection.
From how nice people are to you, to how much they trust you, to how easily they will forgive a (real or perceived) misdeed, to what kind of medical care you get (or don’t), your looks shape your experiences.
In this very easy-reading work that nevertheless contains very many references, Dr. Etcoff explores the science of beauty. Not just what traits are attractive and why, but also, what they will do for (or against) us—in concrete terms, with numbers.
Bottom line: if you’d like to better understand the subconscious biases held by yourself and others, this book is a top-tier primer.
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Exercise with Type 1 Diabetes – by Ginger Vieira
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If you or a loved one has Type 1 Diabetes, you’ll know that exercise can be especially frustrating…
- If you don’t do it, you risk weight gain and eventual insulin resistance.
- If you do it, you risk dangerous hypos, or perhaps hypers if you took off your pump or skipped a bolus.
Unfortunately, the popular medical advice is “well, just do your best”.
Ginger Vieira is Type 1 Diabetic, and writes with 20+ experience of managing her diabetes while being a keen exerciser. As T1D folks out there will also know, comorbidities are very common; in her case, fibromyalgia was the biggest additional blow to her ability to exercise, along with an underactive thyroid. So when it comes to dealing with the practical nuts and bolts of things, she (while herself observing she’s not a doctor, let alone your doctor) has a lot more practical knowledge than an endocrinologist (without diabetes) behind a desk.
Speaking of nuts and bolts, this book isn’t a pep talk.
It has a bit of that in, but most of it is really practical information, e.g: using fasted exercise (4 hours from last meal+bolus) to prevent hypos, counterintuitive as that may seem—the key is that timing a workout for when you have the least amount of fast-acting insulin in your body means your body can’t easily use your blood sugars for energy, and draws from your fat reserves instead… Win/Win!
That’s just one quick tip because this is a 1-minute review, but Vieira gives:
- whole chapters, with example datasets (real numbers)
- tech-specific advice, e.g. pump, injection, etc
- insulin-specific advice, e.g. fast vs slow, and adjustments to each in the context of exercise
- timing advice re meal/bolus/exercise for different insulins and techs
- blood-sugar management advice for different exercise types (aerobic/anaerobic, sprint/endurance, etc)
…and lots more that we don’t have room to mention here
Basically… If you or a loved one has T1D, we really recommend this book!
Order a copy of “Exercise with Type 1 Diabetes” from Amazon today!
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The Big Book of Kombucha – by Hannah Crum & Alex LaGory
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If you’ve been thinking “I should get into kombucha”, then this is the universe prompting you, because with in this book’s 400 pages is all the information you need and more.
Because, it’s understandable to be wary when starting out, from “what if my jar explodes” to “what if I poison my family”, but the authors (and photographer) take every care to ensure that everything goes perfectly, guiding us through everything from start to finish, including very many high-quality color photos of what things should (and shouldn’t) look like.
On which note, that does mean that to enjoy the color you should get a physical copy or Kindle Fire, not a Kindle e-ink version (as then it’d be black and white).
There’s also a comprehensive section on troubleshooting, as well as hundreds of recipes for all kinds of flavors and occasions.
Bottom line: in the category of books that could reasonably be called “The Bible of…”, this one’s the “The Bible of Kombucha”.
Click here to check out The Big Book Of Kombucha, and get brewing!
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Are You Stuck Playing These Three Roles in Love?
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The psychology of Transactional Analysis holds that our interpersonal dynamics can be modelled in the following fashion:
The roles
- Child: vulnerable, trusting, weak, and support-seeking
- Parent: strong, dominant, responsible—but also often exhausted and critical
- Adult: balanced, thoughtful, creative, and kind
Ideally we’d be able to spend most of our time in “Adult” mode, and occasionally go into “Child” or “Parent” mode when required, e.g. child when circumstances have rendered us vulnerable and we need help; parent when we need to go “above and beyond” in the pursuit of looking after others. That’s all well and good and healthy.
However, in relationships, often it happens that partners polarize themselves and/or each other, with one shouldering all of the responsibility, and the other willfully losing their own agency.
The problem lies in that either role can be seductive—on the one hand, it’s nice to be admired and powerful and it’s a good feeling to look after one’s partner; on the other hand, it’s nice to have someone who will meet your every need. What love and trust!
Only, it becomes toxic when these roles stagnate, and each forgets how to step out of them. Each can become resentful of the other (for not pulling their weight, on one side, and for not being able to effortlessly solve all life problems unilaterally and provide endlessly in both time and substance, on the other), digging in to their own side and exacerbating the less healthy qualities.
As to the way out? It’s about self-exploration and mutual honesty—and mutual support:
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Further reading
While we haven’t (before today) written about TA per se, we have previously written about AT (Attachment Theory), and on this matter, the two can overlap, where certain attachment styles can result in recreating parent/child/adult dynamics:
How To Leverage Attachment Theory In Your Relationship ← this is about understanding and recognizing attachment styles, and then making sure that both you and your partner(s) are armed with the necessary knowledge and understanding to meet each other’s needs.
Take care!
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The Surprising Link Between Type 2 Diabetes & Alzheimer’s
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The Surprising Link Between Type 2 Diabetes & Alzheimer’s
This is Dr. Rhonda Patrick. She’s a biomedical scientist with expertise in the areas of aging, cancer, and nutrition. In the past five years she has expanded her research of aging to focus more on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as she has a genetic predisposition to both.
What does that genetic predisposition look like? People who (like her) have the APOE-ε4 allele have a twofold increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease—and if you have two copies (i.e., one from each of two parents), the risk can be up to tenfold. Globally, 13.7% of people have at least one copy of this allele.
So while getting Alzheimer’s or not is not, per se, hereditary… The predisposition to it can be passed on.
What’s on her mind?
Dr. Patrick has noted that, while we don’t know for sure the causes of Alzheimer’s disease, and can make educated guesses only from correlations, the majority of current science seems to be focusing on just one: amyloid plaques in the brain.
This is a worthy area of research, but ignores the fact that there are many potential Alzheimer’s disease mechanisms to explore, including (to count only mainstream scientific ideas):
- The amyloid hypothesis
- The tau hypothesis
- The inflammatory hypothesis
- The cholinergic hypothesis
- The cholesterol hypothesis
- The Reelin hypothesis
- The large gene instability hypothesis
…as well as other strongly correlated factors such as glucose hypometabolism, insulin signalling, and oxidative stress.
If you lost your keys and were looking for them, and knew at least half a dozen places they might be, how often would you check the same place without paying any attention to the others?
To this end, she notes about those latter-mentioned correlated factors:
❝50–80% of people with Alzheimer’s disease have type 2 diabetes; there is definitely something going on❞
There’s another “smoking gun” for this too, because dysfunction in the blood vessels and capillaries that line the blood-brain barrier seem to be a very early event that is common between all types of dementia (including Alzheimer’s) and between type 2 diabetes and APOE-ε4.
Research is ongoing, and Dr. Patrick is at the forefront of that. However, there’s a practical take-away here meanwhile…
What can we do about it?
Dr. Patrick hypothesizes that if we can reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, we may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s with it.
Obviously, avoiding diabetes if possible is a good thing to do anyway, but if we’re aware of an added risk factor for Alzheimer’s, it becomes yet more important.
Of course, all the usual advices apply here, including a Mediterranean diet and regular moderate exercise.
Three other things Dr. Patrick specifically recommends (to reduce both type 2 diabetes risk and to reduce Alzheimer’s risk) include:
(links are to her blog, with lots of relevant science for each)
You can also hear more from Dr. Patrick personally, as a guest on Dr. Peter Attia’s podcast recently. She discusses these topics in much greater detail than we have room for in our newsletter:
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