Understanding and Responding to Self-Harm – by Dr. Allan House
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Whether it’s yourself, or (statistically much more likely) a loved one, it’s common to be faced with the deeply unpleasant reality of self-harm. This is a case where most definitely, “forewarned is forearmed”.
Dr. House covers not just the “what” and “why” of self-harm, but also the differences between suicidal and non-suicidal self-harm, as well as the impulsive and the planned.
Stylistically, the book is well-written, well-edited, and well-formatted. All this makes for easy reading and efficient learning.
Much of the book is, of course, given over to how to help in cases of self-harm. More specifically: how to approach things with both seriousness and compassion, and how to help in a way that doesn’t create undue pressure.
Because, as Dr. House explains and illustrates, a lot of well-meaning people end up causing more harm, by their botched attempts to help.
This book looks to avoid such tragedies.
Bottom line: if you’d rather know these things now, instead of wishing you’d known later, then this book is the one-stop guide it claims to be.
Click here to check out Understanding and Responding to Self-Harm, and be prepared!
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New Year, New Health Habits?
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It’s that time of the year, and many of us hope to make this our healthiest year yet—or at least significantly improve it in some particular area that’s important to us! So, what news from the health world?
The rise of GLP-1 agonists continues
GLP-1 agonists have surged in popularity in the past year, and it looks like that trend is set to continue in the new one. The title of the below-linked pop-science article is slightly misleading, it’s not “almost three quarters of UK women”, but rather, “72% of the women using the digital weight loss platform Juniper”, which means the sample is confined to people interested in weight loss. Still, of those interested in weight loss, 72% is a lot, and the sample size was over 1000:
Read in full: New Year, new approach to weight loss: Almost three quarters of UK women are considering using GLP-1s in 2025
Related: 5 ways to naturally boost the “Ozempic Effect” ← these natural methods “hack” the same metabolic pathways as GLP-1 agonists do (it has to do with incretin levels), causing similar results
The lesser of two evils
Smoking is terrible, for everything. Vaping is… Not great, honestly, but as the below-discussed study shows, at the very least it results in much less severe respiratory symptoms than actual smoking. For many, vaping is a halfway-house to actually quitting; for some, it’s just harm reduction, and that too can be worthwhile.
We imagine that probably very few 10almonds readers smoke cigarettes, but we know quite a few use cannabis, which is discussed also:
Read in full: Switching to e-cigarettes may ease respiratory symptoms, offering hope for smokers
Related: Vaping: A Lot Of Hot Air? ← we look at the pros, cons, and popular beliefs that were true a little while ago but now they’re largely not (because of regulatory changes re what’s allowed in vapes)
Sometimes, more is more
The below-linked pop-science article has a potentially confusingly-worded title that makes it sound like increased exercise duration results in decreasing marginal returns (i.e., after a certain point, you’re getting very limited extra benefits), but in fact the study says the opposite.
Rather, increased moderate exercise (so, walking etc) results in a commensurately decreasing weight and a decreasing waistline.
In short: walk more, lose more (pounds and inches). The study examined those who moved their bodies for 150–300 minutes per week:
Read in full: Increased exercise duration linked to decreasing results in weight and waistline
Related: The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, & Move More
Take care!
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Struggle To Deep Squat? It’s Probably This One Fixable Thing Holding You Back
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Deep squat, Asian squat, Slav squat, resting squat… Whatever we want to call it, many in the West struggle with it.
Nevertheless, this struggle is entirely circumstantial, very fixable, and definitely not some kind of immutable law of the universe:
A strong foundation
A proper deep squat relies on four main factors:
- Ankle dorsiflexion allows the toes to pull toward the shin.
- Hip flexion and external rotation bring the thighs close to the torso while slightly rotating outward.
- Knee flexion ensures the thighs and calves make contact.
- Maintaining the center of mass over the midfoot is essential for balance.
Correspondingly, the reason for struggling can be a case of…
- Limited ankle mobility, which prevents the knees from moving forward, shifting weight backward.
- Tight glutes and weak hip flexors making it hard to bring the torso close to the thighs, often causing people to fall backward.
- Quad tightness can also restrict depth if the thighs cannot meet the calves.
- Proportionally longer femurs than average can cause extra difficulty as the pelvis shifts further back, requiring more knee travel for balance.
However, we said “one thing”, not “four things”, so what’s the deal?
For most people, we are told in this video, ankle mobility is the biggest limiting factor in achieving a deep squat. Thus, she recommends working on that, and (at the end of this video) links to another video with specifically ankle exercises.
For all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
The Secret To Better Squats: Foot, Knee, & Ankle Mobility
Take care!
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Breaking Free from Emotional Eating – Geneen Roth
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The isn’t a book about restrictive dieting, or even willpower. Rather, it’s about making the unconscious conscious, and changing your relationship with food from being one of compulsion, to one of choice, wherein you also get the choice of saying “no”.
Roth takes us through the various ways in which life seems to conspire to take consciousness away from eating, from obvious distractions such as TV, to less obvious ones, like “it doesn’t count if you’re not sitting down”. She also tackles other psychological aspects, such as those people get from parents—which can be a big factor for many.
Importantly, she teaches us that when it comes to “have your cake and eat it”, you can also, in fact, have your cake and not eat it. That’s an option too. Its mere presence in our house is not the boss of us. However, overcoming the “this then that” automatic process that goes from having to eating, is something that Roth gives quite some attention to, offering a number of reframes to make it a lot easier.
The style is friendly, conversational, pop-science, and the format dates it a little—this is very much a book formatted the way pop-science books were formatted 20–50 years ago (the book itself is from 2003, for what it’s worth). However, a lack of modern format doesn’t take away from its very valuable insights, and if anything, the older format rather promotes reading a book from cover to cover, which can be beneficial.
Bottom line: if emotional or compulsive eating is something that you’ve found tricky to overcome, then this book can help make it a lot easier.
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From eye exams to blood tests and surgery: how doctors use light to diagnose disease
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This is the next article in our ‘Light and health’ series, where we look at how light affects our physical and mental health in sometimes surprising ways. Read other articles in the series.
You’re not feeling well. You’ve had a pounding headache all week, dizzy spells and have vomited up your past few meals.
You visit your GP to get some answers and sit while they shine a light in your eyes, order a blood test and request some medical imaging.
Everything your GP just did relies on light. These are just some of the optical technologies that have had an enormous impact in how we diagnose disease.
megaflopp/Shutterstock 1. On-the-spot tests
Point-of-care diagnostics allow doctors to test patients on the spot and get answers in minutes, rather than sending samples to a lab for analysis.
The “flashlight” your GP uses to view the inside of your eye (known as an ophthalmoscope) is a great example. This allows doctors to detect abnormal blood flow in the eye, deformations of the cornea (the outermost clear layer of the eye), or swollen optical discs (a round section at the back of the eye where the nerve link to the brain begins). Swollen discs are a sign of elevated pressure inside your head (or in the worst case, a brain tumour) that could be causing your headaches.
The invention of lasers and LEDs has enabled many other miniaturised technologies to be provided at the bedside or clinic rather than in the lab.
Pulse oximetry is a famous example, where a clip attached to your finger reports how well your blood is oxygenated. It does this by measuring the different responses of oxygenated and de-oxygenated blood to different colours of light.
Pulse oximetry is used at hospitals (and sometimes at home) to monitor your respiratory and heart health. In hospitals, it is also a valuable tool for detecting heart defects in babies.
See that clip on the patient’s finger? That’s a pulse oximeter, which relies on light to monitor respiratory and heart health. CGN089/Shutterstock 2. Looking at molecules
Now, back to that blood test. Analysing a small amount of your blood can diagnose many different diseases.
A machine called an automated “full blood count analyser” tests for general markers of your health. This machine directs focused beams of light through blood samples held in small glass tubes. It counts the number of blood cells, determines their specific type, and reports the level of haemoglobin (the protein in red blood cells that distributes oxygen around your body). In minutes, this machine can provide a snapshot of your overall health.
For more specific disease markers, blood serum is separated from the heavier cells by spinning in a rotating instrument called a centrifuge. The serum is then exposed to special chemical stains and enzyme assays that change colour depending on whether specific molecules, which may be the sign of a disease, are present.
These colour changes can’t be detected with the naked eye. However, a light beam from an instrument called a spectrometer can detect tiny amounts of these substances in the blood and determine if the biomarkers for diseases are present, and at what levels.
Light shines through the blood sample and tells us whether biomarkers for disease are present. angellodeco/Shutterstock 3. Medical imaging
Let’s re-visit those medical images your GP ordered. The development of fibre-optic technology, made famous for transforming high-speed digital communications (such as the NBN), allows light to get inside the body. The result? High-resolution optical imaging.
A common example is an endoscope, where fibres with a tiny camera on the end are inserted into the body’s natural openings (such as your mouth or anus) to examine your gut or respiratory tracts.
Surgeons can insert the same technology through tiny cuts to view the inside of the body on a video screen during laparoscopic surgery (also known as keyhole surgery) to diagnose and treat disease.
Doctors can insert this flexible fibre-optic tube with a camera on the end into your body. Eduard Valentinov/Shutterstock How about the future?
Progress in nanotechnology and a better understanding of the interactions of light with our tissues are leading to new light-based tools to help diagnose disease. These include:
- nanomaterials (materials on an extremely small scale, many thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair). These are being used in next-generation sensors and new diagnostic tests
- wearable optical biosensors the size of your fingernail can be included in devices such as watches, contact lenses or finger wraps. These devices allow non-invasive measurements of sweat, tears and saliva, in real time
- AI tools to analyse how blood serum scatters infrared light. This has allowed researchers to build a comprehensive database of scatter patterns to detect any cancer
- a type of non-invasive imaging called optical coherence tomography for more detailed imaging of the eye, heart and skin
- fibre optic technology to deliver a tiny microscope into the body on the tip of a needle.
So the next time you’re at the GP and they perform (or order) some tests, chances are that at least one of those tests depend on light to help diagnose disease.
Matthew Griffith, Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow and Director, UniSA Microscopy and Microanalysis Facilities, University of South Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Hoisin Sauce vs Teriyaki Sauce – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing hoisin sauce to teriyaki sauce, we picked the teriyaki sauce.
Why?
Neither are great! But spoonful for spoonful, the hoisin sauce has about 5x as much sugar.
Of course, exact amounts will vary by brand, but the hoisin will invariably be much more sugary than the teriyaki.
On the flipside, the teriyaki sauce may sometimes have slightly more salt, but they are usually in approximately the same ballpark of saltiness, so this is not a big deciding factor.
As a general rule of thumb, the first few ingredients will look like this for each, respectively:
Hoisin:
- Sugar
- Water
- Soybeans
Teriyaki:
- Soy sauce (water, soybeans, salt)
- Rice wine
- Sugar
In essence: hoisin is a soy-flavored syrup, while teriyaki is a sweetened soy sauce
Wondering about that rice wine? The alcohol content is negligible, sufficiently so that teriyaki sauce is not considered alcoholic. For health purposes, it is well under the 0.05% required to be considered alcohol-free.
For religious purposes, we are not your rabbi or imam, but to our best understanding, teriyaki sauce is generally considered kosher* (the rice wine being made from rice) and halal (the rice wine being de-alcoholized by the processing, making the sauce non-intoxicating).
Want to try some?
You can compare these examples side-by-side yourself:
Enjoy!
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Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
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Capsaicin’s Hot Benefits
Capsaicin, the compound in hot peppers that makes them spicy, is a chemical irritant and a neurotoxin. However, humans being humans, we decided to eat them for fun.
In contrast to many other ways in which humans recreationally enjoy things that are objectively poisonous, consuming capsaicin (in moderation) is considered to have health benefits, such as aiding weight loss (by boosting metabolism) and reducing inflammation.
Let’s see what the science says…
First: is it safe?
Capsaicin is classified as “Generally Recognized As Safe”. That said, the same mechanism that causes them to boost metabolism, does increase blood pressure:
Mechanisms underlying the hypertensive response induced by capsaicin
If you are in good cardiovascular health, this increase should be slight and not pose any threat, unless for example you enter a chili-eating contest when not acclimated to such:
Capsaicin and arterial hypertensive crisis
As ever, if unsure, do check with your doctor first, especially if you are taking any blood pressure medications, or otherwise have known blood pressure issues.
Does it really boost metabolism?
It certainly does; it works by increasing oxygen consumption and raising body temperature, both of which mean more calories will be burned for the same amount of work:
Dietary capsaicin and its anti-obesity potency: from mechanism to clinical implications
This means, of course, that chili peppers enjoy the status of being functionally a “negative calorie” food, and a top-tier one at that:
Chili pepper as a body weight-loss food
Here’s a good quality study that showed a statistically significant* fat loss improvement over placebo:
*To put it in numbers, the benefit was:
- 5.91 percentage points lower body fat percentage than placebo
- 6.68 percentage points greater change in body fat mass than placebo
See also: Difference between percentages and percentage points
For those who prefer big reviews than single studies, we’ve got you covered:
Does it really reduce inflammation?
Counterintuitive as it may seem, yes. By means of reducing oxidative stress. Given that things that reduce oxidative stress tend to reduce inflammation, and in turn tend to reduce assorted disease risks (from diabetes to cancer to Alzheimer’s), this probably has more knock-on benefits too, but we don’t have room to explore all of those today.
Fresh peppers are best for this, but dried peppers (such as when purchased as a ground spice in the supermarket, or when purchased as a capsule-based supplement) still have a very respectable anti-inflammatory effect:
- Capsaicinoids, Polyphenols and Antioxidant Activities of Capsicum annuum: Comparative Study of the Effect of Ripening Stage and Cooking Methods
- A Review on the Effect of Drying on Antioxidant Potential of Fruits and Vegetables
How much should we take?
It’s recommended to start at a low dose and gradually increase it, but 2–6mg of capsaicin per day is the standard range used in studies.
If you’re getting this from peppers, then for example cayenne pepper (a good source of capsaicin) contains around 2.5mg of capsaicin per 1 gram of cayenne.
In the case of capsules, if for example you don’t like eating hot pepper, this will usually mean taking 2–6 capsules per day, depending on dosage.
Make sure to take it with plenty of water!
Where can we get it?
Fresh peppers or ground spice from your local grocery store is fine. Your local health food store probably sells the supplements, too.
If you’d like to buy it online, here is an example product on Amazon.
Note: options on Amazon were more limited than usual, so this product is not vegan, and probably not halal or kosher, as the capsule contains an unspecified gelatin.
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