Two Awesome Hours – by Dr. Josh Davis
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The brain is an amazing and powerful organ, with theoretically unlimited potential in some respects. So why doesn’t it feel that way a lot of the time?
The truth is that not only are we often tired, dehydrated, or facing other obvious physiological challenges to peak brain health, but also… We’re simply not making the best use of it!
What Dr. Davis does is outline for us how we can create the conditions for “two awesome hours” of effective mental performance by:
- Recognizing when to most effectively flip the switch on our automatic thinking
- Scheduling tasks based on their “processing demand” and recovery time
- Learning how to direct attention, rather than avoid distractions
- Feeding and moving our bodies in ways that prep us for success
- Identifying what matters in our environment to be at the top of our mental game
Why only two hours? Why not four, or eight, or more?
Well, our brains need recovery time too, so we can’t be “always on” and operating and peak efficiency. But, what we can do is optimize a couple of hours for absolute peak efficiency, and then enjoy the rest of time with lower cognitive-load activities.
Bottom line: if the idea of what you could accomplish if you could just be guaranteed two schedulable hours (your preference when!) of peak cognitive performance per day, then this is a great book for you.
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Plums vs Strawberries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing plums to strawberries, we picked the strawberries.
Why?
Both are great! Absolutely top-tier fruits. However, even within the top tier, there are distinctions:
In terms of of macros, plums have more carbs while strawberries have more fiber; we’ll take the extra fiber for the win here.
In the category of vitamins, plums have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, and K, while strawberries have more of vitamins B6, B9, C, E, and choline, thus scoring a marginal win for strawberries in this round.
When it comes to minerals, plums have (slightly) more copper, while strawberries have more calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc. One more win for strawberries.
In terms of phytochemicals, plums have a higher total mass of polyphenols, and so win this round, although strawberries scored well too.
Adding up the sections makes for an overall win for strawberries, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Top 8 Fruits That Prevent & Kill Cancer
Enjoy!
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The BAT-pause!
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
When Cold Weather & The Menopause Battle It Out
You may know that (moderate, safe) exposure to the cold allows our body to convert our white and yellow fat into the much healthier brown fat—also called brown adipose tissue, or “BAT” to its friends.
If you didn’t already know that, then well, neither did scientists until about 15 years ago:
The Changed Metabolic World with Human Brown Adipose Tissue: Therapeutic Visions
You can read more about it here:
Cool Temperature Alters Human Fat and Metabolism
This is important, especially because the white fat that gets converted is the kind that makes up most visceral fat—the kind most associated with all-cause mortality:
Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It ← this is not the same as your subcutaneous fat, the kind that sits directly under your skin and keeps you warm; this is the fat that goes between your organs and of which we should only have a small amount!
The BAT-pause
It’s been known (since before the above discovery) that BAT production slows considerably as we get older. Not too shocking—after all, many metabolic functions slow as we get older, so why should fat regulation be any different?
But! Rodent studies found that this was tied less to age, but to ovarian function: rats who underwent ovariectomies suffered reduced BAT production, regardless of their age.
Naturally, it’s been difficult to recreate such studies in humans, because it’s difficult to find a large sample of young adults willing to have their ovaries whipped out (or even suppressed chemically) to see how badly their metabolism suffers as a result.
Nor can an observational study (for example, of people who incidentally have ovaries removed due to ovarian cancer) usefully be undertaken, because then the cancer itself and any additional cancer treatments would be confounding factors.
Perimenopausal study to the rescue!
A recent (published last month, at time of writing!) study looked at women around the age of menopause, but specifically in cohorts before and after, measuring BAT metabolism.
By dividing the participants into groups based on age and menopausal status, and dividing the post-menopausal group into “takes HRT” and “no HRT” groups, and dividing the pre-menopausal group into “normal ovarian function” and “ovarian production of estrogen suppressed to mimic slightly early menopause” groups (there’s a drug for that), and then having groups exposed to warm and cold temperatures, and measuring BAT metabolism in all cases, they were able to find…
It is about estrogen, not age!
You can read more about the study here:
“Good” fat metabolism changes tied to estrogen loss, not necessarily to aging, shows study
…and the study itself, here:
Brown adipose tissue metabolism in women is dependent on ovarian status
What does this mean for men?
This means nothing directly for (cis) men, sorry.
But to satisfy your likely curiosity: yes, testosterone does at least moderately suppress BAT metabolism—based on rodent studies, anyway, because again it’s difficult to find enough human volunteers willing to have their testicles removed for science (without there being other confounding variables in play, anyway):
Testosterone reduces metabolic brown fat activity in male mice
So, that’s bad per se, but there isn’t much to be done about it, since the rest of your (addressing our male readers here) metabolism runs on testosterone, as do many of your bodily functions, and you would suffer many unwanted effects without it.
However, as men do typically have notably less body fat in general than women (this is regulated by hormones), the effects of changes in BAT metabolism are rather less pronounced in men (per testosterone level changes) than in women (per estrogen level changes), because there’s less overall fat to convert.
In summary…
While menopausal HRT is not necessarily a silver bullet to all metabolic problems, its BAT-maintaining ability is certainly one more thing in its favor.
See also:
Dr. Jen Gunter | What You Should Have Been Told About The Menopause Beforehand
Take care!
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How To Avoid UTIs
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Psst… A Word To The Wise
Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) can strike at any age, but they get a lot more common as we get older:
- About 10% of women over 65 have had one
- About 30% of women over 85 have had one
Source: Urinary tract infection in older adults
Note: those figures are almost certainly very underreported, so the real figures are doubtlessly higher. However, we print them here as they’re still indicative of a disproportionate increase in risk over time.
What about men?
Men do get UTIs too, but at a much lower rate. The difference in average urethra length means that women are typically 30x more likely to get a UTI.
However! If a man does get one, then assuming the average longer urethra, it will likely take much more treatment to fix:
Case study: 26-Year-Old Man With Recurrent Urinary Tract Infections
Risk factors you might want to know about
While you may not be able to do much about your age or the length of your urethra, there are some risk factors that can be more useful to know:
Catheterization
You might logically think that having a catheter would be the equivalent of having a really long urethra, thus keeping you safe, but unfortunately, the opposite is true:
Read more: Review of Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections
Untreated menopause
Low estrogen levels can cause vaginal tissue to dry, making it easier for pathogens to grow.
For more information on menopausal HRT, see:
What You Should Have Been Told About Menopause Beforehand
Sexual activity
Most kinds of sexual activity carry a risk of bringing germs very close to the urethra. Without wishing to be too indelicate: anything that’s going there should be clean, so it’s a case for washing your hands/partner(s)/toys etc.
For the latter, beyond soap and water, you might also consider investing in a UV sanitizer box ← This example has a 9” capacity; if you shop around though, be sure to check the size is sufficient!
Kidney stones and other kidney diseases
Anything that impedes the flow of urine can raise the risk of a UTI.
See also: Keeping Your Kidneys Healthy (Especially After 60)
Diabetes
How much you can control this one will obviously depend on which type of diabetes you have, but diabetes of any type is an immunocompromizing condition. If you can, managing it as well as possible will help many aspects of your health, including this one.
More on that:
How To Prevent And Reverse Type 2 Diabetes
Note: In the case of Type 1 Diabetes, the above advice will (alas) not help you to prevent or reverse it. However, reducing/avoiding insulin resistance is even more important in cases of T1D (because if your exogenous insulin stops working, you die), so the advice is good all the same.
How do I know if I have a UTI?
Routine screening isn’t really a thing, since the symptoms are usually quite self-evident. If it hurts/burns when you pee, the most likely reason is a UTI.
Get it checked out; the test is a (non-invasive) urinalysis test. In other words, you’ll give a urine sample and they’ll test that.
Anything else I can do to avoid it?
Yes! We wrote previously about the benefits of cranberry supplementation, which was found even to rival antibiotics:
❝…recommend cranberry ingestion to decrease the incidence of urinary tract infections, particularly in individuals with recurrent urinary tract infections. This would also reduce the [need for] administration of antibiotics❞
Read more: Health Benefits Of Cranberries
Take care!
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The Spectrum of Hope – by Dr. Gayatri Devi
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We’ve written before about Dr. Devi’s work (See: “Alzheimer’s: The Bad News And The Good“) but she has plenty more to say than we could fit in an article.
The book is written for patients, family/carers, and clinicians—without getting deep into the science, which it is assumed clinicians will know. the general style of the book is pop-science, and it’s more about addressing the misconceptions around Alzheimer’s, rather than focusing on neurological features such as beta amyloid plaques and tau proteins and the like.
Dr. Devi explains a lot about the experience of Alzheimer’s—what to expect, or rather, what to know about in advance. Because, as she explains, there are a lot of different manifestations of Alzheimer’s that are all lumped under the same umbrella.
This means that a person could have negligible memory but perfect language and reasoning skills, or the other way around, or some other combination of symptoms showing up or not.
Which means that any plan for managing one’s Alzheimer’s needs to be adaptable and personalized, which is something Dr. Devi talks us through, too.
Bottom line: if you are a loved one has Alzheimer’s, or you just like to be prepared, this is a great book to prepare anybody for just that.
Click here to check out The Spectrum of Hope, and hold onto that hope!
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Boost Your Digestive Enzymes
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We’ll Try To Make This Easy To Digest
Do you have a digestion-related problem?
If so, you’re far from alone; around 40% of Americans have digestive problems serious enough to disrupt everyday life:
New survey finds forty percent of Americans’ daily lives are disrupted by digestive troubles
…which puts Americans just a little over the global average of 35%:
Mostly likely on account of the Standard American Diet, or “SAD” as it often gets abbreviated in scientific literature.
There’s plenty we can do to improve gut health, for example:
- Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
- Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)
- How Much Difference Do Probiotic Supplements Make?
Today we’re going to be examining digestive enzyme supplements!
What are digestive enzymes?
Digestive enzymes are enzymes that break down food into stuff we can use. Important amongst them are:
- Protease: breaks down proteins (into amino acids)
- Amylase: breaks down starches (into sugars)
- Lipase: breaks down fats (into fatty acids)
All three are available as popular supplements to aid digestion. How does the science stack up for them?
Protease
For this, we only found animal studies like this one, but the results have been promising:
Amylase
Again, the studies for this alone (not combined with other enzymes) have been solely from animal agriculture; here’s an example:
The Effect of Exogenous Amylase Supplementation on the Nutritional Value of Peas
Lipase
Unlike for protease and amylase, now we have human studies as well, and here’s what they had to say:
❝Lipase supplementation significantly reduced stomach fullness without change of EGG.
Furthermore, lipase supplementation may be helpful in control of FD symptom such as postprandial symptoms❞
~ Dr. Seon-Young Park & Dr. Jong-Sun Rew
Read more: Is Lipase Supplementation before a High Fat Meal Helpful to Patients with Functional Dyspepsia?
(short answer: yes, it is)
More studies found the same, such as:
Lipase Supplementation before a High-Fat Meal Reduces Perceptions of Fullness in Healthy Subjects
All together now!
When we look at studies for combination supplementation of digestive enzymes, more has been done, and/but it’s (as you might expect) less specific.
The following paper gives a good rundown:
Pancrelipase Therapy: A Combination Of Protease, Amylase, & Lipase
Is it safe?
For most people it is quite safe, but if taking high doses for a long time it can cause problems, and also there may be complications if you have diabetes, are otherwise immunocompromised, or have some other conditions (listed towards the end of the above-linked paper, along with further information that we can’t fit in here).
As ever, check with your doctor/pharmacist if you’re not completely sure!
Want some?
We don’t sell them, but for your convenience, here’s an example product on Amazon that contains all three
Enjoy!
We’ll Try To Make This Easy To Digest
Do you have a digestion-related problem?
If so, you’re far from alone; around 40% of Americans have digestive problems serious enough to disrupt everyday life:
New survey finds forty percent of Americans’ daily lives are disrupted by digestive troubles
…which puts Americans just a little over the global average of 35%:
Mostly likely on account of the Standard American Diet, or “SAD” as it often gets abbreviated in scientific literature.
There’s plenty we can do to improve gut health, for example:
- Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
- Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)
- How Much Difference Do Probiotic Supplements Make?
Today we’re going to be examining digestive enzyme supplements!
What are digestive enzymes?
Digestive enzymes are enzymes that break down food into stuff we can use. Important amongst them are:
- Protease: breaks down proteins (into amino acids)
- Amylase: breaks down starches (into sugars)
- Lipase: breaks down fats (into fatty acids)
All three are available as popular supplements to aid digestion. How does the science stack up for them?
Protease
For this, we only found animal studies like this one, but the results have been promising:
Amylase
Again, the studies for this alone (not combined with other enzymes) have been solely from animal agriculture; here’s an example:
The Effect of Exogenous Amylase Supplementation on the Nutritional Value of Peas
Lipase
Unlike for protease and amylase, now we have human studies as well, and here’s what they had to say:
❝Lipase supplementation significantly reduced stomach fullness without change of EGG.
Furthermore, lipase supplementation may be helpful in control of FD symptom such as postprandial symptoms❞
~ Dr. Seon-Young Park & Dr. Jong-Sun Rew
Read more: Is Lipase Supplementation before a High Fat Meal Helpful to Patients with Functional Dyspepsia?
(short answer: yes, it is)
More studies found the same, such as:
Lipase Supplementation before a High-Fat Meal Reduces Perceptions of Fullness in Healthy Subjects
All together now!
When we look at studies for combination supplementation of digestive enzymes, more has been done, and/but it’s (as you might expect) less specific.
The following paper gives a good rundown:
Pancrelipase Therapy: A Combination Of Protease, Amylase, & Lipase
Is it safe?
For most people it is quite safe, but if taking high doses for a long time it can cause problems, and also there may be complications if you have diabetes, are otherwise immunocompromised, or have some other conditions (listed towards the end of the above-linked paper, along with further information that we can’t fit in here).
As ever, check with your doctor/pharmacist if you’re not completely sure!
Want some?
We don’t sell them, but for your convenience, here’s an example product on Amazon that contains all three
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
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Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
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Peony Against Inflammation & More
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Yes, this is about the flower, especially white peony (Paeonia lactiflora), and especially the root thereof (Paeoniae radix alba). Yes, the root gets a different botanical name but we promise it is the same plant. You will also read about its active glycoside paeoniflorin, and less commonly, albiflorin (a neuroprotective glycoside present in the root).
It’s one of those herbs that has made its way out of Traditional Chinese Medicine and into labs around the world.
It can be ingested directly as food, or as a powder/capsule, or made into tea.
Anti-inflammatory
Peony suppresses inflammatory pathways, which thus reduces overall inflammation. In particular, this research review found:
❝Pharmacologically, paeoniflorin exhibits powerful anti-inflammatory and immune regulatory effects in some animal models of autoimmune diseases including Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) and Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE)❞
The reviewers also (albeit working from animal models) suggest it may be beneficial in cases of kidney disease and liver disease, along with other conditions.
Here’s a larger review, which also has studies involving humans (and in vivo studies), that found it to effectively help treat autoimmune conditions including rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis, amongst others:
❝Modern pharmacological research on TGP is based on the traditional usage of PRA, and its folk medicinal value in the treatment of autoimmune diseases has now been verified. In particular, TGP has been developed into a formulation used clinically for the treatment of autoimmune diseases.
Based on further research on its preparation, quality control, and mechanisms of action, TGP is expected to eventually play a greater role in the treatment of autoimmune diseases. ❞
(TGP = Total Glucosides of Paeony)
Antidepressant / Anxiolytic
It also acts as a natural serotonin reuptake inhibitor (as per many pharmaceutical antidepressants), by reducing the expression of the serotonin transporter protein:
Gut Microbiota-Based Pharmacokinetics and the Antidepressant Mechanism of Paeoniflorin
(remember, most serotonin is produced in the gut)
Here’s how that played out when tested (on rats, though):
Against PMS and/or menopause symptoms
Peony is widely used in Traditional Chinese Medicine to reduce these symptoms in general. However, we couldn’t find a lot of good science for that, although it is very plausible (as the extract contains phytoestrogens and may upregulate estrogen receptors while dialling down testosterone production). Here’s the best we could find for that, and it’s a side-by-side along with licorice root:
❝Paeoniflorin, glycyrrhetic acid and glycyrrhizin decreased significantly the testosterone production but did not change that of delta 4-androstenedione and estradiol. Testosterone/delta 4-androstenedione production ratio was lowered significantly by paeoniflorin, glycyrrhetic acid and glycyrrhizin❞
Effect of paeoniflorin, glycyrrhizin and glycyrrhetic acid on ovarian androgen production
(note: that it didn’t affect estradiol levels is reasonable; it contains phytoestrogens after all, not estradiol—and in fact, if you are taking estradiol, you might want to skip this one, as its phytoestrogens could compete with your estradiol for receptors)
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
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