Burn – by Dr. Herman Pontzer
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We all have reasons to want to focus on our metabolism. Speed it up to burn more fat; slow it down to live longer. Tweak it for more energy in the day. But what actually is it, and how does it work?
Dr. Herman Pontzer presents a very useful overview of not just what our metabolism is and how it works, but also why.
The style of the book is casual, but doesn’t skimp on the science. Whether we are getting campfire stories of Hadza hunter-gatherers, or an explanation of the use of hydrogen isotopes in metabolic research, Dr. Pontzer keeps things easy-reading.
One of the main premises of the book is that our caloric expenditure is not easy to change—if we exercise more, our bodies will cut back somewhere else. After all, the body uses energy for a lot more than just moving. With this in mind, Dr. Pontzer makes the science-based case for focusing more on diet than exercise if weight management is our goal.
In short, if you’d like your metabolism to be a lot less mysterious, this book can help render a lot of science a lot more comprehensible!
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We’re the ‘allergy capital of the world’. But we don’t know why food allergies are so common in Australian children
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Australia has often been called the “allergy capital of the world”.
An estimated one in ten Australian children develop a food allergy in their first 12 months of life. Research has previously suggested food allergies are more common in infants in Australia than infants living in Europe, the United States or Asia.
So why are food allergies so common in Australia? We don’t know exactly – but local researchers are making progress in understanding childhood allergies all the time.
Miljan Zivkovic/Shutterstock What causes food allergies?
There are many different types of reactions to foods. When we refer to food allergies in this article, we’re talking about something called IgE-mediated food allergy. This type of allergy is caused by an immune response to a particular food.
Reactions can occur within minutes of eating the food and may include swelling of the face, lips or eyes, “hives” or welts on the skin, and vomiting. Signs of a severe allergic reaction (anaphylaxis) include difficulty breathing, swelling of the tongue, swelling in the throat, wheeze or persistent cough, difficulty talking or a hoarse voice, and persistent dizziness or collapse.
Recent results from Australia’s large, long-running food allergy study, HealthNuts, show one in ten one-year-olds have a food allergy, while around six in 100 children have a food allergy at age ten.
A food allergy can present with skin reactions. comzeal images/Shutterstock In Australia, the most common allergy-causing foods include eggs, peanuts, cow’s milk, shellfish (for example, prawn and lobster), fish, tree nuts (for example, walnuts and cashews), soybeans and wheat.
Allergies to foods like eggs, peanuts and cow’s milk often present for the first time in infancy, while allergies to fish and shellfish may be more common later in life. While most children will outgrow their allergies to eggs and milk, allergy to peanuts is more likely to be lifelong.
Findings from HealthNuts showed around three in ten children grew out of their peanut allergy by age six, compared to nine in ten children with an allergy to egg.
Are food allergies becoming more common?
Food allergies seem to have become more common in many countries around the world over recent decades. The exact timing of this increase is not clear, because in most countries food allergies were not well measured 40 or 50 years ago.
We don’t know exactly why food allergies are so common in Australia, or why we’re seeing a rise around the world, despite extensive research.
But possible reasons for rising allergies around the world include changes in the diets of mothers and infants and increasing sanitisation, leading to fewer infections as well as less exposure to “good” bacteria. In Australia, factors such as increasing vitamin D deficiency among infants and high levels of migration to the country could play a role.
In several Australian studies, children born in Australia to parents who were born in Asia have higher rates of food allergies compared to non-Asian children. On the other hand, children who were born in Asia and later migrated to Australia appear to have a lower risk of nut allergies.
Meanwhile, studies have shown that having pet dogs and siblings as a young child may reduce the risk of food allergies. This might be because having pet dogs and siblings increases contact with a range of bacteria and other organisms.
This evidence suggests that both genetics and environment play a role in the development of food allergies.
We also know that infants with eczema are more likely to develop a food allergy, and trials are underway to see whether this link can be broken.
Can I do anything to prevent food allergies in my kids?
One of the questions we are asked most often by parents is “can we do anything to prevent food allergies?”.
We now know introducing peanuts and eggs from around six months of age makes it less likely that an infant will develop an allergy to these foods. The Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy introduced guidelines recommending giving common allergy-causing foods including peanut and egg in the first year of life in 2016.
Our research has shown this advice had excellent uptake and may have slowed the rise in food allergies in Australia. There was no increase in peanut allergies between 2007–11 to 2018–19.
Introducing other common allergy-causing foods in the first year of life may also be helpful, although the evidence for this is not as strong compared with peanuts and eggs.
Giving kids peanuts early can reduce the risk of a peanut allergy. Madame-Moustache/Shutterstock What next?
Unfortunately, some infants will develop food allergies even when the relevant foods are introduced in the first year of life. Managing food allergies can be a significant burden for children and families.
Several Australian trials are currently underway testing new strategies to prevent food allergies. A large trial, soon to be completed, is testing whether vitamin D supplements in infants reduce the risk of food allergies.
Another trial is testing whether the amount of eggs and peanuts a mother eats during pregnancy and breastfeeding has an influence on whether or not her baby will develop food allergies.
For most people with food allergies, avoidance of their known allergens remains the standard of care. Oral immunotherapy, which involves gradually increasing amounts of food allergen given under medical supervision, is beginning to be offered in some facilities around Australia. However, current oral immunotherapy methods have potential side effects (including allergic reactions), can involve high time commitment and cost, and don’t cure food allergies.
There is hope on the horizon for new food allergy treatments. Multiple clinical trials are underway around Australia aiming to develop safer and more effective treatments for people with food allergies.
Jennifer Koplin, Group Leader, Childhood Allergy & Epidemiology, The University of Queensland and Desalegn Markos Shifti, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Child Health Research Centre, Faculty of Medicine, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The Book Of Hormones – by Dr. Shweta Patel
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The subtitle promising “through every stage of life” is a slight overstatement, as the book barely touches on puberty, but we know that the vast majority of our readers have left that one far behind in the past, so probably this is not such an issue.
Where the book gives more attention is in general adult life, through the years of potential fertility, into menopause and beyond. This means lots about the hormonal fluctuations inherent to the menstrual cycle (both the normal, and the still-quite-commonly abnormal, e.g. in cases of PCOS etc), the before-during-after of pregnancy, and many hormonal matters that are not related to sex hormones, such as stress-related hormones and food-related hormones. As such, the book certainly lives up to its title; it is indeed “the book of hormones”.
The style is light and conversational; we get a lot of lessons in chemistry here, but it never feels like it, and there’s certainly no hard science, just clear and easy explanations.
Bottom line: if you’d like to understand hormones quite comprehensively but in a light-hearted manner, this book is a very pleasant and educational read.
Click here to check out The Book Of Hormones, and understand them!
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How To Leverage Attachment Theory In Your Relationship
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How To Leverage Attachment Theory In Your Relationship
Attachment theory has come to be seen in “kids nowadays”’ TikTok circles as almost a sort of astrology, but that’s not what it was intended for, and there’s really nothing esoteric about it.
What it can be, is a (fairly simple, but) powerful tool to understand about our relationships with each other.
To demystify it, let’s start with a little history…
Attachment theory was conceived by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth, and popularized as a theory bypsychiatrist John Bowlby. The two would later become research partners.
- Dr. Ainsworth’s initial work focused on children having different attachment styles when it came to their caregivers: secure, avoidant, or anxious.
- Later, she would add a fourth attachment style: disorganized, and then subdivisions, such as anxious-avoidant and dismissive-avoidant.
- Much later, the theory would be extended to attachments in (and between) adults.
What does it all mean?
To understand this, we must first talk about “The Strange Situation”.
“The Strange Situation” was an experiment conducted by Dr. Ainsworth, in which a child would be observed playing, while caregivers and strangers would periodically arrive and leave, recreating a natural environment of most children’s lives. Each child’s different reactions were recorded, especially noting:
- The child’s reaction (if any) to their caregiver’s departure
- The child’s reaction (if any) to the stranger’s presence
- The child’s reaction (if any) to their caregiver’s return
- The child’s behavior on play, specifically, how much or little the child explored and played with new toys
She observed different attachment styles, including:
- Secure: a securely attached child would play freely, using the caregiver as a secure base from which to explore. Will engage with the stranger when the caregiver is also present. May become upset when the caregiver leaves, and happy when they return.
- Avoidant: an avoidantly attached child will not explore much regardless of who is there; will not care much when the caregiver departs or returns.
- Anxious: an anxiously attached child may be clingy before separation, helplessly passive when the caregiver is absent, and difficult to comfort upon the caregiver’s return.
- Disorganized: a disorganizedly attached child may flit between the above types
These attachment styles were generally reflective of the parenting styles of the respective caregivers:
- If a caregiver was reliably present (physically and emotionally), the child would learn to expect that and feel secure about it.
- If a caregiver was absent a lot (physically and/or emotionally), the child would learn to give up on expecting a caregiver to give care.
- If a caregiver was unpredictable a lot in presence (physical and/or emotional), the child would become anxious and/or confused about whether the caregiver would give care.
What does this mean for us as adults?
As we learn when we are children, tends to go for us in life. We can change, but we usually don’t. And while we (usually) no longer rely on caregivers per se as adults, we do rely (or not!) on our partners, friends, and so forth. Let’s look at it in terms of partners:
- A securely attached adult will trust that their partner loves them and will be there for them if necessary. They may miss their partner when absent, but won’t be anxious about it and will look forward to their return.
- An avoidantly attached adult will not assume their partner’s love, and will feel their partner might let them down at any time. To protect themself, they may try to manage their own expectations, and strive always to keep their independence, to make sure that if the worst happens, they’ll still be ok by themself.
- An anxiously attached adult will tend towards clinginess, and try to keep their partner’s attention and commitment by any means necessary.
Which means…
- When both partners have secure attachment styles, most things go swimmingly, and indeed, securely attached partners most often end up with each other.
- A very common pairing, however, is one anxious partner dating one avoidant partner. This happens because the avoidant partner looks like a tower of strength, which the anxious partner needs. The anxious partner’s clinginess can also help the avoidant partner feel better about themself (bearing in mind, the avoidant partner almost certainly grew up feeling deeply unwanted).
- Anxious-anxious pairings happen less because anxiously attached people don’t tend to be attracted to people who are in the same boat.
- Avoidant-avoidant pairings happen least of all, because avoidantly attached people having nothing to bind them together. Iff they even get together in the first place, then later when trouble hits, one will propose breaking up, and the other will say “ok, bye”.
This is fascinating, but is there a practical use for this knowledge?
Yes! Understanding our own attachment styles, and those around us, helps us understand why we/they act a certain way, and realize what relational need is or isn’t being met, and react accordingly.
That sometimes, an anxiously attached person just needs some reassurance:
- “I love you”
- “I miss you”
- “I look forward to seeing you later”
That sometimes, an avoidantly attached person needs exactly the right amount of space:
- Give them too little space, and they will feel their independence slipping, and yearn to break free
- Give them too much space, and oops, they’re gone now
Maybe you’re reading that and thinking “won’t that make their anxious partner anxious?” and yes, yes it will. That’s why the avoidant partner needs to skip back up and remember to do the reassurance.
It helps also when either partner is going to be away (physically or emotionally! This counts the same for if a partner will just be preoccupied for a while), that they parameter that, for example:
- Not: “Don’t worry, I just need some space for now, that’s all” (à la “I am just going outside and may be some time“)
- But: “I need to be undisturbed for a bit, but let’s schedule some me-and-you-time for [specific scheduled time]”.
Want to learn more about addressing attachment issues?
Psychology Today: Ten Ways to Heal Your Attachment Issues
You also might enjoy such articles such as:
- Nurturing secure attachment: building healthy relationships
- Why anxious and avoidant often attracted each other
- How to help an insecurely attached partner feel loved
- How to cope with a dismissive-avoidant partner
Lastly, to end on a light note…
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In Plain English…
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It’s Q&A Time!
This is the bit whereby each week, we respond to subscriber questions/requests/etc
Have something you’d like to ask us, or ask us to look into? Hit reply to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom, and a Real Human™ will be glad to read it!
Q: Love to have someone research all the additives in our medicines, (risk of birth control and breast cancer) and what goes in all of our food and beverages. So much info out there, but there are so many variations, you never know who to believe.
That’s a great idea! There are a lot of medicines and food and beverages out there, so that’s quite a broad brief, but! We could well do a breakdown of very common additives, and demystify them, sorting them into good/bad/neutral, e.g:
- Ascorbic acid—Good! This is Vitamin C
- Acetic acid—Neutral! This is vinegar
- Acetylsalicylic acid—Good or Bad! This is aspirin (a painkiller and blood-thinning agent, can be good for you or can cause more problems than it solves, depending on your personal medical situation. If in doubt, check with your doctor)
- Acesulfame K—Generally Neutral! This is a sweetener that the body can’t metabolize, so it’s also not a source of potassium (despite containing potassium) and will generally do nothing. Unless you have an allergy to it, which is rare but is a thing.
- Sucralose—Neutral! This is technically a sugar (as is anything ending in -ose), but the body can’t metabolize it and processes it as a dietary fiber instead. We’d list it as good for that reason, but honestly, we doubt you’re eating enough sucralose to make a noticeable difference to your daily fiber intake.
- Sucrose—Bad! This is just plain sugar
Sometimes words that sound the same can ring alarm bells when they need not, for example there’s a big difference between:
- Potassium iodide (a good source of potassium and iodine)
- Potassium cyanide (the famous poison; 300mg will kill you; half that dose will probably kill you)
- Cyanocobalamine (Vitamin B12)
Let us know if there are particular additives (or particular medications) you’d like us to look at!
While for legal reasons we cannot give medical advice, talking about common contraindications (e.g., it’s generally advised to not take this with that, as one will stop the other from working, etc) is definitely something we could do.
For example! St. John’s Wort, very popular as a herbal mood-brightener, is on the list of contraindications for so many medications, including:
- Antidepressants
- Birth control pills
- Cyclosporine, which prevents the body from rejecting transplanted organs
- Some heart medications, including digoxin and ivabradine
- Some HIV drugs, including indinavir and nevirapine
- Some cancer medications, including irinotecan and imatinib
- Warfarin, an anticoagulant (blood thinner)
- Certain statins, including simvastatin
Q: As I am a retired nurse, I am always interested in new medical technology and new ways of diagnosing. I have recently heard of using the eyes to diagnose Alzheimer’s. When I did some research I didn’t find too much. I am thinking the information may be too new or I wasn’t on the right sites.
(this is in response to last week’s piece on lutein, eyes, and brain health)
We’d readily bet that the diagnostic criteria has to do with recording low levels of lutein in the eye (discernible by a visual examination of macular pigment optical density), and relying on the correlation between this and incidence of Alzheimer’s, but we’ve not seen it as a hard diagnostic tool as yet either—we’ll do some digging and let you know what we find! In the meantime, we note that the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (which may be of interest to you, if you’re not already subscribed) is onto this:
See also:
- Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (mixture of free and paid content)
- Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Reports (open access—all content is free)
Q: As to specific health topics, I would love to see someone address all these Instagram ads targeted to women that claim “You only need to ‘balance your hormones’ to lose weight, get ripped, etc.” What does this mean? Which hormones are they all talking about? They all seem to be selling a workout program and/or supplements or something similar, as they are ads, after all. Is there any science behind this stuff or is it mostly hot air, as I suspect?
Thank you for asking this, as your question prompted yesterday’s main feature, What Does “Balancing Your Hormones” Even Mean?
That’s a great suggestion also about addressing ads (and goes for health-related things in general, not just hormonal stuff) and examining their claims, what they mean, how they work (if they work!), and what’s “technically true but may
be misleading* cause confusion”*We don’t want companies to sue us, of course.
Only, we’re going to need your help for this one, subscribers!
See, here at 10almonds we practice what we preach. We limit screen time, we focus on our work when working, and simply put, we don’t see as many ads as our thousands of subscribers do. Also, ads tend to be targeted to the individual, and often vary from country to country, so chances are good that we’re not seeing the same ads that you’re seeing.
So, how about we pull together as a bit of a 10almonds community project?
- Step 1: add our email address to your contacts list, if you haven’t already
- Step 2: When you see an ad you’re curious about, select “share” (there is usually an option to share ads, but if not, feel free to screenshot or such)
- Step 3: Send the ad to us by email
We’ll do the rest! Whenever we have enough ads to review, we’ll do a special on the topic.
We will categorically not be able to do this without you, so please do join in—Many thanks in advance!
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What’s Your Personal Life Expectancy?
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Tick Tock… Goes the Death Clock?
This fun little test will ask a few questions about you and your lifestyle, and then make a prediction of your personal life expectancy, based on global statistics from the World Health Organisation.
And then the countdown starts… Literally, it generates a clock for you to see your life-seconds ticking away—this may or may not delight you, but it sure is a curiosity.
Their “Letters” page has a lot of reactions from people who just got their results (spoiler: people’s perspectives on life vary a lot)
Who mostly uses this service? According to their stats page, it’s mostly curious under-45s, with gradually less interest in knowing about it from 45 onwards… until the age of 70, when suddenly everyone wants to know about it again!
So Is It Possible To Pause The Clock On Aging? – Q&A Spotlight Interview
Life extension is sometimes viewed as the domain of the super-rich, and with less than half of Millennials (and almost none of Gen-Z) having retirement plans, often those of us who aren’t super-rich have more mundane (and immediate!) goals than living to 120.
And yet…
Middle class and working class life-extensionists do exist, even if not garnering the same media attention. We think that’s strange—after all, while the whimsies of the super-rich may be entertaining to read about, it’s not nearly as applicable to most people as more relatable stories:
- The twenty-something who gives up smoking and adds (healthier!) years to their life
- The thirty-something who adopts a plant-based diet and is less likely to die of heart disease
- The forty-something who stops drinking, and avoids health conditions and mishaps alike
- The fifty-something who reconsiders their health plan in light of their changing body
- The sixty-something who takes up yoga, or chess, or salsa dancing
- The seventy-something who gets asked what their secret is
- …and so on
But these are ideas, textbook examples. What if we make it more personal?
We interviewed 10 Almonds subscriber and longevity enthusiast Anastasia S., and here’s what she had to say:
Q: What does life extension mean to you, in your life?
A: To me, the key is healthy life extension. People often joke “I don’t want to live longer; the last years are the worst!” but they’re missing the point that after a certain age, those difficulties are coming whether they come at 50 or 70 or 90. Personally, I’d rather keep them at bay if I can.
Q: How do you do that?
A: Firstly, which won’t be a shock: good diet and exercise. Those two things are possibly the biggest active influences on my longevity. I’m vegan, which I don’t think is outright necessary for good health but done right, it can certainly be good. In this house we eat a lot of whole grains, beans, lentils, vegetables in general, nuts too. As for exercise, I do 30–60 minutes of Pilates daily; it’s nothing fancy and it’s just me in my pajamas at home, but it keeps me strong and fit and supple. I also walk everywhere; I don’t even own a car. Beyond that… I don’t drink or smoke (probably the biggest passive influences on my longevity, i.e., things that aren’t there to make it shorter), and I try to take my sleep seriously, making sure to schedule enough time and prepare properly for it.
Q: Take your sleep seriously? How so?
A: Good “sleep hygiene” as some call it—I schedule a little wind-down time before sleep, with no glaring screens or main lights, making a space between my busy day and restful sleep, kicking anything requiring brainpower to the morning, and making a conscious choice not to think more about those things in the meantime. I take care to make my sleeping environment as conducive as possible to good sleep too; I have a good mattress and pillows, I make sure the temperature is cool but cosy. I have a pot of herbal tea on my bedside table—I hydrate a lot.
Q: Do you take any supplements?
A: I do! They’re mostly quite general though, just “covering my bases”, so to speak. I take a daily nootropic stack (a collection of supplements specifically for brain health), too. I buy them in bulk, so they don’t cost so much.
Q: This seems quite a healthy lifestyle! Do you have any vices at all?
A: I definitely drink more coffee than I probably should! But hey, nobody’s perfect. I do love coffee, though, and as vices go, it’s probably not too bad.
Q: How’s it all working out for you? Do you feel younger?
A: I’m 38 and sometimes I feel like a teenager; sometimes I feel like an old lady. But the latter is usually for social reasons, not health-related reasons. I do have streaks of gray in my hair though, and I love that! If people don’t notice my grays, then they often think I’m in my 20s, rather than pushing 40. A little while back, I was stopped in the street by someone wanting to sell me a change of household utilities provider, then she stopped herself mid-sentence and said “Oh but wait, you look a bit too young, never mind”. Most general metrics of health would put me in my 20s.
Q: That’s interesting that you love your gray hairs, for someone who wants to stay young; is it an exception?
A: It’s more that I want to minimize the problems that come with age, and not everything’s a problem. Gray hairs are cool; joint pain, not so much. A long life rich with experiences is cool; memory loss, not so much. So, I try to keep healthy, and wear my years as best I can.
Q: Sounds good to us; good luck with it!
A: Thank you; I do my best!
Here at 10 Almonds, we love featuring what our readers are doing to improve their health; if you’re willing to be featured in our newsletter, let us know by replying to this email (where an actual human will read it, we promise!)
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Younger – by Dr. Sara Gottfried
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Does this do the things it says in the subtitle? In honestly, not really, no, but what it does do (if implemented) is modify your gene expression, slow aging, and extend healthspan. Which is all good stuff, even if it’s not the snappy SEO-oriented keywords in the subtitle.
A lot of the book pertains to turning certain genes (e.g. SIRT1, mTOR, VDR, APOE4, etc) on or off per what is sensible in each case, noting that while genes are relatively fixed (technically they can be changed, but the science is young and we can’t do much yet), gene expression is something we can control quite a bit. And while it may be unsettling to have the loaded gun that is the APOE4 gene being held against your head, at the end of the day there are things we can do that influence whether the trigger gets pulled, and when. Same goes for other undesirable genes, and also for the desirable ones that are useless if they never actually get expressed.
She offers (contained within the book, not as an upsell) a 7-week program that aims to set the reader up with good healthy habits to do just that and thus help keep age-related maladies at bay, and if we slip up, perhaps later in the year or so, we can always recommence the program.
The advice is also just good health advice, even without taking gene expression into account, because there are a stack of benefits to each of the things in her protocol.
The style is personable without being padded with fluff, accessible without dumbing down, and information-dense without being a challenging read. The formatting helps a lot also; a clear instructional layout is a lot better than a wall of text.
Bottom line: if you’d like to tweak your genes for healthy longevity, this book can help you do just that!
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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