Brain Benefits in 3 Months…through walking?
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Keeping it Simple
Today’s video (below) is another Big Think production (can you tell that we love their work?). Wendy Suzuki does a wonderful job of breaking down the brain benefits of exercise into three categories, within three minutes.
The first question to ask yourself is: what is your current level of fitness?
Low Fitness
Exercising, even if it’s just going on a walk, 2-3 times a week improves baseline mood state, as well as enhances prefrontal and hippocampal function. These areas of the brain are crucial for complex behaviors like planning and personality development, as well as memory and learning.
Mid Fitness
The suggested regimen is, without surprise, to slightly increase your regular workouts over three months. Whilst you’re already getting the benefits from the low-fitness routine, there is a likelihood that you’ll increase your baseline dopamine and serotonin levels–which, of course, we love! Read more on dopamine here, here, or here.
High Fitness
If you consider yourself in the high fitness bracket then well done, you’re doing an amazing job! Wendy Suzuki doesn’t make many suggestions for you; all she mentions is that there is the possibility of “too much” exercise actually having negative effects on the brain. However, if you’re not competing at an Olympic level, you should be fine.
Fitness and Exercise in General
Of course, fitness and exercise are both very broad terms. We would suggest that you find an exercise routine that you genuinely enjoy–something that is easy to continue over the long term. Try browsing different areas of exercise to see what resonates with you. For instance, Total Fitness After 40 is a great book on all things fitness in the second half of your life. Alternatively, search through our archive for fitness-related material.
Anyway, without further ado, here is today’s video:
How was the video? If you’ve discovered any great videos yourself that you’d like to share with fellow 10almonds readers, then please do email them to us!
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The Snooze-Button Controversy
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To Snooze Or Not To Snooze? (Science Has Answers)
This is Dr. Jennifer Kanaan. She’s a medical doctor with a focus on pulmonary critical care, sleep disorders, and sleep medicine.
What does she want to tell us?
She wants us to be wary of the many news articles that have jumped on a certain recent sleep study, such as:
- Is hitting the snooze button really a bad idea? Study sheds light on the impact of morning alarms on sleep and cognition
- Hitting Snooze May Help You Feel Less Sleepy and More Alert, Research Says
- Is it okay to press the snooze button?
- Hitting Snooze May Help You Feel Less Sleepy and More Alert, Research Says
- Hitting the snooze button on your alarm doesn’t make you more tired
For the curious, here is the paper itself, by Dr. Tina Sundelin et al. It’s actually two studies, by the way, but one paper:
The authors of this study concluded:
❝There were no clear effects of snoozing on the cortisol awakening response, morning sleepiness, mood, or overnight sleep architecture.
A brief snooze period may thus help alleviate sleep inertia, without substantially disturbing sleep, for late chronotypes and those with morning drowsiness.❞
Notably, people tend to snooze because an alarm clock will, if not “smart” about it, wake us up mid sleep-cycle more often than not, and that will produce a short “sleep hangover”. By snoozing, we are basically re-rolling the dice on being woken up between sleep cycles, and thus feeling more refreshed.
What’s Dr. Kanaan’s counterpoint?
Dr. Kanaan says:
❝If you’re coming in and out of sleep for 30 minutes, after the alarm goes off the first time, you’re costing yourself 30 minutes of uninterrupted, quality, restorative sleep. This study doesn’t change that fact.❞
She advises that rather than snoozing, we should prioritize getting good sleep in the first place, and once we do wake up, mid sleep-cycle or not, get sunlight. That way, our brain will start promptly scrubbing melatonin and producing the appropriate wakefulness hormones instead. That means serotonin, and also a spike of cortisol.
Remember: cortisol is only bad when it’s chronically elevated. It’s fine, and even beneficial, to have a short spike of cortisol. We make it for a reason!
If you’d like to hear more from Dr. Kanaan, you might like this interview with her at the University of Connecticut:
Want the best of both worlds?
A great option to avoid getting woken in the middle of a sleep cycle, and also not needing to hit snooze, is a sunrise alarm clock. Specifics of these devices vary, but for example, the kind this writer has starts gently glowing an hour before the set alarm time,and gradually gets brighter and lighter over the course of the hour.
We don’t sell them, but here’s an example sunrise alarm clock on Amazon, for your convenience
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Natural Remedies and Foods for Osteoarthritis
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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
❝Natural solutions for osteoarthritis. Eg. Rosehip tea, dandelion root tea. Any others??? What foods should I absolutely leave alone?❞
We’ll do a main feature on arthritis (in both its main forms) someday soon, but meanwhile, we recommend eating for good bone/joint health and against inflammation. To that end, you might like these main features we did on those topics:
- We Are Such Stuff As Fish Are Made Of (collagen for bone and joint health)
- The Bare-Bones Truth About Osteoporosis (eating for bone health generally)
- Keep Inflammation At Bay (dietary tips for minimizing inflammation—also, our all-time most popular article to date!)
Of these, probably the last one is the most critical, and also will have the speediest effects if implemented.
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How to Permanently Loosen a Tight Psoas
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What Is Your Psoas?
Your psoas is a deep muscle in your lower back and hip area that connects your spine to your thigh bone. It helps you bend your hips and spine, making it a hip flexor.
In today’s video, Your Wellness Nerd (the YouTube channel behind the video below) has revealed some great tips on loosening said tight hip flexors!
How to loosen them
First off, the big reveal…your tight psoas is likely stemming from an overlooked cause: your lower back! The video kicks off with a simple technique to loosen up that stiff area in your lower back. All you need is a foam roller.
But, before diving into the exercises, it’s essential to gauge your current flexibility. A basic hip flexor stretch serves as a pre-test.
Note: the goal here isn’t to stretch, but rather to feel how tight you are.
After testing, it’s time to roll…literally. Working through the lower back, use your roller or tennis ball to any find stiff spots and loosen them out; those spots are likely increasing the tension on your psoas.
After some rolling, retest with the hip flexor stretch. Chances are, you’ll feel more mobility and less tightness right away.
Note: this video focuses on chronic psoas issues. If you have sore psoas from a muscular workout, you may want to read our piece on speeding up muscle recovery.
Is That All?
But wait, there’s more! The video also covers two more exercises specifically targeting the psoas. This one’s hard to describe, so we recommend watching the video. However, to provide an overview, you’re doing the “classic couch stretch”, but with a few alterations.
Next, the tennis ball technique zeroes in on specific tight spots in the psoas. By lying on the ball and adjusting its position around the hip area, you can likely release some deeply held tension.
Additionally, some of our readers advocate for acupuncture for psoas relief – we’ve done an acupuncture myth-busting article here for reference.
Other Sources
If you’re looking for some more in-depth guides on stretching your psoas, and your body in general, we’ve made a range of 1-minute summaries of books that specifically target stretching:
- 11 Minutes to Pain-Free Hips (perfect for psoas muscles)
- Stretching Scientifically
- Stretching & Mobility
- Stretching to Stay Young
The final takeaway? If you’re constantly battling tight psoas muscles despite trying different exercises and stretches, it might be time to look at your lower back and your daily habits. This video isn’t just a band-aid fix; it’s about addressing the root cause for long-term relief:
How did you find that video? If you’ve discovered any great videos yourself that you’d like to share with fellow 10almonds readers, then please do email them to us!
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Fat’s Real Barriers To Health
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Fat Justice In Healthcare
This is Aubrey Gordon, an author, podcaster, and fat justice activist. What does that mean?
When it comes to healthcare, we previously covered some ideas very similar to her work, such as how…
There’s a lot of discrimination in healthcare settings
In this case, it often happens that a thin person goes in with a medical problem and gets treated for that, while a fat person can go in with the same medical problem and be told “you should try losing some weight”.
Top tip if this happens to you… Ask: “what would you advise/prescribe to a thin person with my same symptoms?”
Other things may be more systemic, for example:
When a thin person goes to get their blood pressure taken, and that goes smoothly, while a fat person goes to get their blood pressure taken, and there’s not a blood pressure cuff to fit them, is the problem the size of the person or the size of the cuff? It all depends on perspective, in a world built around thin people.
That’s a trivial-seeming example, but the same principle has far-reaching (and harmful) implications in healthcare in general, e.g:
- Surgeons being untrained (and/or unwilling) to operate on fat people
- Getting a one-size-fits-all dose that was calculated using average weight, and now doesn’t work
- MRI machines are famously claustrophobia-inducing for thin people; now try not fitting in it in the first place
…and so forth. So oftentimes, obesity will be correlated with a poor healthcare outcome, where the problem is not actually the obesity itself, but rather the system having been set up with thin people in mind.
It would be like saying “Having O- blood type results in higher risks when receiving blood transfusions”, while omitting to add “…because we didn’t stock O- blood”.
Read more on this topic: Shedding Some Obesity Myths
Does she have practical advice about this?
If she could have you understand one thing, it would be:
You deserve better.
Or if you are not fat: your fat friends deserve better.
How this becomes useful is: do not accept being treated as the problem!
Demand better!
If you meekly accept that you “just need to lose weight” and that thus you are the problem, you take away any responsibility from your healthcare provider(s) to actually do their jobs and provide healthcare.
See also Gordon’s book, which we’ve not reviewed yet but probably will one of these days:
“You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People – by Aubrey Gordon
Are you saying fat people don’t need to lose weight?
That’s a little like asking “would you say office workers don’t need to exercise more?”; there are implicit assumptions built into the question that are going unaddressed.
Rather: some people might benefit healthwise from losing weight, some might not.
In fact, over the age of 65, being what is nominally considered “overweight” reduces all-cause mortality risk.
For details of that and more, see: When BMI Doesn’t Measure Up
But what if I do want/need to lose weight?
Gordon’s not interested in helping with that, but we at 10almonds are, so…
Check out: Lose Weight, But Healthily
Where can I find more from Aubrey Gordon?
You might enjoy her blog:
Aubrey Gordon | Your Fat Friend
Or her other book, which we reviewed previously:
What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat – by Aubrey Gordon
Enjoy!
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Give Your Adrenal Glands A Chance
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The Hats Of Wrath
Your adrenal glands are two little hat-shaped glands that sit on top of your kidneys (like your kidneys are wearing them as hats, in fact).
They produce adrenaline, as you might have guessed, and also cortisol and aldosterone, which you might or might not have known, as well as some miscellaneous corticosteroids that are beyond the scope of today’s article.
Fun fact! For a long time, doctors thought adrenal glands were much larger than they usually are, because of learning anatomy from corpses that were dissected, but invariably the corpses were those of poor people, especially criminals, whose adrenal glands were almost always overworked and swollen.
You don’t want yours to be like that.
What goes wrong
Assuming you don’t have a rare disorder like Addison’s disease (in which the adrenal glands don’t produce enough of the hormones they’re supposed to), your adrenal glands will usually not have trouble producing enough adrenaline et al.
However, as we learned from the Victorian vagabonds, they can also have no problems producing too much—much like any organ that gets overworked, however, this has consequences.
Hopefully you’re not living a life of stressful crime on the streets, but maybe you have other reasons your adrenal glands are working overtime, such as any source of chronic stress, bad sleep (can’t recharge without this downtime), overuse of stimulants (including caffeine and/or nicotine), and, counterintuitively, alcohol. All these things can tax the adrenal glands considerably.
When this happens, in the extreme we can get Cushing’s syndrome, characterized by the symptoms: hypertension, cortisol-based fat distribution i.e. especially face and abdomen, weakness, fragile easily irritable skin, hair loss and/or hirsutism, paradoxically, and of course general fatigue.
In the non-extreme, we get all the same symptoms just to a lower level, and experience what the medical profession is begging us not to call “Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome” because that’s not an official diagnosis, whereas if it gets a name then they’ll be expected to treat it.
What keeps things going right
Obviously, the opposite of the above, for a start. Which means:
Manage chronic stress; see: How To Manage Chronic Stress
Get good sleep; see: Why You Probably Need More Sleep
Go easy on the caffeine; see: Caffeine Mythbusting
Skip the nicotine; see: Nicotine Benefits (That We Don’t Recommend)!
Avoid alcohol; see: How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol
There are specific vitamins and minerals that support adrenal health too; they are: vitamins B5, B6, B12, C, & D, and also magnesium and zinc.
Good dietary sources of the above include green leafy things, cruciferous vegetables*, nuts and seeds, avocados, olive oil, and if you eat fish, then also fatty fish.
In contrast, it is good to cut down (or avoid entirely) red meat and unfermented dairy.
*Unsure how to get cruciferous vegetables in more often? Try today’s featured recipe, superfood broccoli pesto
Want to know more?
A large part of adrenal health is about keeping cortisol levels down generally (except: for most of us, we can have a little hormesis, as a treat), so for the rest of that you might like to read:
Lower Your Cortisol! (Here’s Why & How)
Take care!
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Passion Fruit vs Persimmon – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing passion fruit to persimmon, we picked the passion fruit.
Why?
You may be wondering: “what is this fruit passionate about?” and the answer is: delivering nutrients of many kinds!
Looking at the macros first, passion fruit has a little more protein and a lot more fiber, while persimmon has more carbs. This means that while persimmon’s glycemic index isn’t bad, passion fruit’s glycemic index is a lot lower.
In terms of vitamins, passion fruit has a lot more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B6, B9, E, K, and choline, while persimmon has more vitamin C. For the record passion fruit is also a good source of vitamin C, with a cup of passion fruit already giving a day’s daily dose of vitamin C, but persimmon gives twice that. Still, that’s a 8:1 win for passion fruit.
When it comes to minerals, passion fruit has more copper, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while persimmon has more calcium and iron, meaning a 6:2 win for passion fruit.
Adding up the three convincing individual victories shows a clear overall win for passion fruit.
Enjoy (passionately, even)!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Glycemic Index vs Glycemic Load vs Insulin Index
- Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
- Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
Take care!
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