Fruit, Fiber, & Leafy Greens… On A Low-FODMAP Diet!
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Fiber For FODMAP-Avoiders
First, let’s quickly cover: what are FODMAPs?
FODMAPs are fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols.
In plainer English: they’re carbohydrates that are resistant to digestion.
This is, for most people most of the time, a good thing, for example:
When Is A Fiber Not A Fiber? When It’s A Resistant Starch.
Not for everyone…
However, if you have inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS), including ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, or similar, then suddenly a lot of common dietary advice gets flipped on its head:
While digestion-resistant carbohydrates making it to the end parts of our digestive tract are good for our bacteria there, in the case of people with IBS or similar, it can be a bit too good for our bacteria there.
Which can mean gas (a natural by-product of bacterial respiration) accumulation, discomfort, water retention (as the pseudo-fiber draws water in and keeps it), and other related symptoms, causing discomfort, and potentially disease such as diarrhea.
Again: for most people this is not so (usually: quite the opposite; resistant starches improve things down there), but for those for whom it’s a thing, it’s a Big Bad Thing™.
Hold the veg? Hold your horses.
A common knee-jerk reaction is “I will avoid fruit and veg, then”.
Superficially, this can work, as many fruit & veg are high in FODMAPs (as are fermented dairy products, by the way).
However, a diet free from fruit and veg is not going to be healthy in any sustainable fashion.
There are, however, options for low-FODMAP fruit & veg, such as:
Fruits: bananas (if not overripe), kiwi, grapefruit, lemons, limes, melons, oranges, passionfruit, strawberries
Vegetables: alfalfa, bell peppers, bok choy, carrots, celery, cucumbers, eggplant, green beans, kale, lettuce, olives, parsnips, potatoes (and sweet potatoes, yams etc), radishes, spinach, squash, tomatoes*, turnips, zucchini
*our stance: botanically it’s a fruit, but culinarily it’s a vegetable.
For more on the science of this, check out:
Strategies for Producing Low FODMAPs Foodstuffs: Challenges and Perspectives ← table 2 is particularly informative when it comes to the above examples, and table 3 will advise about…
Bonus
Grains: oats, quinoa, rice, tapioca
…and wheat if the conditions in table 3 (linked above) are satisfied
(worth mentioning since grains also get a bad press when it comes to IBS, but that’s mostly because of wheat)
See also: Gluten: What’s The Truth?
Enjoy!
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What Happens Every Day When You Quit Sugar For 30 Days
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We all know that sugar isn’t exactly a health food, but it can be hard to quit. How long can cravings be expected to last, and when can we expect to see benefits? Today’s video covers the timeline in a realistic yet inspiring fashion:
What to expect on…
Day 1: expect cravings and withdrawal symptoms including headaches, fatigue, mood swings, and irritability—as well as tiredness, without the crutch of sugar.
Days 2 & 3: more of the same, plus likely objections from the gut, since your Candida albicans content will not be enjoying being starved of its main food source.
Days 4–7: reduction of the above symptoms, better energy levels, improved sleep, and likely the gut will be adapting or have adapted.
Days 8–14: beginning of weight loss, clearer skin, improved complexion; taste buds adapt too, making foods taste sweeter. Continued improvement in energy and focus, as well.
Days 15–21: more of the same improvements, plus the immune system will start getting stronger around now. But watch out, because there may still be some cravings from time to time.
Days 22–30: all of the above positive things, few or no cravings now, and enhanced metabolic health as a whole.
For more specificity on each of these stages, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
The Not-So-Sweet Science Of Sugar Addiction
Take care!
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Beetroot vs Carrot – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing beetroot to carrot, we picked the carrot.
Why?
It was close! And beetroot does have its advantages, but we say carrot wins on balance.
In terms of macros, these two root vegetables are close to identical, down to both having 9.57g carbs per 100g, and 2.8g fiber per 100g. Technically, beetroot has a smidgen more protein, but nobody’s eating these for their tiny protein content.
When it comes to vitamins, it’s not close and the margins are mostly huge: carrots have a lot more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, C, E, K, and choline, while beetroot has more vitamin B9.
In the category of minerals, superficially it swings the other way, but the margins this time are small. Nevertheless, beetroot has more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while carrots have more calcium.
This would make things, on balance, a tie: equal on macros, carrots win on vitamins, beetroot wins on minerals.
But because of the relative margins of difference, carrots win the day, because they’re almost as good as beetroot on those minerals, whereas beetroot doesn’t come close to carrot on the vitamins.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
From Apples to Bees, and high-fructose C’s: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Take care!
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Maximize Your Misery! (7 Great Methods)
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Let’s imagine that instead of being healthily fulfilled in life, you wanted to spend your days as miserable as possible. What should you do?
Here are a few pointers:
Stay still
Avoid physical activity and/or outdoor exposure, to avoid any mood-lifting neurochemicals. In fact, remain indoors as much as possible, preferably in the same room.
If you want to absolutely maximize your misery, make your bedroom the sole space for all activities that it’s possible to do there.
Disrupt your sleep
Keep an irregular sleep schedule by varying your bedtime and wake-up times frequently. Sleep in as much as possible, and make up for it by staying up late to ensure ongoing exhaustion.
Maximize screentime
Use digital entertainment as much as possible to distract you from meaningful activities and rest—as a bonus, this will also help you to avoid self-reflection.
Begin and end your day with a device in hand.
Fuel negative emotions
If you’re going to focus on something, focus on problems you cannot control, to stoke the fires of anger and angst.
A good way of doing this is by staying informed about distressing events, while avoiding meaningful actions to address them. Contribute only in token gestures, and then lament the lack of change.
Follow your impulses
Act on short-term desires without considering long-term consequences, while avoiding behaviors that you know might improve your mood or wellbeing.
Trust that doing the same things that have not previously resulted in happiness, will continue to reliably deliver unhappiness.
Set goals to miss
It’s important that your goals should be vague, and overly ambitious in their scope and/or deliverability. Ideally you should also disregard any preparatory work that a person would normally do before embarking on such a project.
Bonus tip: you can further sabotage any chances of progress, by waiting for motivation to strike before you take any action.
Pursue happiness
Focus on chasing happiness itself, instead of improving your situation or skills. Treat happiness as an end goal, instead of a by-product of worthwhile activities.
Want to learn more?
If you’d like to know many more ways to be miserable, we featured these 7 from this book of 40, which we haven’t reviewed yet, but probably will one of these days:
How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use – by Dr. Randy Paterson
Alternatively…
If for some strange reason you’d rather not do those things, you might consider a previous article of ours:
How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)
Enjoy!
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Why Your Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Day
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…and then covers its tracks so that you don’t notice:
Now you see it…
The world you experience is not an accurate representation of reality. Your brain actively constructs your perception, editing your memories as they happen and manipulating your sense of time. What you perceive as the present moment is actually a processed and reconstructed version of past events.
Nor is your vision anywhere near as detailed as it seems. Only a small central portion is in high resolution, while the rest is blurry. Your brain compensates for this by filling in the gaps with its best guess and/or what it believes is there from the last time you saw it. Your eyes constantly make rapid movements called saccades, and during these (i.e. when your eyes are moving), your vision momentarily shuts down—making you effectively blind for (in total, if we add them all up) about two hours every day (according to this video, anyway; our calculations find it to be more than that, but you get the idea). Your brain stitches together the visual input, creating a seamless experience that feels continuous (much like an animation reel composed of still images).
Why does it do this?
It’s because your senses operate at different speeds—light reaches your eyes in nanoseconds, sound in milliseconds, and touch signals in tens of milliseconds. However, your brain processes these inputs together, creating the illusion of a smooth and simultaneous experience. In reality, what you perceive as the present is actually a delayed and selectively edited version of the past.
Instead of showing you the world as it is, your brain predicts what will happen next. In high-speed situations, such as playing table tennis, if your brain relied on past sensory data, you wouldn’t react in time. Instead, it estimates an object’s future position and presents that prediction as your visual reality.
This also means that because your brain effectively sees things slightly sooner than you do, your brain has already prepared multiple possible responses and when an event occurs, it quickly selects the most likely course of action, deleting the alternatives before you are even aware of them. By the time you think you’ve made a decision, your body has already acted.
This goes for more than just the things we think of as requiring quick reactions!
Walking is a complex task that involves multiple time layers—your brain processes past feedback, assesses your current state, and predicts future movements. That’s why it was something that cyberneticists found difficult to recreate for a very long time. If something unexpected happens, like slipping cartoon-style on a banana peel, your body reacts before you consciously notice the danger. Your spinal cord and brainstem trigger emergency reflexes to stabilize you before your conscious mind even catches up.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
This Main Feature Should Take You Two Minutes (and 18 Seconds) To Read ← There’s a problem nobody wants to talk about when it comes to speed-reading; can you guess what it is based on what we just talked about above?
Take care!
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What you need to know about the new weight loss drug Zepbound
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In a recent poll, KFF found that nearly half of U.S. adults were interested in taking a weight management drug like the increasingly popular Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro.
“I can understand why there would be widespread interest in these medications,” says Dr. Alyssa Lampe Dominguez, an endocrinologist and clinical assistant professor at the University of Southern California. “Obesity is a chronic disease that is very difficult to treat. And a lot of the medications that we previously used weren’t as effective.”
Now, there’s a new option available: In November 2023, the FDA approved Zepbound, another weight management medication, developed by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. Zepbound is different from other drugs in many ways, including the fact that it’s proven to be the most effective option so far.
Keep reading to find out more about Zepbound, including who can take it, its side effects, and more.
What is Zepbound?
Zepbound, one of the brand names for tirzepatide, is an injectable drug with a maximum dosage of 15 mg per week. It’s based on incretin, a hormone that’s naturally released in the gut after a meal. (Mounjaro is another brand name for tirzepatide.)
Tirzepatide is considered a dual agonist because it activates the two primary incretin hormones: the glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) and gastric inhibitory peptide (GIP) hormones.
According to Dr. Katherine H. Saunders, an obesity medicine physician at Weill Cornell Medicine and co-founder of Intellihealth, tirzepatide is involved with several processes that regulate blood sugar, slow the removal of food from the stomach, and affect brain areas involved in appetite.
This means that people taking the medication feel less hungry and get fuller faster, leading to less food intake and, ultimately, weight loss.
How is Zepbound different from Ozempic?
The medications are different in many ways. Ozempic and Wegovy, which are both brand names for semaglutide, only target the GLP-1 hormone. Studies have shown that Zepbound can lead to a higher percentage of total body weight loss than semaglutide medications. In addition to being more effective, there is some evidence that Zepbound is overall more tolerable than Ozempic or Wegovy.
“I have seen overall lower rates in severity of side effects with the tirzepatide medications. Mounjaro [tirzepatide] in particular is the one that I’ve used up until this point, but there’s a thought that the GIP component of the medication actually decreases nausea,” adds Lampe Dominguez. “Anecdotally, patients that I have switched from semaglutide or Ozempic to Mounjaro say that they have less side effects with Mounjaro.”
How is Zepbound different from Mounjaro?
Zepbound and Mounjaro are the same medication—tirzepatide—but they’re approved for different conditions. Zepbound is FDA-approved for weight loss, while Mounjaro is approved for type 2 diabetes. (However, Mounjaro is also at times prescribed off-label for weight loss.)
What are some of Zepbound’s side effects?
According to the FDA, side effects include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, stomach discomfort and pain, fatigue, and burping. See a more comprehensive list of side effects here.
Who can take Zepbound?
Zepbound is FDA-approved for adults with obesity (a BMI of 30 or greater) or who have a BMI of 27 or greater with at least one weight-related condition, like high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, or high cholesterol.
“I tend to advise patients who don’t meet those criteria to not take these medications because we really don’t know what the risks are,” says Lampe Dominguez, adding that people with lower BMI weren’t included in the medication’s studies. “We don’t know if there are specific risks to using this medication at a lower body mass index [or] if there might be some negative outcomes.”
Both doctors agree that it’s important for people who are interested in starting any weight loss medication to talk to their doctors about the potential risks and benefits. For instance, the FDA notes that Zepbound has caused thyroid tumors in rats, and while it’s unknown if this could also happen to humans, the agency said the medication shouldn’t be used in patients with a personal or family history of medullary thyroid cancer.
“Zepbound is a powerful medication that can lead to severe side effects, vitamin deficiencies, a complete lack of appetite, or too much weight loss if prescribed without the appropriate personalization, education, and close monitoring,” says Saunders.
“With all of these medications, and particularly with Zepbound, we would want to make sure that [patients] don’t have a family history of a specific type of thyroid cancer called medullary thyroid cancer,” says Lampe Dominguez.
How long should people take Zepbound for?
“Anti-obesity medications like Zepbound are not meant for short-term weight loss, but long-term treatment of obesity, which is a chronic disease,” explains Saunders. “We prepare our patients to be on the medication (or some type of medical obesity treatment) long term for their chronic disease, which is only controlled for the duration of time they’re being treated.”
For more information, talk to your health care provider.
This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Thinking of using an activity tracker to achieve your exercise goals? Here’s where it can help – and where it probably won’t
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It’s that time of year when many people are getting started on their resolutions for the year ahead. Doing more physical activity is a popular and worthwhile goal.
If you’re hoping to be more active in 2024, perhaps you’ve invested in an activity tracker, or you’re considering buying one.
But what are the benefits of activity trackers? And will a basic tracker do the trick, or do you need a fancy one with lots of features? Let’s take a look.
Why use an activity tracker?
One of the most powerful predictors for being active is whether or not you are monitoring how active you are.
Most people have a vague idea of how active they are, but this is inaccurate a lot of the time. Once people consciously start to keep track of how much activity they do, they often realise it’s less than what they thought, and this motivates them to be more active.
You can self-monitor without an activity tracker (just by writing down what you do), but this method is hard to keep up in the long run and it’s also a lot less accurate compared to devices that track your every move 24/7.
By tracking steps or “activity minutes” you can ascertain whether or not you are meeting the physical activity guidelines (150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week).
It also allows you to track how you’re progressing with any personal activity goals, and view your progress over time. All this would be difficult without an activity tracker.
Research has shown the most popular brands of activity trackers are generally reliable when it comes to tracking basic measures such as steps and activity minutes.
But wait, there’s more
Many activity trackers on the market nowadays track a range of other measures which their manufacturers promote as important in monitoring health and fitness. But is this really the case? Let’s look at some of these.
Resting heart rate
This is your heart rate at rest, which is normally somewhere between 60 and 100 beats per minute. Your resting heart rate will gradually go down as you become fitter, especially if you’re doing a lot of high-intensity exercise. Your risk of dying of any cause (all-cause mortality) is much lower when you have a low resting heart rate.
So, it is useful to keep an eye on your resting heart rate. Activity trackers are pretty good at tracking it, but you can also easily measure your heart rate by monitoring your pulse and using a stopwatch.
Heart rate during exercise
Activity trackers will also measure your heart rate when you’re active. To improve fitness efficiently, professional athletes focus on having their heart rate in certain “zones” when they’re exercising – so knowing their heart rate during exercise is important.
But if you just want to be more active and healthier, without a specific training goal in mind, you can exercise at a level that feels good to you and not worry about your heart rate during activity. The most important thing is that you’re being active.
Also, a dedicated heart rate monitor with a strap around your chest will do a much better job at measuring your actual heart rate compared to an activity tracker worn around your wrist.
Maximal heart rate
This is the hardest your heart could beat when you’re active, not something you could sustain very long. Your maximal heart rate is not influenced by how much exercise you do, or your fitness level.
Most activity trackers don’t measure it accurately anyway, so you might as well forget about this one.
VO₂max
Your muscles need oxygen to work. The more oxygen your body can process, the harder you can work, and therefore the fitter you are.
VO₂max is the volume (V) of oxygen (O₂) we could breathe maximally (max) over a one minute interval, expressed as millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute (ml/kg/min). Inactive women and men would have a VO₂max lower than 30 and 40 ml/kg/min, respectively. A reasonably good VO₂max would be mid thirties and higher for women and mid forties and higher for men.
VO₂max is another measure of fitness that correlates well with all-cause mortality: the higher it is, the lower your risk of dying.
For athletes, VO₂max is usually measured in a lab on a treadmill while wearing a mask that measures oxygen consumption. Activity trackers instead look at your running speed (using a GPS chip) and your heart rate and compare these measures to values from other people.
If you can run fast with a low heart rate your tracker will assume you are relatively fit, resulting in a higher VO₂max. These estimates are not very accurate as they are based on lots of assumptions. However, the error of the measurement is reasonably consistent. This means if your VO₂max is gradually increasing, you are likely to be getting fitter.
So what’s the take-home message? Focus on how many steps you take every day or the number of activity minutes you achieve. Even a basic activity tracker will measure these factors relatively accurately. There is no real need to track other measures and pay more for an activity tracker that records them, unless you are getting really serious about exercise.
Corneel Vandelanotte, Professorial Research Fellow: Physical Activity and Health, CQUniversity Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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