Gut Renovation – by Dr. Roshini Raj, with Sheila Buff
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Unless we actually feel something going on down there, gut health is an oft-neglected part of overall health—which is unfortunate, because invisible as it may often be, it affects so much.
Gastroenterologist Dr. Roshini Raj gives us all the need-to-know information, explanations of why things happen the way they do with regard to the gut, and tips, tricks, and hacks to improve matters.
She also does some mythbusting along the way, and advises about what things don’t make a huge difference, including what medications don’t have a lot of evidence for their usefulness.
The style is easy-reading pop-science, with plenty of high-quality medical content.
Reading between the lines, a lot of the book as it stands was probably written by the co-author, Sheila Buff, who is a professional ghostwriter and specializes in working closely with doctors to produce works that are readable and informative to the layperson while still being full of the doctor’s knowledge and expertise. So a reasonable scenario is that Dr. Raj gave her extensive notes, she took it from there, passed it back to her for medical corrections, and they had a little back and forth until it was done. Whatever their setup, the end result was definitely good!
Bottom line: if you’d like a guide to gut health that’s practical and easy to read, while being quite comprehensive and certainly a lot more than “eat probiotics and fiber”, then this book is a fine choice.
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Best Workouts for Women Over 40 To Give Your Metabolism A Makeover
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After 40, the usual course of events goes: your lean muscle mass decreases, which slows your metabolism and makes it easier to gain fat. At the same time, bone density decreases, increasing the risk of osteoporosis and frailty. This leads to lower mobility, flexibility, and overall frustration.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! Fitness coach Jessica Cooke explains how:
It all depends on this
Strength training helps counteract these effects by increasing lean muscle mass, which boosts metabolism and fat burning. It also improves bone density, reducing the risk of osteoporosis. Plus, it builds strength, fitness, and a toned physique.
The best part? It doesn’t require long workouts—short, effective sessions work best.
While walking is very beneficial for general health, it doesn’t provide the resistance needed to build muscle. Without resistance, your body composition won’t change, and so your metabolism will remain the same. Strength training is essential for burning fat at rest and improving overall fitness.
You don’t have to do high-impact exercises or jumping to see results. Low-impact strength training is effective and gentle on the joints. Lifting weights or using your body weight in a controlled manner will help build muscle and improve strength.
Many women only do cardio and neglect strength training, leading to minimal progress. Another common mistake is overcomplicating workouts—simple, consistent strength training is all you need.
Aim to strength train three times per week for 20 minutes. Focus on compound movements that work multiple muscle groups, such as:
- squats
- lunges
- deadlifts
- press-ups
- shoulder presses
- upright rows
- planks
- glute bridges
- sit-ups
- Russian twists
Start with light (e.g. 2-3 kg) weights and maintain proper form.
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:
Don’t Let Menopause Run You Down: 4 Critical Things Female Runners Should Know
Take care!
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Why You Probably Need More Sleep
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Sleep: yes, you really do still need it!
We asked you how much sleep you usually get, and got the above-pictured, below-described set of responses:
- A little of a third of all respondents selected the option “< 7 hours”
- However, because respondents also selected options such as < 6 hours, < 5 hours, and < 4 hours, so if we include those in the tally, the actual total percentage of respondents who reported getting under 7 hours, is actually more like 62%, or just under two thirds of all respondents.
- Nine respondents, which was about 5% of the total, reported usually getting under 4 hours sleep
- A little over quarter of respondents reported usually getting between 7 and 8 hours sleep
- Fifteen respondents, which was a little under 10% of the total, reported usually getting between 8 and 9 hours of sleep
- Three respondents, which was a little under 2% of the total, reported getting over 9 hours of sleep
- In terms of the classic “you should get 7–9 hours sleep”, approximately a third of respondents reported getting this amount.
You need to get 7–9 hours sleep: True or False?
True! Unless you have a (rare!) mutated ADRB1 gene, which reduces that.
The way to know whether you have this, without genomic testing to know for sure, is: do you regularly get under 6.5 hours sleep, and yet continue to go through life bright-eyed and bushy-tailed? If so, you probably have that gene. If you experience daytime fatigue, brain fog, and restlessness, you probably don’t.
About that mutated ADRB1 gene:
NIH | Gene identified in people who need little sleep
Quality of sleep matters as much as duration, and a lot of studies use the “RU-Sated” framework, which assesses six key dimensions of sleep that have been consistently associated with better health outcomes. These are:
- regularity / usual hours
- satisfaction with sleep
- alertness during waking hours
- timing of sleep
- efficiency of sleep
- duration of sleep
But, that doesn’t mean that you can skimp on the last one if the others are in order. In fact, getting a good 7 hours sleep can reduce your risk of getting a cold by three or four times (compared with six or fewer hours):
Behaviorally Assessed Sleep and Susceptibility to the Common Cold
^This study was about the common cold, but you may be aware there are more serious respiratory viruses freely available, and you don’t want those, either.
Napping is good for the health: True or False?
True or False, depending on how you’re doing it!
If you’re trying to do it to sleep less in total (per polyphasic sleep scheduling), then no, this will not work in any sustainable fashion and will be ruinous to the health. We did a Mythbusting Friday special on specifically this, a while back:
Could Just Two Hours Sleep Per Day Be Enough?
PS: you might remember Betteridge’s Law of Headlines
If you’re doing it as a energy-boosting supplement to a reasonable night’s sleep, napping can indeed be beneficial to the health, and can give benefits such as:
- Increased alertness
- Helps with learning
- Improved memory
- Boost to immunity
- Enhance athletic performance
However! There is still a right and a wrong way to go about it, and we wrote about this previously, for a Saturday Life Hacks edition of 10almonds:
How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)
As we get older, we need less sleep: True or False
False, with one small caveat.
The small caveat: children and adolescents need 9–12 hours sleep because, uncredited as it goes, they are doing some seriously impressive bodybuilding, and that is exhausting to the body. So, an adult (with a normal lifestyle, who is not a bodybuilder) will tend to need less sleep than a child/adolescent.
But, the statement “As we get older, we need less sleep” is generally taken to mean “People in the 65+ age bracket need less sleep than younger adults”, and this popular myth is based on anecdotal observational evidence: older people tend to sleep less (as our survey above shows! For any who aren’t aware, our readership is heavily weighted towards the 60+ demographic), and still continue functioning, after all.
Just because we survive something with a degree of resilience doesn’t mean it’s good for us.
In fact, there can be serious health risks from not getting enough sleep in later years, for example:
Sleep deficiency promotes Alzheimer’s disease development and progression
Want to get better sleep?
What gets measured, gets done. Sleep tracking apps can be a really good tool for getting one’s sleep on a healthier track. We compared and contrasted some popular ones:
The Head-To-Head Of Google and Apple’s Top Apps For Getting Your Head Down
Take good care of yourself!
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Atomic Habits – by James Clear
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James Clear’s Atomic Habits has become “the” go-to book about the power of habit-forming. And, there’s no shortage of competition out there, so that’s quite a statement. What makes this book stand out?
A lot of books start by assuming you want to build habits. That can seem a fair assumption; after all, we picked up the book! But an introductory chapter really hammers home the idea in a way that makes it a lot more motivational:
- Habits are the compound interest of productivity
- This means that progress is not linear, but exponential
- Habits can also be stacked, and thus become synergistic
- The more positive habits you add incrementally, the easier they become because each thing is making your life easier/better
For example:
- It’s easier to save money if you’re in good health
- It’s easier to sleep better if you do not have financial worries
- It’s easier to build your relationship with your loved ones if you’re not tired
…and so on.
For many people this presents a Catch-22 problem! Clear instead presents it as an opportunity… Start wherever you like, but just start small, with some two-minute thing, and build from there.
A lot of the book is given over to:
- how to form effective habits (using his “Four Laws”)
- how to build them into your life
- how to handle mishaps
- how to make sure your habits are working for you
- how to see habits as part of your identity, and not just a goal to be checked off
The last one is perhaps key—goals cease to be motivating once accomplished. Habits, on the other hand, keep spiralling upwards (if you guide them appropriately).
There’s lots more we could say, but it’s a one-minute book review, so we’ll just close by saying:
This book can help you to become the kind of person who genuinely gets a little better each day, and reaps the benefits over time.
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Real Self-Care – by Pooja Lakshmin MD
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As the subtitle says, “crystals, cleanses, and bubble baths not included”. So, if it’s not about that sort of self-care, what is it about?
Dr. Lakshmin starts by acknowledging something that many self-help books don’t:
We can do everything correctly and still lose. Not only that, but for many of us, that is the probable outcome. Not because of any fault or weakness of ours, but simply because one way or another the game is rigged against us from the start.
So, should we throw in the towel, throw our hands in the air, and throw the book out of the window?
Nope! Dr. Lakshmin has actually helpful advice, that pertains to:
- creating healthy boundaries and challenging guilt
- treating oneself with compassion
- identifying and aligning oneself with one’s personal values
- asserting one’s personal power to fight for one’s own self-interest
If you’re reading this and thinking “that seems very selfish”, then let’s remember the “challenging guilt” part of that. We’ve all-too-often been conditioned to neglect our own needs and self-sacrifice for others.
And, while selfless service really does have its place, needlessly self-destructive martyrdom does not!
Bottom line: this book delivers a lot of “real talk” on a subject that otherwise often gets removed from reality rather. In short, it’s a great primer for finding the right place to draw the line between being a good-hearted person and being a doormat.
Click here to check out Real Self-Care and “put your own oxygen mask on first”!
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The Knowledge That Harvard Medical School’s Clinical Instructor Dr. Monique Tello Thinks Everyone SHOULD Have About Heart Health
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Anyone (who has not had a double mastectomy, anyway) can get breast cancer.
Breast cancer, if diagnosed early (before it spreads), has a 98% survival rate.
That survival rate drops to 31% if diagnosed after it has spread through the body.
(The US CDC’s breast cancer “stat bite” page has more stats and interactive graphs, so click here to see those charts and get the more detailed low-down on mortality/survival rates with various different situations)
We think that the difference between 98% and 31% survival rates is more than enough reason to give ourselves a monthly self-check at the very least! You’ve probably seen how-to diagrams before, but here are instructions for your convenience:
This graphic created by the Jordan Breast Cancer Program (check them out, as they have lots of resources)
If you don’t have the opportunity to take matters into your own hands right now, rather than just promise yourself “I’ll do that later”, take this free 4-minute Breast Health Assessment from Aurora Healthcare. Again, we think the difference early diagnosis can make to your survival chances make these tests well worth it.
Lest we forget, men can also get breast cancer (the CDC has a page for men too), especially if over 50. But how do you check for breast cancer, when you don’t have breasts in the commonly-understood sense of the word?
So take a moment to do this (yes, really actually do it!), and set a reminder in your calendar to repeat it monthly—there really is no reason not to! Take care of yourself; you’re important.
Pssst! Did you scroll past the diagrams, looking for the online 4-minute test promised by the subtitle? If so, scroll back up; the link is in the middle!
Harvard Medical School’s Clinical Instructor’s Five-Point Plan for Heart Health
Dr. Monique Tello, M.D., M.P.H., is a practicing physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, director of research and academic affairs for the MGH DGM Healthy Lifestyle Program, clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, and author of the evidence-based lifestyle change guide Healthy Habits for Your Heart.
Here are what she says are the five most important factors to help keep your ticker ticking:
5. Have (at most) a moderate alcohol intake! While there are polyphenols such as resveratrol in red wine that could boost heart health, there’s so little per glass that you may need 100–1000 glasses to get the dosage that provides benefits in mouse studies. If you’re not a mouse, it may not be as beneficial, and Dr. Tello recommends drinking no more than one glass per day of any alcohol. What constitutes a glass? It varies from one kind of drink to another, so here’s a handy guide.
4. Don’t smoke. Best of all to never start. But if you did, quit. Simple as that. There is no healthy amount of smoking. While paradoxically, quitting smoking may of course be stressful to you, the long term gains are considered more than worth it. As with all advice, do consult your own physician for guidance, as individual circumstances may vary, and that may change the best approach for you.
3. Maintain a healthy body weight. While BMI (Body Mass Index) is not a perfect system, it’s a system in popular use, and Dr. Tello recommends keeping a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9.
What’s your BMI? It takes into account your height and weight; here’s a Quick BMI Calculator for your convenience.
2. Keep a healthy level of physical activity—which ideally means at least 30 minutes per day vigorous activity, but obviously if you’re not used to this, take it slowly and build up over time. Even just small lifestyle changes (walking where possible, taking the stairs instead of the elevator where possible, etc) can add up to a big difference.
1. Enjoy a healthy diet. This is the single most important thing, and the best modern scientific consensus holds that the best diet contains plenty of vegetables, fruits and nuts, whole grains, and omega-3 fatty acids, while it avoids processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, trans fats (what are trans fats?), and too much sodium.
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The Exercise That Protects Your Brain
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The Neuroscientist In The Gym
This is Dr. Wendy Suzuki. She’s a neuroscientist, and an expert in the neurobiology of memory, as well as neuroplasticity, and the role of exercise in neuroprotection.
We’ve sneakily semi-featured her before when we shared her Big Think talk:
Brain Benefits In Three Months… Through Walking?
Today we’re going to expand on that a little!
A Quick Recap
To share the absolute key points of that already fairly streamlined rundown:
- Exercise boosts levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin (and, which wasn’t mentioned there, noradrenaline)
- These are responsible for motivation, happiness, and focus (amongst other things)
- Persistent exercise boosts certain regions of the brain in particular, most notably the pre-frontal cortex and the hippocampi*
- These are responsible for planning and memory (amongst other things)
Dr. Suzuki advocates for stepping up your exercise routine if you can, with more exercise generally being better than less (unless you have some special medical reason why that’s not the case for you).
*often referred to in the singular as the hippocampus, but you have one on each side of your brain (unless a serious accident/incident destroyed one, but you’ll know if that applies to you, unless you lost both, in which case you will not remember about it).
What kind(s) of workout?
While a varied workout is best for overall health, for these brain benefits specifically, what’s most important is that it raises your heart rate.
This is why in her Big Think talk we shared before, she talks about the benefits of taking a brisk walk daily. See also:
If that’s not your thing, though (and/or is for whatever reason an inaccessible form of exercise for you), there is almost certainly some kind of High Intensity Interval Training that is a possibility for you. That might sound intimidating, but if you have a bit of floor and can exercise for one minute at a time, then HIIT is an option for you:
How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
Dr. Suzuki herself is an ardent fan of “intenSati” which blends cardio workouts with yoga for holistic mind-and-body fitness. In fact, she loves it so much that she became a certified exercise instructor:
How much is enough?
It’s natural to want to know the minimum we can do to get results, but Dr. Suzuki would like us to bear in mind that when it comes to our time spent exercising, it’s not so much an expense of time as an investment in time:
❝Exercise is something that when you spend time on it, it will buy you time when you start to work❞
Read more: A Neuroscientist Experimented on Her Students and Found a Powerful Way to Improve Brain Function
Ok, but we really want to know how much!
Dr. Suzuki recommends at least three to four 30-minute exercise sessions per week.
Note: this adds up to less than the recommended 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, but high-intensity exercise counts for twice the minutes for these purposes, e.g. 1 minute of high-intensity exercise is worth 2 minutes of moderate exercise.
How soon will we see benefits?
Benefits start immediately, but stack up cumulatively with continued long-term exercise:
❝My lab showed that a single workout can improve your ability to shift and focus attention, and that focus improvement will last for at least two hours. ❞
…which is a great start, but what’s more exciting is…
❝The more you’re working out, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex gets. Why is that important?
Because the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus are the two areas that are most susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases and normal cognitive decline in aging. ❞
In other words, while improving your heart rate through regular exercise will help prevent neurodegeneration by the usual mechanism of reducing neuroinflammation… It’ll also build the parts of your brain most susceptible to decline, meaning that when/if decline sets in, it’ll take a lot longer to get to a critical level of degradation, because it had more to start with.
Read more:
Inspir Modern Senior Living | Dr. Wendy Suzuki Boosts Brain Health with Exercise
Want more from Dr. Suzuki?
You might enjoy her TED talk:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically
Prefer text? TED.com has a transcript for you
Prefer lots of text? You might like her book, which we haven’t reviewed yet but will soon:
Enjoy!
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- Exercise boosts levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin (and, which wasn’t mentioned there, noradrenaline)
