Red Bell Peppers vs Tomatoes – Which is Healthier?
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.
Our Verdict
When comparing red bell peppers to tomatoes, we picked the peppers.
Why?
In terms of macronutrients, these two fruits-that-get-used-as-vegetables are similar in most respects; they’re mostly water, negligible protein and fat, similar amounts of carbs, even a similar carb breakdown (mostly fructose and glucose). One thing that does set them apart is that peppers* have about 2x the fiber, which difference results in peppers having the lower Glycemic Index—though tomatoes are quite low in GI too.
*for brevity we’re just going to write “peppers”, but we are still talking about sweet red bell peppers throughout. This is important, as different color peppers have different nutrient profiles.
In the category of vitamins, peppers have much more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B9, C, and E. In contrast, tomatoes have more vitamin K. An easy win for peppers.
When it comes to minerals, the margins are narrower, but peppers have more iron, zinc, and selenium, while tomatoes have more calcium and copper. They’re approximately equal on other minerals they both contain, making this category a slight (3:2) win for peppers.
As for phytochemical benefits, both are good sources of lycopene (both better when cooked) and other carotenes (for example lutein), and both have an array of assorted flavonoids.
All in all, a win for peppers, but both are great!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Brain Food? The Eyes Have It!
- Bell Peppers: A Spectrum Of Specialties
- Lycopene’s Benefits For The Gut, Heart, Brain, & More
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
The “Five Tibetan Rites” & Why To Do Them!
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.
Spinning Around
In Tuesday’s newsletter, we asked you for your opinion of the “Five Tibetan Rites”, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:
- About 41% said “I have never heard of these before”
- About 27% said “they restore youth by adjusting internal vortexes”
- About 22% said “they are basically yoga, by a different name”
- About 11% said “they are a pseudoscience popular in the US”
So what does the science say?
The Five Tibetan Rites are five Tibetan rites: True or False?
False, though this is more question of social science than of health science, so we’ll not count it against them for having a misleading name.
The first known mentioning of the “Five Tibetan Rites” is by an American named Peter Kelder, who in 1939 published, through a small LA occult-specialized publishing house, a booklet called “The Eye of Revelation”. This work was then varyingly republished, repackaged, and occasionally expanded upon by Kelder or other American authors, including Chris Kilham’s popular 1994 book “The Five Tibetans”.
The “Five Tibetan Rites” are unknown as such in Tibet, except for what awareness of them has been raised by people asking about them in the context of the American phenomenon.
Here’s a good history book, for those interested:
The author didn’t originally set out to “debunk” anything, and is himself a keen spiritualist (and practitioner of the five rites), but he was curious about the origins of the rites, and ultimately found them—as a collection of five rites, and the other assorted advices given by Kelder—to be an American synthesis in the whole, each part inspired by various different physical practices (some of them hatha yoga, some from the then-popular German gymnastics movement, some purely American spiritualism, all available in books that were popular in California in the early 1900s).
You may be wondering: why didn’t Kelder just say that, then, instead of telling stories of an ancient Tibetan tradition that empirically does not exist? The answer to this lies again in social science not health science, but it’s been argued that it’s common for Westerners to “pick ‘n’ mix” ideas from the East, champion them as inscrutably mystical, and (since they are inscrutable) then simply decide how to interpret and represent them. Here’s an excellent book on this, if you’re interested:
(in Kelder’s case, this meant that “there’s a Tibetan tradition, trust me” was thus more marketable in the West than “I read these books in LA”)
They are at least five rites: True or False?
True! If we use the broad definition of “rite” as “something done repeatedly in a solemn fashion”. And there are indeed five of them:
- Spinning around (good for balance)
- Leg raises (this one’s from German gymnastics)
- Kneeling back bend (various possible sources)
- Tabletop (hatha yoga, amongst others)
- Pendulum (hatha yoga, amongst others) ← you may recognize this one from the Sun Salutation
You can see them demonstrated here:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically
Kelder also advocated for what was basically the Hay Diet (named not for the substance but for William Hay; it involved separating foods into acid and alkali, not necessarily according to the actual pH of the foods, and combining only “acid” foods or only “alkali” foods at a time), which was popular at the time, but has since been rejected as without scientific merit. Kelder referred to this as “the sixth rite”.
The Five Rites restore youth by adjusting internal vortexes: True or False?
False, in any scientific sense of that statement. Scientifically speaking, the body does not have vortexes to adjust, therefore that is not the mechanism of action.
Spiritually speaking, who knows? Not us, a humble health science publication.
The Five Rites are a pseudoscience popular in the US: True or False?
True, if 27% of those who responded of our mostly North American readership can be considered as representative of what is popular.
However…
“Pseudoscience” gets thrown around a lot as a bad word; it’s often used as a criticism, but it doesn’t have to be. Consider:
A small child who hears about “eating the rainbow” and mistakenly understands that we are all fuelled by internal rainbows that need powering-up by eating fruits and vegetables of different colors, and then does so…
…does not hold a remotely scientific view of how things are happening, but is nevertheless doing the correct thing as recommended by our best current science.
It’s thus a little similar with the five rites. Because…
The Five Rites are at least good for our health: True or False?
True! They are great for the health.
The first one (spinning around) is good for balance. Science would recommend doing it both ways rather than just one way, but one is not bad. It trains balance, trains our stabilizing muscles, and confuses our heart a bit (in a good way).
See also: Fall Special (How To Not Fall, And Not Get Injured If You Do)
The second one (leg raises) is excellent for core strength, which in turn helps keep our organs where they are supposed to be (this is a bigger health issue than most people realise, because “out of sight, out of mind”), which is beneficial for many aspects of our health!
See also: Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It ← visceral fat is the fat that surrounds your internal organs; too much there becomes a problem!
The third, fourth, and fifth ones stretch our spine (healthily), strengthen our back, and in the cases of the fourth and fifth ones, are good full-body exercises for building strength, and maintaining muscle mass and mobility.
See also: Building & Maintaining Mobility
So in short…
If you’ve been enjoying the Five Rites, by all means keep on doing them; they might not be Tibetan (or an ancient practice, as presented), and any mystical aspect is beyond the scope of our health science publication, but they are great for the health in science-based ways!
Take care!
Share This Post
Lucid Dreaming: How To Do It, & Why
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.
Lucid Dreaming: Methods & Uses
We’ve written about dreaming more generally before:
Today we’re going to be talking more about a subject we’ve only touched on previously: lucid dreaming
What it is: lucid dreaming is the practice of being mentally awake while dreaming, with awareness that it is a dream, and control over the dream.
Why is it useful? Beyond simply being fun, it can banish nightmares, it can improve one’s relationship with sleep (always something to look forward to, and sleep doesn’t feel like a waste of time at all!), and it can allow for exploring a lot of things that can’t easily be explored otherwise—which can be quite therapeutic.
How to do it
There are various ways to induce lucid dreaming, but the most common and “entry-level” method is called Mnemonic-Induced Lucid Dreaming (MILD).
MILD involves having some means of remembering what one has forgotten, i.e., that one is dreaming. To break it down further, first we’ll need to learn how to perform a reality check. Again, there are many of these, but one of the simplest is to ask yourself:
How did I get here?
- If you can retrace your steps with relative ease and the story of how you got here does not sound too much like a dream sequence, you are probably not dreaming.
- If you are dreaming, however, chances are that nothing actually led to where you are now; you just appeared here.
Other reality checks include checking whether books, clocks, and/or lightswitches work as they should—all are notorious for often being broken in dreams; books have gibberish or missing or repeated text; clocks do not tell the correct time and often do not even tell a time that could be real (e.g: 07:72), and lightswitches may turn a light on/off without actually changing the level of illumination in the room.
Now, a reality check is only useful if you actually perform it, so this is where MILD comes in.
You need to make a habit of doing a reality check frequently. Whenever you remember, it’s a good time to do a reality check, but you should also try tying it to something. Many people use a red light, because then they can also use a timed red light during the night to subconsciously cue them that they are dreaming. But it could be as simple as “whenever I go to the bathroom, I do a reality check”.
With this in mind, a fun method that has extra benefits is to try to use a magical power, such as psychokinesis. If (while fully awake) whenever you go to pick up some object you imagine it just wooshing magically to meet your hand halfway, then at some point you’ll instinctively do that while dreaming, and it’ll stand a good chance of working—and thus cluing you in that you are dreaming.
How to stay lucid
When you awaken within a dream (i.e. become lucid), there’s a good chance of one of two things happening quickly:
- you forget again
- you wake up
So when you realize you are dreaming, do two things at once:
- verbally repeat to yourself “I am dreaming now”. This will help stretch your awareness from one second to the next.
- look at your hands, and touch things, especially the floor and/or walls. This will help to ground you within the dream.
Things to do while lucid
Flying is a good fun entry-level activity; it’s very common to initially find it difficult though, and only be able to lift up very slightly before gently falling down, or things like that. A good tip is: instead of trying to move yourself, you stay still and move the dream around you, as though you are rotating a 3D model (because guess what: you are).
Confronting your nightmares and/or general fears is a good thing for many. Think, while you’re still awake during the day, about what you would do about the source/trigger of your fear if you had magical powers. Whatever you choose, keep it consistent for now, because this is about habit-forming.
Example: let’s say there’s a person from your past who appears in your nightmares. Let’s say your chosen magic would be “I would cause the ground to open up, swallow them, and close again behind them”. Vividly imagine that whenever they come to mind while you are awake, and when you encounter them next in a nightmare, you’ll remember to do exactly that, and it’ll work.
Learning about your own subconscious is a more advanced activity, but once you’re used to lucid dreaming, you can remember that everything in there is an internal projection of your own mind, so you can literally talk to parts of your subconscious, including past versions of yourself, or singular parts of your greater-whole personality, as per IFS:
Take Care Of Your “Unwanted” Parts Too!
Want to know more?
You might like to read:
Enjoy!
Share This Post
Your Brain Is Always Listening – by Dr. Daniel Amen
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.
There are a lot of books on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), so what makes this one different?
While many CBT books have a focus (as this one also does) on controlling Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs), this one stands out in two ways:
Firstly: Dr. Amen, a medical doctor and psychiatrist, looks not just as the thoughts and feelings side of things… but also the neurological underpinnings. This makes a difference because it gives a much more tangible handle on some of the problems that we might face.
We wouldn’t tell someone with Type 1 Diabetes that they are “just blaming their pancreas” for blood sugar woes. So what’s with the notion of “this person is just blaming their brain”? Why would be harder on ourselves (or others) for having amygdalae that are a little out of whack, or a sluggish prefrontal cortex, or an overactive anterior cingulate gyrus?
So, Dr. Amen’s understanding and insights help us look at how we can give those bits of brain what they need to perk them up or calm them down.
Secondly, rather than picture-perfect easily-solved neat-and-tidy made-up scenarios as illustrations, he uses real (messy, human) case studies.
This means that we get to see how the methods advised work in the case of, for example, a business executive who has a trauma response to public speaking, because at the age of 12 he had to stand in court and argue for why his father should not receive the death penalty.
Bottom line: if these methods can ease situations like that, maybe we can apply them usefully in our own lives, too.
Click here to check out Your Brain Is Always Listening, and take control of yours!
Share This Post
Related Posts
Under Pressure: A Guide To Controlling High Blood Pressure – by Dr. Frita Fisher
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.
Hypertension kills a lot of people, and does so with little warning—it can be asymptomatic before it gets severe enough to cause harm, and once it causes harm, well, one heart attack or stroke is already one too many.
Aimed more squarely at people in the 35–45 danger zone (young enough to not be getting regular blood pressure checks, old enough that it may have been building up for decades), this is a very good primer on blood pressure, factors affecting it, what goes wrong, what to do about it, and how to make a good strategy for managing it for life.
The style is easy-reading, making this short (91 pages) book a very quick read, but an informative one.
Bottom line: if you are already quite knowledgeable about blood pressure and blood pressure management, this one’s probably not for you. But if you’re in the category of “what do those numbers mean again?”, then this is a very handy book to have, to get you up to speed so that you can handle things as appropriate.
Click here to check out Under Pressure, and get/keep yours under control!
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
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
Lost Connections – by Johann Hari
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.
Johann Hari had a long journey through (and out of!) depression, and shares his personal findings, including his disappointment with medical options, and a focus on the external factors that lead to depression.
And that’s key to this book—while he acknowledges later in the book that there are physiological factors involved in depression, he wants to look past things we can’t change (like genes accounting for 37% of depression) or things that there may be unwanted side-effects to changing (as in the case of antidepressants, for many people), to things we genuinely can choose.
And no, it’s not a “think yourself happy” book either; rather, it looks at nine key external factorsthat a) influence depression b) can mostly be changed.
If the book has a downside, it’s that the author does tend to extrapolate his own experience a lot more than might be ideal. If SSRIs didn’t help him, they are useless, and also the only kind of antidepressant. If getting into a green space helped him, a Londoner, someone who lives in the countryside will not be depressed in the first place. And so forth. It can also be argued that he cherry-picked data to arrive at some of his pre-decided conclusions. He also misinterprets data sometimes; which is understandable; he is after all a journalist, not a scientist.
Nevertheless, he offers a fresh perspective with a lot of ideas, and whether or not we agree with them all, new ideas tend to be worth reading. And if even one of his nine ideas helps you, that’s a win.
Bottom line: if you’d like to explore the treatment of depression from a direction other than medicalization or psychotherapy, then this is will be a good book for you.
Click here to check out Lost Connections, and reforge yours!
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
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
7 Days Of Celery Juice: What’s The Verdict?
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.
Laura “Try” tries many popular trends, and reports on the benefits (or problems, or both). In this case, it’s 7 days of celery juice… Not as a fast, though, i.e. she doesn’t just have celery juice for 7 days, but rather, it’s how she kicks off each morning, with half a liter (16oz) on an empty stomach.
What she found
First, she bought a masticating juicer and organic celery. So, those are expenses to consider, especially the one-off expense of the juicer, and the ongoing expense of organic celery—estimated $90/month).
In terms of taste, she was surprised it wasn’t as bitter as expected, but from the second day onwards, she did use the juicer’s filter to remove the frothy sludge, and she also switched to juicing only the stalks, not the leaves—which are more bitter.
10almonds note: the leaves are more bitter because that’s where the polyphenols are more densely concentrated. The leaves are better for you than the stalks. Enjoy the leaves. Really: if you chop them finely you can use them as herbs in your cooking, and if you’re making a salad, just chop them into that too.
The reason she picked the quantity of half a liter is because this is what she found recommended to coat the stomach lining—on the promise of increased stomach acid production, reduced bacteria overgrowth, as well as antiviral, antifungal, and anti-inflammatory properties. As she’s just one woman without a personal lab, she couldn’t test and thus verify any of these though—but she did still have benefits to report:
She did experience clearer skin, more energy, and better sleep after a few days.
Ultimately, she decided to continue to do it just at the weekends, due to its positive effects, despite the cost and time consumption.
For more personal insights, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain
Take care!
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
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
