Supergreen Superfood Salad Slaw
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When it comes to “eating the rainbow”, in principle green should be the easiest color to get in, unless we live in a serious food desert (or serious food poverty). In practice, however, a lot of meals could do with a dash more green. This “supergreen superfood salad slaw” is remarkably versatile, and can be enjoyed as a very worthy accompaniment to almost any main.
You will need
For the bits:
- ½ small green cabbage, finely diced
- 7 oz tenderstem broccoli, finely chopped
- 2 stalks celery, finely chopped (if allergic, simply omit)
- ½ cucumber, diced into small cubes
- 2 oz kale, finely shredded
- 4 green (spring) onions, thinly sliced
For the dressing:
- 1 cup cashews (if allergic, substitute 1 cup roasted chickpeas)
- ½ cup extra virgin olive oil
- 2 oz baby spinach
- 1 oz basil leaves
- 1 oz chives
- ¼ bulb garlic
- 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
- 1 tbsp chia seeds
- Juice of two limes
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Combine the ingredients from the “bits” category in a bowl large enough to accommodate them comfortably
2) Blend the ingredients from the “dressing” category in a blender until very smooth (the crux here is you do not want any stringy bits of spinach remaining)
3) Pour the dressing onto the bits, and mix well to combine. Refrigerate, ideally covered, until ready to serve.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)
- Spinach vs Kale – Which is Healthier?
- Brain Food? The Eyes Have It!
Take care!
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Planning Ahead For Better Sleep
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Sleep: 6 Dimensions And 24 Hours!
This is Dr. Lisa Matricciani, a sleep specialist from the University of South Australia, where she teaches in the School of Health Sciences.
What does she want us to know?
Healthy sleep begins before breakfast
The perfect bedtime routine is all well and good, but we need to begin much earlier in the day, Dr. Matricciani advises.
Specifically, moderate to vigorous activity early in the day plays a big part.
Before breakfast is best, but even midday/afternoon exercise is associated with better sleep at night.
Read more: Daytime Physical Activity is Key to Unlocking Better Sleep
Plan your time well to sleep—but watch out!
Dr. Matricciani’s research has also found that while it’s important to plan around getting a good night’s sleep (including planning when this will happen), allocating too much time for sleep results in more restless sleep:
❝Allocating more time to sleep was associated with earlier sleep onsets, later sleep offsets, less efficient and more consistent sleep patterns for both children and adults.❞
Read more: Time use and dimensions of healthy sleep: A cross-sectional study of Australian children and adults
(this was very large study involving 1,168 children and 1.360 adults, mostly women)
What counts as good sleep quality? Is it just efficiency?
It is not! Although that’s one part of it. You may remember our previous main feature:
The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter)
Dr. Matricciani agrees:
❝Everyone knows that sleep is important. But when we think about sleep, we mainly focus on how many hours of sleep we get, when we should also be looking at our sleep experience as a whole❞
Read more: Trouble sleeping? You could be at risk of type 2 diabetes
That’s not a cheery headline, but here’s her paper about it:
And no, we don’t get a free pass on getting less sleep / less good quality sleep as we get older (alas):
Why You Probably Need More Sleep
So, time to get planning for the best sleep!
Enjoy videos?
Here’s how 7News Australia broke the news of Dr. Matricciani’s more recent work:
Rest well!
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Health Tips for Males Too
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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
❝Articles are very informative and helpful. Maybe it’s me but things seem to lean more toward females. That being said don’t forget us males❞
Rest assured, we could never forget you! We try to make as much as possible of our content applicable to as many as possible of our readers, but of course not everything can be relevant for everyone.
This is, presumably, in response to our recent feature on menopausal health, because previous to that, our next-most-recent main feature that centred women’s health was a month ago—that was about breast cancer, and did have a section on breast cancer in men too. You might also enjoy the book we reviewed recently about prostate health, or our regular sponsor offering testosterone therapy. Please feel free to check out our articles on saw palmetto against male pattern baldness and BPH, as well as mental health issues that disproportionally affect men.
And of course, if you have specific questions/requests about men’s health (or any other health topic) we’re only ever an email away (or use the handy feedback widget, as you did to make this request)!
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Uric Acid’s Extensive Health Impact (And How To Lower It)
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Uric Acid’s Extensive Health Impact (And How To Lower It)
This is Dr. David Perlmutter. He’s a medical doctor, and a Fellow of the American College of Nutrition. He’s a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, and has been widely published in many other peer-reviewed journals.
What does he want us to know?
He wants us to know about the health risks of uric acid (not something popularly talked about so much!), and how to reduce it.
First: what is it? Uric acid is a substance we make in our own body. However, unlike most substances we make in our body, we have negligible use for it—it’s largely a waste product, usually excreted in urine.
However, if we get too much, it can build up (and crystallize), becoming such things as kidney stones, or causing painful inflammation if it shows up in the joints, as in gout.
More seriously (unpleasant as kidney stones and gout may be), this inflammation can have a knock-on effect triggering (or worsening) other inflammatory conditions, ranging from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, to arthritis, to dementia, and even heart problems. See for example:
- David Perlmutter | Uric Acid and Cognitive Decline
- American Heart Association | Uric acid linked to later risk for irregular heart rhythm
- World Journal of Gastroenterology | The role of uric acid in non-alcoholic steatohepatitis development
How can we reduce our uric acid levels?
Uric acid is produced when we metabolize purine nucleotides, which are found in many kinds of food. We can therefore reduce our uric acid levels by reducing our purine intake, as well as things that mess up our liver’s ability to detoxify things. Offsetting the values for confounding variables (such as fiber content, or phytochemicals that mitigate the harm), the worst offenders include…
Liver-debilitating things:
- Alcohol (especially beer)
- High-fructose corn syrup (and other fructose-containing things that aren’t actual fruit)
- Other refined sugars
- Wheat / white flour products (this is why beer is worse than wine, for example; it’s a double-vector hit)
Purine-rich things:
- Red meats and game
- Organ meats
- Oily fish, and seafood (great for some things; not great for this)
Some beans and legumes are also high in purines, but much like real fruit has a neutral or positive effect on blood sugar health despite its fructose content, the beans and legumes that are high in purines, also contain phytochemicals that help lower uric acid levels, so have a beneficial effect.
Eggs (consumed in moderation) and tart cherries have a uric-acid lowering effect.
Water is important for all aspects of health, and doubly important for this.
Hydrate well!
Lifestyle matters beyond diet
The main key here is metabolic health, so Dr. Perlmutter advises the uncontroversial lifestyle choices of moderate exercise and good sleep, as well as (more critically) intermittent fasting. We wrote previously on other things that can benefit liver health:
…in this case, that means the liver gets a break to recuperate (something it’s very good at, but does need to get a chance to do), which means that while you’re not giving it something new to do, it can quickly catch up on any backlog, and then tackle any new things fresh, next time you start eating.
Want to know more about this from Dr. Perlmutter?
You might like his article:
An Integrated Plan for Lowering Uric Acid ← more than we had room for here; he also talks about extra things to include in your diet/supplementation regime for beneficial effects!
And/or his book:
…on which much of today’s main feature was based.
Take care!
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What Are Nootropics, Really?
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What are nootropics, really?
A nootropic is anything that functions as a cognitive enhancer—in other words, improves our brainpower.
These can be sensationalized as “smart drugs”, misrepresented excitingly in science fiction, meme-ified in the mundane (“but first, coffee”), and reframed entirely, (“exercise is the best nootropic”).
So, clearly, “nootropics” can mean a lot of different things. Let’s look at some of the main categories…
The neurochemical modulators
These are what often get called “smart drugs”. They are literally drugs (have a chemical effect on the body that isn’t found in our diet), and they affect the levels of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, such as by:
- Adding more of that neurotransmitter (simple enough)
- Decreasing the rate at which we lose that neurotransmitter (re-uptake inhibitors)
- Antagonizing an unhelpful neurotransmitter (doing the opposite thing to it)
- Blocking an unhelpful neurotransmitter (stopping the receptors from receiving it)
“Unhelpful” here is relative and subjective, of course. We need all the neurotransmitters that are in our brain, after all, we just don’t need all of them all the time.
Examples: modafinil, a dopamine re-uptake inhibitor (mostly prescribed for sleep disorders), reduces the rate at which our brains scrub dopamine, resulting in a gradual build-up of dopamine that we naturally produced, so we get to enjoy that dopamine for longer. This will tend to promote wakefulness, and may also help with problem-solving and language faculties—as well as giving a mood boost. In other words, all things that dopamine is used for. Mirtazaрine, an adrenoreceptor agonist (mostly prescribed as an antidepressant), increases noradrenergic neurotransmission, thus giving many other brain functions a boost.
Why it works: our brains need healthy levels of neurotransmitters, in order to function well. Those levels are normally self-regulating, but can become depleted in times of stress or fatigue, for example.
The metabolic brain boosters
These are the kind of things that get included in nootropic stacks (stack = a collection of supplements and/or drugs that complement each other and are taken together—for example, a multivitamin tablet could be described as a vitamin stack) even though they have nothing specifically relating them to brain function. Why are they included?
The brain needs so much fuel. Metabolically speaking, it’s a gas-guzzler. It’s the single most resource-intensive organ of our body, by far. So, metabolic brain boosters tend to:
- Increase blood flow
- Increase blood oxygenation
- Increase blood general health
- Improve blood pressure (this is relative and subjective, since very obviously there’s a sweet spot)
Examples: B-vitamins. Yep, it can be that simple. A less obvious example might be Co-enzyme Q10, which supports energy production on a cellular level, and good cardiovascular health.
Why it works: you can’t have a healthy brain without a healthy heart!
We are such stuff as brains are made of
Our brains are made of mostly fat, water, and protein. But, not just any old fat and protein—we’re at least a little bit special! So, brain-food foods tend to:
- Give the brain the fats and proteins it’s made of
- Give the brain the stuff to make the fats and proteins it’s made of (simpler fats, and amino acids)
- Give the brain hydration! Just having water, and electrolytes as appropriate, does this
Examples: healthy fats from nuts, seeds, and seafood; also, a lot of phytonutrients from greens and certain fruits. Long-time subscribers may remember our article “Brain Food: The Eyes Have It!” on the importance of dietary lutein in reducing Alzheimer’s risk, for example
Why it works: this is matter of structural upkeep and maintenance—our brains don’t work fabulously if deprived of the very stuff they’re made of! Especially hydration is seriously underrated as a nootropic factor, by the way. Most people are dehydrated most of the time, and the brain dehydrates quickly. Fortunately, it rehydrates quickly as well when we take hydrating liquids.
Weird things that sound like ingredients in a witch’s potion
These are too numerous and too varied in how they work to cover here, but they do appear a lot in nootropic stacks and in popular literature on the subject.
Often they work by one of the mechanisms described above; sometimes we’re not entirely sure how they work, and have only measured their effects sufficiently to know that, somehow, they do work.
Examples: panax ginseng is one of the best-studied examples that still remains quite mysterious in many aspects of its mechanism. Lion’s Mane (the mushroom, not the jellyfish or the big cat hairstyle), meanwhile, is known to contain specific compounds that stimulate healthy brain cell growth.
Why it works: as we say, it varies so much from on ingredient to another in this category, so… Watch out for our Research Review Monday features, as we’ll be covering some of these in the coming weeks!
(PS, if there’s any you’d like us to focus on, let us know! We always love to hear from you. You can hit reply to any of our emails, or use the handy feedback widget at the bottom)
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4 Tips To Stand Without Using Hands
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The “sit-stand” test, getting up off the floor without using one’s hands, is well-recognized as a good indicator of healthy aging, and predictor of longevity. But what if you can’t do it? Rather than struggling, there are exercises to strengthen the body to be able to do this vital movement.
Step by step
Teresa Shupe has been teaching Pilates professionally full-time for over 25 years, and here’s what she has to offer in the category of safe and effective ways of improving balance and posture while doing the sitting-to-standing movement:
- Squat! Doing squats (especially deep ones) regularly strengthens all the parts necessary to effectively complete this movement. If your knees aren’t up to it at first, do the squats with your back against a wall to start with.
- Roll! On your back, cross your feet as though preparing to stand, and rock-and-roll your body forwards. To start with you can “cheat” and use your fingertips to give a slight extra lift. This exercise builds mobility in the various necessary parts of the body, and also strengthens the core—as well as getting you accustomed to using your bodyweight to move your body forwards.
- Lift! This one’s focusing on that last part, and taking it further. Because it may be difficult to get enough momentum initially, you can practice by holding small weights in your hands, to shift your centre of gravity forwards a bit. Unlike many weights exercises, in this case you’re going to transition to holding less weight rather than more, though.
- Complete! Continue from the above, without weights now; use the blades of your feet to stand. If you need to, use your fingertips to give you a touch more lift and stability, and reduce the fingers that you use until you are using none.
For more on each of these as well as a visual demonstration, enjoy this short video:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Further reading
For more exercises with a similar approach, check out:
Mobility As A Sporting Pursuit
Take care!
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Do You Have A Personalized Health Plan? (Here’s How)
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“Good health” is quite a broad umbrella, and while we all have a general idea of what “healthy” looks like, it’s easy to focus on some areas and overlook others.
Of course, how much one does this will still depend on one’s level of interest in health, which can change over the course of life, and (barring serious midlife health-related curveballs such as a cancer diagnosis or something) often looks like an inverse bell curve:
- As small kids, we probably barely thought about health
- As teenagers, we probably had a narrow view of health (often related to whatever is considered sexually attractive at the time)
- In our 20s, may have a bit of a health kick in which we learn and apply a lot… Which often then gets to later take a bit of a back seat to work responsibilities and so forth
- This is commonly followed by a few decades of just trying to make it to Friday by any means necessary (definite risk factor for substance abuse of various kinds), double if we have kids, triple if we have work, kids, and are also solely responsible for managing the household.
- Then just as suddenly as it is predictably, we are ambushed when approaching retirement age by a cluster of age-related increased health risks that we now get to do our best to mitigate—the focus here is “not dying early”. A lot of health education occurs at this time.
- Finally, upon retirement, we actually get the time to truly focus on our health again, and now it’s easier to learn about all aspects of health, even if now there’s a need to juggle many health issues all at once, most of which affect the others.
See also: How Likely Are You To Live To 100? ← in which we can also see a graph of 10almonds subscribers’ ages, consistent with the above
So, let’s recap, and personalize our health plan
There are often things we wish we could have focused on sooner, so now’s the time to figure out what future-you in your next decade (or later!) is going to thank you for having done now.
So, while 20-year-old us might have been focusing on fat levels or athletic performance, how much does that really help us now? (With apologies to any readers in their 20s, but also, with the bonus for you: now’s the perfect time to plan ahead!)
At 10almonds, while we cover very many health topics, we often especially focus on:
- Brain health
- Heart health
- Gut health
…because they affect everything else so much. We’ve listed them there in the order they appear in the body, but in fact it can be useful to view them upside down, because:
- Gut health is critical for good metabolic health (a happy efficient gut allows us to process nutrients, including energy, efficiently)
- Metabolic health is critical for good heart health (a nicely ticking metabolism will not strain our heart)
- Heart health is critical for good brain health (a strong heart will nourish the brain with well-oxygenated blood and the nutrients it also carries)
So, this isn’t a catch-22 at all! There is a clear starting point:
“How do I do the other bits, though?”
We have you covered here: Your Health Audit, From Head To Toe
“Wait, where’s the personalization?”
This comes once you’ve got those above things in order.
Hopefully you know what particular health risks you have—as in, particular to you.
First, you will have any current diagnoses, and a plan for treating those. Many chronic illnesses can be reversed or at least lessened with lifestyle changes, in particular, if we reduce chronic inflammation, which is implicated in countless chronic illnesses, and exacerbates most of the rest.
So: How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation
The same goes for any heightened risks you have as a result of those current diagnoses.
Next, you will have any genetic health risks—so here’s where genetic testing is a good one-shot tool, to get a lot of information all in one go.
Learn more: The Real Benefit Of Genetic Testing
…and then, of course, take appropriate steps to avoid suffering the things of which you are at increased genetic risk.
Finally, you will have any personal concerns or goals—in other words, what do you want to still be able to do, later in life? It’s easy to say “everything”, but what’s most important?
This writer’s example: I want to remain mobile, free from pain, and sharp of mind.
That doesn’t mean I’ll neglect the rest of my health, but it does mean that I will regularly weigh my choices against whether they are consistent with those three things.
As for how to plan for that?
Check out: Train For The Event Of Your Life! ← this one is mostly about the mobility aspect; staying free from pain is in large part a matter of avoiding inflammation which we already discussed, and staying sharp of mind relies on the gut-heart-brain pipeline we also covered.
You can also, of course, personalize your diet per which areas of health are the most important for you:
Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean (most anti-inflammatory, gut-healthiest, heart-healthiest, brain-healthiest)
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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