Mediterranean Diet… In A Pill?

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The 10almonds Team

Does It Come In A Pill?

For any as yet unfamiliar with the Mediterranean diet, you may be wondering what it involves, beyond a general expectation that it’s a diet popularly enjoyed in the Mediterranean. What image comes to mind?

We’re willing to bet that tomatoes feature (great source of lycopene, by the way, and if you’re not getting lycopene, you’re missing out), but what else?

  • Salads, perhaps? Vegetables, olives? Olive oil, yea or nay?
  • Bread? Pasta? Prosciutto, salami? Cheese?
  • Pizza but only if it’s Romana style, not Chicago?
  • Pan-seared liver, with some fava beans and a nice Chianti?

In fact, the Mediterranean diet is quite clear on all these questions, so to read about these and more (including a “this yes, that no” list), see:

What Is The Mediterranean Diet, And What Is It Good For?

So, how do we get that in a pill?

A plucky band of researchers, Dr. Chiara de Lucia et al. (quite a lot of “et al.”; nine listed authors on the study), wondered to what extent the benefits of the Mediterranean diet come from the fact that the Mediterranean diet is very rich in polyphenols, and set about testing that, by putting the same polyphenols in capsule form, and running a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover clinical intervention trial.

Now, polyphenols are not the only reason the Mediterranean diet is great; there are also other considerations, such as:

  • a great macronutrient balance with lots of fiber, healthy fats, moderate carbs, and protein from select sources
  • the absence or at least very low presence of a lot of harmful substances such as refined seed oils, added sugars, refined carbohydrates, and the like (“but pasta” yes pasta; in moderation and wholegrain and served with extra sources of fiber and healthy fats, all of which slow down the absorption of the carbs)

…but polyphenols are admittedly very important too; we wrote about some common aspects of them here:

Tasty Polyphenols: Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain

As for what Dr. de Lucia et al. put into the capsule, behold…

The ingredients:

  1. Apple Extract 10.0%
  2. Pomegranate Extract 10.0%
  3. Tomato Powder 2.5%
  4. Beet, Spray Dried 2.5%
  5. Olive Extract 7.5%
  6. Rosemary Extract 7.5%
  7. Green Coffee Bean Extract (CA) 7.5%
  8. Kale, Freeze Dried 2.5%
  9. Onion Extract 10.0%
  10. Ginger Extract 10.0%
  11. Grapefruit Extract 2.5%
  12. Carrot, Air Dried 2.5%
  13. Grape Skin Extract 17.5%
  14. Blueberry Extract 2.5%
  15. Currant, Freeze Dried 2.5%
  16. Elderberry, Freeze Dried 2.5%

And the relevant phytochemicals they contain:

  • Quercetin
  • Luteolin
  • Catechins
  • Punicalagins
  • Phloretin
  • Ellagic Acid
  • Naringin
  • Apigenin
  • Isorhamnetin
  • Chlorogenic Acids
  • Rosmarinic Acid
  • Anthocyanins
  • Kaempferol
  • Proanthocyanidins
  • Myricetin
  • Betanin

And what, you may wonder, did they find? Well, first let’s briefly summarise the setup of the study:

They took volunteers (n=30), average age 67, BMI >25, without serious health complaints, not taking other supplements, not vegetarian or vegan, not consuming >5 cups of coffee per day, and various other stipulations like that, to create a fairly homogenous study group who were expected to respond well to the intervention. In contrast, someone who takes antioxidant supplements, already eats many different color plants per day, and drinks 10 cups of coffee, probably already has a lot of antioxidant activity going on, and someone with a lower BMI will generally have lower resting levels of inflammatory markers, so it’s harder to see a change, proportionally.

About those inflammatory markers: that’s what they were testing, to see whether the intervention “worked”; essentially, did the levels of inflammatory markers go up or down (up is bad; down is good).

For more on inflammation, by the way, see:

How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation

…which also explains what it actually is, and some important nuances about it.

Back to the study…

They gave half the participants the supplement for a week and the other half placebo; had a week’s gap as a “washout”, then repeated it, switching the groups, taking blood samples before and after each stage.

What they found:

The group taking the supplement had lower inflammatory markers after a week of taking it, while the group taking the placebo had relatively higher inflammatory markers after a week of taking it; this trend was preserved across both groups (i.e., when they switched roles for the second half).

The results were very significant (p=0.01 or thereabouts), and yet at the same time, quite modest (i.e. the supplement made a very reliable, very small difference), probably because of the small dose (150mg) and small intervention period (1 week).

What the researchers concluded from this

The researchers concluded that this was a success; the study had been primarily to provide proof of principle, not to rock the world. Now they want the experiment to be repeated with larger sample sizes, greater heterogeneity, larger doses, and longer intervention periods.

This is all very reasonable and good science.

Read in full: A Randomised, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Cross-Over Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Biological Effects and Safety of a Polyphenol Supplement on Healthy Ageing

What we conclude from this

That ingredients list makes for a good shopping list!

Well, not the extracts they listed, necessarily, but rather those actual fruits, vegetables, etc.

If nine top scientists (anti-aging specialists, neurobiologists, pharmacologists, and at least one professor of applied statistics) came to the conclusion that to get the absolute most bang-for-buck possible, those are the plants to get the phytochemicals from, then we’re not going to ignore that.

So, take another list above and ask yourself: how many of those 16 foods do you eat regularly, and could you work the others in?

Want to make your Mediterranean diet even better?

While the Mediterranean diet is a top-tier catch-all, it can be tweaked for specific areas of health, for example giving it an extra focus on heart health, or brain health, or being anti-inflammatory, or being especially gut healthy:

Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean

Enjoy!

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  • The Dark Side Of Memory (And How To Make Your Life Better)

    The 10almonds Team

    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.

    How To Stop Revisiting Those Memories

    We’ve talked before about putting the brakes on negative thought spirals (and that’s a really useful technique, so if you weren’t with us yet for that one, we do recommend hopping back and reading it!).

    We’ve also talked about optimizing memory, to include making moments unforgettable.

    But what about the moments we’d rather forget?

    First, a quick note: we have no pressing wish or need to re-traumatize any readers, so if you’ve a pressing reason to think your memories you’d rather forget are beyond the scope of a few hundred words “one quick trick” in a newsletter, feel free to skip this section today.

    One more quick note: it is generally not considered healthy to repress important memories. Some things are best worked through consciously in therapy with a competent professional.

    Today’s technique is more for things in the category of “do you really need to keep remembering that one time you did something embarrassing 20 years ago?”

    That said… sometimes, even when it does come to the management of serious PTSD, therapy can (intentionally, reasonably) throw in the towel on processing all of something big, and instead seek to simply look at minimizing its effect on ongoing life. Again, that’s best undertaken with a well-trained professional, however.

    For more trivial annoyances, meanwhile…

    Two Steps To Forgetting

    The first step:

    You may remember that memories are tied to the senses, and the more senses are involved, the more easily and fully we remember a thing. To remember something, therefore, we make sure to pay full attention to all the sensory experience of the memory, bringing in all 5 senses if possible.

    To forget, the reverse is true. Drain the memory of color, make it black and white, fuzzier, blurrier, smaller, further away, sterile, silent, gone.

    You can make a habit of doing this automatically whenever your unwanted memory resurfaces.

    The second missing step:

    This is the second step, but it’s going to be a missing step. Memories, like paths in a forest, are easier to access the more often we access them. A memory we visit every day will have a well-worn path, easy to follow. A memory we haven’t visited for decades will have an overgrown, sometimes nearly impossible-to-find path.

    To labor the metaphor a little: if your memory has literal steps leading to it, we’re going to remove one of the steps now, to make it very difficult to access accidentally. Don’t worry, you can always put the step back later if you want to.

    Let’s say you want to forget something that happened once upon a time in a certain workplace. Rather than wait for the memory in question to come up, we’re going to apply the first step that we just learned, to the entire workplace.

    So, in this example, you’d make the memory of that workplace drained of color, made black and white, fuzzier, blurrier, smaller, further away, sterile, silent, gone.

    Then, you’d make a habit of doing that whenever that workplace nearly comes to mind.

    The result? You’re unlikely to accidentally access a memory that occurred in that workplace, if even mentally wandering to the workplace itself causes it to shrivel up and disappear like paper in fire.

    Important reminder

    The above psychological technique is to psychological trauma what painkillers are to physical pain. It can ease the symptom, while masking the cause. If it’s something serious, we recommend enlisting the help of a professional, rather than “self-medicating” in this fashion.

    If it’s just a small annoying thing, though, sometimes it’s easier to just be able to refrain from prodding and poking it daily, forget about it, and enjoy life.

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  • Cannabis Myths vs Reality

    The 10almonds Team

    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.

    Cannabis Myths vs Reality

    We asked you for your (health-related) opinion on cannabis use—specifically, the kind with psychoactive THC, not just CBD. We got the above-pictured, below-described, spread of responses:

    • A little over a third of you voted for “It’s a great way to relax, without most of the dangers of alcohol”.
    • A little under a third of you voted for “It may have some medical uses, but recreational use is best avoided”.
    • About a quarter of you voted for “The negative health effects outweigh the possible benefits”
    • Three of you voted for “It is the gateway to a life of drug-induced stupor and potentially worse”

    So, what does the science say?

    A quick legal note first: we’re a health science publication, and are writing from that perspective. We do not know your location, much less your local laws and regulations, and so cannot comment on such. Please check your own local laws and regulations in that regard.

    Cannabis use can cause serious health problems: True or False?

    True. Whether the risks outweigh the benefits is a personal and subjective matter (for example, a person using it to mitigate the pain of late stage cancer is probably unconcerned with many other potential risks), but what’s objectively true is that it can cause serious health problems.

    One subscriber who voted for “The negative health effects outweigh the possible benefits” wrote:

    ❝At a bare minimum, you are ingesting SMOKE into your lungs!! Everyone SEEMS TO BE against smoking cigarettes, but cannabis smoking is OK?? Lung cancer comes in many forms.❞

    Of course, that is assuming smoking cannabis, and not consuming it as an edible. But, what does the science say on smoking it, and lung cancer?

    There’s a lot less research about this when it comes to cannabis, compared to tobacco. But, there is some:

    ❝Results from our pooled analyses provide little evidence for an increased risk of lung cancer among habitual or long-term cannabis smokers, although the possibility of potential adverse effect for heavy consumption cannot be excluded.❞

    Read: Cannabis smoking and lung cancer risk: Pooled analysis in the International Lung Cancer Consortium

    Another study agreed there appears to be no association with lung cancer, but that there are other lung diseases to consider, such as bronchitis and COPD:

    ❝Smoking cannabis is associated with symptoms of chronic bronchitis, and there may be a modest association with the development of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Current evidence does not suggest an association with lung cancer.❞

    Read: Cannabis Use, Lung Cancer, and Related Issues

    Cannabis edibles are much safer than smoking cannabis: True or False?

    Broadly True, with an important caveat.

    One subscriber who selected “It may have some medical uses, but recreational use is best avoided”, wrote:

    ❝I’ve been taking cannabis gummies for fibromyalgia. I don’t know if they’re helping but they’re not doing any harm. You cannot overdose you don’t become addicted.❞

    Firstly, of course consuming edibles (rather than inhaling cannabis) eliminates the smoke-related risk factors we discussed above. However, other risks remain, including the much greater ease of accidentally overdosing.

    ❝Visits attributable to inhaled cannabis are more frequent than those attributable to edible cannabis, although the latter is associated with more acute psychiatric visits and more ED visits than expected.❞

    Note: that “more frequent” for inhaled cannabis, is because more people inhale it than eat it. If we adjust the numbers to control for how much less often people eat it, suddenly we see that the numbers of hospital admissions are disproportionately high for edibles, compared to inhaled cannabis.

    Or, as the study author put it:

    ❝There are more adverse drug events associated on a milligram per milligram basis of THC when it comes in form of edibles versus an inhaled cannabis. If 1,000 people smoked pot and 1,000 people at the same dose in an edible, then more people would have more adverse drug events from edible cannabis.❞

    See the numbers: Acute Illness Associated With Cannabis Use, by Route of Exposure

    Why does this happen?

    • It’s often because edibles take longer to take effect, so someone thinks “this isn’t very strong” and has more.
    • It’s also sometimes because someone errantly eats someone else’s edibles, not realising what they are.
    • It’s sometimes a combination of the above problems: a person who is now high, may simply forget and/or make a bad decision when it comes to eating more.

    On the other hand, that doesn’t mean inhaling it is necessarily safer. As well as the pulmonary issues we discussed previously, inhaling cannabis has a higher risk of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (and the resultant cyclic vomiting that’s difficult to treat).

    You can read about this fascinating condition that’s sometimes informally called “scromiting”, a portmanteau of screaming and vomiting:

    Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome

    You can’t get addicted to cannabis: True or False?

    False. However, it is fair to say that the likelihood of developing a substance abuse disorder is lower than for alcohol, and much lower than for nicotine.

    See: Prevalence of Marijuana Use Disorders in the United States Between 2001–2002 and 2012–2013

    If you prefer just the stats without the science, here’s the CDC’s rendering of that:

    Addiction (Marijuana or Cannabis Use Disorder)

    However, there is an interesting complicating factor, which is age. One is 4–7 times more likely to develop a substance abuse disorder, if one starts use as an adolescent, rather than later in life:

    See: Likelihood of developing an alcohol and cannabis use disorder during youth: Association with recent use and age

    Cannabis is the gateway to use of more dangerous drugs: True or False?

    False, generally speaking. Of course, for any population there will be some outliers, but there appears to be no meaningful causal relation between cannabis use and other substance use:

    Is marijuana really a gateway drug? A nationally representative test of the marijuana gateway hypothesis using a propensity score matching design

    Interestingly, the strongest association (where any existed at all) was between cannabis use and opioid use. However, rather than this being a matter of cannabis use being a gateway to opioid use, it seems more likely that this is a matter of people looking to both for the same purpose: pain relief.

    As a result, growing accessibility of cannabis may actually reduce opioid problems:

    Some final words…

    Cannabis is a complex drug with complex mechanisms and complex health considerations, and research is mostly quite young, due to its historic illegality seriously cramping science by reducing sample sizes to negligible. Simply put, there’s a lot we still don’t know.

    Also, we covered some important topics today, but there were others we didn’t have time to cover, such as the other potential psychological benefits—and risks. Likely we’ll revisit those another day.

    Lastly, while we’ve covered a bunch of risks today, those of you who said it has fewer and lesser risks than alcohol are quite right—the only reason we couldn’t focus on that more, is because to talk about all the risks of alcohol would make this feature many times longer!

    Meanwhile, whether you partake or not, stay safe and stay well.

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  • We Are Such Stuff As Fish Are Made Of

    The 10almonds Team

    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.

    Research Review: Collagen

    For something that’s a very popular supplement, not many people understand what collagen is, where it comes from, or what it does.

    In a nutshell:

    Collagen is a kind of protein. Our bodies make it naturally, and we can also get more in our diet and/or take extra as a supplement.

    Our bodies use collagen in connective tissue, skin, tendon, bone, and cartilage. It has many functions, but a broad description would be “holding things together”.

    As we get older, our bodies produce less collagen. Signs of this include wrinkles, loss of skin hydration, and joint pain.

    Quick test: pinch the skin on the middle of the back of one of your hands, and then watch what happens when you get low. How quickly and easily did your skin returns to its original shape?

    If it was pretty much instantanous and flawless, congratulations, you have plenty of collagen (and also elastin). If you didn’t, you are probably low on both!

    (they are quite similar proteins and are made from the same base “stuff”, so if you’re low on one, you’ll usually be low on both)

    Quick note: A lot of research out there has been funded by beauty companies, so we had our work cut out for us today, and have highlighted where any research may be biased.

    More than skin deep

    While marketing for collagen is almost exclusively aimed at “reduce wrinkles and other signs of aging”, it does a lot more than that.

    You remember we mentioned that many things from the bones outward are held together by collagen? We weren’t kidding…

    Read: Osteoporosis, like skin ageing, is caused by collagen loss which is reversible

    Taking extra collagen isn’t the only way

    We can’t (yet!) completely halt the age-related loss of collagen, but we can slow it, with our lifestyle choices:

    Can I get collagen from food?

    Yep! Just as collagen holds our bodies together, it holds the bodies of other animals together. And, just like collagen is found in most parts of our body but most plentifully in our skin and bones, that’s what to eat to get collagen from other animals, e.g:

    • Chicken skin
    • Fish skin
    • Bone broth ← health benefits and recipes at this link!

    What about vegans?

    Yes, vegans are also held together by collagen! We do not, however, recommend eating their skin or boiling their bones into broth. Ethical considerations aside, cannibalism can give you CJD!

    More seriously, if you’re vegan, you can’t get collagen from a plant-based diet, but you can get the stuff your body uses to make collagen. Basically, you want to make sure you get plenty of:

    Read: Diet and Dermatology: The Role of a Whole-food, Plant-based Diet in Preventing and Reversing Skin Aging

    Just be sure to continue to remember to avoid highly-processed foods. So:

    • Soy mince/chunks whose ingredients list reads: “soya”? Yes!
    • The Incredible Burger or Linda McCartney’s Sausages? Sadly less healthy

    Read: Advanced Glycation End Products in Foods and a Practical Guide to Their Reduction in the Diet

    Meat-eaters might want to read that one too. By far the worst offenders for AGEs (Advanced Glycation End Products, which can not only cause collagen to stiffen, but also inactivate proteins responsible for collagen repair, along with doing much more serious damage to your body’s natural functions) include:

    • Hot dogs
    • Bacon
    • Fried/roasted/grilled meats

    Is it worth it as a supplement?

    That depends on you, your age, and your lifestyle, but it’s generally considered safe*

    *if you have a seafood allergy, be careful though, as many supplements are from fish or shellfish—you will need to find one that’s free from your allergen

    Also, all collagen is animal-derived. So if you’re a vegan, decide for yourself whether this constitutes medicine and if so, whether that makes it ethically permissible to you.

    With that out of the way:

    What the science says on collagen supplementation

    Collagen for skin

    Read: Effects of collagen supplementation on skin aging (systematic review and meta-analysis)

    The short version is that they selected 19 studies with over a thousand participants in total, and they found:

    In the meta-analysis, a grouped analysis of studies showed favorable results of hydrolyzed collagen supplementation compared with placebo in terms of skin hydration, elasticity, and wrinkles.

    The findings of improved hydration and elasticity were also confirmed in the subgroup meta-analysis.

    Based on results, ingestion of hydrolyzed collagen for 90 days is effective in reducing skin aging, as it reduces wrinkles and improves skin elasticity and hydration.

    Caveat: while that systematic review had no conflicts of interests, at least some of the 19 studies will have been funded by beauty companies. Here are two, so that you know what that looks like:

    Funded by Quiris to investigate their own supplement, Elasten®:

    A Collagen Supplement Improves Skin Hydration, Elasticity, Roughness, and Density

    Funded by BioCell to investigate their own supplement, BioCell Collagen:

    The Effects of Skin Aging Associated with the Use of BioCell Collagen

    A note on funding bias: to be clear, the issue is not that the researchers might be corrupt (though that could happen).

    The issue is more that sometimes companies will hire ten labs to do ten research studies… and then pull funding from ones whose results aren’t going the way they’d like.

    So the “best” (for them) study is the one that gets published.

    Here’s another systematic review—like the one at the top of this section—that found the same, with doses ranging from 2.5g–15g per day for 8 weeks or longer:

    Read: Oral Collagen Supplementation: A Systematic Review of Dermatological Applications

    Again, some of those studies will have been funded by beauty companies. The general weight of evidence does seem clear and favorable, though.

    Collagen for bones

    Here, we encountered a lot less in the way of potential bias, because this is simply marketed a lot less. Despite being arguably far more important!

    We found a high quality multi-vector randomized controlled study with a sample size of 131 postmenopausal women. They had these women take 5g collagen supplement (or placebo), and studied the results over the course of a year.

    They found:

    • The intake of the supplement increased bone mineral density (BMD)
    • Supplementation was also associated with a favorable shift in bone markers, indicating:
      • increased bone formation
      • reduced bone degradation

    Read: Specific Collagen Peptides Improve Bone Mineral Density and Bone Markers in Postmenopausal Wome

    A follow-up study with 31 of these women found that taking 5 grams of collagen daily for a total of 4 years was associated with a progressive increase in BMD.

    You might be wondering if collagen also helps against osteoarthritis.

    The answer is: yes, it does (at least, it significantly reduces the symptoms)

    Read: Effect of collagen supplementation on osteoarthritis symptoms

    In summary:

    • You need collagen for health skin, bones, joints, and more
    • Your body makes collagen from your food
    • You can help it by getting plenty of protein, vitamins, and minerals
    • You can also help it by not doing the usual Bad Things™ (smoking, drinking, eating processed foods, especially processed meats)
    • You can also eat collagen directly in the form of other animals’ skin and bones
    • You can also buy collagen supplements (but watch out for allergens)

    Want to try collagen supplementation?

    We don’t sell it (or anything else), but for your convenience…

    Check it out: Hydrolyzed Collagen Peptides (the same as in most of the above studies), 90 days supply at 5g/day

    We selected this one because it’s the same kind used in many of the studies, and it doesn’t contain any known allergens.

    It’s bovine collagen, meaning it’s from cows, so it’s not vegan, and also some subscribers may want to abstain for religious reasons. We respect that, and/but make our recommendations based solely on the science of health and productivity.

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  • Reduce Caffeine’s Impact on Kidneys

    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.

    The 10almonds Team

    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

    ❝Avid coffee drinker so very interested in the results Also question Is there something that you could take or eat that would prevent the caffeine from stimulating the kidneys? I tried to drink decaf from morning to night not a good result! Thanks❞

    That is a good question! The simple answer is “no” (but keep reading, because all is not lost)

    There’s no way (that we yet know of) to proof the kidneys against the stimulating effect of caffeine. This is especially relevant because part of caffeine’s stimulating effect is noradrenergic, and that “ren” in the middle there? It’s about the kidneys. This is just because the adrenal gland is situated next to them (actually, it’s pretty much sitting on top of them), hence the name, but it does mean that the kidneys are about the hardest thing in the body to have not effected by caffeine.

    However! The effects of caffeine in general can be softened a little with l-theanine (found in tea, or it can be taken as a supplement). It doesn’t stop it from working, but it makes the curve of the effect a little gentler, and so it can reduce some unwanted side effects.

    You can read more about l-theanine here:

    L-Theanine: What’s The Tea?

    Don’t Forget…

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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  • Beetroot vs Pumpkin – 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.

    The 10almonds Team

    Our Verdict

    When comparing beetroot to pumpkin, we picked the beetroot.

    Why?

    It was close! And an argument could be made for either.

    In terms of macros, beetroot has about 3x more protein and about 3x more fiber, as well as about 2x more carbs, making it the “more food per food” option. While both have a low glycemic index, we picked the beetroot here for its better numbers overall.

    In the category of vitamins, beetroot has more of vitamins B6 and B9, while pumpkin has more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B5, E, and K. So, a fair win for pumpkin this time.

    When it comes to minerals, though, beetroot has more calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while pumpkin has a tiny bit more copper. An easy win for beetroot here.

    In short, both are great, and although pumpkin shines in the vitamin category, beetroot wins on overall nutritional density.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    No, beetroot isn’t vegetable Viagra. But here’s what it can do

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

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  • Lettuce vs Arugula – Which is Healthier?

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    The 10almonds Team

    Our Verdict

    When comparing lettuce to arugula, we picked the arugula.

    Why?

    These two salad leaves that often fulfil quite similar culinary roles (base of a green salad) are actually of different families, and it shows…

    In terms of macros, arugula is lower in carbs, and much higher in protein and fiber—to the point that the protein content in arugula is almost equal to the carb content, which for leaves, is not that common a thing to see.

    When it comes to vitamins, things are more even: lettuce has more of vitamins A, B1, B3, B6, and K, while arugula has more of vitamins B5, B9, C, E, and choline. All in all, we can comfortably call it a tie on the vitamin front.

    In the category of minerals, things are once again more decided: arugula has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc. In contrast, lettuce boasts only more selenium. An easy win for arugula.

    Both of these plants have plenty of health-giving phytochemicals, including flavonoids and carotenoids along with other less talked-about things, and while the profiles are quite different for each of them, they stack up about the same in terms of overall benefits in this category.

    Taking the various categories into account, this of course adds up to an easy win for arugula, but do enjoy both, especially as lettuce brings benefits that arugula doesn’t in the two categories where they tied!

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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