When should you get the updated COVID-19 vaccine?
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Updated COVID-19 vaccines are now available: They’re meant to give you the best protection against the strain of the virus that is making people severely sick and also causing deaths.
Many people were infected during the persistent summer wave, which may leave you wondering when you should get the updated vaccine. The short answer is that it depends on when you last got infected or vaccinated and on your particular level of risk.
We heard from six experts—including medical doctors and epidemiologists—about when they recommend getting an updated vaccine. Read on to learn what they said. And to make it easy, check out the flowchart below.
If I was infected with COVID-19 this summer, when should I get the updated vaccine?
All the experts we spoke to agreed that if you were infected this summer, you should wait at least three months since you were infected to get vaccinated.
“Generally, an infection may be protective for about three months,” Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System, tells PGN. “If they got infected three or more months ago, it is a good idea to get vaccinated sooner than later.”
This three-month rule applies if you got vaccinated over the summer, which may be the case for some immunocompromised people, adds Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
If I didn’t get infected with COVID-19 this summer, when should I get vaccinated?
Most of the experts we talked to say that if you didn’t get infected with COVID-19 this summer, you should get the vaccine as soon as possible. Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, emphasizes that if this applies to you, you should get vaccinated as soon as possible, especially given the current COVID-19 surge.
Al-Aly agrees. “Vaccine-derived immunity lasts for several months, and it should cover the winter season. Plus, the current vaccine is a KP.2-adapted vaccine, so it will work most optimally against KP.2 and related subvariants [such as] KP.3 that are circulating now,” Al-Aly says. “We don’t know when the virus will mutate to a variant that is not compatible with the KP.2 vaccine.”
Al-Aly adds that if you’d rather take the protection you can get right now, “It may make more sense to get vaccinated sooner than later.”
This especially applies if you’re over 65 or immunocompromised and you haven’t received a COVID-19 vaccine in a year or more because, as Chin-Hong adds, “that is the group that is being hospitalized and disproportionately dying now.”
Some experts—including epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina, author of newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist—also say that if you’re younger than 65 and not immunocompromised, you can consider waiting and aiming to get vaccinated before Halloween to get the best protection in the winter, when we’re likely to experience another wave because of the colder weather, gathering indoors, and the holidays.
“I am more worried about the winter than the summer, so I would think of October (some time before Halloween) as the ‘Goldilocks moment’—not too early, not too late, but just right,” Chin-Hong adds. Time it “such that your antibodies peak during the winter when COVID-19 cases are expected to exceed what we are seeing this summer.”
My children are starting school—should I get them vaccinated now?
According to most experts we spoke to, now is a good time to get your children vaccinated.
Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, adds that “with COVID-19 infection levels as high as they are and increased exposures in school,” now is a particularly good time to get an updated vaccine if people haven’t gotten COVID-19 recently.
Additionally, respiratory viruses spike when kids are back in school, so “doing everything you can to reduce your child’s risk of infection can help protect families and communities,” says epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera, science communications advisor at the de Beaumont Foundation.
For more information, talk to your health care provider.
(Disclosure: The de Beaumont Foundation is a partner of The Public Good Projects, the organization that owns Public Good News.)
This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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“You Just Need to Lose Weight” And 19 Other Myths About Fat People – by Aubrey Gordon
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We’ve previously reviewed another book by this author, “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat”, and this time, she’s doing some important mythbusting.
The titular “you just need to lose weight” is a commonly-taken easy-out for many doctors, to avoid having to dispense actual treatment for an actual condition. Whether or not weight loss would help in a given situation is often immaterial; “kicking the can down the road” is the goal.
Most of the book is divided into 20 chapters, each of them devoted to debunking one myth. Think of it like 10almonds’ “Mythbusting Friday” edition (indeed, we did one about obesity), but with an entire book, and as much room as she needs to provide much more detail than we can ever get into in a single article.
And far from being a mere polemic, she does indeed provide that detail—this is clearly a very well-researched book, above and beyond the author’s own personal experience. Further, all the key points are illustrated and articulated clearly, making the book’s ideas very comprehensible.
The style is pop-science, but with frequent bibliographical references for relevant sources.
Bottom line: for some readers, this book will come as a great validation; for others, it may be eye-opening. Either way, it’s a very worthwhile read.
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Black Coffee vs Orange Juice – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing black coffee to orange juice, we picked the coffee.
Why?
While this one isn’t a very like-for-like choice, it’s a choice often made, so it bears examining.
In favor of the orange juice, it has vitamins A and C and the mineral potassium, while the coffee contains no vitamins or minerals beyond trace amounts.
However, to offset that: drinking juice is one of the worst ways to consume sugar; the fruit has not only been stripped of its fiber, but also is in its most readily absorbable state (liquid), meaning that this is going to cause a blood sugar spike, which if done often can lead to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and more. Now, the occasional glass of orange juice (and resultant blood sugar spike) isn’t going to cause disease by itself, but everything we consume tips the scales of our health towards wellness or illness (or sometimes both, in different ways), and in this case, juice has a rather major downside that ought not be ignored.
In favor of the coffee, it has a lot of beneficial phytochemicals (mostly antioxidant polyphenols of various kinds), with no drawbacks worth mentioning unless you have a pre-existing condition of some kind.
Coffee can of course be caffeinated or decaffeinated, and we didn’t specify which here. Caffeine has some pros and cons that at worst, balance each other out, and whether or not it’s caffeinated, there’s nothing in coffee to offset the beneficial qualities of the antioxidants we mentioned before.
Obviously, in either case we are assuming consuming in moderation.
In short:
- orange juice has negatives that at least equal, if not outweigh, its positives
- coffee‘s benefits outweigh any drawbacks for most people
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- The Bitter Truth About Coffee (or is it?)
- Caffeine: Cognitive Enhancer Or Brain-Wrecker?
- Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Take care!
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Elderly loss of energy
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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
❝Please please give some information on elderly loss of energy and how it can be corrected. Please!❞
A lot of that is the metabolic slump described above! While we certainly wouldn’t describe 60 as elderly, and the health impacts from those changes at 45–55 get a gentler curve from 60 onwards… that curve is only going in one direction if we don’t take exceptionally good care of ourselves.
And of course, there’s also a degree of genetic lottery, and external factors we can’t entirely control (e.g. injuries etc).
One factor that gets overlooked a lot, though, is really easy to fix: B-vitamins.
In particular, vitamins B1, B5, B6, and B12. Of those, especially vitamins B1 and B12.
(Vitamins B5 and B6 are critical to health too, but relatively few people are deficient in those, while many are deficient in B1 and/or B12, especially as we get older)
Without going so detailed as to make this a main feature: these vitamins are essential for energy conversion from food, and they will make a big big difference.
You might especially want to consider taking sulbutiamine, which is a synthetic version of thiamin (vitamin B1), and instead of being water-soluble, it’s fat-soluble, and it easily crosses the blood-brain barrier, which is a big deal.
As ever, always check with your doctor because your needs/risks may be different. Also, there can be a lot of reasons for fatigue and you wouldn’t want to overlook something important.
You might also want to check out yesterday’s sponsor, as they offer personalized at-home health testing to check exactly this sort of thing.
❝What are natural ways to lose weight after 60? Taking into account bad knees or ankles, walking may be out as an exercise, running certainly is.❞
Losing weight is generally something that comes more from the kitchen than the gym, as most forms of exercise (except HIIT; see below) cause the metabolism to slow afterwards to compensate.
However, exercise is still very important, and swimming is a fine option if that’s available to you.
A word to the wise: people will often say “gentle activities, like tai chi or yoga”, and… These things are not the same.
Tai chi and yoga both focus on stability and suppleness, which are great, but:
- Yoga is based around mostly static self-support, often on the floor
- Tai chi will have you very often putting most of your weight on one slowly-increasingly bent knee at a time, and if you have bad knees, we’ll bet you winced while reading that.
So, maybe skip tai chi, or at least keep it to standing meditations and the like, not dynamic routines. Qigong, the same breathing exercises used in tai chi, is also an excellent way to improve your metabolism, by the way.
Ok, back onto HIIT:
You might like our previous article: How To Do HIIT* (Without Wrecking Your Body)
*High-Intensity Interval Training (the article also explains what this is and why you want to do it)
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How To Avoid Carer Burnout (Without Dropping Care)
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How To Avoid Carer Burnout
Sometimes in life we find ourselves in a caregiving role.
Maybe we chose it. For example, by becoming a professional carer, or even just by being a parent.
Oftentimes we didn’t. Sometimes because our own parents now need care from us, or because a partner becomes disabled.
Philosophical note: an argument could be made for that latter also having been a pre-emptive choice; we probably at some point said words to the effect of “in sickness and in health”, hopefully with free will, and hopefully meant it. And of course, sometimes we enter into a relationship with someone who is already disabled.
But, we are not a philosophy publication, and will henceforth keep to the practicalities.
First: are you the right person?
Sometimes, a caregiving role might fall upon you unasked-for, and it’s worth considering whether you are really up for it. Are you in a position to be that caregiver? Do you want to be that caregiver?
It may be that you do, and would actively fight off anyone or anything that tried to stop you. If so, great, now you only need to make sure that you are actually in a position to provide the care in question.
It may be that you do want to, but your circumstances don’t allow you to do as good a job of it as you’d like, or it means you have to drop other responsibilities, or you need extra help. We’ll cover these things later.
It may be that you don’t want to, but you feel obliged, or “have to”. If that’s the case, it will be better for everyone if you acknowledge that, and find someone else to do it. Nobody wants to feel a burden, and nobody wants someone providing care to be resentful of that. The result of such is two people being miserable; that’s not good for anyone. Better to give the job to someone who actually wants to (a professional, if necessary).
So, be honest (first with yourself, then with whoever may be necessary) about your own preferences and situation, and take steps to ensure you’re only in a caregiving role that you have the means and the will to provide.
Second: are you out of your depth?
Some people have had a life that’s prepared them for being a carer. Maybe they worked in the caring profession, maybe they have always been the family caregiver for one reason or another.
Yet, even if that describes you… Sometimes someone’s care needs may be beyond your abilities. After all, not all care needs are equal, and someone’s condition can (and more often than not, will) deteriorate.
So, learn. Learn about the person’s condition(s), medications, medical equipment, etc. If you can, take courses and such. The more you invest in your own development in this regard, the more easily you will handle the care, and the less it will take out of you.
And, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Maybe the person knows their condition better than you, and certainly there’s a good chance they know their care needs best. And certainly, there are always professionals that can be contacted to ask for advice.
Sometimes, a team effort may be required, and there’s no shame in that either. Whether it means enlisting help from family/friends or professionals, sometimes “many hands make light work”.
Check out: Caregiver Action Network: Organizations Near Me
A very good resource-hub for help, advice, & community
Third: put your own oxygen mask on first
Like the advice to put on one’s own oxygen mask first before helping others (in the event of a cabin depressurization in an airplane), the rationale is the same here. You can’t help others if you are running on empty yourself.
As a carer, sometimes you may have to put someone else’s needs above yours, both in general and in the moment. But, you do have needs too, and cannot neglect them (for long).
One sleepless night looking after someone else is… a small sacrifice for a loved one, perhaps. But several in a row starts to become unsustainable.
Sometimes it will be necessary to do the best you can, and accept that you cannot do everything all the time.
There’s a saying amongst engineers that applies here too: “if you don’t schedule time for maintenance, your equipment will schedule it for you”.
In other words: if you don’t give your body rest, your body will break down and oblige you to rest. Please be aware this goes for mental effort too; your brain is just another organ.
So, plan ahead, schedule breaks, find someone to take over, set up your cared-for-person with the resources to care for themself as well as possible (do this anyway, of course—independence is generally good so far as it’s possible), and make the time/effort to get you what you need for you. Sleep, distraction, a change of scenery, whatever it may be.
Lastly: what if it’s you?
If you’re reading this and you’re the person who has the higher care needs, then firstly:all strength to you. You have the hardest job here; let’s not forget that.
About that independence: well-intentioned people may forget that, so don’t be afraid to remind them when “I would prefer to do that myself”. Maintaining independence is generally good for the health, even if sometimes it is more work for all concerned than someone else doing it for you. The goal, after all, is your wellbeing, so this shouldn’t be cast aside lightly.
On the flipside: you don’t have to be strong all the time; nobody should.
Being disabled can also be quite isolating (this is probably not a revelation to you), so if you can find community with other people with the same or similar condition(s), even if it’s just online, that can go a very, very long way to making things easier. Both practically, in terms of sharing tips, and psychologically, in terms of just not feeling alone.
See also: How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation
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Relationships: When To Stick It Out & When To Call It Quits
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Like A Ship Loves An Anchor?
Today’s article may seem a little bit of a downer to start with, but don’t worry, it picks up again too. Simply put, we’ve written before about many of the good parts of relationships, e.g:
Only One Kind Of Relationship Promotes Longevity This Much!
…but what if that’s not what we have?
Note: if you have a very happy, secure, fulfilling, joyous relationship, then, great! Or if you’re single and happy, then, also great! Hopefully you will still find today’s feature of use if you find yourself advising a friend or family member one day. So without further ado, let’s get to it…
You may be familiar with the “sunk cost fallacy”; if not: it’s what happens when a person or group has already invested into a given thing, such that even though the thing is not going at all the way they hoped, they now want to continue trying to make that thing work, lest their previous investment be lost. But the truth is: if it’s not going to work, then the initial investment is already lost, and pouring out extra won’t help—it’ll just lose more.
That “investment” in a given thing could be money, time, energy, or (often the case) a combination of the above.
In the field of romance, the “sunk cost fallacy” keeps a lot of bad relationships going for longer than perhaps they should, and looking back (perhaps after a short adjustment period), the newly-single person says “why did I let that go on?” and vows to not make the same mistake again.
But that prompts the question: how can we know when it’s right to “keep working on it, because relationships do involve work”, as perfectly reasonable relationship advice often goes, and when it’s right to call it quits?
Should I stay or should I go?
Some questions for you (or perhaps a friend you might find yourself advising) to consider:
- What qualities do you consider the most important for a partner to have—and does your partner have them?
- If you described the worst of your relationship to a close friend, would that friend feel bad for you?
- Do you miss your partner when they’re away, or are you glad of the break? When they return, are they still glad to see you?
- If you weren’t already in this relationship, would you seek to enter it now? (This takes away sunk cost and allows a more neutral assessment)
- Do you feel completely safe with your partner (emotionally as well as physically), or must you tread carefully to avoid conflict?
- If your partner decided tomorrow that they didn’t want to be with you anymore and left, would that be just a heartbreak, or an exciting beginning of a new chapter in your life?
- What things would you generally consider dealbreakers in a relationship—and has your partner done any of them?
The last one can be surprising, by the way. We often see or hear of other people’s adverse relationship situations and think “I would never allow…” yet when we are in a relationship and in love, there’s a good chance that we might indeed allow—or rather, excuse, overlook, and forgive.
And, patience and forgiveness certainly aren’t inherently bad traits to have—it’s just good to deploy them consciously, and not merely be a doormat.
Either way, reflect (or advise your friend/family member to reflect, as applicable) on the “score” from the above questions.
- If the score is good, then maybe it really is just a rough patch, and the tools we link at the top and bottom of this article might help.
- If the score is bad, the relationship is bad, and no amount of historic love or miles clocked up together will change that. Sometimes it’s not even anyone’s fault; sometimes a relationship just ran its course, and now it’s time to accept that and turn to a new chapter.
“At my age…”
As we get older, it’s easy for that sunk cost fallacy to loom large. Inertia is heavy, the mutual entanglement of lives is far-reaching, and we might not feel we have the same energy for dating that we did when we were younger.
And there may sometimes be a statistical argument for “sticking it out” at least for a while, depending on where we are in the relationship, per this study (with 165,039 participants aged 20–76), which found:
❝Results on mean levels indicated that relationship satisfaction decreased from age 20 to 40, reached a low point at age 40, then increased until age 65, and plateaued in late adulthood.
As regards the metric of relationship duration, relationship satisfaction decreased during the first 10 years of the relationship, reached a low point at 10 years, increased until 20 years, and then decreased again.❞
Source: Development of Relationship Satisfaction Across the Life Span: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
And yet, when it comes to prospects for a new relationship…
- If our remaining life is growing shorter, then it’s definitely too short to spend in an unhappy relationship
- Maybe we really won’t find romance again… And maybe that’s ok, if w’re comfortable making our peace with that and finding joy in the rest of life (this widowed writer (hi, it’s me) plans to remain single now by preference, and her life is very full of purpose and beauty and joy and yes, even love—for family, friends, etc, plus the memory of my wonderful late beloved)
- Nevertheless, the simple fact is: many people do find what they go on to describe as their best relationship yet, late in life ← this study is with a small sample size, but in this case, even anecdotal evidence seems sufficient to make the claim reasonable; probably you personally know someone who has done so. If they can, so can you, if you so wish.
- Adding on to that last point… Later life relationships can also offer numerous significant advantages unique to such (albeit some different challenges too—but with the right person, those challenges are just a fun thing to tackle together). See for example:
An exploratory investigation into dating among later‐life women
And about those later-life relationships that do work? They look like this:
this one looks like the title says it all, but it really doesn’t, and it’s very much worth at least reading the abstract, if not the entire paper—because it talks a lot about the characteristics that make for happy or unhappy relationships, and the effect that those things have on people. It really is very good, and quite an easy read.
See again: Healthy Relationship, Healthy Life
Take care!
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Pistachios vs Almonds – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing pistachios to almonds, we picked the almonds.
Why?
It was very close! And those who’ve been following our “This or That” comparisons might be aware that pistachios and almonds have both been winning their respective comparisons with other nuts so far, so today we put them head-to-head.
In terms of macros, almonds have a little more protein and a little more fiber—as well as slightly more fat, though the fats are healthy. Pistachios, meanwhile, are higher in carbs. A moderate win for almonds on the macro front.
When it comes to vitamins, pistachios have more of vitamins A, B1, and B6, while almonds have more of vitamins B2, B3, and E. We could claim a slight victory for pistachios, based on the larger margins, or else a slight victory for almonds, based on vitamin E being a more common nutritional deficiency than vitamin A, and therefore the more useful vitamin to have more of. We’re going to call this category a tie.
In the category of minerals, almonds lead with more calcium, magnesium, manganese, and zinc, while pistachios boast more copper, potassium, and selenium, though the margins are more modest for pistachios. A moderate win for almonds on minerals, therefore.
Adding up the sections gives a win for almonds, but of course, do enjoy both, because both are excellent in their own right.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!
- Pistachios vs Walnuts – Which is Healthier?
- Almonds vs Cashews – Which is Healthier?
Take care!
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