Unlock Your Menopause Type – by Dr. Heather Hirsch
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We featured Dr. Hirsch before, here, and mentioned this book which, at the time, we had not yet reviewed. So, here it is:
What sets this apart from a lot of menopause books is that there’s a lot less “eat these foods and your body will magically stop exhibiting symptoms of menopause” and a lot more clinical observations and then evidence-based recommendations.
Which is not to say don’t eat broccoli and almonds; by all means, they’re great foods and contain valuable nutrients that will help. But it is to say that if your doctor’s prescription is just broccoli and almonds, maybe have those as a snack while you’re looking for a second opinion.
Dr. Hirsch goes through various “menopause types”, but it’s not so much “astrology for gynecologists” and more “here are clusters of menopause symptoms set against timeline of presentation, and they can be categorized into six main ways that between them, cover pretty much all my patients, which have been many”.
So if you, dear reader, are menopausal (including peri- or post-), then the chances are very good that you will see yourself in one of those six sets.
She then goes about how to prioritize relief and safety, and personalize a treatment plan, and maintain the best menopausal care for you, going forward.
The style is easy-reading pop-science, punctuated by clinical science and 35 pages of references. She’s also, unlike a lot of authors in the genre, manifestly not invested in being a celebrity or making a personality cult out of her recommendations; she’s happy to stick to the science and put out good advice.
Bottom line: if you or someone you love is menopausal (including peri- or post-), this is a top-tier book.
Click here to check out Unlock Your Menopause Type, and get the best care for you!
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3 Day Juice Fasting? Not So Fast!
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Juice fasts are trending… Again. They have been before, and this will probably not be the last time either.
The rationale is that by having nothing but fruit and/or vegetable juice for a few days, the body can clear itself of toxins while it’s not being preoccupied by dealing with what you’re eating on a daily basis.
This is not bad in theory, and in fact is a sort of parallel to the actually good advice to help the liver regenerate—by abstaining from things that the liver has to do hard work about, it has more internal resources to devote to taking care of itself.
Learn more about this: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver
Just one problem
By having only juice for a few days, you are doing the opposite of what the liver needs.
In fact, by giving it what’s basically straight sugars in water with no fiber and not even any fats to slow it down, you are making your liver work overtime to deal with the flood of sugars, and it will not cope well.
Indeed, processed carbs without sufficient fiber are one of the main drivers of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
And yes, that’s what juice is: processed carbs without fiber
(juicing is a process!)
You can read more about the science of that, here:
From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose Cs: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same? ← we get into quite some detail about how, exactly, such a harmless-seeming thing as fruit juice messes up the liver so badly
Here be (more) science
A three-day interventional study was performed on juicing and microbiome health, with three groups:
- Juice only
- Juice with whole foods
- Only whole plant-based foods
The results?
- Juice only: biggest growth in bacteria that cause inflammation and gut permeability (that’s bad; very bad)
- Juice with whole foods: the same bad effects, but much less pronounced than the juice-only group
- Only whole plant-based food: notable improvements in the microbiome
That’s what the changes were immediately post-intervention; what’s interesting to note is that the bad effects of the juice-only group also lingered longer, whereas the juice+food group enjoyed a relatively quicker recovery in the two weeks after the intervention.
Here’s the paper itself; be warned, you’ll be reading a lot about feces and saliva alongside eating and drinking:
Effects of Vegetable and Fruit Juicing on Gut and Oral Microbiome Composition
Ok, what can I do to detox?
Well, the advice we gave up top in the linked article about liver health is very sound, and also you might like to check out:
Detox: What’s Real, What’s Not, What’s Useful, What’s Dangerous?
Want to learn more?
Here’s a video explainer from the ever-charming French biochemist Jessie Inchauspé (and our own text overview, for those who prefer reading):
Fruit Is Healthy; Juice Isn’t (Here’s Why)
Take care!
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The Lost Art of Silence – by Sarah Anderson
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From “A Room Of One’s Own” to “Silent Mondays”, from spiritual retreats to noise-cancelling headphones, this book covers the many benefits of silence—and a couple of downsides too.
In an age where most things are available at the touch of a button, a little peaceful solitude can come at quite a premium, but what it offers can effect all manner of physical changes, from reduced stress responses to increased neurogenesis (growing new brain cells).
The tone throughout is a combination of personal and pop-science, and it’s very motivating to find a little more space-between-the-things in life.
The book is best enjoyed in a quiet room.
Bottom line: if you get the feeling sometimes that you could rest and recover fully and properly if you could just find the downtime, this book will help you find exactly that.
Click here to check out the Lost Art of Silence, and find peace and strength in it!
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10 Lessons For A Healthy Mind & Body
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Sadia Badiei, food scientist of “Pick Up Limes” culinary fame, has advice in and out of the kitchen:
Pick up a zest for life
Here’s what she picked up, and we all can too:
- “I can’t do it… yet”: it’s never too late to adopt a growth mindset by adding “yet” to your self-doubt, focusing on progress and the possibility of improvement.
- The spotlight effect: people are generally too absorbed in their own lives to focus on you, so don’t worry too much about others’ perceptions.
- Nutrition by addition: focus on adding healthier foods to your diet rather than eliminating the less healthy ones to avoid restrictive mindsets. You can still eliminate the less healthy ones if you want to! It just shouldn’t be the primary focus. Focusing on a conceptually negative thing is rarely helpful.
- It’s ok to change: embrace change as a sign of growth and evolution, rather than seeing it as a failure or waste of time.
- The way you do one thing is the way you do everything: be mindful of how you approach small tasks, regular tasks, boring tasks, unwanted tasks—you can either create a habit of enthusiasm or a habit of suffering (it’s entirely your choice which)
- Setting goals for success: set goals based on actions you can control (inputs) rather than outcomes that are uncertain. Less “lose 10 lbs”, and more “eat fiber before starch”, for example.
- You probably can’t have it all at once: you can achieve all your dreams, but often not simultaneously; goals and desires unfold in stages over time.
- The five-year rule: before adopting a new lifestyle or habit, ask yourself if you can realistically sustain it for five years to ensure it’s not just a short-term fix. If you struggle with this prognostic, look backwards first instead. Which healthy habits have you maintained for decades, and which were you never able to make stick?
- Are you afraid or excited?: reframe fear as excitement, as both emotions share similar physical sensations and signify that you care about the outcome.
- The voice you hear most: speak kindly to yourself in self-talk to create a softer, more compassionate tone. Your subconscious is always listening, so reinforce healthy rather than unhealthy thought patterns.
For more on each of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
80-Year-Olds Share Their Biggest Regrets
Take care!
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Can We Drink To Good Health?
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Can we drink to good health?
We asked you for your thoughts on alcohol and heart health, and we got quite an even spread of results!
If perchance that’s too tiny to read, the figures were:
- 32% voted for “Alcohol is a relaxant, reduces stress, and can contain resveratrol too. It’s good for the heart!”
- 32% voted for: “Moderate alcohol consumption can be at least neutral for the health, if not positive ⚖️”
- 36% voted for: “Alcohol is bad for pretty much everything, including heart health ✋”
One subscriber who voted for “Alcohol is a relaxant, reduces stress, and can contain resveratrol too. It’s good for the heart!” added the following thoughts:
❝While it isn’t necessary to consume alcohol, moderate amounts can be beneficial and contribute to well-being through social activity, celebrations, etc.❞
That’s an interesting point, and definitely many people do see alcohol that way! Of course, that does not mean that one will find no social activities, celebrations, etc, in parts of the world where alcohol consumption is uncommon. Indeed, in India, wedding parties where no alcohol is consumed can go on for days!
But, “we live in a society” and all that, and while we’re a health newsletter not a social issues newsletter, it’d be remiss of us to not acknowledge the importance of socialization for good mental health—and thus the rest of our health too.
So, if indeed all our friends and family drink alcohol, it can certainly make abstaining more of a challenge.
On that note, let’s take a moment to consider “The French Paradox” (an observation of a low prevalence of ischemic heart disease despite high intakes of saturated fat, a phenomenon accredited to the consumption of red wine).
As it happens, a comprehensive review in “Circulation”, a cardiovascular health journal, has suggested the French Paradox may not be so paradoxical after all.
Research suggests it has more to do with other lifestyle factors (and historic under-reporting of cardiovascular disease by French doctors), which would explain why Japan has lower rates of heart disease, despite drinking little wine, and more beer and spirits.
So, our subscriber’s note may not be completely without reason! It’s just about the party, not the alcohol.
One subscriber who voted for “Moderate alcohol consumption can be at least neutral for the health, if not positive ⚖️” wrote:
❝Keeping in mind, moderate means one glass of wine for women a day and two for men. Hard alcohol doesn’t have the same heart benefits as wine❞
That is indeed the guideline according to some health bodies!
In other places with different guiding advisory bodies, that’s been dropped down to one a day for everyone (the science may be universal, but how government institutions interpret that is not).
About that wine… Specifically, red wine, for its resveratrol content:
While there are polyphenols such as resveratrol in red wine that could boost heart health, there’s so little per glass that you may need 100–1000 glasses to get the dosage that provides benefits in mouse studies. If you’re not a mouse, you might even need more.
To this end, many people prefer resveratrol supplementation. ← link is to an example product, but there are plenty more so feel free to shop around
A subscriber who voted for “Alcohol is bad for pretty much everything, including heart health ✋” says:
❝New guidelines suggest 1 to 2 drinks a week are okay but the less the better.❞
If you haven’t heard these new guidelines, we’ll mention again: every government has its own official bodies and guidelines so perhaps your local guidelines differ, but for example here’s what that World Health Organization has to say (as of January this year):
WHO: No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health
So, whom to believe? The governments who hopefully consider the welfare of their citizenry more important than the tax dollars from alcohol sales, or the World Health Organization?
It’s a tough one, but we’ll always err on the side of the science.
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The Ultimate Booster
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Winning The Biological Arms Race
The human immune system (and indeed, other immune systems, but we are all humans here, after all) is in a constant state of war with pathogens, and that war is a constant biological arms race:
- We improve our defenses and destroy the attackers; the 1% of pathogens that survived now “know” how to counter that trick.
- The pathogens wreak havoc in our systems; the n% of us that survive now have immune systems that “know” how to counter that trick.
Vaccines are a mighty tool in our favor here, because they’re the technology that stops our n% from also being a very low number.
With vaccines, we can effectively pass on established defenses onto the population at large, as this cute video explains very well and very simply in 57 seconds:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
The problem with vaccines
The problem is that this accelerates the arms race. It’s like a chess game where we are able to respond to every move quickly (which is good for us), and/but this means passing the move over to our opponent sooner.
That problem’s hard to avoid, because the alternative has always been “let people die in much larger numbers”.
Traditional vs mRNA vaccines
A quick refresher before we continue to the big news of the day:
- Traditional vaccines use a disabled version of a pathogen to trigger an immune response that will teach the body to recognize the pathogen ready for when the full version shows up
- mRNA vaccines use a custom-made bit of genetic information to tell the body to make its own harmless fake pathogen and then respond to the harmless fake pathogen it made.
Note: this happens independently of the host’s DNA, so no, it does not change your DNA
See also: The Truth About Vaccines
Here’s a more detailed explainer (with a helpful diagram) using the COVID mRNA vaccine as an example:
Genome.gov | How does an mRNA vaccine work?
However, this still leaves us “chasing strains”, because as the pathogen (in this case, a virus) adapts, the vaccine has to be updated too, hence all the boosters.
This is a lot like a security update for your computer’s antivirus software. They’re annoying, but they do an important job.
No more “chasing strains”
The press conference soundbite on this sums it up well:
❝Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.❞
Read in full: Vaccine breakthrough means no more chasing strains
You may be wondering: what makes this one effective against any strain?
❝What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad.
It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.
Viruses may mutate in regions not targeted by traditional vaccines. However, we are targeting their whole genome with thousands of small RNAs. They cannot escape this.❞
Importantly, this means it can be applied not just to one disease, let alone just one strain of COVID. Rather, it can be used for a wide variety of viruses that have similar viral functions—COVID / SARS in general, including influenza, and even viruses such as dengue.
How it does this: the above article explains in more detail, but in few words: it targets tiny strings of the genome that are present in all strains of the virus.
Illustrative example: if you wanted to block 10almonds (please don’t), you could block our email address.
But if we were malicious (we’re not) we could be sneaky and change it, so you’d have to block the new one, and the cycle repeats.
But if you were block all emails containing the tiny string of characters “10almonds”, changing our email address would no longer penetrate your defenses.
Now imagine also blocking strings such as “One-Minute Book Review” and “Today’s almonds have been activated by” and other strings we use in every email.
Now multiply this by thousands of strings (because genomes are much larger than our little newsletter), and you see its effectiveness!
Great! How can I get this?
It’s still in the testing stages for now; this is “breaking news” science, after all.
The study itself
…is paywalled for now, sadly, but if you happen to have institutional access, here it is:
Take care!
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7 Days Of Celery Juice: What’s The Verdict?
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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
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