Buckwheat vs Rye – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing buckwheat to rye, we picked the buckwheat.
Why?
Both are good, wholegrain options for most people! On which note, yes, we are comparing whole groats* vs whole grains here, respectively.
*buckwheat is, you may remember, a flowering plant and not technically a grain or even a grass (and is very unrelated to wheat; it’s as closely related to wheat as a lionfish is to a lion).
In terms of macros, buckwheat has more protein, while rye has more carbs and fiber, the ratios of which mean that rye has the higher glycemic index. All in all, we’re calling this category a win for buckwheat on the basis of those things, but really, both are fine.
When it comes to vitamins, buckwheat has more of vitamins B1, B3, B6, B7, B9, K, and choline, while rye has more of vitamins B2, B5, and E. An easy win for buckwheat here.
In the category of minerals, buckwheat has more copper, calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc, while rye has more manganese and selenium. Another clear win for buckwheat.
Lastly. it’s worth noting that while buckwheat does not contain gluten, rye does. So, if you’re avoiding gluten, buckwheat is the option to choose here for that reason too.
If you don’t have celiac disease, wheat allergy, gluten intolerance, or something like that, then rye is still very worthwhile; buckwheat may have won on numbers in each category, but rye wasn’t far behind on anything; the margins of difference were quite small today.
Still, buckwheat is the best all-rounder here!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Grains: Bread Of Life, Or Cereal Killer?
- Gluten: What’s The Truth?
- Eat More (Of This) For Lower Blood Pressure
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Black Beans vs Pinto Beans – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing black beans to pinto beans, we picked the pinto beans.
Why?
Both of these beans have won all their previous comparisons, so it’s no surprise that this one was very close. Despite their different appearance, taste, and texture, their nutritional profiles are almost identical:
In terms of macros, pinto beans have a tiny bit more protein, carbs, and fiber. So, a nominal win for pinto beans, but again, the difference is very slight.
When it comes to vitamins, black beans have more of vitamins A, B1, B3, and B5, while pinto beans have more of vitamins B2, B6, B9, C, E, K and choline. Superficially, again this is nominally a win for pinto beans, but in most cases the differences are so slight as to be potentially the product of decimal place rounding.
In the category of minerals, black beans have more calcium, copper, iron, and phosphorus, while pinto beans have more magnesium, manganese, selenium, and zinc. That’s a 4:4 tie, but the only one with a meaningful margin of difference is selenium (of which pinto beans have 4x more), so we’re calling this one a very modest win for pinto beans.
All in all, adding these up makes for a “if we really are pressed to choose” win for pinto beans, but honestly, enjoy either in accordance with your preference (this writer prefers black beans!), or better yet, both.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
Take care!
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Early Dementia Screening From Your Blood & More
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Dementia is, statistically speaking, the most feared disease in the US. Notwithstanding…
- heart disease killing more
- COVID being more of a lottery
- cancer being the “yes you can modify risk factors but it can come for anyone” life-changing (and often life-ending) disease,
…it’s still dementia that Americans report fearing the most.
And yet… Early dementia screening is seriously underused
It may be a case of a head-in-sand approach to avoid unwanted news, or it could be a case of not knowing what’s available.
So, with that in mind…
How to watch out: first line warning signs
You walk into a room of your house, and suddenly stop: “what did I come in here for?”, you wonder.
A moment later, you’re worrying whether this is a sign of age-related cognitive decline.
The good news: it usually isn’t. In fact, you did that when you were younger, too, you just didn’t pay enough attention at the time to remember it now.
Dementia-related memory loss is less “where did I put my car keys?”, and more “what is this thing for?” (it’s your car keys). Or at a less advanced stage: “whose are these car keys?” (they are yours).
You can read about some of the nuances here:
Is It Dementia? Spot The Signs (Because None Of Us Are Immune) ← If you’d like an objective test of memory and other cognitive impairments, this article also has a link to the industry’s gold standard test (it’s free)
(The Self-Administered Gerocognitive Exam (SAGE) is designed to detect early signs of cognitive, memory or thinking impairments)
Tests you can’t do at home
We wrote a little while back about how one kind of blood testing for Alzheimer’s disease works:
The Brain Alarm Signs That Warn Of Dementia
Why “Brain Alarm Signs” if it’s a blood test? Because the blood gets (in very lay terms) bits of broken brain in it. Or more specifically, they tested the blood for density of cerebrovascular endothelial extracellular vesicles (CEEVs), which are bits of the cells from the lining of blood vessels in the brain. These cerebrovascular endothelial extracellular vesicles should not, ideally, be falling off and riding around your bloodstream, and the greater the density of them, the greater likelihood of mild cognitive impairment now, and by extension, dementia later.
It’s not the only blood test available though, see:
Highly accurate blood test for Alzheimer’s disease is similar or superior to clinical cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) tests ← this one checks the ratio of phosporylated-tau217 to non-phosphorylated tau (which is a protein antibody), which equalled or outperformed FDA-approved CSF tests in classifying amyloid-β positron emission topography (PET, as in a PET scan) status, with a confidence interval as high as, or better than, industry standards.
If you don’t like having your blood taken, trust us that you’d find having your cerebrospinal fluid taken even less enjoyable, so this is a very welcome improvement!
In case you’re curious about how the CSF test works, here you go: NPTX2 in Cerebrospinal Fluid Predicts the Progression From Normal Cognition to Mild Cognitive Impairment ← NPTX2 is a protein biomarker of Alzheimer’s risk
…but again, we really think the blood test is preferable.
Tests beyond the physiological
There are, of course, psychological tests that can be done, including a linguistic analysis of your conversation, compared with a vast database of other people’s conversations, with and without various degrees of cognitive impairment
As Dr. Ioannis Paschalidis explains:
❝We wanted to predict what would happen in the next six years—and we found we can reasonably make that prediction with relatively good confidence and accuracy.
Rather than using acoustic features of speech, like enunciation or speed, the model is just pulling from the content of the interview—the words spoken, how they’re structured.
You can think of the score as the likelihood, the probability, that someone will remain stable or transition to dementia. It had significant predictive ability.
Digital is the new blood. You can collect it, analyze it for what is known today, store it, and reanalyze it for whatever new emerges tomorrow.❞
You can read the full paper here: Prediction of Alzheimer’s disease progression within 6 years using speech: A novel approach leveraging language models
See also: AI: The Doctor That Never Tires?
What if the news isn’t good?
While bad news is never welcome per se, it is preferable to not knowing, insofar as we can then take steps to manage the situation.
You may be wondering: what can be done that I wouldn’t already be doing to minimize my dementia risk in the first place?
And the answer is: yes, do continue those things of course, but there is more to do:
See: Beyond Guarding Against Dementia: When Age’s Brain-Changes Come Knocking
Take care!
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Stuck in fight-or-flight mode? 5 ways to complete the ‘stress cycle’ and avoid burnout or depression
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Can you remember a time when you felt stressed leading up to a big life event and then afterwards felt like a weight had been lifted? This process – the ramping up of the stress response and then feeling this settle back down – shows completion of the “stress cycle”.
Some stress in daily life is unavoidable. But remaining stressed is unhealthy. Chronic stress increases chronic health conditions, including heart disease and stroke and diabetes. It can also lead to burnout or depression.
Exercise, cognitive, creative, social and self-soothing activities help us process stress in healthier ways and complete the stress cycle.
What does the stress cycle look like?
Scientists and researchers refer to the “stress response”, often with a focus on the fight-or-flight reactions. The phrase the “stress cycle” has been made popular by self-help experts but it does have a scientific basis.
The stress cycle is our body’s response to a stressful event, whether real or perceived, physical or psychological. It could be being chased by a vicious dog, an upcoming exam or a difficult conversation.
The stress cycle has three stages:
- stage 1 is perceiving the threat
- stage 2 is the fight-or-flight response, driven by our stress hormones: adrenaline and cortisol
- stage 3 is relief, including physiological and psychological relief. This completes the stress cycle.
Different people will respond to stress differently based on their life experiences and genetics.
Unfortunately, many people experience multiple and ongoing stressors out of their control, including the cost-of-living crisis, extreme weather events and domestic violence.
Remaining in stage 2 (the flight-or-flight response), can lead to chronic stress. Chronic stress and high cortisol can increase inflammation, which damages our brain and other organs.
When you are stuck in chronic fight-or-flight mode, you don’t think clearly and are more easily distracted. Activities that provide temporary pleasure, such as eating junk food or drinking alcohol are unhelpful strategies that do not reduce the stress effects on our brain and body. Scrolling through social media is also not an effective way to complete the stress cycle. In fact, this is associated with an increased stress response.
Stress and the brain
In the brain, chronic high cortisol can shrink the hippocampus. This can impair a person’s memory and their capacity to think and concentrate.
Chronic high cortisol also reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex but increases activity in the amygdala.
The prefrontal cortex is responsible for higher-order control of our thoughts, behaviours and emotions, and is goal-directed and rational. The amygdala is involved in reflexive and emotional responses. Higher amygdala activity and lower prefrontal cortex activity explains why we are less rational and more emotional and reactive when we are stressed.
There are five types of activities that can help our brains complete the stress cycle. https://www.youtube.com/embed/eD1wliuHxHI?wmode=transparent&start=0 It can help to understand how the brain encounters stress.
1. Exercise – its own complete stress cycle
When we exercise we get a short-term spike in cortisol, followed by a healthy reduction in cortisol and adrenaline.
Exercise also increases endorphins and serotonin, which improve mood. Endorphins cause an elated feeling often called “runner’s high” and have anti-inflammatory effects.
When you exercise, there is more blood flow to the brain and higher activity in the prefrontal cortex. This is why you can often think more clearly after a walk or run. Exercise can be a helpful way to relieve feelings of stress.
Exercise can also increase the volume of the hippocampus. This is linked to better short-term and long-term memory processing, as well as reduced stress, depression and anxiety.
2. Cognitive activities – reduce negative thinking
Overly negative thinking can trigger or extend the stress response. In our 2019 research, we found the relationship between stress and cortisol was stronger in people with more negative thinking.
Higher amygdala activity and less rational thinking when you are stressed can lead to distorted thinking such as focusing on negatives and rigid “black-and-white” thinking.
Activities to reduce negative thinking and promote a more realistic view can reduce the stress response. In clinical settings this is usually called cognitive behaviour therapy.
At home, this could be journalling or writing down worries. This engages the logical and rational parts of our brain and helps us think more realistically. Finding evidence to challenge negative thoughts (“I’ve prepared well for the exam, so I can do my best”) can help to complete the stress cycle.
Journalling could help process stressful events and complete the stress cycle. Shutterstock/Fellers Photography 3. Getting creative – a pathway out of ‘flight or fight’
Creative activities can be art, craft, gardening, cooking or other activities such as doing a puzzle, juggling, music, theatre, dancing or simply being absorbed in enjoyable work.
Such pursuits increase prefrontal cortex activity and promote flow and focus.
Flow is a state of full engagement in an activity you enjoy. It lowers high-stress levels of noradrenaline, the brain’s adrenaline. When you are focussed like this, the brain only processes information relevant to the task and ignores non-relevant information, including stresses.
4. Getting social and releasing feel-good hormones
Talking with someone else, physical affection with a person or pet and laughing can all increase oxytocin. This is a chemical messenger in the brain that increases social bonding and makes us feel connected and safe.
Laughing is also a social activity that activates parts of the limbic system – the part of the brain involved in emotional and behavioural responses. This increases endorphins and serotonin and improves our mood.
5. Self-soothing
Breathing exercises and meditation stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system (which calms down our stress responses so we can “reset”) via the vagus nerves, and reduce cortisol.
A good cry can help too by releasing stress energy and increasing oxytocin and endorphins.
Emotional tears also remove cortisol and the hormone prolactin from the body. Our prior research showed cortisol and prolactin were associated with depression, anxiety and hostility.
Getting moving can help with stress and its effects on the brain. Shutterstock/Jaromir Chalabala Action beats distraction
Whether it’s watching a funny or sad movie, exercising, journalling, gardening or doing a puzzle, there is science behind why you should complete the stress cycle.
Doing at least one positive activity every day can also reduce our baseline stress level and is beneficial for good mental health and wellbeing.
Importantly, chronic stress and burnout can also indicate the need for change, such as in our workplaces. However, not all stressful circumstances can be easily changed. Remember help is always available.
If you have concerns about your stress or health, please talk to a doctor.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800.
Theresa Larkin, Associate professor of Medical Sciences, University of Wollongong and Susan J. Thomas, Associate professor in Mental Health and Behavioural Science, University of Wollongong
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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What Would a Second Trump Presidency Look Like for Health Care?
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On the presidential campaign trail, former President Donald Trump is, once again, promising to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act — a nebulous goal that became one of his administration’s splashiest policy failures.
“We’re going to fight for much better health care than Obamacare. Obamacare is a catastrophe,” Trump said at a campaign stop in Iowa on Jan. 6.
The perplexing revival of one of Trump’s most politically damaging crusades comes at a time when the Obama-era health law is even more popular and widely used than it was in 2017, when Trump and congressional Republicans proved unable to pass their own plan to replace it. That failed effort was a big part of why Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms.
Despite repeated promises, Trump never presented his own Obamacare replacement. And much of what Trump’s administration actually accomplished in health care has been reversed by the Biden administration.
Still, Trump secured some significant policy changes that remain in place today, including efforts to bring more transparency to prices charged by hospitals and paid by health insurers.
Trying to predict Trump’s priorities in a second term is even more difficult given that he frequently changes his positions on issues, sometimes multiple times.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Perhaps Trump’s biggest achievement is something he rarely talks about on the campaign trail. His administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” managed to create, test, and bring to market a covid-19 vaccine in less than a year, far faster than even the most optimistic predictions.
Many of Trump’s supporters, though, don’t support — and some even vehemently oppose — covid vaccines.
Here is a recap of Trump’s health care record:
Public Health
Trump’s pandemic response dominates his overall record on health care.
More than 400,000 Americans died from covid over Trump’s last year in office. His travel bans and other efforts to prevent the global spread of the virus were ineffective, his administration was slower than other countries’ governments to develop a diagnostic test, and he publicly clashed with his own government’s health officials over the response.
Ahead of the 2020 election, Trump resumed large rallies and other public campaign events that many public health experts regarded as reckless in the face of a highly contagious, deadly virus. He personally flouted public health guidance after contracting covid himself and ending up hospitalized.
At the same time, despite what many saw as a politicization of public health by the White House, Trump signed a massive covid relief bill (after first threatening to veto it). He also presided over some of the largest boosts for the National Institutes of Health’s budget since the turn of the century. And the mRNA-based vaccines Operation Warp Speed helped develop were an astounding scientific breakthrough credited with helping save millions of lives while laying the groundwork for future shots to fight other diseases including cancer.
Abortion
Trump’s biggest contribution to abortion policy was indirect: He appointed three Supreme Court justices, who were instrumental in overturning the constitutional right to an abortion.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump has been all over the place on the red-hot issue. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Trump has bemoaned the issue as politically bad for Republicans; criticized one of his rivals, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for signing a six-week abortion ban; and vowed to broker a compromise with “both sides” on abortion, promising that “for the first time in 52 years, you’ll have an issue that we can put behind us.”
He has so far avoided spelling out how he’d do that, or whether he’d support a national abortion ban after any number of weeks.
More recently, however, Trump appears to have mended fences over his criticism of Florida’s six-week ban and more with key abortion opponents, whose support helped him get elected in 2016 — and whom he repaid with a long list of policy changes during his presidency.
Among the anti-abortion actions taken by the Trump administration were a reinstatement of the “Mexico City Policy” that bars giving federal funds to international organizations that support abortion rights; a regulation to bar Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide abortions from the federal family planning program, Title X; regulatory changes designed to make it easier for health care providers and employers to decline to participate in activities that violate their religious and moral beliefs; and other changes that made it harder for NIH scientists to conduct research using fetal tissue from elective abortions.
All of those policies have since been overturned by the Biden administration.
Health Insurance
Unlike Trump’s policies on reproductive health, many of his administration’s moves related to health insurance still stand.
For example, in 2020, Trump signed into law the No Surprises Act, a bipartisan measure aimed at protecting patients from unexpected medical bills stemming from payment disputes between health care providers and insurers. The bill was included in the $900 billion covid relief package he opposed before signing, though Trump had expressed support for ending surprise medical bills.
His administration also pushed — over the vehement objections of health industry officials — price transparency regulations that require hospitals to post prices and insurers to provide estimated costs for procedures. Those requirements also remain in place, although hospitals in particular have been slow to comply.
Medicaid
While first-time candidate Trump vowed not to cut popular entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, his administration did not stick to that promise. The Affordable Care Act repeal legislation Trump supported in 2017 would have imposed major cuts to Medicaid, and his Department of Health and Human Services later encouraged states to require Medicaid recipients to prove they work in order to receive health insurance.
Drug Prices
One of the issues the Trump administration was most active on was reducing the price of prescription drugs for consumers — a top priority for both Democratic and Republican voters. But many of those proposals were blocked by the courts.
One Trump-era plan that never took effect would have pegged the price of some expensive drugs covered by Medicare to prices in other countries. Another would have required drug companies to include prices in their television advertisements.
A regulation allowing states to import cheaper drugs from Canada did take effect, in November 2020. However, it took until January 2024 for the FDA, under Trump’s successor, to approve the first importation plan, from Florida. Canada has said it won’t allow exports that risk causing drug shortages in that country, leaving unclear whether the policy is workable.
Trump also signed into law measures allowing pharmacists to disclose to patients when the cash price of a drug is lower than the cost using their insurance. Previously pharmacists could be barred from doing so under their contracts with insurers and pharmacy benefit managers.
Veterans’ Health
Trump is credited by some advocates for overhauling Department of Veterans Affairs health care. However, while he did sign a major bill allowing veterans to obtain care outside VA facilities, White House officials also tried to scuttle passage of the spending needed to pay for the initiative.
Medical Freedom
Trump scored a big win for the libertarian wing of the Republican Party when he signed into law the “Right to Try Act,” intended to make it easier for patients with terminal diseases to access drugs or treatments not yet approved by the FDA.
But it is not clear how many patients have managed to obtain treatment using the law because it is aimed at the FDA, which has traditionally granted requests for “compassionate use” of not-yet-approved drugs anyway. The stumbling block, which the law does not address, is getting drug companies to release doses of medicines that are still being tested and may be in short supply.
Trump said in a Jan. 10 Fox News town hall that the law had “saved thousands and thousands” of lives. There’s no evidence for the claim.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
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Better Than BMI
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BMI is a very flawed system, and there are several more useful ways of measuring our bodies. Let’s take a look at them!
What’s wrong with BMI?
Oof, what isn’t wrong with BMI?
In short, it was developed as a demographic-based tool to specifically chart the weight-related health of working-age European white men a little under 200 years ago.
This means that if you are, perchance, not a working-age European white man in 1830 or so, then it’s not so useful. It’d be like first establishing height norms based on NBA basketball players, and then applying it to the general population, and thus coming to the conclusion that someone who is 6’2″ is very short.
In long, we did a deep-dive into it here, and in particular what things go dangerously wrong when it’s applied to women, non-white people, athletic people, pregnant people, people under 16 or over 65 and more:
When BMI Doesn’t Quite Measure Up
What we usually recommend instead
For heart disease risk and diabetes risk both, waist circumference is a much more universally reliable indicator. And since those two things tend to affect a lot of other health risks, it becomes an excellent starting point for being aware of many aspects of health.
Pregnancy will still throw off waist circumference a little (measure below the bump, not around it!), but it will nevertheless be more helpful than BMI even then, as it becomes necessary to just increase the numbers a little, according to gestational month and any confounding factors e.g. twins, triplets, etc. Ask your obstetrician about this, as it’s beyond the scope of our article today!
As to what’s considered a risk:
- Waist circumference of more than 35 inches for women
- Waist circumference of more than 40 inches for men
These numbers are considered applicable across demographics of age, ethnicity, and lifestyle.
Bonus extra measurement based on the above
Important also is waist to hip ratio.
How to calculate it:
- measure your waist circumference
- measure your hip circumference
- divide the first measurement by the second one
Because it’s a ratio, it doesn’t matter what units you use (e.g. inches, cm, etc) so long as you use the same units for both measurements.
The World Health Organization offers the following chart:
Health risk Women Men Low 0.80 or lower 0.95 or lower Moderate 0.81–0.85 0.96–1.0 High 0.86 or higher 1.1 or higher Source: Waist Circumference and Waist-Hip Ratio: Report of a WHO Expert Consultation
This is especially relevant for cardiovascular disease risk:
…and also holds true for all-cause mortality:
Waist-Hip-Ratio as a Predictor of All-Cause Mortality in High-Functioning Older Adults
An ancient contender that’s still more useful than BMI
Remember Archimedes? The (perhaps apocryphal) story of his “Eureka” moment in the bathtub when he realized that water displacement could be used to measure the volume of an irregular shape?
Just like Archimedes (who, the story goes, had been hired to determine the composition of a crown that might or might not have been pure gold), we can use this method to determine body composition, because we have references for how much a given volume of a given substance will weigh, so combing what we know about a body’s weight and volume will tell us about its composition in ways that neither metric could give us alone.
Indeed, it’s one of the commonly-mentioned flaws of BMI that muscle weighs more than fat, and Archimedes’ method not only avoids that problem, but also, actually turns that knowledge (muscle weighs more than fat) to our advantage.
It’s called “hydrostatic weighing” now:
You may be wondering: what about bones? Or internal organs?
The fact is that those are slightly confounding factors that do get in the way of a truly accurate analysis, but the variation in how much one person’s skeleton weighs vs another’s, or one person’s set of organs weigh than another’s, is too small to make an important difference to the health implications.
Lastly…
Hydrostatic weighing isn’t the only way to work out how much of our body is made of fat; if you have for example a smart scale at home (like this one) that tells you your body fat percentage, that is an estimate based on bioelectrical impedance analysis.
It’s less accurate than the hydrostatic method, but easier to do at home!
As to what percentages are “best”, healthy body fat percentages are (assuming normal hormones) generally considered to be in the range of 20–25% for women and 15–20% for men.
You can read more about this here:
Is A Visible Six-Pack Obtainable Regardless Of Genetic Predisposition?
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Tuna Steak with Protein Salad
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Yes, it’s protein on protein today, and it’s all healthy.
You will need (per person)
- 1 tuna steak
- 1 400g/12oz can mixed beans, drained & rinsed
- 1 tsp capers
- 2 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
- 1 red chili, chopped
- 1 lime, cut into wedges
- ½ tsp white wine vinegar
- Extra virgin olive oil, for cooking
- Garnish: chopped parsley
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Put the beans in a bowl, mixing in the capers, vinegar, and 1 tsp of the black pepper
2) Gently rub a little olive oil onto each side of the tuna steak, and season with the remainder of the black pepper (as in, the other tsp, not the rest of what you have in the house).
3) Heat a ridged grill pan until hot, and then cook the tuna for around 3 minutes on each side. Do not jiggle it! Do not slide it, and definitely do not stir it. Just gently turn it over when necessary. The edges should be cooked, and the inside should still be pink (it’s easy to forget when it comes from a can, but remember tuna is usually eaten raw)
4) Serve, sprinkling with the chopped chili and garnishing with the parsley. The lime wedges go on the side for squeezing at the table.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Protein: How Much Do We Need, Really?
- Salmon vs Tuna – Which is Healthier?
- Cilantro vs Parsley – Which is Healthier?
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
Take care!
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