Health Nut: A Feel-Good Cookbook – by Jess Damuck
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The author is a classically trained chef (worked with Martha Stewart for a long time!), and while health is the focus here, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all, so there’s a lot of attention given to pleasure also. Which, after all, is not a zero-sum game—we can have both!
So, the title and subtitle together sum up the ethos of the book pretty well.
The recipes themselves are divided into categories by meal-type, snacks, desserts, etc. They’re varied enough to suit most moods and seasons, as well as being equally appropriate for cooking for one, or a family, or entertaining. Many (but not all) of the recipes are vegan, though where they’re not, the substitutions are mostly easy and obvious, or explained, or else alternative recipes are given (for example a vegan “tuna” recipe).
In terms of complexity, these are not very complex, yet include everything they need to to make things interesting. That said, the ingredients are also not obscure, and should be easy to find in any reasonably well-stocked supermarket.
One small downside is that many of the recipes are not illustrated, but the instructions are clear enough that this isn’t really a problem, in this reviewer’s opinion.
Bottom line: if you’d like to broaden your kitchen repertoire with plants-forward cooking from an accomplished chef, then this is a good book for that.
Click here to check out Health Nut, and enjoy the feel-good food!
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Zucchini & Oatmeal Koftas
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These vegetarian (and with one tweak, vegan) koftas are delicious as a snack, light lunch, or side to a larger meal. Healthwise, they contain the healthiest kind of fiber, as well as omega-3 fatty acids, and beneficial herbs and spices.
You will need
- ¼ cup oatmeal
- 1 large zucchini, grated
- 1 small carrot, grated
- ¼ cup cheese (your preference; vegan is also fine)
- 2 tbsp ground flaxseed
- 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
- ¼ bulb garlic, minced
- 2 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Small handful fresh parsley, chopped
- Extra virgin olive oil, for frying
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Soak the flaxseed in 2 oz hot water for at least 5 minutes
2) Combine all of the ingredients except the olive oil (and including the water that the flax has been soaking in) in a big bowl, mixing thoroughly
3) Shape into small balls, patties, or sausage shapes, and fry until the color is golden and the structural integrity is good. If doing patties, you’ll need to gently flip them to cook both sides; otherwise, rolling them to get all sides is fine.
4) Serve! Traditional is with some kind of yogurt dip, but we’re not the boss of you, so enjoy them how you like:
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- The Best Kind Of Fiber For Overall Health? ← it’s β-glucan, as found in oats
- What Omega-3 Fatty Acids Really Do For Us ← as in the flax
- The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic
- Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
- Monosodium Glutamate: Sinless Flavor-Enhancer Or Terrible Health Risk? ← it’s healthier than table salt
Take care!
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What You Should Have Been Told About The Menopause Beforehand
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What You Should Have Been Told About Menopause Beforehand
This is Dr. Jen Gunter. She’s a gynecologist, specializing in chronic pain and vulvovaginal disorders. She’s also a woman on a mission to demystify things that popular culture, especially in the US, would rather not talk about.
When was the last time you remember the menopause being referenced in a movie or TV show? If you can think of one at all, was it just played for laughs?
And of course, the human body can be funny, so that’s not necessarily the problem, but it sure would be nice if that weren’t all that there is!
So, what does Dr. Gunter want us to know?
It’s a time of changes, not an end
The name “menopause” is misleading. It’s not a “pause”, and those menses aren’t coming back.
And yet, to call it a “menostop” would be differently misleading, because there’s a lot more going on than a simple cessation of menstruation.
Estrogen levels will drop a lot, testosterone levels may rise slightly, mood and sleep and appetite and sex drive will probably be affected (progesterone can improve all these things!) and
not to mention butwe’re going to mention: vaginal atrophy, which is very normal and very treatable with a topical estrogen cream. Untreated menopause can also bring a whole lot of increased health risks (for example, heart disease, osteoporosis, and, counterintuitively given the lower estrogen levels, breast cancer).However, with a little awareness and appropriate management, all these things can usually be navigated with minimal adverse health outcomes.
Dr Gunter, for this reason, refers to it interchangeably as “the menopausal transition”. She describes it as being less like a cliff edge we fall off, and more like a bridge we cross.
Bridges can be dangerous to cross! But they can also get us safely where we’re going.
Ok, so how do we manage those things?
Dr. Gunter is a big fan of evidence-based medicine, so we’ll not be seeing any yonic crystals or jade eggs. Or “goop”.
See also: Meet Goop’s Number One Enemy
For most people, she recommends Menopausal Hormone Therapy (MHT), which falls under the more general category of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT).
This is the most well-evidenced, science-based way to avoid most of the risks associated with menopause.
Nevertheless, there are scare-stories out there, ranging from painful recommencement of bleeding, to (once again) increased risk of breast cancer. However, most of these are either misunderstandings, or unrelated to menopause and MHT, and are rather signs of other problems that should not be ignored.
To get a good grounding in this, you might want to read her Hormone Therapy Guide, freely available as a standalone section on her website. This series of posts is dedicated to hormone therapy. It starts with some basics and builds on that knowledge with each post:
Dr. Gunter’s Guide To The Hormone Menoverse
What about natural therapies?
There are some non-hormonal things that work, but these are mostly things that:
- give a statistically significant reduction in symptoms
- give the same statistically significant reduction in symptoms as placebo
As Dr. Gunter puts it:
❝While most of the studies of prescription medications for hot flashes have an appropriate placebo arm, this is rarely the case with so-called alternative therapies.
In fact, the studies here are almost always low quality, so it’s often not possible to conclude much.
Many reviews that look at these studies often end with a line that goes something like, “Randomized trials with a placebo arm, a low risk of bias, and adequate sample sizes are urgently needed.”
You should interpret this kind of conclusion as the polite way of saying, “We need studies that aren’t BS to say something constructive.”❞
However, if it works, it works, whatever its mechanism. It’s just good, when making medical decisions, to do so with the full facts!
For that matter, even Dr. Gunter acknowledges that while MHT can be lifechanging (in a positive way) for many, it’s not for everyone:
Informed Decisions: When Menopause Hormone Therapy Isn’t Recommended
Want to know more?
Dr. Gunter also has an assortment of books available, including The Menopause Manifesto (which we’ve reviewed previously), and some others that we haven’t, such as “Blood” and “The Vagina Bible”.
Enjoy!
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Purpose – by Gina Bianchini
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To address the elephant in the room, this is not a rehash of Rick Warren’s best-selling “The Purpose-Driven Life”. Instead, this book is (in this reviewer’s opinion) a lot better. It’s a lot more comprehensive, and it doesn’t assume that what’s most important to the author will be what’s most important to you.
What’s it about, then? It’s about giving your passion (whatever it may be) the tools to have an enduring impact on the world. It recommends doing this by leveraging a technology that would once have been considered magic: social media.
Far from “grow your brand” business books, this one looks at what really matters the most to you. Nobody will look back on your life and say “what a profitable second quarter that was in such-a-year”. But if you do your thing well, people will look back and say:
- “he was a pillar of the community”
- “she raised that community around her”
- “they did so much for us”
- “finding my place in that community changed my life”
- …and so forth. Isn’t that something worth doing?
Bianchini takes the position of both “idealistic dreamer” and “realistic worker”.
Further, she blends the two beautifully, to give practical step-by-step instructions on how to give life to the community that you build.
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Hate salad or veggies? Just keep eating them. Here’s how our tastebuds adapt to what we eat
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Do you hate salad? It’s OK if you do, there are plenty of foods in the world, and lots of different ways to prepare them.
But given almost all of us don’t eat enough vegetables, even though most of us (81%) know eating more vegetables is a simple way to improve our health, you might want to try.
If this idea makes you miserable, fear not, with time and a little effort you can make friends with salad.
Why don’t I like salads?
It’s an unfortunate quirk of evolution that vegetables are so good for us but they aren’t all immediately tasty to all of us. We have evolved to enjoy the sweet or umami (savoury) taste of higher energy foods, because starvation is a more immediate risk than long-term health.
Vegetables aren’t particularly high energy but they are jam-packed with dietary fibre, vitamins and minerals, and health-promoting compounds called bioactives.
Those bioactives are part of the reason vegetables taste bitter. Plant bioactives, also called phytonutrients, are made by plants to protect themselves against environmental stress and predators. The very things that make plant foods bitter, are the things that make them good for us.
Unfortunately, bitter taste evolved to protect us from poisons, and possibly from over-eating one single plant food. So in a way, plant foods can taste like poison.
For some of us, this bitter sensing is particularly acute, and for others it isn’t so bad. This is partly due to our genes. Humans have at least 25 different receptors that detect bitterness, and we each have our own genetic combinations. So some people really, really taste some bitter compounds while others can barely detect them.
This means we don’t all have the same starting point when it comes to interacting with salads and veggies. So be patient with yourself. But the steps toward learning to like salads and veggies are the same regardless of your starting point.
It takes time
We can train our tastes because our genes and our receptors aren’t the end of the story. Repeat exposures to bitter foods can help us adapt over time. Repeat exposures help our brain learn that bitter vegetables aren’t posions.
And as we change what we eat, the enzymes and other proteins in our saliva change too. This changes how different compounds in food are broken down and detected by our taste buds. How exactly this works isn’t clear, but it’s similar to other behavioural cognitive training.
Add masking ingredients
The good news is we can use lots of great strategies to mask the bitterness of vegetables, and this positively reinforces our taste training.
Salt and fat can reduce the perception of bitterness, so adding seasoning and dressing can help make salads taste better instantly. You are probably thinking, “but don’t we need to reduce our salt and fat intake?” – yes, but you will get more nutritional bang-for-buck by reducing those in discretionary foods like cakes, biscuits, chips and desserts, not by trying to avoid them with your vegetables.
Adding heat with chillies or pepper can also help by acting as a decoy to the bitterness. Adding fruits to salads adds sweetness and juiciness, this can help improve the overall flavour and texture balance, increasing enjoyment.
Pairing foods you are learning to like with foods you already like can also help.
The options for salads are almost endless, if you don’t like the standard garden salad you were raised on, that’s OK, keep experimenting.
Experimenting with texture (for example chopping vegetables smaller or chunkier) can also help in finding your salad loves.
Challenge your biases
Challenging your biases can also help the salad situation. A phenomenon called the “unhealthy-tasty intuition” makes us assume tasty foods aren’t good for us, and that healthy foods will taste bad. Shaking that assumption off can help you enjoy your vegetables more.
When researchers labelled vegetables with taste-focused labels, priming subjects for an enjoyable taste, they were more likely to enjoy them compared to when they were told how healthy they were.
The bottom line
Vegetables are good for us, but we need to be patient and kind with ourselves when we start trying to eat more.
Try working with biology and brain, and not against them.
And hold back from judging yourself or other people if they don’t like the salads you do. We are all on a different point of our taste-training journey.
Emma Beckett, Senior Lecturer (Food Science and Human Nutrition), School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Water Water Everywhere, But Which Is Best To Drink?
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Well Well Well…
In Tuesday’s newsletter, we asked you for your (health-related) opinion on drinking water—with the understanding that this may vary from place to place. We got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:
- About 65% said “Filtered is best”
- About 20% said “From the mains is best”
- About 8% said “Bottled is best”
- About 3% said “Distilled is best”
- About 3% said “Some other source is best”
Of those who said “some other source is best”, one clarified that their preferred source was well water.
So what does the science say?
Fluoridated water is bad for you: True or False?
False, assuming a normal level of consumption. Rather than take up more space today though, we’ll link to what we previously wrote on this topic:
You may be wondering: but what if my level of consumption is higher than normal?
Let’s quickly look at some stats:
- The maximum permitted safety level varies from place to place, but is (for example) 2mg/l in the US, 1.5mg/l in Canada & the UK.
- The minimum recommended amount also varies from place to place, but is (for example) 0.7mg/l in Canada and the US, and 1mg/l in the UK.
It doesn’t take grabbing a calculator to realize that if you drink twice as much water as someone else, then depending on where you are, water fluoridated to the minimum may give you more than the recommended maximum.
However… Those safety margins are set so much lower than the actual toxicity levels of fluoride, that it doesn’t make a difference.
For example: your writer here takes a medication that has the side effect of causing dryness of the mouth, and consequently she drinks at least 3l of water per day in a climate that could not be described as hot (except perhaps for about 2 weeks of the year). She weighs 72kg (that’s about 158 pounds), and the toxicity of fluoride (for ill symptoms, not death) is 0.2mg/kg. So, she’d need 14.4mg of fluoride, which even if the water fluoridation here were 2mg/l (it’s not; it’s lower here, but let’s go with the highest figure to make a point), would require drinking more than 7l of water faster than the body can process it.
For more about the numbers, check out:
Acute Fluoride Poisoning from a Public Water System
Bottled water is the best: True or False?
False, if we consider “best” to be “healthiest”, which in turn we consider to be “most nutrients, with highest safety”.
Bottled water generally does have higher levels of minerals than most local mains supply water does. That’s good!
But you know what else is generally has? Microplastics and nanoplastics. That’s bad!
We don’t like to be alarmist in tone; it’s not what we’re about here, but the stats on bottled water are simply not good; see:
We Are Such Stuff As Bottles Are Made Of
You may be wondering: “but what about bottled water that comes in glass bottles?”
Indeed, water that comes in glass bottles can be expected to have lower levels of plastic than water that comes in plastic bottles, for obvious reasons.
However, we invite you to consider how likely you believe it to be that the water wasn’t stored in plastic while being processed, shipped and stored, before being portioned into its final store-ready glass bottles for end-consumer use.
Distilled water is the best: True or False?
False, generally, with caveats:
Distilled water is surely the safest water anywhere, because you know that you’ve removed any nasties.
However, it’s also devoid of nutrients, because you also removed any minerals it contained. Indeed, if you use a still, you’ll be accustomed to the build-up of these minerals (generally simplified and referenced as “limescale”, but it’s a whole collection of minerals).
Furthermore, that loss of nutrients can be more than just a “something good is missing”, because having removed certain ions, that water could now potentially strip minerals from your teeth. In practice, however, you’d probably have to swill it excessively to cause this damage.
Nevertheless, if you have the misfortune of living somewhere like Flint, Michigan, then a water still may be a fair necessity of life. In other places, it can simply be useful to have in case of emergency, of course.
Here’s an example product on Amazon if you’d like to invest in a water still for such cases.
PS: distilled water is also tasteless, and is generally considered bad, tastewise, for making tea and coffee. So we really don’t recommend distilling your water unless you have a good reason to do so.
Filtered water is the best: True or False?
True for most people in most places.
Let’s put it this way: it can’t logically be worse than whatever source of water you put into it…
Provided you change the filter regularly, of course.
Otherwise, after overusing a filter, at best it won’t be working, and at worst it’ll be adding in bacteria that have multiplied in the filter over however long you left it there.
You may be wondering: can water filters remove microplastics, and can they remove minerals?
The answer in both cases is: sometimes.
- For microplastics it depends on the filter size and the microplastic size (see our previous article for details on that).
- For minerals, it depends on the filter type. Check out:
The H2O Chronicles | 5 Water Filters That Remove Minerals
One other thing to think about: while most water filtration jugs are made of PFAS-free BPA-free plastics for obvious reasons, for greater peace of mind, you might consider investing in a glass filtration jug, like this one ← this is just one example product on Amazon; by all means shop around and find one you like
Take care!
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It Didn’t Start with You – by Mark Wolynn
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There is a trend in psychology to “blame the parents” for “childhood trauma” that can result in problems later in life. Sometimes fairly, sometimes not. This book’s mostly not about that.
It does touch on our own childhood trauma, if applicable. But mostly, it’s about epigenetic trauma inheritance. In other words, not just trauma that’s passed on in terms of “the cycle of abuse”, but trauma that’s passed on in terms of “this generation experienced trauma x, developed trauma response y, encoded it epigenetically, and passed it on to their offspring”.
So, how does one heal from a trauma one never directly experienced, and just inherited the response to it? That’s what most of this book is about, after establishing how epigenetic trauma inheritance works.
The author, a therapist, provides practical advice for how to do the things that can be done to rewrite the epigenetic code we inherited. Better late than never!
Bottom line: it is well-established that trauma is inheritable. But unlike one’s eye color or the ability to smell asparagus metabolites in urine, we can rewrite epigenetic things, to a degree. This book explains how.
Click here to check out It Didn’t Start With You, and put things to rest!
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