Metabolism Made Simple – by Sam Miller
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The author, a nutritionist, sets out to present exactly what the title promises: metabolism made simple.
On this, he delivers. Explaining things from the most basic elements upwards, he gives a well-rounded introduction to the science of metabolism and what it means for us when it comes to our dietary habits.
The book is in large part a how-to, but with a lot of flexibility left to the reader. He doesn’t advocate for any particular dietary plan, but he does give the reader the tools necessary to make an informed choice and go from there—including the pros and cons of some popular dietary approaches.
He talks a lot about getting the most out of whatever we do choose to—managing appetite, mitigating adaptation, maximizing adherence, optimizing absorption of nutrients, and so forth.
The book does also touch on things like exercise and stress management, but diet is always center-stage and is the main topic of the book.
The style is—as promised by the title—simple. However, this simply means that he avoids unnecessary jargon and explains any necessary terms along the way. As for backing up claims with science, there are 22 pages of references, which is always a good sign.
Bottom line: if you’d like a simple, practical guide to eating for metabolic health, this book will start you off on a good footing.
Click here to check out Metabolism Made Simple, and give your metabolic health a boost!
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Yoga for Better Sleep – by Mark Stephens
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The book has, as you might expect:
- postural exercises
- breathing exercises
- meditation exercises
Instructions given in all of the above categories are clear and easy to follow, and there are photographic illustrations too where appropriate.
What sets it apart from many books of this kind is that it also has chapters dedicated to various specific circumstances; the many actual reasons people seriously struggle to sleep; not just “screentime too late”, but for example deprepression, sleep apnea, hyperarousal, or even just aging.
As well as the comprehensive exercises, there are also many tips, tricks, hacks, and workarounds—it’s a practical guidebook with practical advice.
While the book is about yogic practices, the author also does tackle this holistically, acknowledging that there are many factors going on, and that yogic practices should be one more string to our sleep-improving bow—as we continue with other general good advice for good sleep too, have medical tests if it seems appropriate, that kind of thing. Basically, to have one’s assorted approaches work together with synergistic effect.
Bottom line: this book will quite possibly put you to sleep! But only in the best possible way.
Click here to check out Yoga for Better Sleep, and get those valuable Zs in, healthily!
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Ghanaian Red Bean & Sweet Potato Groundnut Stew
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This is a dish popular in principle throughout West Africa. We say “in principle” because that’s a big place, and there is a lot of regional variation. The archetypal peanut stew is from Senegal (as maafe) or Mali (as tigadèguèna), but for its more balanced nutritional profile we’ve chosen one from Ghana—and since there are regional variations within Ghana too, we should specify that this one is from the south.
If you are allergic to nuts, you can substitute a seed butter (or tahini) for the nut butter, and omit the nuts—this will work in culinary terms and be fine healthwise, but we can’t claim it would be the same dish, having lost its defining ingredient. If your allergy is solely to peanuts, then substituting with any oily nut would work. So, not almonds for example, but cashews or even walnuts would be fine.
You will need
- 1½ lbs sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into ½” cubes
- 2 cups low-sodium vegetable stock
- 2 cans kidney beans, drained, cooked, and rinsed (or 2 cups same; cooked, drained, and rinsed)
- 1 can chopped tomatoes
- ½ cup unsalted dry-roasted peanuts
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 red bell pepper, deseeded and chopped
- ¼ bulb garlic, finely chopped
- 2 heaped tbsp unsalted peanut butter, minimal (ideally: no) additives
- 2 tsp white miso paste
- 2 tsp grated fresh ginger
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp cayenne pepper
- 1 tsp black pepper
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- ½ tsp coarsely ground nigella seeds
- Extra virgin olive oil
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Heat some oil in a sauté pan, or other pan suitable for both frying and fitting the entire stew in. Fry the onions until softened, turn the heat down low, and add the garlic, ginger, red bell pepper, cumin, cayenne, black pepper, and MSG/salt.
2) Add ¼ cup of the vegetable stock, and the sweet potato, and turn the heat back up, on high for about 30 seconds to get it to temperature, and then take it down to a simmer.
3) Stir in the miso paste and chopped tomatoes.
4) Add most of the rest of the vegetable stock, keeping ¼ cup aside. Simmer for about 20 minutes.
5) Stir in the kidney beans, and simmer for about 30 minutes more—the sweet potato should be soft now; if it isn’t, let it simmer a while longer until it is.
6) Combine the peanut butter with the remaining ¼ cup vegetable stock, and blend until smooth. Stir it into the stew.
7) If the stew is looking more like a soup than a stew, take out 1 cup and blend this 1 cup to a purée, adding it back in.
8) Add half the peanuts unto the stew. Taste, and adjust the seasonings if necessary.
9) Crush the remaining peanuts using a pestle and mortar; not too much though; you want them broken into bits, not pulverised.
10) Garnish with the crushed nuts and nigella seeds, and serve.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Eat More (Of This) For Lower Blood Pressure
- Lycopene’s Benefits For The Gut, Heart, Brain, & More
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits? ← we used 4/5 today!
Take care!
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Online Reaction Tests & Women’s Cognitive Health (Test Yours!)
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A team of researchers have looked into the use of online reaction tests (in which, for example, one clicks whenever a certain prompt is shown, or for more of a cognitive challenge, one presses a numerical key when the corresponding digit is shown) to cognitive health in women at different ages.
Why women? To quote the man who had the honor of being the first-listed author on the study (something that happens mysteriously often in science),
❝Women have long been under-represented in healthy aging research, despite making up more than half the population. We developed an easy way to measure cognitive function in the home, without the need for individuals to travel to clinics or receive home visits. Our research shows that testing of cognitive function in the home largely acceptable, easy and convenient❞
About that convenience: they used data from the UK Women’s Cohort Study, which involved over 35,000 British women, and then specifically focused on a follow-up study of 768 participants aged 48–85.
Of the two kinds of online reaction tests we described up top, they used the numerical kind. The participants also filled in a questionnaire about their personal traits (demographic data, mostly, though things like self-reported level of health literacy, and how they would rate their overall health).
What they found
The findings included:
- Younger women were more likely to participate, with participation rates dropping from 89% at age 45 to 44% at age 65.
- Each higher level of education increased the likelihood of volunteering by 7%.
- Women who rated themselves as having “high” intelligence were 19% more likely to participate than those who considered themselves of “average” intelligence.
- Women with lower self-reported health literacy made fewer errors, possibly due to taking longer to decide on answers—consistent with findings from older adults.
You can read the full paper itself here: Health literacy in relation to web-based measurement of cognitive function in the home: UK Women’s Cohort Study
Why this matters
We wrote, a little while ago, about the use of online games (of a specific kind) to improve cognitive function:
Synergistic Brain-Training: Let The Games Begin (But It Matters What Kind) ← the good news is, these are very accessible too
When it comes to rapid and/but correct reactions, this becomes really critical:
How (And Why) To Train Your Pre-Frontal Cortex ← Dr. Sandra Chapman advocates strongly for this, and it’s closely related to working memory and the ability to focus
Want to test yours?
Here are two ways to do it (now, for free, without needing to sign up for anything; the tests are right there on the page):
- HumanBenchmark.com’s Reaction Time Test ← this one’s just a “click when the red panel turns green” test, but the merit here is that it compares your scores to a very large dataset of other people
- Keypress Reaction Time Test ← this one’s the kind that was used in the study, and requires pressing the correct numerical key when the corresponding digit is shown on the screen. You can make it easier or harder by restricting or increasing the range of numbers it uses (default setting is to use the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6)
Enjoy!
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Managing Major Chronic Diseases – by Alexis Dupree
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Our author, Alexis Dupree, is herself in her 70s, and writing with more than three decades of experience of surviving multiple chronic diseases (in her case, Multiple Sclerosis, and then a dozen comorbidities that came with such).
She is not a doctor or a scientist, but for more than 30 years she’s been actively working to accumulate knowledge not just on her own conditions, but on the whole medical system, and what it means to be a “forever patient” without giving up hope.
She talks lived-experience “life management” strategies for living with chronic disease, and she talks—again from lived experience—about navigating the complexities of medical care; not on a legalistic “State regulations say…” level, because that kind of thing changes by the minute, but on a human level.
Perhaps most practically: how to advocate strongly for yourself while still treating medical professionals with the respect and frankly compassion that they deserve while doing their best in turn.
But also: how to change your attitude to that of a survivor, and yet also redefine your dreams. How to make a new game plan of life—while working to make life easier for yourself. How to deal, psychologically, with the likelihood that not only will you probably not get better, but also, you will probably get worse, while still never, ever, giving up.
After all, many things are easily treatable today that mere decades ago were death sentences, and science is progressing all the time. We just have to stay alive, and in as good a condition as we reasonably can, to benefit from those advances!
Bottom line: if you have a chronic disease, or if a loved one does, then this is an immensely valuable book to read.
Click here to check out Managing Major Chronic Diseases, and make life easier!
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Improving Women’s Health Across the Lifespan – by Dr. Michelle Tollefson et al.
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We say “et al.”, because this hefty book (504 pages) is a compilation of contributions by about 60 authors, of whom, 100% are doctors and about 90% are women.
As one might expect from a book with many small self-contained chapters by such a lot of doctors, the content is very diverse, though the style is consistent throughout, likely due to the authors working from a style sheet, plus the work of the editorial team.
About that content: the focus here is lifestyle medicine, and while much of the advice will go for men too (most people are unlikely to go wrong with “eat more fruits and vegetables and get better sleep” etc), anything more detailed than that (of which there’s a lot) is focussed on women. Hence, we get chapters on optimal nutrition for women, physical activity for women, sleep and women’s health, etc, as well as topics that can affect everyone but disproportionately affect women—ranging from autoimmune diseases to social burdens that affect health in measurable ways. There’s also, as you might expect, plenty about sexual health, pregnancy-related health, menopausal health, and so forth.
The strength of this book is really in its diversity; it’s very much a case of “60 heads are better than one”, and as such, we’re pretty much getting 60 books for the price of one here, as each author brings what they are most specialized in.
Bottom line: if you are a woman and/or love a woman, this book is packed with information that will be of interest and applicable use.
Click here to check out Improving Women’s Health Across The Lifespan, and do just that!
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Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
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A spoonful of pepper makes the… Hang on, no, that’s not right…
We know that spices are the spice of life, and many have great health-giving qualities. But…
- How much is the right amount?
- What’s the minimum to get health benefits?
- What’s the maximum to avoid toxicity?
That last one always seems like a scary question, but please bear in mind: everything is toxic at a certain dose. Oxygen, water, you-name-it.
On the other hand, many things have a toxicity so low that one could not physically consume it sufficiently faster than the body eliminates it, to get a toxic build-up.
Consider, for example, the €50 banknote that was nearly withdrawn from circulation because one of the dyes used in it was found to be toxic. However, the note remained in circulation after scientists patiently explained that a person would have to eat many thousands of them to get a lethal dose.
So, let’s address these questions in reverse order:
What’s the maximum to avoid toxicity?
In the case of the spices we’ll look at today, the human body generally* has high tolerance for them if eaten at levels that we find comfortable eating.
*IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have (or may have) a medical condition that may be triggered by spices, go easier on them (or if appropriate, abstain completely) after you learn about that.
Check with your own physician if unsure, because not only are we not doctors, we’re specifically not your doctors, and cannot offer personalized health advice.
We’re going to be talking in averages and generalizations here. Caveat consumator.
For most people, unless you are taking the spice in such quantities that you are folding space and seeing the future, or eating them as the main constituents of your meal rather than an embellishment, you should be fine. Please don’t enter a chilli-eating contest and sue us.
What is the minimum to get health benefits and how much should we eat?
The science of physiology generally involves continuous rather than discrete data, so there’s not so much a hard threshold, as a point at which the benefits become significant. The usefulness of most nutrients we consume, be they macro- or micro-, will tend to have a bell curve.
In other words, a tiny amount won’t do much, the right amount will have a good result, and usefulness will tail off after that point. To that end, we’re going to look at the “sweet spot” of peaking on the graph.
Also note: the clinical dose is the dose of the compound, not the amount of the food that one will need to eat to get that dose. For example, food x containing compound y will not usually contain that compound at 100% rate and nothing else. We mention this so that you’re not surprised when we say “the recommended dose is 5mg of compound, so take a teaspoon of this spice”, for example.
Further note: we only have so much room here, so we’re going to list only the top benefits, and not delve into the science of them. You can see the related main features for more details, though!
The “big 5” health-giving spices, with their relevant active compound:
- Black pepper (piperine)
- Hot pepper* (capsaicin)
- Garlic (allicin)
- Ginger (gingerol)
- Turmeric (curcumin**)
*Cayenne pepper is very high in capsaicin; chilli peppers are also great
**not the same thing as cumin, which is a completely different plant. Cumin does have some health benefits of its own, but not in the same league as the spices above, and there’s only so much we have room to cover today.
Black pepper
- Benefits: antioxidant, anti-cancer, boosts bioavailability of other nutrients, aids digestion
- Dosage: 5–20mg for benefits
- Suggestion: ½ teaspoon of black pepper is sufficient for benefits. However, this writer’s kitchen dictum in this case is “if you can’t see the black pepper in/on the food, add more”—but that’s more about taste!
- Related main feature: Black Pepper’s Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
Hot Pepper
- Benefits: anti-inflammatory, metabolism accelerator
- Dosage: 6mg gives benefits, 500mg is a common dose in capsules
- Suggestion: if not making a spicy dish, consider using a teaspoon of cayenne as part of the seasoning for rice or potatoes
- Related main feature: Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
Garlic
- Benefits: heart health, blood sugar balancing, anti-cancer
- Dosage: 4–8µg for benefits
- Suggestion: 1–2 cloves daily is generally good. However, cooking reduces allicin content (and so does oxidation after cutting/crushing), so you may want to adjust accordingly if doing those things.
- Related main feature: The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic
Ginger
- Benefits: anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anti-nausea
- Dosage: 3–4g for benefits
- Suggestion: 1 teaspoon grated raw ginger or ½ a teaspoon powdered ginger, can be used in baking or as part of the seasoning for a stir-fry
- Related main feature: Ginger Does A Lot More Than You Think
Turmeric
- Benefits: anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer
- Dosage: 500–2000mg for benefits
- Suggestion: ¼ teaspoon per day is sufficient for benefits; ½ teaspoon dropped into the water when cooking rice will infuse the rice with turmeric (which is very water-soluble), turn the rice a pretty golden color, and not affect the flavor. Throw in some black pepper as it increases the bioavailability of curcumin up to 2000%
- Related main feature: Why Curcumin (Turmeric) Is Worth Its Weight In Gold
Closing notes
The above five spices are very healthful for most people. Personal physiology can and will vary, so if in doubt, a) check with your doctor b) start at lowest doses and establish your tolerance (or lack thereof).
Enjoy, and stay well!
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