
Almonds vs Macadamias – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing almonds to macadamias, we picked the almonds.
Why?
It’s not just our pro-almonds bias:
In terms of macros, almonds have 3x the protein and as well as more fiber and carbs, the ratio of which latter two give almonds the lower glycemic index, while macadamias have more total fat, and 4x the saturated fat percentage. All in all, we say this is a win for almonds in this category.
In the category of vitamins, almonds have more of vitamins B2, B3, B9, E, and choline, while macadamias have more of vitamins B1, B5, B6, and C. A modest 5:4 win for almonds, unless we consider that almonds have more than 47x as much vitamin E (almonds are an exceptionally good source of vitamin E), in which case, a stronger win for almonds.
When it comes to minerals, almonds have more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while macadamias have more manganese. A very clear win for almonds.
Adding up the sections makes for a convincing overall win for almonds, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!
Enjoy!
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Is TikTok right? Are there health benefits to eating sea moss?
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Sea moss is the latest “superfood” wellness influencers are swearing by. They claim sea moss products – usually in gel form – have multiple health benefits. These include supporting brain and immune function, or protecting against viruses and other microbes.
But do these health claims stack up? Let’s take a look.
Plataresca/Shutterstock What is sea moss?
Sea moss is produced using a kind of seaweed – particularly red algae – that grow in various locations all around the world. Three main species are used in sea moss products:
- Chondrus crispus (known as Irish moss or carrageenan moss)
- Eucheuma cottonii (sea moss or seabird’s nest)
- Gracilaria (Irish moss or ogonori).
Some products also contain the brown algae Fucus vesiculosus (commonly known as bladderwrack, black tang, rockweed, sea grapes, bladder fucus, sea oak, cut weed, dyers fucus, red fucus or rock wrack).
Most sea moss products are sold as a gel that can be added to recipes, used in smoothies, frozen into ice cubes or eaten on its own. The products also come in capsule form or can be purchased “raw” and used to make your own gels at home.
Several kinds of red algae are used in commercially-available sea moss products. Nancy Ann Bowe/Shutterstock What’s the evidence?
Sea moss products claim a host of potential health benefits, from supporting immunity, to promoting skin health and enhancing mood and focus, among many others.
But is there any evidence supporting these claims?
Recent studies have reviewed the biological properties of the main sea moss species (Chondrus crispus, Eucheuma cottonii, Gracilaria and Fucus vesiculosus).
They suggest these species may have anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anticancer, antidiabetic and probiotic properties.
However, the vast majority of research relating to Chondrus crispus, Gracilaria and Fucus vesiculosus – and all of the research on Eucheuma cottonii – comes from studies done in test tubes or using cell and animal models. We should not assume the health effects seen would be the same in humans.
In cell and animal studies, researchers usually administer algae in a laboratory and use specific extracts rich in bioactive compounds rather than commercially available sea moss products.
They also use very different – often relatively larger – amounts compared to what someone would typically consume when they eat sea moss products.
This means the existing studies can’t tell us about the human body’s processes when eating and digesting sea moss.
Sea moss may have similar effects in humans. But so far there is very little evidence people who consume sea moss will experience any of the claimed health benefits.
Nutritional value
Eating sea moss does not replace the need for a balanced diet, including a variety of fruits and vegetables.
Chondrus crispus, Eucheuma cottonii and Gracilaria, like many seaweeds, are rich sources of nutrients such as fatty acids, amino acids, vitamin C and minerals. These nutrients are also likely to be present in sea moss, although some may be lost during the preparation of the product (for example, soaking may reduce vitamin C content), and those that remain could be present in relatively low quantities.
There are claims that sea moss may be harmful for people with thyroid problems. This relates to the relationship between thyroid function and iodine. The algae used to make sea moss are notable sources of iodine and excess iodine intake can contribute to thyroid problems, particularly for people with pre-existing conditions. That is why these products often carry disclaimers related to iodine sensitivity or thyroid health.
Is it worth it?
So you may be wondering if it’s worth trying sea moss. Here are a few things to consider before you decide whether to start scooping sea moss into your smoothies.
A 375mL jar costs around $A25–$30 and lasts about seven to ten days, if you follow the recommended serving suggestion of two tablespoons per day. This makes it a relatively expensive source of nutrients.
Sea moss is commonly sold as a gel that can be eaten on a kitchen bench. April Sims/Shutterstock Sea moss is often hyped for containing 92 different minerals. While there may be 92 minerals present, the amount of minerals in the algae will vary depending on growing location and conditions.
The efficiency with which minerals from algae can be absorbed and used by the body also varies for different minerals. For example, sodium is absorbed well, while only about 50% of iodine is absorbed.
But sea moss has also been shown to contain lead, mercury and other heavy metals – as well as radioactive elements (such as radon) that can be harmful to humans. Seaweeds are known for their ability to accumulate minerals from their environment, regardless of whether these are beneficial or harmful for human nutrition. Remember, more doesn’t always mean better.
What else am I eating?
While you won’t get a full nutritional breakdown on the jar, it is always wise to check what other ingredients you may be eating. Sea moss products can contain a range of other ingredients, such as lime, monk fruit powder, spirulina and ginger, among many others.
These ingredients differ between brands and products, so be aware of your needs and always check.
Despite their health claims, most sea moss products also carry disclaimers indicating that the products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
If you have concerns about your health, always speak to a health professional for accurate and personalised medical advice.
Margaret Murray, Senior Lecturer, Nutrition, Swinburne University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Meditation That You’ll Actually Enjoy
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Meditation That You’ll Actually Enjoy
We previously wrote about…
No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness
this is a great primer, by the way, for the science and simplicity of mindfulness, along with the simplest mindfulness meditation to get you going.
Today, we’re going to have some fun with meditation.
First: The Problem
Once the usefulness and health benefits of meditation have been established, often people want to meditate, but complain they don’t have the time.
But that’s not the real reason, though, is it?
Let’s face it, a basic meditation can give benefits within two minutes. Or within two breaths, for that matter. So, it’s not really for a lack of time.
The real reason is because it doesn’t feel productive, and it’s not fun. For us to feel motivated to do a thing, usually we need at least one or the other. And even if we know it really is productive, it not feeling that way will hobble us.
So instead, let us make things a little more fun, with…
Meditation games!
As it turns out, there are good kinds of meditation with which one can have a little fun.
Catch the next thought
A common feature of many meditative practices is the experience of having fewer, or ideally no, thoughts.
But it’s hard to enact a negative, and thoughts keep coming.
So instead, make yourself comfortable, settle in, and lie in wait for thoughts. When one comes along, pounce on it in your mind. And then release it, and wait for the next.
At first, your thoughts may be coming thick and fast, but soon, you’ll find the pauses between them lengthening, and you have moments of contented not-knowing of what the next thought will be before it comes along.
This state of relaxed, ready alertness, calm and receptive, is exactly what we’re hoping to find here. But don’t worry about that while you’re busy lying in wait for the next wild thought to come along
Counting breaths
Many meditative practices involve focus on one’s breath. But it’s easy for attention to wander!
This game is a simple one. Count your breaths, not trying to change your rate of breathing at all, just letting it be, and see how high you can get before you lose count.
Breathing in and out, once, counts as one breath, by the way.
You may find that your rate of breathing naturally slows while you’re doing this. That’s fine; let it. It’ll add to the challenge of the game, because before long there will be lengthy pauses between each number.
If you lose count, just start again, and see if you can beat your high score.
This meditation game is an excellent exercise to build for sustained focus, while also improving the quality of breathing (as a side-effect of merely paying attention to it).
Hot spot, cold spot
The above two meditation games were drawn from Japanese and Chinese meditative practices, zen and qigong respectively; this one’s from an Indian meditative practice, yoga nidra. But for now, just approach it with a sense of playful curiosity, for best results.
Make yourself comfortable, lying on your back, arms by your sides.
Take a moment first to pay attention to each part of your body from head to toe, and release any tension that you may be holding along the way.
First part: mentally scan your body for where it feels warmest, or most active, or most wanting of attention (for example if there is pain, or an itch, or some other sensation); that’s your “hot spot” for the moment.
Second part: mentally scan your body for where it feels coolest, or most inert, or almost like it’s not a part of your body at all; that’s your “cold spot” for the moment.
Now, see if you can flip them. Whether you can or can’t, notice if your “hot spot” or “cold spot” moves, or if you can move them consciously.
This meditation game is a great exercise to strengthen interoception and somatic awareness in general—essential for being able to “listen to your body”!
Closing thoughts
All three practices above have very serious reasons and great benefits, but make sure you don’t skip enjoyment of the fun aspects!
Being “young at heart” is, in part, to do with the ability to enjoy—literally, to take joy in—the little things in life.
With that in mind, all we have left to say here is…
Enjoy!
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Milk Thistle For The Brain, Bones, & More
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“Thistle Do Nicely”
Milk thistle is a popular supplement; it comes from the milk thistle plant (Silybum marianum), commonly just called thistles. There are other kinds of thistle too, but these are one of the most common.
So, what does it do?
Liver health
Milk thistle enjoys popular use to support liver health; the liver is a remarkably self-regenerative organ if given the chance, but sometimes it can use a helping hand.
See for example: How To Undo Liver Damage
As for milk thistle’s beneficence, it is very well established:
- Milk thistle in liver diseases: past, present, future
- Hepatoprotective effect of silymarin
- Silybum Marianum and Chronic Liver Disease: A Marriage of Many Years
Brain health
For this one the science is less well-established, as studies so far have been on non-human animals, or have been in vitro studies.
Nevertheless, the results so far are promising, and the mechanism of action seems to be a combination of reducing oxidative stress and neuroinflammation, as well as suppressing amyloid β-protein (Aβ) fibril formation, in other words, reducing amyloid plaques.
General overview: A Mini Review on the Chemistry and Neuroprotective Effects of Silymarin
All about the plaques, but these are non-human animal studies:
- Mouse model: Silymarin attenuated the amyloid β plaque burden and improved behavioral abnormalities in an Alzheimer’s disease mouse model
- Rat model: Silymarin effect on amyloid-β plaque accumulation and gene expression of APP in an Alzheimer’s disease rat model
Against diabetes
Milk thistle improves insulin sensitivity, and reduces fasting blood sugar levels and HbA1c levels. The research so far is mostly in type 2 diabetes, however (at least, so far as we could find). For example:
Studies we could find for T1D were very far from translatable to human usefulness, for example, “we poisoned these rats with streptozotocin then gave them megadoses of silymarin (10–15 times the dose usually recommended for humans) and found very small benefits to the lenses of their eyes” (source).
Against osteoporosis
In this case, milk thistle’s estrogenic effects may be of merit to those at risk of menopause-induced osteoporosis:
If you’d like a quick primer about such things as what antiosteoclastic activity is, here’s a quick recap:
Which Osteoporosis Medication, If Any, Is Right For You?
Is it safe?
It is “Generally Recognized As Safe”, and even when taken at high doses for long periods, side effects are very rare.
Contraindications include if you’re pregnant, nursing, or allergic.
Potential reasons for caution (but not necessarily contraindication) include if you’re diabetic (its blood-sugar lowering effects will decrease the risk of hyperglycemia while increasing the risk of hypoglycemia), or have a condition that could be exacerbated by its estrogenic effects—including if you are on HRT, because it’s an estrogen receptor agonist in some ways (for example those bone benefits we mentioned before) but an estrogen antagonist in others (for example, in the uterus, if you have one, or in nearby flat muscles, if you don’t).
As ever, speak with your doctor/pharmacist to be sure.
Want to try it?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon
Enjoy!
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Sweet Dreams Are Made of THC (Or Are They?)
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
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 😎
❝I’m one of those older folks that have a hard time getting 7 hrs. I know a lot of it my fault…like a few beers at nite…🥰am now trying THC gummies for anxiety, instead of alcohol……less calories 😁how does THC affect our sleep,? Safer than alcohol…..I know your next article 😊😊😊😊❣️😊alot of us older kids do take gummies 😲😲😲thank you❞
Great question! We wrote a little about CBD gummies (not THC) before:
…and went on to explore THC’s health benefits and risks here:
For starters, let’s go ahead and say: you’re right that it’s safer (for most people) than alcohol—but that’s not a strong claim, because alcohol is very bad for pretty much everything, including sleep.
So how does THC measure up when it comes to sleep quality?
Good news: it affects the architecture of sleep in such a way that you will spend longer in deep sleep (delta wave activity), which means you get more restorative and restful sleep!
See also: Alpha, beta, theta: what are brain states and brain waves? And can we control them?
Bad news: it does so at the cost of reducing your REM sleep, which is also necessary for good brain health, and will cause cognitive impairment if you skip too much. Normally, if you are sleep-deprived, the brain will prioritize REM sleep at the cost of other kinds of sleep; it’s that important. However, if you are chemically impaired from getting healthy REM sleep, there’s not much your brain can do to save you from the effects of REM sleep loss.
See: Cannabis, Cannabinoids, and Sleep: a Review of the Literature
This is, by the way, a reason that THC gets prescribed for some sleep disorders, in cases where the initial sleep disruption was because of nightmares, as it will reduce those (along with any other dreams, as collateral damage):
One thing to be careful of if using THC as a sleep aid is that withdrawal may make your symptoms worse than they were to start with:
Updates in the use of cannabis for insomnia
With all that in mind, you might consider (if you haven’t already tried it) seeing whether CBD alone improves your sleep, as while it does also extend time in deep sleep, it doesn’t reduce REM nearly as much as THC does:
👆 this study was paid for by the brand being tested, so do be aware of potential publication bias. That’s not to say the study is necessarily corrupt, and indeed it probably wasn’t, but rather, the publication of the results was dependent on the company paying for them (so hypothetically they could have pulled funding from any number of other research groups that didn’t get the results they wanted, leaving this one to be the only one published). That being said, the study is interesting, which is why we’ve linked it, and it’s a good jumping-off-point for finding a lot of related papers, which you can see listed beneath it.
CBD also has other benefits of its own, even without THC:
CBD Oil: What Does The Science Say?
Take care!
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Mushrooms vs Eggplant – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing mushrooms to eggplant, we picked the mushrooms.
Why?
First, you may be wondering: which mushrooms? Button mushrooms? White mushrooms? Chestnut mushrooms? Portobello mushrooms? And the answer is yes. Those (and more; it represents most mushrooms that are commonly sold fresh in western supermarkets) are all the same species at different ages; namely, Agaricus bisporus—not to be mistaken for fly agaric, which despite the name, is not even a member of the Agaricus genus, and is in fact Amanita muscari. This is an important distinction, because fly agaric is poisonous, though fatality is rare, and it’s commonly enjoyed recreationally (after some preparation, which reduces its toxicity) for its psychoactive effects. It’s the famous red one with white spots. Anyway, today we will be talking instead about Agaricus bisporus, which is most popular western varieties of “edible mushroom”.
With that in mind, let’s get down to it:
In terms of macros, mushrooms contain more than 3x the protein, while eggplant contains nearly 2x the carbs and 3x the fiber. We’ll call this a tie for macros.
As for vitamins, mushrooms contain more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, D, and choline, while eggplant contains more of vitamins A, E, and K. Most notably for vegans, mushrooms are a good non-animal source of vitamins B12 and D, which nutrients are not generally found in plants. Mushrooms, of course, are not technically plants. In any case, the vitamins category is an easy win for mushrooms.
When it comes to minerals, mushrooms have more copper, iron, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while eggplant has more calcium, magnesium, and manganese. Another easy win for mushrooms.
One final thing worth noting is that mushrooms are a rich source of the amino acid ergothioneine, which has been called a “longevity vitamin” for its healthspan-increasing effects (see our article below).
Meanwhile, in the category of mushrooms vs eggplant, mushrooms don’t leave much room for doubt and are the clear winner here.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
The Magic of Mushrooms: “The Longevity Vitamin” (That’s Not A Vitamin)
Take care!
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How To Clean Your Brain (Glymphatic Health Primer)
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That’s not a typo! The name “glymphatic system” was coined by the Danish neuroscientist Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, and is a nod to its use of glial cells to do a similar job to that of the peripheral lymphatic system—but this time, in the CNS. Today, we have Dr. Jin Sung to tell us more:
Brainwashing (but not like that)
The glymphatic system may sound like a boring job, but so does “sanitation worker” in a city—yet the city would grind to a messy halt very very quickly without them. Same goes for your brain.
Diseases that are prevalent when this doesn’t happen the way it should include Alzheimer’s (beta-amyloid clearance) and Parkinson’s (alpha-synuclein clearance) amongst others.
Things Dr. Sung recommends for optimal glymphatic function include: sleep (7–9 hours), exercise (30–45 minutes daily), hydration (half your bodyweight in pounds, in ounces, so if your body weighs 150 lbs, that means 75 oz of water), good posture (including the use of good ergonomics, e.g. computer monitor at right height, car seat correct, etc), stress reduction (reduces inflammatory cytokines), getting enough omega-3 (the brain needs certain fats to work properly, and this is the one most likely to see a deficit), vagal stimulation (methods include humming, gargling, and gagging—please note we said vagal stimulation; easy to misread at a glance!), LED light therapy, and fasting (intermittent or prolonged).
For more on each of these, including specific tips, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Ask Not What Your Lymphatic System Can Do For You…
- The Vagus Nerve (And How You Can Make Use Of It)
- Casting Yourself In A Healthier Light
- Intermittent Fasting: How Does It Work?
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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