Sugar, Hazelnuts, Books & Brains

It’s Q&A Day!

Each Thursday, we respond to subscriber questions and requests! If it’s something small, we’ll answer it directly; if it’s something bigger, we’ll do a main feature in a follow-up day instead!

So, no question/request to big or small; they’ll just get sorted accordingly

Remember, you can always hit reply to any of our emails, or use the handy feedback widget at the bottom. We always look forward to hearing from you!

Q: Interesting info, however, I drink hazelnut milk LOL so would have liked a review of that. But now I want to give hemp and pea milks a try. Thanks

Aww! Here then just for you, is a quick rundown…

• Pros: high in protein¹, vitamin B, and vitamin E
• Cons: high in fat², low in calcium

¹Compared head-to-head with almond milk for example, it has double the protein (but also double the calories)

²However, is also has been found to lower LDL (bad) cholesterol (and incidentally, also reduce inflammation), and in a later systematic review, it was found to not correlate to weight gain, despite its high calorie-content.

If you don’t already, and would like to try making your own…

Click here for step-by-step instructions to make your own hazelnut milk! (very simple)

Q: Wondering if you can evaluate CLA and using it to assist with weight loss. Thanks

Will do! (Watch this space)

Q: What’s the process behind the books you recommend? You seem to have a limitless stream of recommendations

We do our best!

The books we recommend are books that…

• are on Amazon—it makes things tidy, consistent, and accessible. And if you end up buying one of the books, we get a small affiliate commission*.
• we have read—we would say “obviously”, but you might be surprised how many people write about books without having read them.
• pertain in at least large part to health and/or productivity.
• are written by humans—bookish people (and especially Kindle Unlimited users) may have noticed lately that there are a lot of low quality AI-written books flooding the market, sometimes with paid 5-star reviews to bolster them. It’s frustrating, but we can tell the difference and screen those out.
• are of a certain level of quality. They don’t have to be “top 5 desert-island books”, because well, there’s one every day and the days keep coming. But they do have to genuinely deliver the value that we describe, and merit a sincere recommendation.
• are varied—we try to not give a run of “samey” books one after another. We will sometimes review a book that covers a topic another previously-reviewed book did, but it must have something about it that makes it different. It may be a different angle or a different writing style, but it needs something to set it apart.

*this is from Amazon and isn’t product-specific, so this is not affecting our choice of what books to review at all—just that they will be books that are available on Amazon.

Q: Great video on dopamine. Thumbs up on the book recommendation. Would you please consider doing a piece or two on inflammation? I live with Lupus and it is a constant struggle. Thanks for the awesome work you do. Have an excellent day.

Great suggestion! We will do that, and thank you for the kind words!

Q: Why is your newsletter called 10almonds? Maybe I missed it in the intro email, but my curiosity wants to know the significance. Thanks!”

It’s a reference to a viral Facebook hoax! There was a post going around that claimed:

❝HEADACHE REMEDY. Eat 10–12 almonds, the equivalent of two aspirins, next time you have a headache❞ ← not true!

It made us think about how much health-related disinformation there was online… So, calling ourselves 10almonds was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek reference to that story… but also a reminder to ourselves:

We must always publish information with good scientific evidence behind it!