How To Stay In Shape At 70

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The 10almonds Team

Questions and Answers at 10almonds

Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!

This newsletter has been growing a lot lately, and so have the questions/requests, and we love that! 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 have a question: what are the pros and cons of older people (60+) taking creatine every day?

It depends what else you’re doing, as creatine mostly helps the muscles recover after exercise. So:

  • iff you’re doing resistance training (such as weights or bodyweight training), or HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training), then creatine monohydrate may help you keep at that and keep doing well.
  • if you’re just doing light-to-moderate exercises, you might not get much benefit from creatine!

The topic merits diving deeper though, so we’ll queue that for one of our “Research Review Monday” days!

I wanted to ask if you think marine collagen is decent to take. I’ve heard a lot of bad press about it

We don’t know what you’ve heard, but generally speaking it’s been found to be very beneficial to bones, joints, and skin! We wrote about it quite recently on a “Research Review Monday”:

See: We Are Such Stuff As Fish Are Made Of

Natural alternatives to medication for depression?

Great question! We did a mean feature a while back, but we definitely have much more to say! We’ll do another main feature soon, but in the meantime, here’s what we previously wrote:

See: The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need

^This covers not just the obvious, but also why the most common advice is not helpful, and practical tips to actually make manageable steps back to wellness, on days when “literally just survive the day” is one’s default goal.

I am now in the “aging” population. A great concern for me is Alzheimers. My father had it and I am so worried. What is the latest research on prevention?

One good thing to note is that while Alzheimer’s has a genetic component, it doesn’t appear to be hereditary per se. Still, good to be on top of these things, and it’s never too early to start with preventive measures!

You might like a main feature we did on this recently:

See: How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk

Side effects of statins, are they worth it? Depression, are antidepressants worth it?

About statins, that depends a lot on you, your circumstances, and—as it happens—your gender. We covered this in a main feature recently, but a short answer is: for most people, they may not be the best first choice, and could even make things worse. For some people, however, they really are just what’s needed.

  • Factors that make them more likely better for you: being a man, or having atherosclerosis
  • Factors that make them more likely worse for you: being a woman in general

Check out the main feature we did: Statins: His & Hers?

As for antidepressants? That depends a lot on you, your physiology, your depression, your circumstances, and more. We’ll definitely do a main feature on that sometime soon, as there’s a lot that most people don’t know!

I am interested in the following: Aging, Exercise, Diet, Relationships, Purpose, Lowering Stress

You’re going to love our Psychology Sunday editions of 10almonds!

You may particularly like some of these:

(This coming Psychology Sunday will have a feature specifically on stress, so do make sure to read that when it comes out!)

Hair growth strategies for men combing caffeine and minoxidil?

Well, the strategy for that is to use caffeine and minoxidil! Some more specific tips, though:

  • Both of those things need to be massaged (gently!) into your scalp especially around your hairline.
    • In the case of caffeine, that boosts hair growth. No extra thought or care needed for that one.
    • In the case of minoxidil, it reboots the hair growth cycle, so if you’ve only recently started, don’t be surprised (or worried) if you see more shedding in the first three months. It’s jettisoning your old hairs because new ones were just prompted (by the minoxidil) to start growing behind them. So: it will get briefly worse before it gets better, but then it’ll stay better… provided you keep using it.
  • If you’d like other options besides minoxidil, finasteride is a commonly prescribed oral drug that blocks the conversion of testosterone to DHT, which latter is what tells your hairline to recede.
  • If you’d like other options besides prescription drugs, saw palmetto performs comparably to finasteride (and works the same way).
    • You may also want to consider biotin supplementation if you don’t already enjoy that
  • Consider also using a dermaroller on your scalp. If you’re unfamiliar, this is a device that looks like a tiny lawn aerator, with many tiny needles, and you roll it gently across your skin.
    • It can be used for promoting hair growth, as well as for reducing wrinkles and (more slowly) healing scars.
    • It works by breaking up the sebum that may be blocking new hair growth, and also makes the skin healthier by stimulating production of collagen and elastin (in response to the thousands of microscopic wounds that the needles make).
    • Sounds drastic, but it doesn’t hurt and doesn’t leave any visible marks—the needles are that tiny. Still, practise good sterilization and ensure your skin is clean when using it.

See: How To Use A Dermaroller ← also explains more of the science of it

PS: this question was asked in the context of men, but the information goes the same for women suffering from androgenic alepoceia—which is a lot more common than most people think!

How to get to sleep at night as fast and as naturally as possible? Thank you!

We’ll definitely write more on that! You might like these articles we wrote already, meanwhile:

Q: How to be your best self after 60: Self motivation / Avoiding or limiting salt, sugar & alcohol: Alternatives / Ways to sneak in more movements/exercise

…and, from a different subscriber…

Q: Inflammation & over 60 weight loss. Thanks!

Here are some of our greatest hits on those topics:

Also, while we’ve recommended a couple of books on stopping (or reducing) drinking, we’ve not done a main feature on that, so we definitely will one of these days!

Don’t Forget…

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  • The Diabetes Drugs That Can Cut Asthma Attacks By 70%

    The 10almonds Team

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Asthma, obesity, and type 2 diabetes are closely linked, with the latter two greatly increasing asthma attack risk.

    While bronchodilators / corticosteroids can have immediate adverse effects due to sympathetic nervous system activation, and lasting adverse effects due to the damage it does to metabolic health, diabetes drugs, on the other hand, can improve things with (for most people) fewer unwanted side effects.

    Great! Which drugs?

    Metformin, and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs).

    Specifically, researchers have found:

    • Metformin is associated with a 30% reduction in asthma attacks
    • GLP-1RAs are associated with a 40% reduction in asthma attacks

    …and yes, they stack, making for a 70% reduction in the case of people taking both. Furthermore, the results are independent of weight, glycemic control, or asthma phenotype.

    In terms of what was counted, the primary outcome was asthma attacks at 12-month follow-up, defined by oral corticosteroid use, emergency visits, hospitalizations, or death.

    The effect of metformin on asthma attacks was not affected by BMI, HbA1c levels, eosinophil count, asthma severity, or sex.

    Of the various extra antidiabetic drugs trialled in this study, only GLP-1 receptor agonists showed a further and sustained reduction in asthma attacks.

    Here’s the study itself, hot off the press, published on Monday:

    JAMA Int. Med. | Antidiabetic Medication and Asthma Attacks

    “But what if I’m not diabetic?”

    Good news:

    More than half of all US adults are eligible for semaglutide therapy ← this is because they’ve expanded the things that semaglutide (the widely-used GLP-1 receptor agonist drug) can be prescribed for, now going beyond just diabetes and/or weight loss 😎

    And metformin, of course, is more readily available than semaglutide, so by all means speak with your doctor/pharmacist about that, if it’s of interest to you.

    Take care!

    Share This Post

  • Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal

    The 10almonds Team

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)

    Piperine, a compound found in Piper nigrum (black pepper, to its friends), has many health benefits. It’s included as a minor ingredient in some other supplements, because it boosts bioavailability. In its form as a kitchen spice, it’s definitely a superfood.

    What does it do?

    First, three things that generally go together:

    These things often go together for the simple reason that oxidative stress, inflammation, and cancer often go together. In each case, it’s a matter of cellular wear-and-tear, and what can mitigate that.

    For what it’s worth, there’s generally a fourth pillar: anti-aging. This is again for the same reason. That said, black pepper hasn’t (so far as we could find) been studied specifically for its anti-aging properties, so we can’t cite that here as an evidence-based claim.

    Nevertheless, it’s a reasonable inference that something that fights oxidation, inflammation, and cancer, will often also slow aging.

    Special note on the anti-cancer properties

    We noticed two very interesting things while researching piperine’s anti-cancer properties. It’s not just that it reduces cancer risk and slows tumor growth in extant cancers (as we might expect from the above-discussed properties). Let’s spotlight some studies:

    It is selectively cytotoxic (that’s a good thing)

    Piperine was found to be selectively cytotoxic to cancerous cells, while not being cytotoxic to non-cancerous cells. To this end, it’s a very promising cancer-sniper:

    Piperine as a Potential Anti-cancer Agent: A Review on Preclinical Studies

    It can reverse multi-drug resistance in cancer cells

    P-glycoprotein, found in our body, is a drug-transporter that is known for “washing out” chemotherapeutic drugs from cancer cells. To date, no drug has been approved to inhibit P-glycoprotein, but piperine has been found to do the job:

    Targeting P-glycoprotein: Investigation of piperine analogs for overcoming drug resistance in cancer

    What’s this about piperine analogs, though? Basically the researchers found a way to “tweak” piperine to make it even more effective. They called this tweaked version “Pip1”, because calling it by its chemical name,

    ((2E,4E)-5-(benzo[d][1,3]dioxol-5-yl)-1-(6,7-dimethoxy-3,4-dihydroisoquinolin-2(1 H)-yl)penta-2,4-dien-1-one)

    …got a bit unwieldy.

    The upshot is: Pip1 is better, but piperine itself is also good.

    Other benefits

    Piperine does have other benefits too, but the above is what we were most excited to talk about today. Its other benefits include:

    Enjoy!

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  • Beyond Balancing The Books – by George Marino, CPA, CFP

    The 10almonds Team

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    We hear a lot about the importance of mindfulness, yet how can Zen-like non-attachment to the material world go well with actually surviving (let alone thriving) in a Capitalist society?

    Books that try to connect the two often end up botching it badly to the level of early 2000s motivational posters.

    So, what does this book do differently? Mostly it’s because rather than a motivational speech with exhortations to operate on a higher plain and manifest your destiny and all that, it gives practical, down-to-earth advice and offers small simple things you can do or change to mindfully engage with the world of business rather than operating on auto-pilot.

    Basically: how to cut out the stress without cutting out your performance.

    All in all, we think both your health and your productivity will thank you for it!

    Take Your Business (and Brain) “Beyond Balancing The Books” Today

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  • 16 Overlooked Autistic Traits In Women

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    The 10almonds Team

    We hear a lot about “autism moms”, but Taylor Heaton is an autistic mom, diagnosed as an adult, and she has insights to share about overlooked autistic traits in women.

    The Traits

    • Difficulty navigating romantic relationships: often due to misreading signs
    • Difficulty understanding things: including the above, but mostly: difficulty understanding subtext, when people leave things as “surely obvious”. Autistic women are likely to be aware of the possible meanings, but unsure which it might be, and may well guess wrongly.
    • Masking: one of the reasons for the gender disparity in diagnosis is that autistic women are often better at “masking”, that is to say, making a conscious effort to blend in to allistic society—often as a result of being more societally pressured to do so.
    • Honesty: often to a fault
    • Copy and paste: related to masking, this is about consciously mirroring others in an effort to put them at ease and be accepted
    • Being labelled sensitive and/or gifted: usually this comes at a young age, but the resultant different treatment can have a lifetime effect
    • Secret stims: again related to masking, and again for the same reasons that displaying autistic symptoms is often treated worse in women, autistic women’s stims tend to be more subtle.
    • Written communication: autistic women are often more comfortable with the written word than the spoken
    • Leadership: autistic women will often gravitate to leadership roles, partly as a survival mechanism
    • Gaslighting: oneself, e.g. “If this person did this without that, then I can to” (without taking into account that maybe the circumstances are different, or maybe they actually did lean on crutches that you didn’t know were there, etc).
    • Inner dialogue: rich inner dialogue, but unable to express it outwardly—often because of the sheer volume of thoughts per second.
    • Fewer female friends: often few friends overall, for that matter, but there’s often a gender imbalance towards male friends, or where there isn’t, towards more masculine friends at least.
    • Feeling different: often a matter of feeling one does not meet standard expectations in some fashion
    • School: autistic women are often academically successful
    • Special interests: often more “socially accepted” interests than autistic men’s.
    • Flirting: autistic women are often unsure how to flirt or what to do about it, which can result in simple directness instead

    For more details on all of these, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Related reading:

    You might like a main feature of ours from not long back:

    Miss Diagnosis: Anxiety, ADHD, & Women

    Take care!

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  • Calm Your Inflammation – by Dr. Brenda Tidwell

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    The 10almonds Team

    The book starts with an overview of inflammation, both acute and chronic, before diving into how to reduce the latter kind (acute inflammation being usually necessary and helpful, usually fighting disease rather than creating it).

    The advice in the book is not just dietary, and covers lifestyle interventions too, including exercise etc—and how to strike the right balance, since the wrong kind of exercise or too much of it can sabotage our efforts. Similarly, Dr. Tidwell doesn’t just say such things as “manage stress” but also provides 10 ways of doing so, and so forth for other vectors of inflammation-control. She does cover dietary things as well though, including supplements where applicable, and the role of gut health, sleep, and other factors.

    The style of the book is quite entry-level pop-science, designed to be readable and comprehensible to all, without unduly dumbing-down. In terms of hard science or jargon, there are 6 pages of bibliography and 3 pages of glossary, so it’s neither devoid of such nor overwhelmed by it.

    Bottom line: if fighting inflammation is a priority for you, then this book is an excellent primer.

    Click here to check out Calm Your Inflammation, and indeed calm your inflammation!

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  • How (And Why) To Train Your Pre-Frontal Cortex

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    The 10almonds Team

    Dr. Chapman’s Keys For Mental Focus

    This is Dr. Sandra Chapman; she’s a cognitive neuroscientist, on a mission to, in her words, further our understanding of:

    • what makes the brain stronger, faster and last longer
    • what enhances human cognitive capacity, and
    • what enhances the underlying brain systems across the lifespan.

    To this end, she’s also the founder and Chief Director of the Center For Brain Health, where she has worked on her mission for the past 25 years (clocking up hundreds of peer-reviewed publications to her name), as well as being a professor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at UT Dallas.

    What does she want us to know?

    Get your brain into gear

    When it comes to your brainpower, it is “use it or lose it”, but it is also perfectly possible to use it and lose it.

    Why?

    Very often, what we are using our brains for is high-strain, low-yield stuff, such as multitasking, overthinking, or overthinking while multitasking. And to make it worse, we often do it without sufficient rest.

    This is the equivalent of owning a Ferrari but trying to drive it in second and third gear at once by switching between the two as rapidly as possible. And doing that for 18 hours each day.

    Suffice it to say, you’ll be going nowhere quickly.

    An alternative “use” of brainpower is low-strain, low-yield stuff, such as having to pay close attention to a boring conversation. It’s enough to stop your mind from doing anything else, but not enough to actually stimulate you.

    This is the equivalent of owning a Ferrari but keeping it idling. The wear and tear is minimal this time, but you’re not actually going anywhere either.

    Better, of course, are the other two quadrants:

    • low-strain, high-yield: consistently using our brain in relatively non-taxing ways that encourage its development
    • high-strain, high-yield: here the Ferrari metaphor definitely fails, because unlike cars, our bodies (including our brains) are machines that benefit from judicious regular progressive overloading (but just by a bit, and with adequate recovery time between overloads).

    See also: 12 Weeks To Measurably Boost Your Brain

    How to do the “low-strain, low-yield” part

    When it comes to “what’s the most important part of the brain to help in the face of cognitive decline?” the usual answer is either to focus on memory (hippocampi) or language (various parts, but for example Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area), since people most fear losing memory, and language is very important both socially and practically.

    Those are indeed critical, and we at 10almonds stand by them, but Dr. Chapman (herself having originally trained as speech and language pathologist!) makes a strong case for adding a third brain part to the list.

    Specifically, she advocates for strengthening the pre-frontal cortex, which is responsible for inhibition, task-switching, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. If that seems like a lot, do remember it’s a whole cortex and not one of the assorted important-but-small brain bits we mentioned above.

    How? She has developed training programs for this, based on what she calls Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Tactics (SMART), to support support attention, planning, judgment and emotional management.

    You can read more about those programs here:

    Center For Brain Health | Our Programs

    Participation in those is mostly not free, however, if you join their…

    Center For Brain Health | BrainHealth Project

    …then they will periodically invite you to join pilot programs, research programs, and the like, which will either be free or they-pay-you affairs—because this is how science is done, and you can read about yourself (anonymized, of course) later in peer-reviewed papers of the kind we often cite here.

    If you’re not interested in any of that though, we will say that according to Dr. Chapman, the keys are:

    Inhibition: be conscious of this function of your brain, and develop it. This is the function of your brain that stops you from making mistakes—or put differently: stops you from saying/doing something stupid.

    Switching: do this consciously; per “I am now doing this task, now I am switching to this other task”, rather than doing the gear-grinding thing we discussed earlier

    Working memory: this is effectively your brain’s RAM. Unlike the RAM of a computer (can be enhanced by adding another chip or replacing with a bigger chip), our brain’s RAM can be increased by frequent use, and especially by judicious use of progressive overloading (with rests between!) which we’ll discuss in the high-strain, high-yield section.

    Flexibility: this is about creative problem-solving, openness to new ideas, and curiosity

    See also: Curiosity Kills The Neurodegeneration

    How to do the “high-strain, high-yield” part

    Delighting this chess-playing writer, Dr. Chapman recommends chess. Although, similar games such as go (a Chinese game that looks simpler than chess but actually requires more calculation) work equally well too.

    Why?

    Games like chess and go cause structural changes that are particularly helpful, in terms of engaging in such foundational tasks as learning, abstract reasoning, problem-solving and self-control:

    Chess Practice as a Protective Factor in Dementia

    Basically, it checks (so to speak) a lot of boxes, especially for the pre-frontal cortex. Some notes:

    • Focusing on the game is required for brain improvement; simply pushing wood casually will not do it. Ideally, calculating several moves ahead will allow for strong working memory use (because to calculate several moves ahead, one will have to hold increasingly many possible positions in the mind while doing so).
    • The speed of play must be sufficiently slow as to allow not only for thinking, but also for what in chess is called “blunder-checking”, in other words, having decided on one’s move, pausing to consider whether it is a mistake, and actively trying to find evidence that it is. This is the crucial “inhibition habit”, and when one does it reflexively, one will make fewer mistakes. Tying this to dementia, see for example how one of the common symptoms of dementia is falling for scams that one wouldn’t have previously. How did cognitive decline make someone naïve? It didn’t, per se; it just took away their ability to, having decided what to do, pause to consider whether it was a mistake, and actively trying to find evidence that it is.
    • That “conscious switching” that we talked about, rather than multitasking? In chess, there is a difference between strategy and tactics. Don’t worry about what that difference is for now (learn it if you want to take up chess), but know that strong players will only strategize while it is their opponent’s turn, and only calculate (tactics) while it is their own turn. It’s very tempting to flit constantly between one and the other, but chess requires players to have the mental discipline be able to focus on one task or the other and stick with that task until it’s the appointed time to switch.

    If you feel like taking up chess, this site (and related app, if you want it) is free (it’s been funded by voluntary donations for a long time now) and good and even comes with free tuition and training tools: LiChess.org

    Here’s another site that this writer (hi, it’s me) personally uses—it has great features too, but many are paywalled (I’m mostly there just because I’ve been there nearly since its inception, so I’m baked into the community now): Chess.com

    Want to know more?

    You might like this book by Dr. Chapman, which we haven’t reviewed yet but it did inform large parts of today’s article:

    Make Your Brain Smarter: Increase Your Brain’s Creativity, Energy, and Focus – by Dr. Sandra Chapman

    Enjoy!

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