The After-Dinner Activities You Don’t Want

A quick note first: our usual medical/legal disclaimer applies here, and we are not here to diagnose you or treat you; we are not doctors, let alone your doctors. Do see yours if you have any reason to believe there may be cause for concern.

Coughing and/or wheezing after eating is more common the younger or older someone is. Lest that seem contradictory: it’s a U-shaped bell-curve.

It can happen at any age and for any of a number of reasons, but there are patterns to the distribution:

Mostly affects younger people:

Allergies, asthma

Young people are less likely to have a body that’s fully adapted to all foods yet, and asthma can be triggered by certain foods (for example sulfites, a common preservative additive):

Adverse reactions to the sulphite additives

Foods/drinks that commonly contain sulfites include soft drinks, wines and beers, and dried fruit

As for the allergies side of things, you probably know the usual list of allergens to watch out for, e.g: dairy, fish, crustaceans, eggs, soy, wheat, nuts.

However, that’s far from an exhaustive list, so it’s good to see an allergist if you suspect it may be an allergic reaction.

Affects young and old people equally:

Again, there’s a dip in the middle where this doesn’t tend to affect younger adults so much, but for young and old people:

Dysphagia (difficulty swallowing)

For children, this can be a case of not having fully got used to eating yet if very small, and when growing, can be a case of “this body is constantly changing and that makes things difficult”.

For older people, this can can come from a variety of reasons, but common culprits include neurological disorders (including stroke and/or dementia), or a change in saliva quality and quantity—a side-effect of many medications:

Hyposalivation in Elderly Patients

(particularly useful in the article above is the table of drugs that are associated with this problem, and the various ways they may affect it)

Managing this may be different depending on what is causing your dysphagia (as it could be anything from antidepressants to cancer), so this is definitely one to see your doctor about. For some pointers, though:

NHS Inform | Dysphagia (swallowing problems)

Affects older people more:

Gastroesophagal reflux disease (GERD)

This is a kind of acid reflux, but chronic, and often with a slightly different set of symptoms.

GERD has no known cure once established, but its symptoms can be managed (or avoided in the first place) by:

• Healthy eating (Mediterranean diet is, as usual, great)
• Weight loss (if and only if obese)
• Avoiding trigger foods
• Eating smaller meals
• Practicing mindful eating
• Staying upright for 3–4 hours after eating

And of course, don’t smoke, and ideally don’t drink alcohol.

You can read more about this (and the different ways it can go from there), here:

NICE | Gastro-oesophageal reflux disease

Note: this above page refers to it as “GORD”, because of the British English spelling of “oesophagus” rather than “esophagus”. It’s the exact same organ and condition, just a different spelling.

Take care!

Some fall-themed advice…

It is now, nominally at least, fall. We’re going to talk about the other kind of “fall” though, the kind that results in broken hips and more.

If you’re thinking “not me; that happens to older more infirm people”, rest assured, it can and statistically probably will happen to you at some point. So, how to play the odds?

First, be robust!

We may not be able to make ourselves like children who bounce easily, but we also don’t have to crumble into dust at the slightest knock, either. There are two important ways we can start to make ourselves robust from the inside out, and they are simple: diet and exercise.

• Diet: The Bare-Bones Truth About Osteoporosis
• Exercise: Osteoporosis Exercises

“But I don’t have osteoporosis”—great! But osteoporosis is preceded by osteopenia, which is generally asymptomatic at first, and also if we’re not very careful about it, we will lose about 1% bone density per year from the age of about 35 onwards, with that rate of loss climbing sharply from the age of 50 onwards, and even more steeply in cases of untreated menopause.

So in other words, don’t take your bone strength for granted; there’s a first time for everything, and you don’t want to find out the hard (and yet, dare we say it, brittle) way.

Second, be dynamic!

Be able to fall and get up safely. If your later life is going to be a triathlon of things you need to train for now, then being able to fall and get up safely should be at the top of the list.

Being able to “deep squat” will help you a lot here, in being able to get up with minimal (or no) use of your hands. We shared a great instructional video about this last week.

It also means that the more your lower body can still take your weight while your torso is closer to the ground (without your legs buckling and collapsing, for instance), the softer and gentler you’ll hit the floor if you do fall, because the final “drop” will be from a lower height.

If at all possible, consider taking some classes of a martial art that involves safely falling—aikido is typically the softest and gentlest and is famously great for people of all ages, but judo or jujitsu will suffice if aikido isn’t available where you are. You don’t have to get a black belt (unless you want to), and any decent instructor will be happy to guide you through the basics of safely falling and then send you on your merry way, if that’s all you wanted.

The benefits of this are twofold:

• Obviously, if you fall, you will have better technique and thus be less likely to incur injury
• As you are falling, you will be less afraid, and thus less likely to tense up mid-fall (tensing up will exacerbate any falling injury)

Click here to find an aikido teacher near you (you can search by country, state, and city)

Third, be balanced!

Spending even just a few minutes each day working on your balance can go a long way.

Standing on one leg (and then the other) is a very good obvious starting point. Please, do so safely. The shower is not the best place to take up this practice, for instance. A nice safe grassy area is great. Your carpeted living room or bedroom is next-best.

Another great approach is the practice of bāguàzhǎng circle-walking.

Bāguà is tai chi’s lesser-known cousin, and those arts are two of the three main schools of wǔdāngquán. But, fear not, you don’t have to don orange robes and live atop the Wudang mountains to get what you need in this case.

To give a text-based summary: bāguàzhǎng circle-walking involves walking in a small circle, with a low center of gravity, moving one’s weight very purposefully from one leg to the other, keeping complete stability the whole time that one is (often!) on one leg.

Once you get good at this, you’ll see that this is essentially a super-enhanced version of the “standing on one leg” exercise, because it’s about keeping balance while on one leg, and/but while moving also.

Naturally, if you do get good at this, you’ll be very unlikely to fall in the first place.

Here’s a visual primer. This video will show the basic footwork, and the video that follows it (it’ll prompt you if you want to watch it) shows how to bring it up to a standard walking speed, without losing fluidity of movement:

When it’s time to tell the meat to beat it…

Meat in general, and red meat and processed meat in particular, have been associated with so many health risks, that it’s very reasonable to want to reduce, if not outright eliminate, our meat consumption.

First, in case anyone’s wondering “what health risks?”

The aforementioned culprits tend to turn out to be a villain in the story of every second health-related thing we write about here. To name just a few:

• Processed Meat Consumption and the Risk of Cancer: A Critical Evaluation of the Constraints of Current Evidence from Epidemiological Studies
• Red Meat Consumption (Heme Iron Intake) and Risk for Diabetes and Comorbidities?
• Health Risks Associated with Meat Consumption: A Review of Epidemiological Studies
• Associations of Processed Meat, Unprocessed Red Meat, Poultry, or Fish Intake With Incident Cardiovascular Disease and All-Cause Mortality
• Meat consumption: Which are the current global risks? A review of recent (2010-2020) evidences

Seasoned subscribers will know that we rarely go more than a few days without recommending the very science-based Mediterranean Diet which studies find beneficial for almost everything we write about. The Mediterranean Diet isn’t vegetarian per se—by default it consists of mostly plants but does include some fish and a very small amount of meat from land animals. But even that can be improved upon:

• A Pesco-Mediterranean Diet With Intermittent Fasting
• Mediterranean, vegetarian and vegan diets as practical outtakes of EAS and ACC/AHA recommendations for lowering lipid profile
• A Mediterranean Low-Fat Vegan Diet to Improve Body Weight and Cardiometabolic Risk Factors: A Randomized, Cross-over Trial

So that’s the “why”; now for the “how”…

It’s said that with a big enough “why” you can always find a “how”, but let’s make things easy!

Meatless Mondays

One of the biggest barriers to many people skipping the meat is “what will we even eat?”

The idea of “Meatless Mondays” means that this question need only be answered once a week, and in doing that a few Mondays in a row, you’ll soon find you’re gradually building your repertoire of meatless meals, and finding it’s not so difficult after all.

Then you might want to expand to “meat only on the weekends”, for example.

Flexitarian

This can be met with derision, “Yes and I’m teetotal, apart from wine”, but there is a practical aspect here:

The idea is “I will choose vegetarian options, unless it’s really inconvenient for me to do so”, which wipes out any difficulty involved.

After doing this for a while, you might find that as you get more used to vegetarian stuff, it’s almost never inconvenient to eat vegetarian.

Then you might want to expand it to “I will choose vegan options, unless it’s really inconvenient for me to do so”

Like-for-like substitutions

Pretty much anything that can come from an animal, one can get a plant-based version of it nowadays. The healthiness (and cost!) of these substitutions can vary, but let’s face it, meat is neither the healthiest nor the cheapest thing out there these days either.

If you have the money and don’t fancy leaping to lentils and beans, this can be a very quick and easy zero-effort change-over. Then once you’re up and running, maybe you can—at your leisure—see what all the fuss is about when it comes to tasty recipes with lentils and beans!

That’s all we have time for today, but…

We’re thinking of doing a piece making your favorite recipes plant-based (how to pick the right substitutions so the meal still tastes and “feels” the same), so let us know if you’d like that? Feel free to mention your favorite foods/meals too, as that’ll help us know what there’s a market for!

You can do that by hitting reply to any of our emails, or using the handy feedback widget at the bottom!

Curious to know more while you wait?

Check out: The Vegan Diet: A Complete Guide for Beginners ← this is a well-sourced article from Healthline, who—just like us—like to tackle important health stuff in an easy-to-read, well-sourced format