Anise vs Diabetes & Menopause
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What A Daily Gram Of Anise Can Do
Anise, specifically the seed of the plant, also called aniseed, is enjoyed for its licorice taste—as well as its medicinal properties.
Let’s see how well the science lives up to the folk medicine…
What medicinal properties does it claim?
The main contenders are:
- Reduces menopause symptoms
- Reduces blood sugar levels
- Reduces inflammation
Does it reduce menopause symptoms?
At least some of them! Including hot flashes and bone density loss. This seems to be due to the estrogenic-like activity of anethole, the active compound in anise that gives it these effects:
Estrogenic activity of isolated compounds and essential oils of Pimpinella species
1g of anise/day yielded a huge reduction in frequency and severity of hot flashes, compared to placebo*:
*you may be wondering what the placebo is for 1g of a substance that has a very distinctive taste. The researchers used capsules, with 3x330g as the dose, either anise seed or potato starch.
❝In the experimental group, the frequency and severity of hot flashes before the treatment were 4.21% and 56.21% and, after that, were 1.06% and 14.44% at the end of the fourth week respectively. No change was found in the frequency and severity of hot flashes in the control group. The frequency and severity of hot flashes was decreased during 4 weeks of follow up period. P. anisum is effective on the frequency and severity of hot flashes in postmenopausal women. ❞
See for yourself: The Study on the Effects of Pimpinella anisum on Relief and Recurrence of Menopausal Hot Flashes
As for bone mineral density, we couldn’t find a good study for anise, but we did find this one for fennel, which is a plant of the same family and also with the primary active compound anethole:
The Prophylactic Effect of Fennel Essential Oil on Experimental Osteoporosis
That was a rat study, though, so we’d like to see studies done with humans.
Summary on this one: it clearly helps against hot flashes (per the very convincing human study we listed above); it probably helps against bone mineral density loss.
Does it reduce blood sugar levels?
This one got a flurry of attention all so recently, on account of this research review:
Review on Anti-diabetic Research on Two Important Spices: Trachyspermum ammi and Pimpinella anisum
If you read this (and we do recommend reading it! It has a lot more information than we can squeeze in here!) one of the most interesting things about the in vivo anti-diabetic activity of anise was that while it did lower the fasting blood glucose levels, that wasn’t the only effect:
❝Over a course of 60 days, study participants were administered seed powders (5 g/d), which resulted in significant antioxidant, anti-diabetic, and hypolipidemic effects.
Notably, significant reductions in fasting blood glucose levels were observed. This intervention also elicited alterations in the lipid profile, LPO, lipoprotein levels, and the high-density lipoprotein (HDL) level.
Moreover, the serum levels of essential antioxidants, such as beta carotene, vitamin C, vitamin A, and vitamin E, which are typically decreased in diabetic patients, underwent a reversal.❞
That’s just one of the studies cited in that review (the comments lightly edited here for brevity), but it stands out, and you can read that study in its entirety (it’s well worth reading).
Rajeshwari et al, bless them, added a “tl;dr” at the top of their already concise abstract; their “tl;dr” reads:
❝Both the seeds significantly influenced almost all the parameters without any detrimental effects by virtue of a number of phytochemicals, vitamins and minerals present in the seeds having therapeutic effects.❞
Shortest answer: yes, yes it does
Does it fight inflammation?
This one’s quick and simple enough: yes it does; it’s full of antioxidants which thus also have an anti-inflammatory effect:
Review of Pharmacological Properties and Chemical Constituents of Pimpinella anisum
…which can also be used an essential oil, applied topically, to fight both pain and the inflammation that causes it—at least in rats and mice:
❝Indomethacin and etodolac were treated reference drugs for the anti-inflammatory activity. Aspirin and morphine hydrochloride were treated reference drugs for the analgesic activity. The results showed that fixed oil of P. anisum has an anti-inflammatory action more than etodolac and this effect was as strong as indomethacin. P. anisum induces analgesic effect comparable to that of 100 mg/kg Aspirin and 10 mg/kg morphine at 30 th min. of the study❞
Summary of this section:
- Aniseeds are a potent source of antioxidants, which fight inflammation.
- Anise essential oil is probably also useful as a topical anti-inflammatory and analgesic agent, but we’d like to see human tests to know for sure.
Is it safe?
For most people, enjoyed in moderation (e.g., within the dosage parameters described in the above studies), anise is safe. However:
- If you’re allergic to it, it won’t be safe
- Its estrogen-mimicking effects could cause problems if you have (or have a higher risk factor for) breast cancer, ovarian cancer, or endometriosis.
- For most men, the main concern is that it may lower sperm count.
Where to get it?
As ever, we don’t sell it (or anything else), but for your convenience, you can buy the seeds in bulk on Amazon, or in case you prefer it, here’s an example of it available as an essential oil.
Enjoy!
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Managing Your Mortality
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When Planning Is a Matter of Life and Death
Barring medical marvels as yet unrevealed, we are all going to die. We try to keep ourselves and our loved ones in good health, but it’s important to be prepared for the eventuality of death.
While this is not a cheerful topic, considering these things in advance can help us manage a very difficult thing, when the time comes.
We’ve put this under “Psychology Sunday” as it pertains to processing our own mortality, and managing our own experiences and the subsequent grief that our death may invoke in our loved ones.
We’ll also be looking at some of the medical considerations around end-of-life care, though.
Organizational considerations
It’s generally considered good to make preparations in advance. Write (or update) a Will, tie up any loose ends, decide on funerary preferences, perhaps even make arrangements with pre-funding. Life insurance, something difficult to get at a good rate towards the likely end of one’s life, is better sorted out sooner rather than later, too.
Beyond bureaucracy
What’s important to you, to have done before you die? It could be a bucket list, or it could just be to finish writing that book. It could be to heal a family rift, or to tell someone how you feel.
It could be more general, less concrete: perhaps to spend more time with your family, or to engage more with a spiritual practice that’s important to you.
Perhaps you want to do what you can to offset the grief of those you’ll leave behind; to make sure there are happy memories, or to make any requests of how they might remember you.
Lest this latter seem selfish: after a loved one dies, those who are left behind are often given to wonder: what would they have wanted? If you tell them now, they’ll know, and can be comforted and reassured by that.
This could range from “bright colors at my funeral, please” to “you have my blessing to remarry if you want to” to “I will now tell you the secret recipe for my famous bouillabaisse, for you to pass down in turn”.
End-of-life care
Increasingly few people die at home.
- Sometimes it will be a matter of fighting tooth-and-nail to beat a said-to-be-terminal illness, and thus expiring in hospital after a long battle.
- Sometimes it will be a matter of gradually winding down in a nursing home, receiving medical support to the end.
- Sometimes, on the other hand, people will prefer to return home, and do so.
Whatever your preferences, planning for them in advance is sensible—especially as money may be a factor later.
Not to go too much back to bureaucracy, but you might also want to consider a Living Will, to be enacted in the case that cognitive decline means you cannot advocate for yourself later.
Laws vary from place to place, so you’ll want to discuss this with a lawyer, but to give an idea of the kinds of things to consider:
National Institute on Aging: Preparing A Living Will
Palliative care
Palliative care is a subcategory of end-of-life care, and is what occurs when no further attempts are made to extend life, and instead, the only remaining goal is to reduce suffering.
In the case of some diseases including cancer, this may mean coming off treatments that have unpleasant side-effects, and retaining—or commencing—pain-relief treatments that may, as a side-effect, shorten life.
Euthanasia
Legality of euthanasia varies from place to place, and in some times and places, palliative care itself has been considered a form of “passive euthanasia”, that is to say, not taking an active step to end life, but abstaining from a treatment that prolongs it.
Clearer forms of passive euthanasia include stopping taking a medication without which one categorically will die, or turning off a life support machine.
Active euthanasia, taking a positive action to end life, is legal in some places and the means varies, but an overdose of barbiturates is an example; one goes to sleep and does not wake up.
It’s not the only method, though; options include benzodiazepines, and opioids, amongst others:
Efficacy and safety of drugs used for assisted dying
Unspoken euthanasia
An important thing to be aware of (whatever your views on euthanasia) is the principle of double-effect… And how it comes to play in palliative care more often than most people think.
Say a person is dying of cancer. They opt for palliative care; they desist in any further cancer treatments, and take medication for the pain. Morphine is common. Morphine also shortens life.
It’s common for such a patient to have a degree of control over their own medication, however, after a certain point, they will no longer be in sufficient condition to do so.
After this point, it is very common for caregivers (be they medical professionals or family members) to give more morphine—for the purpose of reducing suffering, of course, not to kill them.
In practical terms, this often means that the patient will die quite promptly afterwards. This is one of the reasons why, after sometimes a long-drawn-out period of “this person is dying”, healthcare workers can be very accurate about “it’s going to be in the next couple of days”.
The take-away from this section is: if you would like for this to not happen to you or your loved one, you need to be aware of this practice in advance, because while it’s not the kind of thing that tends to make its way into written hospital/hospice policies, it is very widespread and normalized in the industry on a human level.
Further reading: Goods, causes and intentions: problems with applying the doctrine of double effect to palliative sedation
One last thing…
Planning around our own mortality is never a task that seems pressing, until it’s too late. We recommend doing it anyway, without putting it off, because we can never know what’s around the corner.
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Tips for Improving Memory
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Q&A with 10almonds Subscribers!
Q: Any tips, other than supplements, for improving memory?
A: So many tips! Certainly enough to do a main feature on, so again maybe we’ll do that in another issue soon. Meanwhile, here are the absolute most critical things for you to know, understand, and apply:
- Memory is a muscle. Not literally, but in the sense that it will grow stronger if exercised and will atrophy if neglected.
- Counterpart of the above: your memory is not a finite vessel. You can’t “fill it up with useless things”, so no need to fear doing so.
- Your memory is the product of countless connections in your brain. The more connections lead to a given memory, the more memorable it will be. What use is this knowledge to you? It means that if you want to remember something, try to make as many connections to it as possible, so:
- Involve as many senses as possible.
- When you learn things, try to learn them in context. Then when your mind has reason to think about the context, it’ll be more likely to remember the thing itself too.
- Rehearsal matters. A lot. This means repeatedly going over something in your head. This brings about the neural equivalent of “muscle memory”.
- Enjoy yourself if you can. The more fun something is, the more you will mentally rehearse it, and the more mental connections you’ll make to it.
Have a question you’d like to see answered here? Hit reply to this email, or use the feedback widget at the bottom! We always love to hear from you
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Are You Flourishing? (There’s a Scale)
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What does it mean, to flourish? And how can you do it more?
In 2009, psychologists Diener et al developed the “Flourishing Scale”, or as it was more prosaically called originally, “Subjective Wellness Scale”. The name was changed later, as it was noted that it went beyond what was typically considered mere “wellness”.
This scale was so useful, that colleagues scrambled to see if they could improve on it, such as with PERMA (2012), which looked at:
- Positive emotion
- Engagement
- positive Relationships
- Meaning
- Accomplishment/Achievement
While popular (despite the tenuous acronym, it is a very good list of things to foster in your life), this was studied and measured scientifically and found to not be an improvement on the Flourishing Scale / SWS, so we’re going to stick to the original version for now.
We couldn’t find an interactive online quiz for the scale though (apart from this NY Times one, which is paywalled for NYT subscribers, so enjoy if you’re a NYT subscriber!), so here’s the source material, still hosted on the website of the (now deceased, as of a couple of years ago) author:
Flourishing Scale (FS) ← it’s an eight-question, ranked choice scale
How did you score? And…
What are the keys to flourishing more?
According to Jeffrey Davis M.A., of Tracking Wonder, there are five key attributes that we must develop and/or maintain:
The ability to direct and re-direct your attention
This isn’t just a task-related thing.This is about your mind itself. For example, the ability to recognize what your emotions are telling you, thank them for the message, and then set them aside. Or the ability to cut through negative thought spirals! How often have you worried about future events that didn’t transpire, or twisted yourself in knots over a past event that you can’t change?
Action: check out our previous article “The Off-Button For Your Brain” ← this is a technique for switching off racing thoughts, and it’s really good
Want more? We also did this:
The tendency to shape your time with intention and for impact
Time is an incredibly precious asset. How you use it is a very personal choice. You don’t have to maximize productivity (though you can if you want), but for example there’s a difference between:
- Deciding to spend an hour watching a TV show you really enjoy
- Wondering what’s on TV, browsing aimlessly, watching listlessly, just a distraction
In the former case, you are enjoying your time. Literally: you are experiencing joy during your time.
In the latter case, to borrow from Jim Steinman, “you were only killing time and it’ll kill you right back”!
Action: do a time audit for a week, and see where your time really goes, rather than where you expect or hope for it to go. Use this information to plan your next week more intentionally. Repeat as and when it seems like it might be useful!
The practice of constant improvement
Fun fact: you are good enough already. And you can also improve. You don’t have to, but improving in the areas that are meaningful to you can really add up over time. This could be becoming excellent at something for which already have a passion… It could also be brushing up something that you feel might be holding you back.
Action: do a quick SWOT* self-assessment. Then plan your next step from there!
*Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. What are yours?
The ability to communicate and listen to others
A lot of this is about feedback. Giving and receiving feedback are often amongst the hardest things we do in the category of communication… Especially if the feedback is negative. How to decide what to disregard as baseless criticism, and what to take on board (and try not to take it personally), or the other way around, how to present negative feedback in a way that won’t trigger defensiveness.
Action: check out our previous article “Save Time With Better Communication” for some tips that really make relationships (of any kind) so much easier.
The commitment to positive experiences
Many things in life are not fun. Often, we know in advance that they will not be fun. The key here is the ability to make the most of a bad situation, and seek out better situations by your actions. Not like a lost person in a desert seeks water, but like a chess player who employs a general strategy to make tactical advantages more likely to appear.
Action: think about something you have to do but don’t want to. How could it be made more fun? Or failing that, how could it be made at least more comfortable?
See also: Working Smarter < Working Brighter!
Want to read more?
Check out: What Is Flourishing in Positive Psychology? (+8 Tips & PDF)
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Optimal Black Pepper Dosage and Supplement
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It’s Q&A Day 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!
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 may have missed it, but how much black pepper provides benefits?❞
So, for any new subscribers joining us today, this is about two recent main features:
As for a daily dosage of black pepper, it varies depending on the benefit you’re looking for, but:
- 5–20mg of piperine is the dosage range used in most scientific studies we looked at
- 10mg is a very common dosage found in many popular supplements
- That’s the mass of piperine though, so if taking it as actual black pepper rather than as an extract, ½ teaspoon is considered sufficient to enjoy benefits.
❝I loved the health benefits of pepper. I do not like pepper. Where can I get it as a supplement?❞
You can simply buy whole black peppercorns and take a few with water as though they were tablets. Your stomach acid will do the rest. Black pepper is also good for digestion, so taking it with a meal is best.
You can buy piperine (black pepper extract) by itself as a supplement in powder form, but if you don’t like black pepper, you will probably not like this powder either. We couldn’t find it readily in capsule form.
You can buy piperine (black pepper extract) as an adjunct to other supplements, with perhaps the most common/popular being turmeric capsules that also contain 10mg (or more) piperine per capsule. Shop around if you like, but here’s one that has 15mg piperine* per capsule, for example.
*They call it “Bioperine®” but that is literally just piperine. Same go
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Surgery won’t fix my chronic back pain, so what will?
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This week’s ABC Four Corners episode Pain Factory highlighted that our health system is failing Australians with chronic pain. Patients are receiving costly, ineffective and risky care instead of effective, low-risk treatments for chronic pain.
The challenge is considering how we might reimagine health-care delivery so the effective and safe treatments for chronic pain are available to millions of Australians who suffer from chronic pain.
One in five Australians aged 45 and over have chronic pain (pain lasting three or more months). This costs an estimated A$139 billion a year, including $12 billion in direct health-care costs.
The most common complaint among people with chronic pain is low back pain. So what treatments do – and don’t – work?
Opioids and invasive procedures
Treatments offered to people with chronic pain include strong pain medicines such as opioids and invasive procedures such as spinal cord stimulators or spinal fusion surgery. Unfortunately, these treatments have little if any benefit and are associated with a risk of significant harm.
Spinal fusion surgery and spinal cord stimulators are also extremely costly procedures, costing tens of thousands of dollars each to the health system as well as incurring costs to the individual.
Addressing the contributors to pain
Recommendations from the latest Australian and World Health Organization clinical guidelines for low back pain focus on alternatives to drug and surgical treatments such as:
- education
- advice
- structured exercise programs
- physical, psychological or multidisciplinary interventions that address the physical or psychological contributors to ongoing pain.
Pain education is central. Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock Two recent Australian trials support these recommendations and have found that interventions that address each person’s physical and psychological contributors to pain produce large and sustained improvements in pain and function in people with chronic low back pain.
The interventions have minimal side effects and are cost-effective.
In the RESOLVE trial, the intervention consists of pain education and graded sensory and movement “retraining” aimed to help people understand that it’s safe to move.
In the RESTORE trial, the intervention (cognitive functional therapy) involves assisting the person to understand the range of physical and psychological contributing factors related to their condition. It guides patients to relearn how to move and to build confidence in their back, without over-protecting it.
Why isn’t everyone with chronic pain getting this care?
While these trials provide new hope for people with chronic low back pain, and effective alternatives to spinal surgery and opioids, a barrier for implementation is the out-of-pocket costs. The interventions take up to 12 sessions, lasting up to 26 weeks. One physiotherapy session can cost $90–$150.
In contrast, Medicare provides rebates for just five allied health visits (such as physiotherapists or exercise physiologists) for eligible patients per year, to be used for all chronic conditions.
Private health insurers also limit access to reimbursement for these services by typically only covering a proportion of the cost and providing a cap on annual benefits. So even those with private health insurance would usually have substantial out-of-pocket costs.
Access to trained clinicians is another barrier. This problem is particularly evident in regional and rural Australia, where access to allied health services, pain specialists and multidisciplinary pain clinics is limited.
Higher costs and lack of access are associated with the increased use of available and subsidised treatments, such as pain medicines, even if they are ineffective and harmful. The rate of opioid use, for example, is higher in regional Australia and in areas of socioeconomic disadvantage than metropolitan centres and affluent areas.
So what can we do about it?
We need to reform Australia’s health system, private and public, to improve access to effective treatments for chronic pain, while removing access to ineffective, costly and high-risk treatments.
Better training of the clinical workforce, and using technology such as telehealth and artificial intelligence to train clinicians or deliver treatment may also improve access to effective treatments. A recent Australian trial, for example, found telehealth delivered via video conferencing was as effective as in-person physiotherapy consultations for improving pain and function in people with chronic knee pain.
Advocacy and improving the public’s understanding of effective treatments for chronic pain may also be helpful. Our hope is that coordinated efforts will promote the uptake of effective treatments and improve the care of patients with chronic pain.
Christine Lin, Professor, University of Sydney; Christopher Maher, Professor, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney; Fiona Blyth, Professor, University of Sydney; James Mcauley, Professor of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, and Mark Hancock, Professor of Physiotherapy, Macquarie University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Vegan Eager for Milk Alternatives
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Q: Thanks for the info about dairy. As a vegan, I look forward to a future comment about milk alternatives
Thanks for bringing it up! What we research and write about is heavily driven by subscriber feedback, so notes like this really help us know there’s an audience for a given topic!
We’ll do a main feature on it, to do it justice. Watch out for Research Review Monday!
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