ADHD 2.0 – by Dr. Edward Hallowell & Dr. John Ratey
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A lot of ADHD literature is based on the assumption that the reader is a 30-something parent of a child with ADHD. This book, on the other hand, addresses all ages, and includes just as readily the likelihood that the person with ADHD is the reader, and/or the reader’s partner.
The authors cover such topics as:
- ADHD mythbusting, before moving on to…
- The problems of ADHD, and the benefits that those exact same traits can bring too
- How to leverage those traits to get fewer of the problems and more of the benefits
- The role of diet beyond the obvious, including supplementation
- The role of specific exercises (especially HIIT, and balance exercises) in benefiting the ADHD brain
- The role of medications—and arguments for and gainst such
The writing style is… Thematic, let’s say. The authors have ADHD and it shows. So, expect comprehensive deep-dives from whenever their hyperfocus mode kicked in, and expect no stones left unturned. That said, it is very readable, and well-indexed too, for ease of finding specific sub-topics.
Bottom line: if you are already very familiar with ADHD, you may not learn much, and might reasonably skip this one. However, if you’re new to the topic, this book is a great—and practical—primer.
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Lemon vs Lime – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing lemons to limes, we picked the lemons.
Why?
This one’s simple today. They’re both comparable fruits in most ways, and their macro profiles are almost identical. When it comes to vitamins, however, they stand apart a little.
Both are most well-known for their vitamin C content, but lemons contain about 2x the vitamin C of limes.
In other vitamins, they’re not too far apart. Technically limes have 2x the vitamin A, but this doesn’t count for much because it’s a case of “two times almost nothing is still almost nothing”.
In the category of minerals, neither fruit is a very good source of most minerals, and the minerals they do have, are mostly more or less the same.
Both are acidic, and this can have blood sugar benefits in both cases (and, if not careful, damage tooth enamel in both cases). Nothing to set either apart from the other here.
So, it comes down to the vitamin C! In which category, lemons take the prize with their higher content.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars ← where it talks about the use of vinegar here, it’s about the acidity, so lemon juice or lime juice is an option too!
Take care!
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The Twenty-Four Hour Mind – by Dr. Rosalind Cartwright
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We’ve reviewed books about sleep before, and even about dreaming, so what does this one have to offer that’s new?
Quite a lot, actually! Before Dr. Cartwright, there were mainly two models of sleep and dreaming:
- The “top-down” model of psychoanalysts: our minds shape our dreams which in turn reveal things about us as people
- The “bottom-up” model of neuroscientists: our brains need to go through regular maintaince cycles, of which vivid hallucinations are a quirky side-effect.
And now, as Dr. Cartwright puts it:
❝I will lay out a new [horizontal] psychological model of the twenty-four hour mind; that is, how the predominantly conscious (waking) and unconscious (sleeping) forms of mental behavior interact through the brain’s regular, but differently organized, states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming.❞
This she does in the exploratory style of a 224-page lecture, which sounds like it might be tedious, but is actually attention-grabbing and engaging throughout. This book is more of a page-turner than soporific bedtime reading!
Bottom line: if you’d like to know more about the effect your waking and sleeping brain have on each other (to include getting in between those and making adjutments as appropriate), this is very much an elucidating read!
Click here to check out The Twenty-Four Hour Mind, and learn more about yours!
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How to Think More Effectively – by Alain de Botton
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Our brain is our most powerful organ, and our mind is an astonishing thing. So why do we sometimes go off-piste?
The School of Life‘s Alain de Botton lays out for us a framework of cumulative thinking, directions for effort, and unlikely tools for cognitive improvement.
The book especially highlights the importance of such things as…
- making time for cumulative thinking
- not, however, trying to force it
- working with, rather than in spite of, distractions
- noting and making use of our irrationalities
- taking what we think/do both seriously and lightly, at once
- practising constructive self-doubt
The style is as clear and easy as you may have come to expect from Alain de Botton / The School of Life, and yet, its ideas are still likely to challenge every reader in some (good!) way.
Bottom line: if you would like what you think, say, do to be more meaningful, this book will help you to make the most of your abilities!
Click here to check out How To Think More Effectively, and upgrade your thought processes!
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Undo The Sun’s Damage To Your Skin
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It’s often said that our skin is our largest organ. Our brain or liver are the largest solid organs by mass (which one comes out on top will vary from person to person), our gut is the longest, and our lungs are the largest by surface area. But our skin is large, noticeable, and has a big impact on the rest of our health.
The sun is one of the main damaging factors for our skin; assorted toxins are also a major threat for many people, and once the skin barrier gets broken, it’s a field-day for bacteria.
So, what can we do about it?
Tretinoin: the skin’s rejuvenator
Tretinoin is also called retinoic acid, not to be mistaken for retinol, although they are both retinoids. Tretinoin is much stronger.
As for what it’s stronger at:
It’s usually prescribed for the treatment of sun-damage, acne, and wrinkles. Paradoxically, it works by inflaming the skin (and then making it better, and having done so, keeping it better).
In few words: it encourages your skin to speed up its life cycle, which means that cells die and are replaced sooner, which means the average age of skin cells will be considerably younger at any given time.
This is the same principle as we see at work when it comes to cellular apoptosis and autophagy in general, and specifically the same idea as we discussed when talking about senolytics, compounds that kill aging cells:
Fisetin: The Anti-Aging Assassin
About that paradoxical inflammation…
❝The topical use of tretinoin as an antiacne agent began almost a half century ago. Since that time it has been successfully used to treat comedonal and inflammatory acne.
Over the intervening years, the beneficial effects of tretinoin have grown from an understanding of its potent cornedolytie-related properties to an evolving appreciation of its antiinflammatory actions.
…
The topical use of clindamycin and tretinoin as a combination treatment modality that includes antibacterial, comedolytic, and antiinflammatoiy properties has proven to be a very effective therapy for treating the various stages of acne
…
It is now becoming increasingly clear that there may be good reasons for these observations.❞
~ Drs. Schmidt & Gans, lightly edited here for brevity
Read in full: Tretinoin: A Review of Its Anti-inflammatory Properties in the Treatment of Acne
Against damage by the sun
The older we get, the more likely sun damage is a problem than acne. And in the case of tretinoin,
❝In several well-controlled clinical trials, the proportion of patients showing improvement was significantly higher with 0.01 or 0.05% tretinoin cream than with placebo for criteria such as global assessment, fine and coarse wrinkling, pigmentation and roughness.
Improvements in the overall severity of photodamage were also significantly greater with tretinoin than with placebo.
…
Several placebo-controlled clinical studies have demonstrated that topical tretinoin has significant efficacy in the treatment of photodamaged skin. Improvements in subjective global assessment scores were recorded in:
49–100% of patients using once-daily 0.01% tretinoin,
68–100% of patients using 0.05% tretinoin, and
0–44% of patients using placebo.❞
~ Drs. Wagstaff & Noble
…which is quite compelling.
Read in full: Tretinoin: A Review of its Pharmacological Properties and Clinical Efficacy in the Topical Treatment of Photodamaged Skin
This is very well-established by now; here’s an old paper from when the mechanism of action was unknown (here in the current day, 17 mechanisms of action have been identified; beyond the scope of this article as we only have so much room, but it’s nice to see science building on science):
❝Tretinoin cream has been used extensively to reverse the changes of photoaging. It is the first topical therapy to undergo controlled clinical testing and proved to be efficacious. These results have been substantiated with photography, histopathologie examination, and skin surface replicas.
…
Tretinoin cream has an excellent safety record; a local cutaneous hypervitaminosis A reaction is the only common problem.❞
~ Dr. Goldfarb et al.
Read in full: Topical tretinoin therapy: Its use in photoaged skin
Is it safe?
For most people, when used as directed*, yes. However, it’s likely to irritate your skin at first, and that’s normal. If this persists more than a few weeks, or seems unduly severe, then you might want to stop and talk to your doctor again.
*See also: Scarring following inappropriate use of 0.05% tretinoin gel
(in the case of a young woman who used it 4x daily instead of 1x daily)
Want to try some?
Tretinoin is prescription-only, so speak with your doctor/pharmacist about that. Alternatively, retinal (not retinol) is the strongest natural alternative that works on the same principles; here’s an example product on Amazon 😎
Take care!
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Dark Calories – by Dr. Catherine Shanahan
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You may be wondering: do we really need a 416-page book to say “don’t use vegetable oils”?
The author, who was a biochemist before becoming a family physician, takes a lot of care to explain in ways the non-chemists amongst us can understand (with molecular diagrams very well-labelled), exactly why certain seed/vegetable oils (both of those names being imprecise and unhelpful as umbrella terms) cause metabolic problems for us, when in contrast olive oil, avocado oil, and even peanut oil, do not.
Understanding is, for many, the root foundation of compliance. We are more likely to abide by rules we understand the logic behind, than seemingly arbitrary “thou shalt not…” proclamations.
So that’s an important strength of the book, demystifying various fats and how our body responds to them on a biochemical level, not just “is associated with such-and-such, based on observational population studies”. This kind of explanation clears up why, for example, seed oils correlate with obesity more than calories, sugar, wheat, or beef—having as it does to do with affecting our body’s ability to generate and use energy.
She also offers practical tips/reminders throughout, such as how “organic” does not necessarily mean “healthy” (indeed, many poisonous plants can be grown “organically”), and nor does “organic” mean “unrefined”, it speaks only for the conditions in which the raw product was first made, before other things were done to it later.
We learn a lot, too, about the processes of oxidation, the biochemistry behind that (more diagrams!), and of course the inflammatory response to same (an important factor in most if not all chronic disease).
The style is mostly very easy-to-read pop-science, though if you’re not a chemist, you’ll probably need to slow down for the biochemistry explanations (this reviewer certainly did).
Bottom line: this is more than just a litany against vegetable oils; it’s a ground-upwards education in metabolic biochemistry for the layperson, and what that means for us in terms of chronic disease risks.
Click here to check out Dark Calories, and learn what’s going on with these oils!
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Beating Sleep Apnea
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Healthier, Natural Sleep Without Obstruction!
Obstructive Sleep Apnea, the sleep disorder in which one periodically stops breathing (and thus wakes up) repeatedly through the night, affects about 25% of men and 10% of women:
Prevalence of Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome: A Single-Center Retrospective Study
Why the gender split?
There are clues that suggest it is at least partially hormonal: once women have passed menopause, the gender split becomes equal.
Are there other risk factors?
There are few risk other factors; some we can’t control, and some we can:
- Being older is riskier than being younger
- Being overweight is riskier than not being overweight
- Smoking is (what a shock) riskier than not smoking
- Chronic respiratory diseases increase risk, for example:
- Asthma
- COPD
- Long COVID*—probably. The science is young for this one so far, so we can’t say for sure until more research has been done.
- Some hormonal conditions increase risk, for example:
- Hypothyroidism
- PCOS
*However, patients already undergoing Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) treatment for obstructive sleep apnea may have an advantage when fighting a COVID infection:
What can we do about it?
Avoiding the above risk factors, where possible, is great!
If you are already suffering from obstructive sleep apnea, then you probably already know about the possibility of a CPAP device; it’s a mask that one wears to sleep, and it does what its name says (i.e. it applies continuous positive airway pressure), which keeps the airway open.
We haven’t tested these, but other people have, so here are some that the Sleep Foundation found to be worthy of note:
Sleep Foundation | Best CPAP Machines of 2024
What can we do about it that’s not CPAP?
Wearing a mask to sleep is not everyone’s preferred way to do things. There are also a plethora of surgeries available, but we’ll not review those, as those are best discussed with your doctor if necessary.
However, some lifestyle changes can help, including:
- Lose weight, if overweight. In particular, having a collar size under 16” for women or under 17” for men, is sufficient to significantly reduce the risk of obstructive sleep apnea.
- Stop smoking, if you smoke. This one, we hope, is self-explanatory.
- Stop drinking alcohol, or at least reduce intake, if you drink. People who consume alcohol tend to have more frequent, and longer, incidents of obstructive sleep apnea. See also: How To Reduce Or Quit Drinking
- Avoid sedatives and muscle relaxants, if it is safe for you to do so. Obviously, if you need them to treat some other condition you have, talk this through with your doctor. But basically, they can contribute to the “airway collapses on itself” by reducing the muscular tension that keeps your airway the shape it’s supposed to be.
- Sleep on your side, not your back. This is just plain physics, and a matter of wear the obstruction falls.
- Breathe through your nose, not through your mouth. Initially tricky to do while sleeping, but the more you practice it while awake, the more it becomes possible while asleep.
- Consider a nasal decongestant before sleep, if congestion is a problem for you, as that can help too.
For more of the science of these, see:
Cultivating Lifestyle Transformations in Obstructive Sleep Apnea
There are more medical options available not discussed here, too:
American Sleep Apnea Association | Sleep Apnea Treatment Options
Take care!
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