Are You Eating AGEs?
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The Trouble of the AGEs
Advanced Glycation End-Products (AGEs) are the result of the chemical process of glycation, which can occur in your body in response to certain foods you ate, or you can consume them directly, if you eat animal products that contained them (because we’re not special and other animals glycate too, especially mammals such as pigs, cows, and sheep).
As a double-whammy, if you cook animal products (especially without water, such as by roasting or frying), extra AGEs will form during cooking.
When proteinous and/or fatty food turns yellow/golden/brown during cooking, that’s generally glycation.
If there’s starch present, some or all of that yellow/golden/brown stuff will be a Maillard Reaction Product (MRP), such as acrylamide. That’s not exactly a health food, but it’s nowhere near being even in the same ballpark of badness.
In short, during cooking:
- Proteinous/fatty food turns yellow/golden/brown = probably an AGE
- Starchy food turns yellow/golden/brown = probably a MRP
The AGEs are far worse.
What’s so bad about AGEs?
Let’s do a quick tour of some studies:
- The role of advanced glycation end-products in retinal ageing and disease
- Advanced glycation end-products and their circulating receptors predict cardiovascular disease mortality in older women
- Elevated serum advanced glycation end-products in obese indicate risk for the metabolic syndrome: a link between healthy and unhealthy obesity?
- Increased levels of serum advanced glycation end-products in women with polycystic ovary syndrome
- Advanced glycation end-products and their involvement in liver disease
- Effects of advanced glycation end-products on renal fibrosis and oxidative stress
- Role of advanced glycation end-products and oxidative stress in vascular complications in diabetes
- Cancer malignancy is enhanced by advanced glycation end-products
- Advanced glycation end-products in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease
We could keep going, but you probably get the picture!
What should we do about it?
There are three main ways to reduce serum AGE levels:
Reduce or eliminate consumption of animal products
Especially mammalian animal products, such as from pigs, cows, and sheep, especially their meat. Processed versions are even worse! So, steak is bad, but bacon and sausages are literally top-tier bad.
Cook wet
Dry cooking (which includes frying, and especially includes deep fat frying, which is worse than shallow frying which is worse than air frying) produces far more AGEs than cooking with methods that involve water (boiling, steaming, slow-cooking, etc).
As a bonus, adding acidic ingredients (e.g. vinegar, lemon juice, tomato juice) can halve the amount of AGEs produced.
Consume antioxidants
Our body does have some ability to deal with AGEs, but that ability has its limits, and our body can be easily overwhelmed if we consume foods that are bad for it. So hopefully you’ll tend towards a plant-based diet, but whether you do or don’t:
You can give your body a hand by consuming antioxidant foods and drinks (such as berries, tea/coffee, and chocolate), and/or taking supplements.
Want to know more about the science of this?
Check out…
Advanced Glycation End-Products in Foods and a Practical Guide to Their Reduction in the Diet
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6 Lifestyle Factors To Measurably Reduce Biological Age
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Julie Gibson Clark competes on a global leaderboard of people actively fighting aging (including billionaire Bryan Johnson, who is famously very focused on such). She’s currently ahead of him on that leaderboard, so what’s she doing?
Top tips
We’ll not keep the six factors a mystery; they are:
- Exercise: her weekly exercise includes VO2 Max training, strength training, balance work, and low-intensity cardio. She exercises outdoors on Saturdays and takes rest days on Fridays and Sundays.
- Diet: she follows a 16-hour intermittent fasting schedule (eating between 09:00–17:00), consumes a clean omnivore diet with an emphasis on vegetables and adequate protein, and avoids junk food.
- Brain: she meditates for 20 minutes daily, prioritizes mental health, and ensures sufficient quality sleep, helped by morning sunlight exposure and time in nature.
- Hormesis: she engages in 20-minute sauna sessions followed by cold showers four times per week to support recovery and longevity.
- Supplements: she takes longevity supplements and bioidentical hormones to optimize her health and aging process.
- Testing: she regularly monitors her biological age and health markers through various tests, including DEXA scans, VO2 Max tests, lipid panels, and epigenetic aging clocks, allowing her to adjust her routine accordingly.
For more on all of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?
Take care!
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Why 7 Hours Sleep Is Not Enough
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How Sleep-Deprived Are You, Really?
This is Dr. Matthew Walker. He’s a neuroscientist and sleep specialist, and is the Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology. He’s also the author of the international bestseller “Why We Sleep”.
What does he want us to know?
Sleep deprivation is more serious than many people think it is. After about 16 hours without sleep, the brain begins to fail, and needs more than 7 hours of sleep to “reset” cognitive performance.
Note: note “seven or more”, but “more than seven”.
After ten days with only 7 hours sleep (per day), Dr. Walker points out, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for 24 hours.
Here’s the study that sparked a lot of Dr. Walker’s work:
Importantly, in Dr. Walker’s own words:
❝Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping❞
~ Dr. Matthew Walker
See also: Why You Probably Need More Sleep
Furthermore: the sleep-deprived mind is unaware of how sleep-deprived it is.
You know how a drunk person thinks they can drive safely? It’s like that.
You do not know how sleep-deprived you are, when you are sleep-deprived!
For example:
❝(60.7%) did not signal sleepiness before a sleep fragment occurred in at least one of the four MWT trials❞
Source: Sleepiness is not always perceived before falling asleep in healthy, sleep-deprived subjects
Sleep efficiency matters
With regard to the 7–9 hours band for optimal health, Dr. Walker points out that the sleep we’re getting is not always the sleep we think we’re getting:
❝Assuming you have a healthy sleep efficiency (85%), to sleep 9 hours in terms of duration (i.e. to be a long-sleeper), you would need to be consistently in bed for 10 hours and 36 minutes a night. ❞
~ Dr. Matthew Walker
At the bottom end of that, by the way, doing the same math: to get only the insufficient 7 hours sleep discussed earlier, a with a healthy 85% sleep efficiency, you’d need to be in bed for 8 hours and 14 minutes per night.
The unfortunate implication of this: if you are consistently in bed for 8 hours and 14 minutes (or under) per night, you are not getting enough sleep.
“But what if my sleep efficiency is higher than 85%?”
It shouldn’t be.If your sleep efficiency is higher than 85%, you are sleep-deprived and your body is having to enforce things.
Want to know what your sleep efficiency is?
We recommend knowing this, by the way, so you might want to check out:
Head-To-Head Comparison of Google and Apple’s Top Sleep-Monitoring Apps
(they will monitor your sleep and tell you your sleep efficiency, amongst other things)
Want to know more?
You might like his book:
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
…and/or his podcast:
…and for those who like videos, here’s his (very informative) TED talk:
Prefer text? Click here to read the transcript
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later
Enjoy!
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Radical CBT
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Radical Acceptance!
A common criticism of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is that much of it hinges on the following process:
- You are having bad feelings
- Which were caused by negative automatic thoughts
- Which can be taken apart logically
- Thus diffusing the feelings
- And then feeling better
For example:
- I feel like I’m an unwanted burden to my friend
- Because he canceled on me today
- But a reasonable explanation is that he indeed accidentally double-booked himself and the other thing wasn’t re-arrangeable
- My friend is trusting me to be an understanding friend myself, and greatly values my friendship
- I feel better and look forward to our next time together
But what if the negative automatic thoughts are, upon examination, reasonable?
Does CBT argue that we should just “keep the faith” and go on looking at a cruel indifferent world through rose-tinted spectacles?
Nope, there’s a back-up tool.
This is more talked-about in Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT), and is called radical acceptance:
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Radical acceptance here means accepting the root of things as true, and taking the next step from there. It follows a bad conclusion with “alright, and now what?”
“But all evidence points to the fact that my friend has been avoiding me for months; I really can’t ignore it or explain it away any longer”
“Alright. Now what?”- Maybe there’s something troubling your friend that you don’t know about (have you asked?)
- Maybe that something is nothing to do with you (or maybe it really is about you!)
- Maybe there’s a way you and he can address it together (how important is it to you?)
- Maybe it’s just time to draw a line under it and move on (with or without him)
Whatever the circumstances, there’s always a way to move forwards.
Feelings are messengers, and once you’ve received and processed the message, the only reason to keep feeling the same thing, is if you want to.
Note that this is true even when you know with 100% certainty that the Bad Thing™ is real and exactly as-imagined. It’s still possible for you to accept, for example:
“Alright, so this person really truly hates me. Damn, that sucks; I think I’ve been nothing but nice to them. Oh well. Shit happens.”
Feel all the feelings you need to about it, and then decide for yourself where you want to go from there.
Get: 25 CBT Worksheets To Help You Find Solutions To A Wide Variety of Problems
Recognizing Emotions
We talked in a previous edition of 10almonds’ Psychology Sunday about how an important part of dealing with difficult emotions is recognizing them as something that you experience, rather than something that’s intrinsically “you”.
But… How?
One trick is to just mentally (or out loud, if your current environment allows for such) greet them when you notice them:
- Hello again, Depression
- Oh, hi there Anxiety, it’s you
- Nice of you to join us, Anger
Not only does this help recognize and delineate the emotion, but also, it de-tooths it and recognizes it for what it is—something that doesn’t actually mean you any harm, but that does need handling.
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How often should you wash your sheets and towels?
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Everyone seems to have a different opinion when it comes to how often towels and bed sheets should be washed. While many people might wonder whether days or weeks is best, in one survey from the United Kingdom, almost half of single men reported not washing their sheets for up to four months at a time.
It’s fairly clear that four months is too long to leave it, but what is the ideal frequency?
Bed linen and towels are quite different and so should be washed at different intervals. While every week or two will generally suffice for sheets, towels are best washed every few days.
Anyway, who doesn’t love the feeling of a fresh set of sheets or the smell of a newly laundered towel?
Why you should wash towels more often
When you dry yourself, you deposit thousands of skin cells and millions of microbes onto the towel. And because you use your towel to dry yourself after a shower or bath, your towel is regularly damp.
You also deposit a hefty amount of dead skin, microbes, sweat and oils onto your sheets every night. But unless you’re a prolific night sweater, your bedding doesn’t get wet after a night’s sleep.
Towels are also made of a thicker material than sheets and therefore tend to stay damp for longer.
So what is it about the dampness that causes a problem? Wet towels are a breeding ground for bacteria and moulds. Moulds especially love damp environments. Although mould won’t necessarily be visible (you would need significant growth to be able to see it) this can lead to an unpleasant smell.
As well as odours, exposure to these microbes in your towels and sheets can cause asthma, allergic skin irritations, or other skin infections.
People don’t always agree on how often to change the sheets.
http://rawpixel.com/ShutterstockSo what’s the ideal frequency?
For bedding, it really depends on factors such as whether you have a bath or shower just before going to bed, or if you fall into bed after a long, sweaty day and have your shower in the morning. You will need to wash your sheets more regularly in the latter case. As a rule of thumb, once a week or every two weeks should be fine.
Towels should ideally be washed more regularly – perhaps every few days – while your facecloth should be cleaned after every use. Because it gets completely wet, it will be wet for a longer time, and retain more skin cells and microbes.
Wash your towels at a high temperature (for example, 65°C) as that will kill many microbes. If you are conscious of saving energy, you can use a lower temperature and add a cup of vinegar to the wash. The vinegar will kill microbes and prevent bad smells from developing.
Clean your washing machine regularly and dry the fold in the rubber after every wash, as this is another place microbes like to grow.
Smelly towels
What if you regularly wash your towels, but they still smell bad? One of the reasons for this pong could be that you’ve left them in the washing machine too long after the wash. Especially if it was a warm wash cycle, the time they’re warm and damp will allow microbes to happily grow. Under lab conditions the number of these bacteria can double every 30 minutes.
It’s important to hang your towel out to dry after use and not to leave towels in the washing machine after the cycle has finished. If possible, hang your towels and bedding out in the sun. That will dry them quickly and thoroughly and will foster that lovely fresh, clean cotton smell. Using a dryer is a good alternative if the weather is bad, but outdoors in the sun is always better if possible.
Also, even if your towel is going to be washed, don’t throw a wet towel into the laundry basket, as the damp, dirty towel will be an ideal place for microbes to breed. By the time you get to doing your washing, the towel and the other laundry around it may have acquired a bad smell. And it can be difficult to get your towels smelling fresh again.
Towels should be washed more often than sheets.
New Africa/ShutterstockWhat about ‘self-cleaning’ sheets and towels?
Some companies sell “quick-dry” towels or “self-cleaning” towels and bedding. Quick-dry towels are made from synthetic materials that are weaved in a way to allow them to dry quickly. This would help prevent the growth of microbes and the bad smells that develop when towels are damp for long periods of time.
But the notion of self-cleaning products is more complicated. Most of these products contain nanosilver or copper, antibacterial metals that kill micro-organisms. The antibacterial compounds will stop the growth of bacteria and can be useful to limit smells and reduce the frequency with which you need to clean your sheets and towels.
However, they’re not going to remove dirt like oils, skin flakes and sweat. So as much as I would love the idea of sheets and towels that clean themselves, that’s not exactly what happens.
Also, excessive use of antimicrobials such as nanosilver can lead to microbes becoming resistant to them.
Rietie Venter, Associate professor, Clinical and Health Sciences, University of South Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Strong Curves – by Bret Contreras & Kellie Davis
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The title (and subtitle) is, of course, an appeal to vanity. However, the first-listed author is well-known as “The Glute Guy”, and he takes this very seriously, not just for aesthetic reasons but also for practical reasons.
After all, when it comes to posture and stability, a lot rests on our hips, and hips, well, they rest on our butt and thighs. What’s more, the gluteus maximus is the largest muscle in the human body, so really, is it a good one to neglect? Probably not, and your lower back will definitely thank you for keeping your glutes in good order, too.
That said, while it’s a focal point, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all, and this book does cover the whole body.
The book takes the reader from “absolute beginner” to “could compete professionally”, with clearly-illustrated and well-described exercises. We also get a strong “crash course” in the relevant anatomy and physiology, and even a chapter on nutrition, which is a lot better than a lot of exercise books’ efforts in that regard.
For those who like short courses, this book has several progressive 12-week workout plans that take the reader from a very clear starting point to a very clear goal point.
Another strength of the book is that while a lot of exercises expect (and require) access to a gym, there are also whole sections of “at home / bodyweight” exercises, including 12-week workout plans for such, as described above.
Bottom line: there’s really nothing bad that this reviewer can find to say about this one—highly recommendable to any woman who wants to get strong while keeping a feminine look.
Click here to check out Strong Curves, and rebuild your body, your way!
PS: at first glance, the cover art looks like an AI model; it’s not; that’s the co-author Kellie Davis, who also serves as the model through the book’s many photographic illustrations.
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For Many Rural Women, Finding Maternity Care Outweighs Concerns About Abortion Access
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BAKER CITY, Ore. — In what has become a routine event in rural America, a hospital maternity ward closed in 2023 in this small Oregon town about an hour from the Idaho border.
For Shyanne McCoy, 23, that meant the closest hospital with an obstetrician on staff when she was pregnant was a 45-mile drive away over a mountain pass.
When McCoy developed symptoms of preeclampsia last January, she felt she had the best chance of getting the care she needed at a larger hospital in Boise, Idaho, two hours away. She spent the final week of her pregnancy there, too far from home to risk leaving, before giving birth to her daughter.
Six months later, she said it seems clear to her that the health care needs of rural young women like her are largely ignored.
For McCoy and others, figuring out how to obtain adequate care to safely have a baby in Baker City has quickly eclipsed concerns about another medical service lacking in the area: abortion. But in Oregon and elsewhere in the country, progressive lawmakers’ attempts to expand abortion access sometimes clash with rural constituencies.
Oregon is considered one of the most protective states in the country when it comes to abortion. There are no legal limits on when someone can receive an abortion in the state, and the service is covered by its Medicaid system. Still, efforts to expand access in the rural, largely conservative areas that cover most of the state have encountered resistance and incredulity.
It’s a divide that has played out in elections in such states as Nevada, where voters passed a ballot measure in November that seeks to codify abortion protections in the state constitution. Residents in several rural counties opposed the measure.
In Oregon, during the months just before the Baker City closure was announced, Democratic state lawmakers were focused on a proposed pilot program that would launch two mobile reproductive health care clinics in rural areas. The bill specified that the van-based clinics would include abortion services.
State Rep. Christine Goodwin, a Republican from a southwestern Oregon district, called the proposal the “latest example” of urban legislators telling rural leaders what their communities need.
The mobile health clinic pilot was eventually removed from the bill that was under discussion. That means no new abortion options in Oregon’s Baker County — and no new state-funded maternity care either.
“I think if you expanded rural access in this community to abortions before you extended access to maternal health care, you would have an uprising on your hands,” said Paige Witham, 27, a member of the Baker County health care steering committee and the mother of two children, including an infant born in October.
A study published in JAMA in early December that examined nearly 5,000 acute care hospitals found that by 2022, 52% of rural hospitals lacked obstetrics care after more than a decade of unit closures. The health implications of those closures for young women, the population most likely to need pregnancy care, and their babies can be significant. Research has shown that added distance between a patient and obstetric care increases the likelihood the baby will be admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU.
Witham said that while she does not support abortion, she believes the government should not “legislate it away completely.” She said that unless the government provides far more support for young families, like free child care and better mental health care, abortion should remain legal.
Conversations with a liberal school board member, a moderate owner of a timber company, members of Baker City’s Republican Party chapter, a local doula, several pregnant women, and the director of the Baker County Health Department — many of whom were not rigidly opposed to abortion — all turned up the same answer: No mobile clinics offering abortions here, please.
Kelle Osborn, a nurse supervisor for the Baker County Health Department, loved the idea of a mobile clinic that would provide education and birth control services to people in outlying areas. She was less thrilled about including abortion services in a clinic on wheels.
“It’s not something that should just be handed out from a mobile van,” she said of abortion services. She said people in her conservative rural county would probably avoid using the clinics for anything if they were understood to provide abortion services.
Both Osborn and Meghan Chancey, the health department’s director, said they would rank many health care priorities higher, including the need for a general surgeon, an ICU, and a dialysis clinic.
Nationally, reproductive health care services of all types tend to be limited for people in rural areas, even within states that protect abortion access. More than two-thirds of people in “maternity care deserts” — all of which are in rural counties — must drive more than a half-hour to get obstetric care, according to a 2024 March of Dimes report. For people in the Southern states where lawmakers installed abortion bans, abortion care can be up to 700 miles away, according to a data analysis by Axios.
Nathan Defrees grew up in Baker City and has practiced medicine here since 2017. He works for a family medicine clinic. If a patient asks about abortion, he provides information about where and how one can be obtained, but he doesn’t offer abortions himself.
“There’s not a lot of anonymity in small towns for physicians who provide that care,” he said. “Many of us aren’t willing to sacrifice the rest of our career for that.”
He also pointed to the small number of patients requesting the service locally. Just six people living in Baker County had an abortion in 2023, according to data from the Oregon Department of Public Health. Meanwhile, 125 residents had a baby that year.
A doctor with obstetric training living in another rural part of the state has chosen to quietly provide early-stage abortions when asked. The doctor, concerned for their family’s safety in the small, conservative town where they live, asked not to be identified.
The idea that better access to abortion is not needed in rural areas seems naive, the doctor said. People most in need of abortion often don’t have access to any medical service not already available in town, the doctor pointed out. The first patient the doctor provided an abortion for at the clinic was a meth user with no resources to travel or to manage an at-home medication abortion.
“It seemed entirely inappropriate for me to turn her away for care I had the training and the tools to do,” the doctor said.
Defrees said it has been easier for Baker County residents to get an abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
A new Planned Parenthood clinic in Ontario, Oregon, 70 miles away in neighboring Malheur County, was built primarily to provide services to people from the Boise metro area, but it also created an option for many living in rural eastern Oregon.
Idaho is one of the 16 states with near-total bans on abortion. Like many states with bans, Idaho has struggled to maintain its already small fleet of fetal medicine doctors. The loss of regional expertise touches Baker City, too, Defrees said.
For example, he said, the treatment plan for women who have a desired pregnancy but need a termination for medical reasons is now far less clear. “It used to be those folks could go to Boise,” he said. “Now they can’t. That does put us in a bind.”
Portland is the next closest option for that type of care, and that means a 300-mile drive along a set of highways that can be treacherous in winter.
“It’s a lot scarier to be pregnant now in Baker City than it ever has been,” Defrees said.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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