Ageless Aging – by Maddy Dychtwald
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Maddy Dychtwald, herself 73, has spent her career working in the field of aging. She’s not a gerontologist or even a doctor, but she’s nevertheless been up-to-the-ears in the industry for decades, mostly as an organizer, strategist, facilitator, and so forth. As such, she’s had her finger on the pulse of the healthy longevity movement for a long time.
This book was written to address a problem, and the problem is: lifespan is increasing (especially for women), but healthspan has not been keeping up the pace.
In other words: people (especially women) are living longer, but often with more health problems along the way than before.
And mostly, it’s for lack of information (or sometimes: too much competing incorrect information).
Fortunately, information is something that a woman in Dychtwald’s position has an abundance of, because she has researchers and academics in many fields on speed-dial and happy to answer her questions (we get a lot of input from such experts throughout the book—which is why this book is so science-based, despite the author not being a scientist).
The book answers a lot of important questions beyond the obvious “what diet/exercise/sleep/supplements/etc are best for healthy aging” (spoiler: it’s quite consistent with the things we recommend here, because guess what, science is science), questions like how best to prepare for this that or the other, how to get a head start on preventative healthcare for some things, how to avoid being a burden to our families (one can argue that families are supposed to look after each other, but still, it’s a legitimate worry for many, and understandably so), and even how to balance the sometimes conflicting worlds of health and finances.
Unlike many authors, she also talks about the different kinds of aging, and tackles each of them separately and together. We love to see it!
Bottom line: this book is a very good one-stop-shop for all things healthy aging. It’s aimed squarely at women, but most advice goes for men the same too, aside from the section on hormones and such.
Click here to check out Ageless Aging, and plan your future!
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Can you die from long COVID? The answer is not so simple
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Nearly five years into the pandemic, COVID is feeling less central to our daily lives.
But the virus, SARS-CoV-2, is still around, and for many people the effects of an infection can be long-lasting. When symptoms persist for more than three months after the initial COVID infection, this is generally referred to as long COVID.
In September, Grammy-winning Brazilian musician Sérgio Mendes died aged 83 after reportedly having long COVID.
Australian data show 196 deaths were due to the long-term effects of COVID from the beginning of the pandemic up to the end of July 2023.
In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 3,544 long-COVID-related deaths from the start of the pandemic up to the end of June 2022.
The symptoms of long COVID – such as fatigue, shortness of breath and “brain fog” – can be debilitating. But can you die from long COVID? The answer is not so simple.
Jan Krava/Shutterstock How could long COVID lead to death?
There’s still a lot we don’t understand about what causes long COVID. A popular theory is that “zombie” virus fragments may linger in the body and cause inflammation even after the virus has gone, resulting in long-term health problems. Recent research suggests a reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 proteins in the blood might explain why some people experience ongoing symptoms.
We know a serious COVID infection can damage multiple organs. For example, severe COVID can lead to permanent lung dysfunction, persistent heart inflammation, neurological damage and long-term kidney disease.
These issues can in some cases lead to death, either immediately or months or years down the track. But is death beyond the acute phase of infection from one of these causes the direct result of COVID, long COVID, or something else? Whether long COVID can directly cause death continues to be a topic of debate.
Of the 3,544 deaths related to long COVID in the US up to June 2022, the most commonly recorded underlying cause was COVID itself (67.5%). This could mean they died as a result of one of the long-term effects of a COVID infection, such as those mentioned above.
COVID infection was followed by heart disease (8.6%), cancer (2.9%), Alzheimer’s disease (2.7%), lung disease (2.5%), diabetes (2%) and stroke (1.8%). Adults aged 75–84 had the highest rate of death related to long COVID (28.8%).
These findings suggest many of these people died “with” long COVID, rather than from the condition. In other words, long COVID may not be a direct driver of death, but rather a contributor, likely exacerbating existing conditions.
The symptoms of long COVID can be debilitating. Lysenko Andrii/Shutterstock ‘Cause of death’ is difficult to define
Long COVID is a relatively recent phenomenon, so mortality data for people with this condition are limited.
However, we can draw some insights from the experiences of people with post-viral conditions that have been studied for longer, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS).
Like long COVID, ME/CFS is a complex condition which can have significant and varied effects on a person’s physical fitness, nutritional status, social engagement, mental health and quality of life.
Some research indicates people with ME/CFS are at increased risk of dying from causes including heart conditions, infections and suicide, that may be triggered or compounded by the debilitating nature of the syndrome.
So what is the emerging data on long COVID telling us about the potential increased risk of death?
Research from 2023 has suggested adults in the US with long COVID were at greater risk of developing heart disease, stroke, lung disease and asthma.
Research has also found long COVID is associated with a higher risk of suicidal ideation (thinking about or planning suicide). This may reflect common symptoms and consequences of long COVID such as sleep problems, fatigue, chronic pain and emotional distress.
But long COVID is more likely to occur in people who have existing health conditions. This makes it challenging to accurately determine how much long COVID contributes to a person’s death.
Research has long revealed reliability issues in cause-of-death reporting, particularly for people with chronic illness.
Determining the exact cause of someone’s death is not always easy. Pixabay/Pexels So what can we conclude?
Ultimately, long COVID is a chronic condition that can significantly affect quality of life, mental wellbeing and overall health.
While long COVID is not usually immediately or directly life-threatening, it’s possible it could exacerbate existing conditions, and play a role in a person’s death in this way.
Importantly, many people with long COVID around the world lack access to appropriate support. We need to develop models of care for the optimal management of people with long COVID with a focus on multidisciplinary care.
Dr Natalie Jovanovski, Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in the School of Health and Biomedical Sciences at RMIT University, contributed to this article.
Rose (Shiqi) Luo, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, RMIT University; Catherine Itsiopoulos, Professor and Dean, School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, RMIT University; Kate Anderson, Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow, RMIT University; Magdalena Plebanski, Professor of Immunology, RMIT University, and Zhen Zheng, Associate Professor, STEM | Health and Biomedical Sciences, RMIT University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Anti-Inflammatory Pineapple Fried Rice
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Fried rice is not most people’s go-to when one thinks of health food, but this one is. It’s packed with plenty of nutrients, many of which are anti-inflammatory, but the real star is the pineapple (with its high bromelain content and thus particularly potent benefits).
You will need
- 2½ cups cooked wholegrain basmati rice (you can use our Tasty Versatile Rice recipe if you don’t already have leftovers to use)
- 1 cup pineapple chunks
- ½ red onion, diced
- 1 red bell pepper, diced
- ½ cup sweetcorn
- ½ peas
- 3 green onions, chopped
- 2 serrano peppers, chopped (omit if you don’t care for heat)
- 2 tbsp coconut oil
- 1 tbsp grated fresh ginger
- 1 tbsp black pepper, coarse ground
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Fry the red onion, serrano peppers, and ginger in the coconut oil over a medium heat, stirring frequently, for about 3 minutes.
2) Add the pineapple, bell pepper, sweetcorn, peas, and black pepper, stirring frequently, for about another 3 minutes.
3) Add the rice, stirring gently but thoroughly, until fully reheated and mixed in.
4) Serve, garnishing with the green onions.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Eat To Beat Inflammation
- Ginger Does A Lot More Than You Think
- Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
- Bromelain vs Inflammation & Much More
Take care!
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Foods For Managing Hypothyroidism (incl. Hashimoto’s)
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Foods for Managing Hypothyroidism
For any unfamiliar, hypothyroidism is the condition of having an underactive thyroid gland. The thyroid gland lives at the base of the front of your neck, and, as the name suggests, it makes and stores thyroid hormones. Those are important for many systems in the body, and a shortage typically causes fatigue, weight gain, and other symptoms.
What causes it?
This makes a difference in some cases to how it can be treated/managed. Causes include:
- Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune condition
- Severe inflammation (end result is similar to the above, but more treatable)
- Dietary deficiencies, especially iodine deficiency
- Secondary endocrine issues, e.g. pituitary gland didn’t make enough TSH for the thyroid gland to do its thing
- Some medications (ask your pharmacist)
We can’t do a lot about those last two by leveraging diet alone, but we can make a big difference to the others.
What to eat (and what to avoid)
There is nuance here, which we’ll go into a bit, but let’s start by giving the
one-linetwo-line summary that tends to be the dietary advice for most things:- Eat a nutrient-dense whole-foods diet (shocking, we know)
- Avoid sugar, alcohol, flour, processed foods (ditto)
What’s the deal with meat and dairy?
- Meat: avoid red and processed meats; poultry and fish are fine or even good (unless fried; don’t do that)
- Dairy: limit/avoid milk; but unsweetened yogurt and cheese are fine or even good
What’s the deal with plants?
First, get plenty of fiber, because that’s important to ease almost any inflammation-related condition, and for general good health for most people (an exception is if you have Crohn’s Disease, for example).
If you have Hashimoto’s, then gluten (as found in wheat, barley, and rye) may be an issue, but the jury is still out, science-wise. Here’s an example study for “avoid gluten” and “don’t worry about gluten”, respectively:
- The Effect of Gluten-Free Diet on Thyroid Autoimmunity in Women with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis
- Doubtful Justification of the Gluten-Free Diet in the Course of Hashimoto’s Disease
So, you might want to skip it, to be on the safe side, but that’s up to you (and the advice of your nutritionist/doctor, as applicable).
A word on goitrogens…
Goitrogens are found in cruciferous vegetables and soy, both of which are very healthy foods for most people, but need some extra awareness in the case of hypothyroidism. This means there’s no need to abstain completely, but:
- Keep serving sizes small, for example a 100g serving only
- Cook goitrogenic foods before eating them, to greatly reduce goitrogenic activity
For more details, reading even just the abstract (intro summary) of this paper will help you get healthy cruciferous veg content without having a goitrogenic effect.
(as for soy, consider just skipping that if you suffer from hypothyroidism)
What nutrients to focus on getting?
- Top tier nutrients: iodine, selenium, zinc
- Also important: vitamin B12, vitamin D, magnesium, iron
Enjoy!
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Escape Self-Sabotage
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Stop Making The Same Mistakes
It’s easy to think that a self-destructive cycle is easy to avoid if you have no special will to self-destruction. However, the cycle is sneaky.
It’s sneaky because it can be passive, and/or omissions rather than actions, procrastinations rather than obvious acts of impulse, and so forth.
So, they’re often things that specifically aren’t there to see.
How to catch them
How often do you think “I wish I had [done xyz]” or “I wish I had [done yxz] sooner”?
Now, how often have you thought that about the same thing more than once? For example, “I should have kept up my exercise”.
For things like this, habit-trackers are a great way to, well, keep track of habits. If for example you planned to do a 10-minute exercise session daily but you’ve been postponing it since you got distracted on January the 2nd, then it’ll highlight that. See also:
How To Really Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits
Speaking of habits, this goes for other forms of procrastination, too. For example, if you are always slow to get medical check-ups, or renew your prescriptions, or get ready for some regularly-occurring thing in your schedule, then set a reminder in your preferred way (phone app, calendar on the wall, whatever) and when the appointed time arrives (to book the check-up, renew the prescription, do your taxes, whatever), do it on the day you set your reminder for, as a personal rule for you that you keep to, barring extreme calamity.
By “extreme calamity” we mean less “running late today” and more “house burned down”.
Digital traps
Bad habits can be insidious in other ways too, like getting sucked into social media scrolling (it is literally designed to do that to you; you are not immune modern programming hijacking evolutionary dopamine responses).
Setting a screentime limit (you can specify “just these apps” if you like) will help with this. On most devices, this feature includes a sticky notification in the notification bar, that’ll remind you “27 out of 30 minutes remaining” or whatever you set it for. That’ll remind you to do what you went there to do, instead of getting caught in the endless scroll (and if you went there to just browse, to do so briefly).
Here’s how to set that:
Instructions for iOS devices | Instructions for Android devices
Oh, and on the topic of social media? If you find yourself getting caught up in unproductive arguments on the Internet, try the three-response rule:
- You reply; they reply (no progress made)
- You reply; they reply (still no progress made)
- You reply; they reply (still yet no progress made)
You reply just one more time: “I have a personal rule that if I’m arguing on the Internet and no progress has been made after three replies, I don’t reply further—I find this is helpful to avoid a lot of time lost to pointless arguing that isn’t going anywhere. Best wishes.”
(and then stick to it, no matter how they try to provoke you; best is to just not look until at least the next day)
When “swept up in love” gets to one of those little whirlpools…
The same works in personal relationships, by the way. If for example you are arguing with a loved one and not making progress, it can be good if you both have a pre-arranged agreement that either of you can, up to once on any given day, invoke a “time-out” (e.g. 30 minutes, but you agree the time between you when you first make this standing policy) during which you will both keep out of the other’s way, and come back with a more productive head on (remembering that things go best when it’s you both vs the problem, rather than vs each other).
See also:
Seriously Useful Communication Skills: Conflict Resolution
What if the self-sabotaging cycle is active and apparent?
Well, that is less sneaky, but certainly no less serious, and sometimes moreso. An obvious example is drinking too much; this is often cyclical in nature. We wrote about this one previously:
That article’s alcohol-specific, but the same advices go for other harmful activities, including other substance abuse (which in turn includes binge-eating), as well psychological addictions (such as gambling, for example).
Finally…
If your destructive cycle is more of a rut you’ve got stuck in, a common advice is to change something, anything, to get out of the rut.
That can be very bad advice! Because sometimes the change you go for is absolutely not the change that was needed, and is rather just cracking under pressure and doing something impulsive.
Here’s one way to actively get out of a slump:
Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety
Note: you do not have to be depressed or anxious to do this. But the point is, it’s a tool you can use even if you are depressed and/or anxious, so it’s a good thing to try for getting out of most kinds of slumps.
And really finally, here’s a resource for, well, the title speaks for itself:
When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
Take care!
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Glycemic Index vs Glycemic Load vs Insulin Index
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How To Actually Use Those Indices
Carbohydrates are essential for our life, and/but often bring about our early demise. It would be a very conveniently simple world if it were simply a matter of “enjoy in moderation”, but the truth is, it’s not that simple.
To take an extreme example, for the sake of clearest illustration: The person who eats an 80% whole fruit diet (and makes up the necessary protein and fats etc in the other 20%) will probably be healthier than the person who eats a “standard American diet”, despite not practising moderation in their fruit-eating activities. The “standard American diet” has many faults, and one of those faults is how it promotes sporadic insulin spikes leading to metabolic disease.
If your breakfast is a glass of orange juice, this is a supremely “moderate” consumption, but an insulin spike is an insulin spike.
Quick sidenote: if you’re wondering why eating immoderate amounts of fruit is unlikely to cause such spikes, but a single glass of orange juice is, check out:
Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Glycemic Index
The first tool in our toolbox here is glycemic index, or GI.
GI measures how much a carb-containing food raises blood glucose levels, also called blood sugar levels, but it’s just glucose that’s actually measured, bearing in mind that more complex carbs will generally get broken down to glucose.
Pure glucose has a GI of 100, and other foods are ranked from 0 to 100 based on how they compare.
Sometimes, what we do to foods changes its GI.
- Some is because it changed form, like the above example of whole fruit (low GI) vs fruit juice (high GI).
- Some is because of more “industrial” refinement processes, such as whole grain wheat (medium GI) vs white flour and white flour products (high GI)
- Some is because of other changes, like starches that were allowed to cool before being reheated (or eaten cold).
Broadly speaking, a daily average GI of 45 is considered great.
But that’s not the whole story…
Glycemic Load
Glycemic Load, or GL, takes the GI and says “ok, but how much of it was there?”, because this is often relevant information.
Refined sugar may have a high GI, but half a teaspoon of sugar in your coffee isn’t going to move your blood sugar levels as much as a glass of Coke, say—the latter simply has more sugar in, and just the same zero fiber.
GL is calculated by (grams of carbs / 100) x GI, by the way.
But it still misses some important things, so now let’s look at…
Insulin Index
Insulin Index, which does not get an abbreviation (probably because of the potentially confusing appearance of “II”), measures the rise in insulin levels, regardless of glucose levels.
This is important, because a lot of insulin response is independent of blood glucose:
- Some is because of other sugars, some some is in response to fats, and yes, even proteins.
- Some is a function of metabolic base rate.
- Some is a stress response.
- Some remains a mystery!
Another reason it’s important is that insulin drives weight gain and metabolic disorders far more than glucose.
Note: the indices of foods are calculated based on average non-diabetic response. If for example you have Type 1 Diabetes, then when you take a certain food, your rise in insulin is going to be whatever insulin you then take, because your body’s insulin response is disrupted by being too busy fighting a civil war in your pancreas.
If your diabetes is type 2, or you are prediabetic, then a lot of different things could happen depending on the stage and state of your diabetes, but the insulin index is still a very good thing to be aware of, because you want to resensitize your body to insulin, which means (barring any urgent actions for immediate management of hyper- or hypoglycemia, obviously) you want to eat foods with a low insulin index where possible.
Great! What foods have a low insulin index?
Many factors affect insulin index, but to speak in general terms:
- Whole plant foods are usually top-tier options
- Lean and/or white meats generally have lower insulin index than red and/or fatty ones
- Unprocessed is generally lower than processed
- The more solid a food is, generally the lower its insulin index compared to a less solid version of the same food (e.g. baked potatoes vs mashed potatoes; cheese vs milk, etc)
But do remember the non-food factors too! This means where possible:
- reducing/managing stress
- getting frequent exercise
- getting good sleep
- practising intermittent fasting
See for example (we promise you it’s relevant):
Fix Chronic Fatigue & Regain Your Energy, By Science
…as are (especially recommendable!) the two links we drop at the bottom of that page; do check them out if you can
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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Sauerkraut vs Pickled Cucumber – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing sauerkraut to pickled cucumber, we picked the sauerkraut.
Why?
Both of these fermented foods can give a gut-healthy microbiome boost, but how do they stack up otherwise?
In terms of macros, sauerkraut has more protein, carbs, and fiber. They are both low glycemic index foods, so we’ll go with the one that has more fiber out of the two, and that’s the ‘kraut.
In the category of vitamins, sauerkraut has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, E, and choline, while pickled cucumbers have more of vitamins A and K. An easy win for sauerkraut.
When it comes to minerals, sauerkraut has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while pickled cucumbers are not higher in any mineral, except sodium (on average, pickled cucumbers have about 2x the sodium of sauerkraut). Another clear win for sauerkraut.
In short, enjoy either or both in moderation, but it’s clear which boasts the most nutritional benefits, and that’s the sauerkraut!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Make Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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