Aging Backwards – by Miranda Esmonde-White

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In this book, there’s an upside and a downside to the author’s professional background:

  • Upside: Miranda Esmonde-White is a ballet-dancer-turned-physical-trainer, and it shows
  • Downside: Miranda Esmonde-White is not a scientist, and it shows

She cites a lot of science, but she either does not understand it or else intentionally misrepresents it. We will assume the former. But as one example, she claims:

“for every minute you exercise, you lengthen your life by 7 minutes”

…which cheat code to immortality is absolutely not backed-up by the paper she cites for it. The paper, like most papers, was much more measured in its proclamations; “there was an association” and “with these conditions”, etc.

Nevertheless, while she misunderstands lots of science along the way, her actual advice is good and sound. Her workout programs really will help people to become younger by various (important, life-changing!) metrics of biological age, mostly pertaining to mobility.

And yes, this is a workout-based approach; we won’t read much about diet and other lifestyle factors here.

Bottom line: it has its flaws, but nevertheless delivers on its premise of helping the reader to become biologically younger through exercises, mostly mobility drills.

Click here to check out Aging Backwards, and age backwards!

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Recommended

  • Bold Beans – by Amelia Christie-Miller
  • The Brain Fog Fix – by Dr. Mike Dow
    Dive into a 3-week, holistic brain health overhaul: dietary tweaks, sleep improvement, exercise, and a strong social network, all backed by psychotherapist insights and scientific evidence.

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  • Two Things You Can Do To Improve Stroke Survival Chances

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    Dr. Andrew’s Stroke Survival Guide

    This is Dr. Nadine Andrew. She’s a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine at Monash University. She’s the Research Data Lead for the National Center of Healthy Aging. She is lead investigator on the NHMRC-funded PRECISE project… The most comprehensive stroke data linkage study to date! In short, she knows her stuff.

    We’ve talked before about how sample size is important when it comes to scientific studies. It’s frustrating; sometimes we see what looks like a great study until we notice it has a sample size of 17 or something.

    Dr. Andrew didn’t mess around in this regard, and the 12,386 participants in her Australian study of stroke patients provided a huge amount of data!

    With a 95% confidence interval because of the huge dataset, she found that there was one factor that reduced mortality by 26%.

    And the difference was…

    Whether or not patients had a chronic disease management plan set up with their GP (General Practitioner, or “family doctor”, in US terms), after their initial stroke treatment.

    45% of patients had this; the other 55% did not, so again the sample size was big for both groups.

    Why this is important:

    After a stroke, often a patient is discharged as early as it seems safe to do so, and there’s a common view that “it just takes time” and “now we wait”. After all, no medical technology we currently have can outright repair that damage—the body must repair itself! Medications—while critical*—can only support that and help avoid recurrence.

    *How critical? VERY critical. Critical critical. Dr. Andrew found, some years previously, that greater levels of medication adherence (ie, taking the correct dose on time and not missing any) significantly improved survival outcomes. No surprise, right? But what may surprise is that this held true even for patients with near-perfect adherence. In other words: miss a dose at your peril. It’s that important.

    But, as Dr. Andrew’s critical research shows, that’s no reason to simply prescribe ongoing meds and otherwise cut a patient loose… or, if you or a loved one are the patient, to allow yourself/them to be left without a doctor’s ongoing active support in the form of a chronic disease management plan.

    What does a chronic disease management plan look like?

    First, what it’s not:

    • “Yes yes, I’m here if you need me, just make an appointment if something changes”
    • “Let’s pencil in a check-up in three months”
    • Etc

    What it actually looks like:

    It looks like a plan. A personal care plan, built around that person’s individual needs, risks, liabilities… and potential complications.

    Because who amongst us, especially at the age where strokes are more likely, has an uncomplicated medical record? There will always be comorbidities and confounding factors, so a one-size-fits-all plan will not do.

    Dr. Andrew’s work took place in Australia, so she had the Australian healthcare system in mind… We know many of our subscribers are from North America and other places. But read this, and you’ll see how this could go just as much for the US or Canada:

    ❝The evidence shows the importance of Medicare financially supporting primary care physicians to provide structured chronic disease management after a stroke.

    We also provide a strong case for the ongoing provision of these plans within a universal healthcare system. Strategies to improve uptake at the GP level could include greater financial incentives and mandates, education for patients and healthcare professionals.❞

    See her groundbreaking study for yourself here!

    The Bottom Line:

    If you or a loved one has a stroke, be prepared to make sure you get a chronic health management plan in place. Note that if it’s you who has the stroke, you might forget this or be unable to advocate for yourself. So, we recommend to discuss this with a partner or close friend sooner rather than later!

    “But I’m quite young and healthy and a stroke is very unlikely for me”

    Good for you! And the median age of Dr. Andrew’s gargantuan study was 70 years. But:

    • do you have older relatives? Be aware for them, too.
    • strokes can happen earlier in life too! You don’t want to be an interesting statistic.

    Some stroke-related quick facts:

    Stroke is the No. 5 cause of death and a leading cause of disability in the U.S.

    Stroke can happen to anyone—any age, any time—and everyone needs to know the warning signs.

    On average, 1.9 million brain cells die every minute that a stroke goes untreated.

    Stroke is an EMERGENCY. Call 911 immediately.

    Early treatment leads to higher survival rates and lower disability rates. Calling 911 lets first responders start treatment on someone experiencing stroke symptoms before arriving at the hospital.

    Source: https://www.stroke.org/en/about-stroke

    What are the warning signs for stroke?

    Use the letters F.A.S.T. to spot a stroke and act quickly:

    • F = Face Drooping—does one side of the face droop or is it numb? Ask the person to smile. Is the person’s smile uneven?
    • A = Arm Weakness—is one arm weak or numb? Ask the person to raise both arms. Does one arm drift downward?
    • S = Speech Difficulty—is speech slurred?
    • T = Time to call 911

    Source: https://www.stroke.org/en/about-stroke/stroke-symptoms

    Last but not least, while we’re sharing resources:

    Download the PDF Checklist: 8 Ways To Help Prevent a Second Stroke

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  • Spiced Fruit & Nut Chutney

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    ‘Tis the season to make the chutney that will then be aged chutney when you want it later! And unlike supermarket varieties with their ingredients list that goes “Sugar, spirit vinegar, inverted glucose-fructose syrup,” this one has an array of health-giving fruits and nuts (just omit the nuts if you or someone you may want to give this to has an allergy), and really nothing bad in here at all. And of course, tasty healthful spices!

    You will need

    • 2 red onions, chopped
    • 1½ cups dried apricots, chopped
    • 1½ cups dried figs, chopped
    • 1 cup raisins
    • ½ cup apple cider vinegar
    • ½ cup slivered almonds
    • ½ lime, chopped and deseeded
    • ¼ bulb garlic, chopped
    • 1 hot pepper, chopped (your choice what kind; omit if you don’t like heat at all; multiply if you want more heat)
    • 2 tablespoons honey or maple syrup (omit for a less sweet chutney; there is sweetness in the dried fruits already, after all)
    • 1 tbsp freshly grated ginger
    • 2 tsp sweet cinnamon
    • 1 tsp nutmeg
    • 1 tsp black pepper
    • ½ teaspoon allspice
    • ½ MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
    • Extra virgin olive oil

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Heat some oil in a heavy-based pan that will be large enough for all ingredients to go into eventually. Fry the onions on a gentle heat for around 15 minutes. We don’t need to caramelize them yet (this will happen with time), but we do want them soft and sweet already.

    2) Add the ginger, garlic, and chili, and stir in well.

    3) When the onions start to brown, add the fruit and stir well to mix thoroughly.

    4) Add the honey or maple syrup (if using), and the vinegar; add the remaining spices/seasonings, so everything is in there now except the almonds.

    5) Cook gently for another 30 minutes while stirring. At some point it’ll become thick and sticky; add a little water as necessary. You don’t want to drown it, but you do want it to stay moist. It’ll probably take only a few tablespoons of added water in total, but add them one at a time and stir in before judging whether more is needed. By the end of the 30 minutes, it should be more solid, to the point it can stand up by itself.

    6) Add the almonds, stir to combine, and leave to cool. Put it in jars until you need it (or perhaps give it as gifts).

    Alternative method: if you don’t want to be standing at a stove stirring for about an hour in total, you can use a slow cooker / crock pot instead. Put the same ingredients in the same order, but don’t stir them, just leave them in layers (this is because of the pattern of heat distribution; it’ll be hotter at the bottom, so the things that need to be more cooked should be there, and the design means they won’t burn) for about two hours, then stir well to mix thoroughly, and leave it for another hour or two, before turning it off to let it cool. Put it in jars until you need it (or perhaps give it as gifts).

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    Take care!

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  • Happy Mind, Happy Life – by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

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    Let’s start with a “why”. If happiness doesn’t strike you as a worthwhile goal in and of itself, Dr. Chatterjee discusses the health implications of happiness/unhappiness.

    And, yes, including in studies where other factors were controlled for, so he shows how happiness/unhappiness does really have a causal role in health—it’s not just a matter of “breaking news: sick people are less happy”.

    The author, a British GP (General Practitioner, the equivalent of what the US calls a “family doctor”) with decades of experience, has found a lot of value in the practice of holistic medicine. For this reason, it’s what he recommends to his patients at work, in his books, his blog, and his regular spot on a popular BBC breakfast show.

    The writing style is relaxed and personable, without skimping on information density. Indeed, Dr. Chatterjee offers many pieces of holistic health advice, and dozens of practical exercises to boost your happiness and proof you against adversity.

    Because, whatever motivational speakers may say, we can’t purely “think ourselves happy”; sometimes we have real external threats and bad things in life. But, we can still improve our experience of even these things, not to mention suffer less, and get through it in better shape with a smile at the end of it.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to be happier and healthier (who wouldn’t?), then this book is a sure-fire way to set you on that path.

    Click here to check out Happy Mind, Happy Life and upgrade yours!

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Related Posts

  • Bold Beans – by Amelia Christie-Miller
  • Hormone Replacement

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    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 cant believe 10 Almonds addresses questions. Thanks. I see the word symptoms for menopause. I don’t know what word should replace it but maybe one should be used or is symptom accurate? And I recently read that there was a great disservice for women in my era as they were denied/scared of hormones replacement. Unnecessarily❞

    You’d better believe it! In fact we love questions; they give us things to research and write about.

    “Symptom” is indeed an entirely justified word to use, being:

    1. General: any phenomenon or circumstance accompanying something and serving as evidence of it.
    2. Medical: any phenomenon that arises from and accompanies a particular disease or disorder and serves as an indication of it.

    If the question is more whether the menopause can be considered a disease/disorder, well, it’s a naturally occurring and ultimately inevitable change, yes, but then, so is cancer (it’s in the simple mathematics of DNA replication and mutation that, unless a cure for cancer is found, we will always eventually get cancer, if nothing else kills us first).

    So, something being natural/inevitable isn’t a reason to not consider it a disease/disorder, nor a reason to not treat it as appropriate if it is causing us harm/discomfort that can be safely alleviated.

    Moreover, and semantics aside, it is medical convention to consider menopause to be a medical condition, that has symptoms. Indeed, for example, the US’s NIH (and its constituent NIA, the National Institute of Aging) and the UK’s NHS, both list the menopause’s symptoms, using that word:

    With regard to fearmongering around HRT, certainly that has been rife, and there were some very flawed (and later soundly refuted) studies a while back that prompted this—and even those flawed studies were not about the same (bioidentical) hormones available today, in any case. So even if they had been correct (they weren’t), it still wouldn’t be a reason to not get treatment nowadays, if appropriate!

    Don’t Forget…

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  • Eat All You Want (But Wisely)

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    Some Surprising Truths About Hunger And Satiety

    This is Dr. Barbara Rolls. She’s Professor and Guthrie Chair in Nutritional Sciences, and Director of the Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestive Behavior at Pennsylvania State University, after graduating herself from Oxford and Cambridge (yes, both). Her “awards and honors” take up four A4 pages, so we won’t list them all here.

    Most importantly, she’s an expert on hunger, satiety, and eating behavior in general.

    What does she want us to know?

    First and foremost: you cannot starve yourself thin, unless you literally starve yourself to death.

    What this is about: any weight lost due to malnutrition (“not eating enough” is malnutrition) will always go back on once food becomes available. So unless you die first (not a great health plan), merely restricting good will always result in “yo-yo dieting”.

    So, to avoid putting the weight back on and feeling miserable every day along the way… You need to eat as much as you feel you need.

    But, there’s a trick here (it’s about making you genuinely feel you need less)!

    Your body is an instrument—so play it

    Your body is the tool you use to accomplish pretty much anything you do. It is, in large part, at your command. Then there are other parts you can’t control directly.

    Dr. Rolls advises taking advantage of the fact that much of your body is a mindless machine that will simply follow instructions given.

    That includes instructions like “feel hungry” or “feel full”. But how to choose those?

    Volume matters

    An important part of our satiety signalling is based on a physical sensation of fullness. This, by the way, is why bariatric surgery (making a stomach a small fraction of the size it was before) works. It’s not that people can’t eat more (the stomach is stretchy and can also be filled repeatedly), it’s that they don’t want to eat more because the pressure sensors around the stomach feel full, and signal the hormone leptin to tell the brain we’re full now.

    Now consider:

    • On the one hand, 20 grapes, fresh and bursting with flavor
    • On the other hand, 20 raisins (so, dried grapes), containing the same calories

    Which do you think will get the leptin flowing sooner? Of course, the fresh grapes, because of the volume.

    So if you’ve ever seen those photos that show two foods side by side with the same number of calories but one is much larger (say, a small slice of pizza or a big salad), it’s not quite the cheap trick that it might have appeared.

    Or rather… It is a cheap trick; it’s just a cheap trick that works because your stomach is quite a simple organ.

    So, Dr. Rolls’ advice: generally speaking, go for voluminous food. Fruit is great from this, because there’s so much water. Air-popped popcorn also works great. Vegetables, too.

    Water matters, but differently than you might think

    A well-known trick is to drink water before and with a meal. That’s good, it’s good to be hydrated. However, it can be better. Dr. Rolls did an experiment:

    The design:

    ❝Subjects received 1 of 3 isoenergetic (1128 kJ) preloads 17 min before lunch on 3 d and no preload on 1 d.

    The preloads consisted of 1) chicken rice casserole, 2) chicken rice casserole served with a glass of water (356 g), and 3) chicken rice soup.

    The soup contained the same ingredients (type and amount) as the casserole that was served with water.❞

    The results:

    ❝Decreasing the energy density of and increasing the volume of the preload by adding water to it significantly increased fullness and reduced hunger and subsequent energy intake at lunch.

    The equivalent amount of water served as a beverage with a food did not affect satiety.❞

    The conclusion:

    ❝Consuming foods with a high water content more effectively reduced subsequent energy intake than did drinking water with food.❞

    You can read the study in full (it’s a worthwhile read!) here:

    Water incorporated into a food but not served with a food decreases energy intake in lean women

    Protein matters

    With all those fruits and vegetables and water, you may be wondering Dr. Rolls’ stance on proteins. It’s simple: protein is an appetite suppressant.

    However, it takes about 20 minutes to signal the brain about that, so having some protein in a starter (if like this writer, you’re the cook of the household, a great option is to enjoy a small portion of nuts while cooking!) gets that clock ticking, to signal satiety sooner.

    It may also help in other ways:

    Clinical Evidence and Mechanisms of High-Protein Diet-Induced Weight Loss

    As for other foods that can suppress appetite, by the way, you might like;

    25 Foods That Act As Natural Appetite Suppressants

    Variety matters, and in ways other than you might think

    A wide variety of foods (especially: a wide variety of plants) in one’s diet is well recognized as a key to a good balanced diet.

    However…

    A wide variety of dishes at the table, meanwhile, promotes greater consumption of food.

    Dr. Rolls did a study on this too, a while ago now (you’ll see how old it is) but the science seems robust:

    Variety in a Meal Enhances Food Intake in Man

    Notwithstanding the title, it wasnot about a man (that was just how scientists wrote in ye ancient times of 1981). The test subjects were, in order: rats, cats, a mixed group of men and women, the same group again, and then a different group of all women.

    So, Dr. Rolls’ advice is: it’s better to have one 20-ingredient dish, than 10 dishes with 20 ingredients between them.

    Sorry! We love tapas and buffets too, but that’s the science!

    So, “one-pot” meals are king in this regard; even if you serve it with one side (reasonable), that’s still only two dishes, which is pretty good going.

    Note that the most delicious many-ingredient stir-fries and similar dishes from around the world also fall into this category!

    Want to know more?

    If you have the time (it’s an hour), you can enjoy a class of hers for free:

    !

    Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later

    Enjoy!

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  • Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen

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    Give Us This Day Our Daily Dozen

    This is Dr. Michael Greger. He’s a physician-turned-author-educator, and we’ve featured him and his work occasionally over the past year or so:

    But what we’ve not covered, astonishingly, is one of the things for which he’s most famous, which is…

    Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen

    Based on the research in the very information-dense tome that his his magnum opus How Not To Die (while it doesn’t confer immortality, it does help avoid the most common causes of death), Dr. Greger recommends that we take care to enjoy each of the following things per day:

    Beans

    • Servings: 3 per day
    • Examples: ½ cup cooked beans, ¼ cup hummus

    Greens

    • Servings: 2 per day
    • Examples: 1 cup raw, ½ cup cooked

    Cruciferous vegetables

    • Servings: 1 per day
    • Examples: ½ cup chopped, 1 tablespoon horseradish

    Other vegetables

    • Servings: 2 per day
    • Examples: ½ cup non-leafy vegetables

    Whole grains

    • Servings: 3 per day
    • Examples: ½ cup hot cereal, 1 slice of bread

    Berries

    • Servings: 1 per day
    • Examples: ½ cup fresh or frozen, ¼ cup dried

    Other fruits

    • Servings: 3 per day
    • Examples: 1 medium fruit, ¼ cup dried fruit

    Flaxseed

    • Servings: 1 per day
    • Examples: 1 tablespoon ground

    Nuts & (other) seeds

    • Servings: 1 per day
    • Examples: ¼ cup nuts, 2 tablespoons nut butter

    Herbs & spices

    • Servings: 1 per day
    • Examples: ¼ teaspoon turmeric

    Hydrating drinks

    • Servings: 60 oz per day
    • Examples: Water, green tea, hibiscus tea

    Exercise

    • Servings: Once per day
    • Examples: 90 minutes moderate or 40 minutes vigorous

    Superficially it seems an interesting choice to, after listing 11 foods and drinks, have the 12th item as exercise but not add a 13th one of sleep—but perhaps he quite reasonably expects that people get a dose of sleep with more consistency than people get a dose of exercise. After all, exercise is mostly optional, whereas if we try to skip sleep for too long, our body will force the matter for us.

    Further 10almonds notes:

    Enjoy!

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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