Altered Traits – by Dr. Daniel Goleman & Dr. Richard Davidson

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We know that meditation helps people to relax, but what more than that?This book explores the available science.

We say “explore the available science”, but it’d be remiss of us not to note that the authors have also expanded the available science, conducting research in their own lab.

From stress tests and EEGs to attention tests and fMRIs, this book looks at the hard science of what different kinds of meditation do to the brain. Not just in terms of brain state, either, but gradual cumulative anatomical changes, too. Powerful stuff!

The style is very pop-science in presentation, easily comprehensible to all. Be aware though that this is an “if this, then that” book of science, not a how-to manual. If you want to learn to meditate, this isn’t the book for that.

Bottom line: if you’d like to understand more about how different kinds of meditation affect the brain differently, this is the book for you.

Click here to check out Altered Traits, and alter yours!

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Recommended

  • The Joy of Saying No – by Natalie Lue
  • How old’s too old to be a doctor? Why GPs and surgeons over 70 may need a health check to practise
    Medical Board of Australia considers health assessments for doctors over 70 amidst rising complaints and patient safety concerns.

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  • We analysed almost 1,000 social media posts about 5 popular medical tests. Most were utterly misleading

    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.

    When Kim Kardashian posted on Instagram about having had a full-body MRI, she enthused that the test can be “life saving”, detecting diseases in the earliest stages before symptoms arise.

    What Kardashian neglected to say was there’s no evidence this expensive scan can bring benefits for healthy people. She also didn’t mention it can carry harms including unnecessary diagnoses and inappropriate treatments.

    With this post in mind, we wanted to explore what influencers are telling us about medical tests.

    In a new study published today in JAMA Network Open, we analysed nearly 1,000 Instagram and TikTok posts about five popular medical tests which can all do more harm than good to healthy people, including the full-body MRI scan.

    We found the overwhelming majority of these posts were utterly misleading.

    C-R-V/Shutterstock

    5 controversial tests

    Before we get into the details of what we found, a bit about the five tests included in our study.

    While these tests can be valuable to some, all five carry the risk of overdiagnosis for generally healthy people. Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of a condition which would have never caused symptoms or problems. Overdiagnosis leads to overtreatment, which can cause unnecessary side effects and stress for the person, and wasted resources for the health system.

    As an example, estimates suggest 29,000 cancers a year are overdiagnosed in Australia alone.

    Overdiagnosis is a global problem, and it’s driven in part by healthy people having tests like these. Often, they’re promoted under the guise of early screening, as a way to “take control” of your health. But most healthy people simply don’t need them.

    These are the five tests we looked at:

    The full-body MRI scan claims to test for up to 500 conditions, including cancer. Yet there is no proven benefit of the scan for healthy people, and a real risk of unnecessary treatment from “false alarm” diagnoses.

    The “egg timer” test (technically known as the AMH, or anti-mullarian hormone test) is often falsely promoted as a fertility test for healthy women. While it may be beneficial for women within a fertility clinic setting, it cannot reliably predict the chance of a woman conceiving, or menopause starting. However, low results can increase fear and anxiety, and lead to unnecessary and expensive fertility treatments.

    Multi-cancer early detection blood tests are being heavily marketed as the “holy grail of cancer detection”, with claims they can screen for more than 50 cancers. In reality, clinical trials are still a long way from finished. There’s no good evidence yet that the benefits will outweigh the harms of unnecessary cancer diagnoses.

    The gut microbiome test of your stool promises “wellness” via early detection of many conditions, from flatulence to depression, again without good evidence of benefit. There’s also concern that test results can lead to wasted resources.

    Testosterone testing in healthy men is not supported by any high-quality evidence, with concerns direct-to-consumer advertising leads men to get tested and take testosterone replacement therapy unnecessarily. Use of testosterone replacement therapy carries its own risk of potential harms with the long-term safety in relation to heart disease and mortality still largely unknown.

    Woman scrolling on a phone
    Multi-cancer early detection blood tests are heavily marketed. Yuri A/Shutterstock

    What we found

    Together with an international group of health researchers, we analysed 982 posts pertaining to the above tests from across Instagram and TikTok. The posts we looked at came from influencers and account holders with at least 1,000 followers, some with a few million followers. In total, the creators of the posts we included had close to 200 million followers.

    Even discounting the bots, that’s a massive amount of influence (and likely doesn’t reflect their actual reach to non-followers too).

    The vast majority of posts were misleading, failing to even mention the possibility of harm arising from taking one of these tests. We found:

    • 87% of posts mentioned test benefits, while only 15% mentioned potential harms
    • only 6% of posts mentioned the risk of overdiagnosis
    • only 6% of posts discussed any scientific evidence, while 34% of posts used personal stories to promote the test
    • 68% of influencers and account holders had financial interests in promoting the test (for example, a partnership, collaboration, sponsorship or selling for their own profit in some way).

    Further analysis revealed medical doctors were slightly more balanced in their posts. They were more likely to mention the harms of the test, and less likely to have a strongly promotional tone.

    A man on public transport looking at a smartphone.
    The vast majority of posts we looked at were misleading. DimaBerlin/Shutterstock

    As all studies do, ours had some limitations. For example, we didn’t analyse comments connected to posts. These may give further insights into the information being provided about these tests, and how social media users perceive them.

    Nonetheless, our findings add to the growing body of evidence showing misleading medical information is widespread on social media.

    What can we do about it?

    Experts have proposed a range of solutions including pre-bunking strategies, which means proactively educating the public about common misinformation techniques.

    However, solutions like these often place responsibility on the individual. And with all the information on social media to navigate, that’s a big ask, even for people with adequate health literacy.

    What’s urgently needed is stronger regulation to prevent misleading information being created and shared in the first place. This is especially important given social media platforms including Instagram are moving away from fact-checking.

    In the meantime, remember that if information about medical tests promoted by influencers sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

    Brooke Nickel, NHMRC Emerging Leader Research Fellow, University of Sydney; Joshua Zadro, NHMRC Emerging Leader Research Fellow, Sydney Musculoskeletal Health, University of Sydney, and Ray Moynihan, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences & Medicine, Bond University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • As the U.S. Struggles With a Stillbirth Crisis, Australia Offers a Model for How to Do Better

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    ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

    Series: Stillbirths:When Babies Die Before Taking Their First Breath

    The U.S. has not prioritized stillbirth prevention, and American parents are losing babies even as other countries make larger strides to reduce deaths late in pregnancy.

    The stillbirth of her daughter in 1999 cleaved Kristina Keneally’s life into a before and an after. It later became a catalyst for transforming how an entire country approaches stillbirths.

    In a world where preventing stillbirths is typically far down the list of health care priorities, Australia — where Keneally was elected as a senator — has emerged as a global leader in the effort to lower the number of babies that die before taking their first breaths. Stillbirth prevention is embedded in the nation’s health care system, supported by its doctors, midwives and nurses, and touted by its politicians.

    In 2017, funding from the Australian government established a groundbreaking center for research into stillbirths. The next year, its Senate established a committee on stillbirth research and education. By 2020, the country had adopted a national stillbirth plan, which combines the efforts of health care providers and researchers, bereaved families and advocacy groups, and lawmakers and government officials, all in the name of reducing stillbirths and supporting families. As part of that plan, researchers and advocates teamed up to launch a public awareness campaign. All told, the government has invested more than $40 million.

    Meanwhile, the United States, which has a far larger population, has no national stillbirth plan, no public awareness campaign and no government-funded stillbirth research center. Indeed, the U.S. has long lagged behind Australia and other wealthy countries in a crucial measure: how fast the stillbirth rate drops each year.

    According to the latest UNICEF report, the U.S. was worse than 151 countries in reducing its stillbirth rate between 2000 and 2021, cutting it by just 0.9%. That figure lands the U.S. in the company of South Sudan in Africa and doing slightly better than Turkmenistan in central Asia. During that period, Australia’s reduction rate was more than double that.

    Definitions of stillbirth vary by country, and though both Australia and the U.S. mark stillbirths as the death of a fetus at 20 weeks or more of pregnancy, to fairly compare countries globally, international standards call for the use of the World Health Organization definition that defines stillbirth as a loss after 28 weeks. That puts the U.S. stillbirth rate in 2021 at 2.7 per 1,000 total births, compared with 2.4 in Australia the same year.

    Every year in the United States, more than 20,000 pregnancies end in a stillbirth. Each day, roughly 60 babies are stillborn. Australia experiences six stillbirths a day.

    Over the past two years, ProPublica has revealed systemic failures at the federal and local levels, including not prioritizing research, awareness and data collection, conducting too few autopsies after stillbirths and doing little to combat stark racial disparities. And while efforts are starting to surface in the U.S. — including two stillbirth-prevention bills that are pending in Congress — they lack the scope and urgency seen in Australia.

    “If you ask which parts of the work in Australia can be done in or should be done in the U.S., the answer is all of it,” said Susannah Hopkins Leisher, a stillbirth parent, epidemiologist and assistant professor in the stillbirth research program at the University of Utah Health. “There’s no physical reason why we cannot do exactly what Australia has done.”

    Australia’s goal, which has been complicated by the pandemic, is to, by 2025, reduce the country’s rate of stillbirths after 28 weeks by 20% from its 2020 rate. The national plan laid out the target, and it is up to each jurisdiction to determine how to implement it based on their local needs.

    The most significant development came in 2019, when the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence — the headquarters for Australia’s stillbirth-prevention efforts — launched the core of its strategy, a checklist of five evidence-based priorities known as the Safer Baby Bundle. They include supporting pregnant patients to stop smoking; regular monitoring for signs that the fetus is not growing as expected, which is known as fetal growth restriction; explaining the importance of acting quickly if fetal movement changes or decreases; advising pregnant patients to go to sleep on their side after 28 weeks; and encouraging patients to talk to their doctors about when to deliver because in some cases that may be before their due date.

    Officials estimate that at least half of all births in the country are covered by maternity services that have adopted the bundle, which focuses on preventing stillbirths after 28 weeks.

    “These are babies whose lives you would expect to save because they would survive if they were born alive,” said Dr. David Ellwood, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Griffith University, director of maternal-fetal medicine at Gold Coast University Hospital and a co-director of the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence.

    Australia wasn’t always a leader in stillbirth prevention.

    In 2000, when the stillbirth rate in the U.S. was 3.3 per 1,000 total births, Australia’s was 3.7. A group of doctors, midwives and parents recognized the need to do more and began working on improving their data classification and collection to better understand the problem areas. By 2014, Australia published its first in-depth national report on stillbirth. Two years later, the medical journal The Lancet published the second report in a landmark series on stillbirths, and Australian researchers applied for the first grant from the government to create the stillbirth research center.

    But full federal buy-in remained elusive.

    As parent advocates, researchers, doctors and midwives worked to gain national support, they didn’t yet know they would find a champion in Keneally.

    Keneally’s improbable journey began when she was born in Nevada to an American father and Australian mother. She grew up in Ohio, graduating from the University of Dayton before meeting the man who would become her husband and moving to Australia.

    When she learned that her daughter, who she named Caroline, would be stillborn, she remembers thinking, “I’m smart. I’m educated. How did I let this happen? And why did nobody tell me this was a possible outcome?”

    A few years later, in 2003, Keneally decided to enter politics. She was elected to the lower house of state parliament in New South Wales, of which Sydney is the capital. In Australia, newly elected members are expected to give a “first speech.” She was able to get through just one sentence about Caroline before starting to tear up.

    As a legislator, Keneally didn’t think of tackling stillbirth as part of her job. There wasn’t any public discourse about preventing stillbirths or supporting families who’d had one. When Caroline was born still, all Keneally got was a book titled “When a Baby Dies.”

    In 2009, Keneally became New South Wales’ first woman premier, a role similar to that of an American governor. Another woman who had suffered her own stillbirth and was starting a stillbirth foundation learned of Keneally’s experience. She wrote to Keneally and asked the premier to be the foundation’s patron.

    What’s the point of being the first female premier, Keneally thought, if I can’t support this group?

    Like the U.S., Australia had previously launched an awareness campaign that contributed to a staggering reduction in sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. But there was no similar push for stillbirths.

    “If we can figure out ways to reduce SIDS,” Keneally said, “surely it’s not beyond us to figure out ways to reduce stillbirth.”

    She lost her seat after two years and took a break from politics, only to return six years later. In 2018, she was selected to serve as a senator at Australia’s federal level.

    Keneally saw this as her second chance to fight for stillbirth prevention. In the short period between her election and her inaugural speech, she had put everything in place for a Senate inquiry into stillbirth.

    In her address, Keneally declared stillbirth a national public health crisis. This time, she spoke at length about Caroline.

    “When it comes to stillbirth prevention,” she said, “there are things that we know that we’re not telling parents, and there are things we don’t know, but we could, if we changed how we collected data and how we funded research.”

    The day of her speech, March 27, 2018, she and her fellow senators established the Select Committee on Stillbirth Research and Education.

    Things moved quickly over the next nine months. Keneally and other lawmakers traveled the country holding hearings, listening to testimony from grieving parents and writing up their findings in a report released that December.

    “The culture of silence around stillbirth means that parents and families who experience it are less likely to be prepared to deal with the personal, social and financial consequences,” the report said. “This failure to regard stillbirth as a public health issue also has significant consequences for the level of funding available for research and education, and for public awareness of the social and economic costs to the community as a whole.”

    It would be easy to swap the U.S. for Australia in many places throughout the report. Women of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds experienced double the rate of stillbirth of other Australian women; Black women in America are more than twice as likely as white women to have a stillbirth. Both countries faced a lack of coordinated research and corresponding funding, low autopsy rates following a stillbirth and poor public awareness of the problem.

    The day after the report’s release, the Australian government announced that it would develop a national plan and pledged $7.2 million in funding for prevention. Nearly half was to go to education and awareness programs for women and their health care providers.

    In the following months, government officials rolled out the Safer Baby Bundle and pledged another $26 million to support parents’ mental health after a loss.

    Many in Australia see Keneally’s first speech as senator, in 2018, as the turning point for the country’s fight for stillbirth prevention. Her words forced the federal government to acknowledge the stillbirth crisis and launch the national action plan with bipartisan support.

    Australia’s assistant minister for health and aged care, Ged Kearney, cited Keneally’s speech in an email to ProPublica where she noted that Australia has become a world leader in stillbirth awareness, prevention and supporting families after a loss.

    “Kristina highlighted the power of women telling their story for positive change,” Kearney said, adding, “As a Labor Senator Kristina Keneally bravely shared her deeply personal story of her daughter Caroline who was stillborn in 1999. Like so many mothers, she helped pave the way for creating a more compassionate and inclusive society.”

    Keneally, who is now CEO of Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation, said the number of stillbirths a day in Australia spurred the movement for change.

    “Six babies a day,” Keneally said. “Once you hear that fact, you can’t unhear it.”

    Australia’s leading stillbirth experts watched closely as the country moved closer to a unified effort. This was the moment for which they had been waiting.

    “We had all the information needed, but that’s really what made it happen.” said Vicki Flenady, a perinatal epidemiologist, co-director of the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence based at the Mater Research Institute at the University of Queensland, and a lead author on The Lancet’s stillbirth series. “I don’t think there’s a person who could dispute that.”

    Flenady and her co-director Ellwood had spent more than two decades focused on stillbirths. After establishing the center in 2017, they were now able to expand their team. As part of their work with the International Stillbirth Alliance, they reached out to other countries with a track record of innovation and evidence-based research: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ireland. They modeled the Safer Baby Bundle after a similar one in the U.K., though they added some elements.

    In 2019, the state of Victoria, home to Melbourne, was the first to implement the Safer Baby Bundle. But 10 months into the program, the effort had to be paused for several months because of the pandemic, which forced other states to cancel their launches altogether.

    “COVID was a major disruption. We stopped and started,” Flenady said.

    Still, between 2019 and 2021, participating hospitals across Victoria were able to reduce their stillbirth rate by 21%. That improvement has yet to be seen at the national level.

    A number of areas are still working on implementing the bundle. Westmead Hospital, one of Australia’s largest hospitals, planned to wrap that phase up last month. Like many hospitals, Westmead prominently displays the bundle’s key messages in the colorful posters and flyers hanging in patient rooms and in the hallways. They include easy-to-understand slogans such as, “Big or small. Your baby’s growth matters,” and, “Sleep on your side when baby’s inside.”

    As patients at Westmead wait for their names to be called, a TV in the waiting room plays a video on stillbirth prevention, highlighting the importance of fetal movement. If a patient is concerned their baby’s movements have slowed down, they are instructed to come in to be seen within two hours. The patient’s chart gets a colorful sticker with a 16-point checklist of stillbirth risk factors.

    Susan Heath, a senior clinical midwife at Westmead, came up with the idea for the stickers. Her office is tucked inside the hospital’s maternity wing, down a maze of hallways. As she makes the familiar walk to her desk, with her faded hospital badge bouncing against her navy blue scrubs, it’s clear she is a woman on a mission. The bundle gives doctors and midwives structure and uniform guidance, she said, and takes stillbirth out of the shadows. She reminds her staff of how making the practices a routine part of their job has the power to change their patients’ lives.

    “You’re trying,” she said, “to help them prevent having the worst day of their life.”

    Christine Andrews, a senior researcher at the Stillbirth Centre who is leading an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness, said the national stillbirth rate beyond 28 weeks has continued to slowly improve.

    “It is going to take a while until we see the stillbirth rate across the whole entire country go down,” Andrews said. “We are anticipating that we’re going to start to see a shift in that rate soon.”

    As officials wait to receive and standardize the data from hospitals and states, they are encouraged by a number of indicators.

    For example, several states are reporting increases in the detection of babies that aren’t growing as they should, a major factor in many late-gestation stillbirths. Many also have seen an increase in the number of pregnant patients who stopped smoking. Health care providers also are more consistently offering post-stillbirth investigations, such as autopsies.

    In addition to the Safer Baby Bundle, the national plan also calls for raising awareness and reducing racial disparities. The improvements it recommends for bereavement care are already gaining global attention.

    To fulfill those directives, Australia has launched a “Still Six Lives” public awareness campaign, has implemented a national stillbirth clinical care standard and has spent two years developing a culturally inclusive version of the Safer Baby Bundle for First Nations, migrant and refugee communities. Those resources, which were recently released, incorporated cultural traditions and used terms like Stronger Bubba Born for the bundle and “sorry business babies,” which is how some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women refer to stillbirth. There are also audio versions for those who can’t or prefer not to read the information.

    In May, nearly 50 people from the state of Queensland met in a large hotel conference room. Midwives, doctors and nurses sat at round tables with government officials, hospital administrators and maternal and infant health advocates. Some even wore their bright blue Safer Baby T-shirts.

    One by one, they discussed their experiences implementing the Safer Baby Bundle. One midwifery group was able to get more than a third of its patients to stop smoking between their first visit and giving birth.

    Officials from a hospital in one of the fastest-growing areas in the state discussed how they carefully monitored for fetal growth restriction.

    And staff from another hospital, which serves many low-income and immigrant patients, described how 97% of pregnant patients who said their baby’s movements had decreased were seen for additional monitoring within two hours of voicing their concern.

    As the midwives, nurses and doctors ticked off the progress they were seeing, they also discussed the fear of unintended consequences: higher rates of premature births or increased admissions to neonatal intensive care units. But neither, they said, has materialized.

    “The bundle isn’t causing any harm and may be improving other outcomes, like reducing early-term birth,” Flenady said. “I think it really shows a lot of positive impact.”

    As far behind as the U.S. is in prioritizing stillbirth prevention, there is still hope.

    Dr. Bob Silver, who co-authored a study that estimated that nearly 1 in 4 stillbirths are potentially preventable, has looked to the international community as a model. Now, he and Leisher — the University of Utah epidemiologist and stillbirth parent — are working to create one of the first stillbirth research and prevention centers in the U.S. in partnership with stillbirth leaders from Australia and other countries. They hope to launch next year.

    “There’s no question that Australia has done a better job than we have,” said Silver, who is also chair of the University of Utah Health obstetrics and gynecology department. “Part of it is just highlighting it and paying attention to it.”

    It’s hard to know what parts of Australia’s strategy are making a difference — the bundle as a whole, just certain elements of it, the increased stillbirth awareness across the country, or some combination of those things. Not every component has been proven to decrease stillbirth.

    The lack of U.S. research on the issue has made some cautious to adopt the bundle, Silver said, but it is clear the U.S. can and should do more.

    There comes a point when an issue is so critical, Silver said, that people have to do the best they can with the information that they have. The U.S. has done that with other problems, such as maternal mortality, he said, though many of the tactics used to combat that problem have not been proven scientifically.

    “But we’ve decided this problem is so bad, we’re going to try the things that we think are most likely to be helpful,” Silver said.

    After more than 30 years of working on stillbirth prevention, Silver said the U.S. may be at a turning point. Parents’ voices are getting louder and starting to reach lawmakers. More doctors are affirming that stillbirths are not inevitable. And pressure is mounting on federal institutions to do more.

    Of the two stillbirth prevention bills in Congress, one already sailed through the Senate. The second bill, the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education for Autumn Act, includes features that also appeared in Australia’s plan, such as improving data, increasing awareness and providing support for autopsies.

    And after many years, the National Institutes of Health has turned its focus back to stillbirths. In March, it released a report with a series of recommendations to reduce the nation’s stillbirth rate that mirror ProPublica’s reporting about some of the causes of the crisis. Since then, it has launched additional groups to begin to tackle three critical angles: prevention, data and bereavement. Silver co-chairs the prevention group.

    In November, more than 100 doctors, parents and advocates gathered for a symposium in New York City to discuss everything from improving bereavement care in the U.S to tackling racial disparities in stillbirth. In 2022, after taking a page out of the U.K.’s book, the city’s Mount Sinai Hospital opened the first Rainbow Clinic in the U.S., which employs specific protocols to care for people who have had a stillbirth.

    But given the financial resources in the U.S. and the academic capacity at American universities and research institutions, Leisher and others said federal and state governments aren’t doing nearly enough.

    “The U.S. is not pulling its weight in relation either to our burden or to the resources that we have at our disposal,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of babies dying, and we’ve got a really bad imbalance of who those babies are as well. And yet we look at a country with a much smaller number of stillbirths who is leading the world.”

    “We can do more. Much more. We’re just not,” she added. “It’s unacceptable.”

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  • The New Menopause – by Dr. Mary Claire Haver

    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.

    The author is most famous for “The Galveston Diet”, which book is astonishingly similar in its content, chapters, format, etc to Nikki Williams’ “It’s Not You, It’s Your Hormones” which came out a few years previously but didn’t get the same marketing.

    Nonetheless, this time Dr. Haver has something new to add, and we think it’s worth a read.

    The general theme of this book is a comprehensive overview of the menopause, experientially (subjective to the person going through it) and empirically (by science), from start to finish and beyond. This book’s more about human physiology, and less about diet than the previous.

    Dr. Haver also discusses in-depth how estrogen is thought of as a sex hormone (and it is), to the point that people consider it perhaps expendable, and forget (or are simply unaware) that we have estrogen receptors throughout our bodies and estrogen is vital for maintaining many other bodily functions, including your heart, cognitive function, bone integrity, blood sugar balance, and more.

    (in case you’re wondering “why don’t men fall to bits, then?”, don’t worry, their testosterone does these things for them. Testosterone is orders of magnitude less potent than estrogen, mg for mg, so they need a lot more of it, but under good conditions they produce plenty so it’s fine)

    But, the amount of testosterone available to peri/postmenopausal women is simply not enough to do that job (and it’d also result in a transition of secondary sex characteristics, which for most people would be very unwanted), so, something else needs to be done.

    Dr. Haver also discusses in detail the benefits and risks of HRT and how to get/manage them, respectively, with the latest up-to-date research (at time of going to print; the book was published in April 2024).

    Bottom line: if you want to know what’s going on with your peri- or post-menopausal body and how it could be better (or if you want to know what’s going on with someone else approaching/experiencing menopause), then this is a top-tier book.

    Click here to check out The New Menopause, and know what’s going on and what to do about it!

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Related Posts

  • The Joy of Saying No – by Natalie Lue
  • Non-Alcohol Mouthwash vs Alcohol Mouthwash – Which is Healthier?

    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.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing non-alcohol mouthwash to alcohol mouthwash, we picked the alcohol.

    Why?

    Note: this is a contingent choice and is applicable to most, but not all, people.

    In short, there has been some concern about alcohol mouthwashes increasing cancer risk, but research has shown this is only the case if you already have an increased risk of oral cancer (for example if you smoke, and/or have had an oral cancer before).

    For those for whom this is not the case (for example, if you don’t smoke, and/or have no such cancer history), then best science currently shows that alcohol mouthwash does not cause any increased risk.

    What about non-alcohol mouthwashes? Well, they have a different problem; they usually use chlorine-based chemicals like chlorhexidine or cetylpyridinium chloride, which are (exactly as the label promises) exceptionally good at killing oral bacteria.

    (They’d kill us too, at higher doses, hence: swill and spit)

    Unfortunately, much like the rest of our body, our mouth is supposed to have bacteria there and bad things happen when it doesn’t. In the case of our oral microbiome, cleaning it with such powerful antibacterial agents can kill our “good” bacteria along with the bad, which lowers the pH of our saliva (that’s bad; it means it is more acidic), and thus indirectly erodes tooth enamel.

    You can read more about the science of all of the above (with references), here:

    Toothpastes & Mouthwashes: Which Help And Which Harm?

    Summary:

    For most people, alcohol mouthwashes are a good way to avoid the damage that can be done by chlorhexidine in non-alcohol mouthwashes.

    Here are some examples, but there will be plenty in your local supermarket:

    Non-Alcohol, by Colgate | Alcohol, by Listerine

    If you have had oral cancer, or if you smoke, then you may want to seek a third alternative (and also, please, stop smoking if you can).

    Or, really, most people could probably skip mouthwashes, if you’ve good oral care already by other means. See also:

    Toothpastes & Mouthwashes: Which Help And Which Harm?

    (yes, it’s the same link as before, but we’re now drawing your attention to the fact it has information about toothpastes too)

    If you do want other options though, might want to check out:

    Less Common Oral Hygiene Options ← miswak sticks are especially effective

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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  • The China Study – by Dr. T Colin Campbell and Dr. Thomas M. Campbell

    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.

    This is not the newest book we’ve reviewed (originally published 2005; this revised and expanded edition 2016), but it is a seminal one.

    You’ve probably heard it referenced, and maybe you’ve wondered what the fuss is about. Now you can know!

    The titular study itself was huge. We tend to think “oh there was one study” and look to discount it, but it literally looked at the population of China. That’s a large study.

    And because China is relatively ethnically homogenous, especially per region, it was easier to isolate what dietary factors made what differences to health. Of course, that did also create a limitation: follow-up studies would be needed to see if the results were the same for non-Chinese people. But even for the rest of us (this reviewer is not Chinese), it already pointed science in the right direction. And sure enough, smaller follow-up studies elsewhere found the same.

    But enough about the research; what about the book? This is a book review, not a research review, after all.

    The book itself is easy for a lay reader to understand. It explains how the study was conducted (no small feat), and how the data was examined. It also discusses the results, and the conclusions drawn from those results.

    In light of all this, it also offers simple actionable advices, on how to eat to avoid disease in general, and cancer in particular. In especially that latter case, one take-home conclusion was: get more of your protein from plants for a big reduction in cancer risk, for example.

    Bottom line: this book is an incredible blend of “comprehensive” and “readable” that we don’t often find in the same book! It contains not just a lot of science, but also an insight into how the science works, on a research level. And, of course, its results and conclusions have strong implications for all our lives.

    Click here to check out The China Study, to know more about it!

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  • Psychology Sunday: Family Estrangement & How To Fix It

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    Estrangement, And How To Heal It

    We’ve written before about how deleterious to the health loneliness and isolation can be, and what things can be done about it. Today, we’re tackling a related but different topic.

    We recently had a request to write about…

    ❝Reconciliation of relationships in particular estrangement mother adult daughter❞

    And, this is not only an interesting topic, but a very specific one that affects more people than is commonly realized!

    In fact, a recent 800-person study found that more than 43% of people experienced family estrangement of one sort or another, and a more specific study of more than 2,000 mother-child pairs found that more than 11% of mothers were estranged from at least one adult child.

    So, if you think of the ten or so houses nearest to you, probably at least one of them contains a parent estranged from at least one adult child. Maybe it’s yours. Either way, we hope this article will give you some pause for thought.

    Which way around?

    It makes a difference to the usefulness of this article whether any given reader experiencing estrangement is the parent or the adult child. We’re going to assume the reader is the parent. It also makes a difference who did the estranging. That’s usually the adult child.

    So, we’re broadly going to write with that expectation.

    Why does it happen?

    When our kids are small, we as parents hold all the cards. It may not always feel that way, but we do. We control our kids’ environment, we influence their learning, we buy the food they eat and the clothes they wear. If they want to go somewhere, we probably have to take them. We can even set and enforce rules on a whim.

    As they grow, so too does their independence, and it can be difficult for us as parents to relinquish control, but we’re going to have to at some point. Assuming we are good parents, we just hope we’ve prepared them well enough for the world.

    Once they’ve flown the nest and are living their own adult lives, there’s an element of inversion. They used to be dependent on us; now, not only do they not need us (this is a feature not a bug! If we have been good parents, they will be strong without us, and in all likelihood one day, they’re going to have to be), but also…

    We’re more likely to need them, now. Not just in the “oh if we have kids they can look after us when we’re old” sense, but in that their social lives are growing as ours are often shrinking, their family growing, while ours, well, it’s the same family but they’re the gatekeepers to that now.

    If we have a good relationship, this goes fine. However, it might only take one big argument, one big transgression, or one “final straw”, when the adult child decides the parent is more trouble than they’re worth.

    And, obviously, that’s going to hurt. But it’s pretty much how it pans out, according to studies:

    Here be science: Tensions in the Parent and Adult Child Relationship: Links to Solidarity and Ambivalence

    How to fix it, step one

    First, figure out what went wrong.

    Resist any urge to protect your own feelings with a defensive knee-jerk “I don’t know; I was a good, loving parent”. That’s a very natural and reasonable urge and you’re quite possibly correct, but it won’t help you here.

    Something pushed them away. And, it will almost certainly have been a push factor from you, not a pull factor from whoever is in their life now. It’s easy to put the blame externally, but that won’t fix anything.

    And, be honest with yourself; this isn’t a job interview where we have to present a strength dressed up as a “greatest weakness” for show.

    You can start there, though! If you think “I was too loving”, then ok, how did you show that love? Could it have felt stifling to them? Controlling? Were you critical of their decisions?

    It doesn’t matter who was right or wrong, or even whether or not their response was reasonable. It matters that you know what pushed them away.

    How to fix it, step two

    Take responsibility, and apologize. We’re going to assume that your estrangement is such that you can, at least, still get a letter to them, for example. Resist the urge to argue your case.

    Here’s a very good format for an apology; please consider using this template:

    The 10-step (!) apology that’s so good, you’ll want to make a note of it

    You may have to do some soul-searching to find how you will avoid making the same mistake in the future, that you did in the past.

    If you feel it’s something you “can’t change”, then you must decide what is more important to you. Only you can make that choice, but you cannot expect them to meet you halfway. They already made their choice. In the category of negotiation, they hold all the cards now.

    How to fix it, step three

    Now, just wait.

    Maybe they will reply, forgiving you. If they do, celebrate!

    Just be aware that once you reconnect is not the time to now get around to arguing your case from before. It will never be the time to get around to arguing your case from before. Let it go.

    Nor should you try to exact any sort of apology from them for estranging you, or they will at best feel resentful, wonder if they made a mistake in reconnecting, and withdraw.

    Instead, just enjoy what you have. Many people don’t get that.

    If they reply with anger, maybe it will be a chance to reopen a dialogue. If so, family therapy could be an approach useful for all concerned, if they are willing. Chances are, you all have things that you’d all benefit from talking about in a calm, professional, moderated, neutral environment.

    You might also benefit from a book we reviewed previously, “Parent Effectiveness Training”. This may seem like “shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted”, but in fact it’s a very good guide to relationship dynamics in general, and extensively covers relations between parents and adult children.

    If they don’t reply, then, you did your part. Take solace in knowing that much.

    Some final thoughts:

    At the end of the day, as parents, our kids living well is (hopefully) testament to that we prepared them well for life, and sometimes, being a parent is a thankless task.

    But, we (hopefully) didn’t become parents for the plaudits, after all.

    Don’t Forget…

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