Anchovies vs Sardines – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing anchovies to sardines, we picked the sardines.
Why?
In terms of macros, sardines have slightly more protein and more than 2x the fat, but the fat profile is healthier than that of anchovies, meaning that the amount of saturated fat is the same, and sardines have more poly- and monounsaturated fats. Breaking it down further, sardines also have more omega-3. Unless you are for whatever reason especially keen to keep your total fat* intake down, sardines win here.
*or calories, which in this case come almost entirely from the fat, and sardines are consequently nearly 2x higher in calories.
When it comes to vitamins, sardines further distinguish themselves; anchovies have more of vitamins B2 and B3, while sardines have more of vitamins A, B1, B6, B12, B9, E, and K—in some cases, by quite large margins (especially the B12 and K, being 14x more and 26x more, respectively). A clear win for sardines.
Minerals are closer to even; anchovies have more copper, iron, and zinc, while sardines have more calcium, manganese, phosphorus, and selenium. That’s already a slight win for sardines, before we take into account that sardines’ margins of difference are also much greater than anchovies’.
In short, enjoy either in moderation if you are so inclined, but sardines win on overall nutritional density.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Farmed Fish vs Wild Caught: More Important Than You Might Think
Take care!
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Move – by Caroline Williams
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- Get 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, says the American Heart Association
- There are over 10,000 minutes per week, says the pocket calculator
Is 150/10,000 really the goal here? Really?
For Caroline Williams, the answer is no.
In this book that’s practically a manifesto, she outlines the case that:
- Humans evolved to move
- Industrialization and capitalism scuppered that
- We now spend far too long each day without movement
Furthermore, for Williams this isn’t just an anthropological observation, it’s a problem to be solved, because:
- Our lack of movement is crippling us—literally
- Our stagnation affects not just our bodies, but also our minds
- (again literally—there’s a direct correlation with mental health)
- We urgently need to fix this
So, what now, do we need to move in to the gym and become full-time athletes to clock up enough hours of movement? No.
Williams convincingly argues the case (using data from supercentenarian “blue zones” around the world) that even non-exertive movement is sufficient. In other words, you don’t have to be running; walking is great. You don’t have to be lifting weights; doing the housework or gardening will suffice.
From that foundational axiom, she calls on us to find ways to build our life around movement… rather than production-efficiency and/or convenience. She gives plenty of tips for such too!
Bottom line: some books are “I couldn’t put it down!” books. This one’s more of a “I got the urge to get up and get moving!” book.
Get your get-up-and-go up and going with “Move”—order yours from Amazon today!
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Can You Be Fat AND Fit?
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The short answer is “yes“.
And as for what that means for your heart and/or all-cause mortality risk: it’s just as good as being fit at a smaller size, and furthermore, it’s better than being less fit at a smaller size.
Here’s the longer answer:
The science
A research team did a systematic review looking at multiple large cohort studies examining the associations between:
- Cardiorespiratory fitness and cardiovascular disease risk
- Cardiorespiratory fitness and all-cause mortality
- BMI and cardiovascular disease risk
- BMI and all-cause mortality
However, they also took this further, and tabulated the data such that they could also establish the cardiovascular disease mortality risk and all-cause mortality risk of:
- Unfit people with “normal” BMI
- Unfit people with “overweight” BMI
- Unfit people with “obese” BMI
- Fit people with “normal” BMI
- Fit people with “overweight” BMI
- Fit people with “obese” BMI
Before we move on, let’s note for the record that BMI is a woeful system in any case, for enough reasons to fill a whole article:
Now, with that in mind, let’s get to the results:
What they found
For cardiovascular disease mortality risk of unfit people specifically, compared to fit people of “normal” BMI:
- Unfit people with “normal” BMI: 2.04x higher risk.
- Unfit people with “overweight” BMI: 2.58x higher risk.
- Unfit people with “obese” BMI: 3.35x higher risk
So here we can see that if you are unfit, then being heavier will indeed increase your CVD mortality risk.
For all-cause mortality risk of unfit people specifically, compared to fit people of “normal” BMI:
- Unfit people with “normal” BMI: 1.92x higher risk.
- Unfit people with “overweight” BMI: 1.82x higher risk.
- Unfit people with “obese” BMI: 2.04x higher risk
This time we see that if you are unfit, then being heavier or lighter than “overweight” will increase your all-cause mortality risk.
So, what about if you are fit? Then being heavier or lighter made no significant difference to either CVD mortality risk or all-cause mortality risk.
Fit individuals, regardless of weight category (normal, overweight, or obese), had significantly lower mortality risks compared to unfit individuals in any weight category.
Note: not just “compared to unfit individuals in their weight category”, but compared to unfit individuals in any weight category.
In other words, if you are obese and have good cardiorespiratory fitness, you will (on average) live longer than an unfit person with “normal” BMI.
You can find the paper itself here, if you want to examine the data and/or method:
Cardiorespiratory fitness, body mass index and mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Ok, so how do I improve the kind of fitness that they measured?
They based their cardiorespiratory fitness on VO2 Max, which scientific consensus holds to be a good measure of how efficiently your body can use oxygen—thus depending on your heart and lungs being healthy.
If you use a fitness tracker that tracks your exercise and your heart rate, it will estimate your VO2 Max for you—to truly measure the VO2 Max itself directly, you’ll need a lot more equipment; basically, access to a lab that tests this. But the estimates are fairly accurate, and so good enough for most personal purposes that aren’t hard-science research.
Next, you’ll want to do this:
53 Studies Later: The Best Way to Improve VO2 Max
Take care!
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Water Bath + More Cookbook for Beginners – by Sarah Roslin
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Whether you want to be prepared for the next major crisis that shuts down food supply chains, or just learn a new skill, this book provides the tools!
Especially beneficial if you also grow your own vegetables, but even you just buy those… Home-canned food is healthy, contains fewer additives and preservatives, and costs less in the long run.
Roslin teaches an array of methods, including most importantly:
- fermentation and pickling
- water bath canning, and
- pressure canning.
As for what’s inside? She covers not just vegetables, but also fruit, seafood, meat… Basically, anything that can be canned.
The book explains the tools and equipment you will need as well as how to perform it safely—as well as common mistakes to avoid!
Lest we be intimidated by the task of acquiring appropriate equipment, she also walks us through what we’ll need in that regard too!
Last but not least, there’s also a (sizeable) collection of simple, step-by-step recipes, catering to a wide variety of tastes.
Bottom line: a highly valuable resource that we recommend heartily.
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Language Fluency Beats General Intelligence & Memory For Longevity
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And no, it doesn’t have to be a second language, although that helps a lot:
An Underrated Tool Against Alzheimer’s ← you don’t even have to learn the second language to a high level, to benefit
Rather, what we’re talking about today is your first language fluency. So, for most of our readers, English. For the study participants it was German, because this was a German research team using data from the German population.
The Berlin Aging Study
Previous research has linked intelligence to longevity, but intelligence comprises multiple traits. So, what’s most important? Memory? General intelligence? Nope. Language fluency!
Let’s clarify something before we continue: “fluency” does not, in linguistics, mean what most people use it to mean. It’s not about the size of one’s overall knowledge of the language (e.g. vocabulary size), but rather, it is about one’s ability to speak and/or write fluently—literally, fluently means “flowingly”, i.e. without undue hesitation or difficulty.
The study used data from the Berlin Aging Study, which tracked 516 people aged 70–105 from 1989 onwards.
Researchers assessed four cognitive abilities, with two kinds of tests for each of:
- Verbal fluency (detailed description below)
- Perceptual speed (pattern-recognition speed)
- Verbal knowledge (vocabulary size)
- Episodic memory (personal memory recall)
General intelligence, meanwhile, was assessed as “the average of those 8 scores”.
The two tests for the cognitive ability of “verbal fluency” were:
Categories
Participants had to name as many different animals as possible within 90 seconds. Their answers were subsequently rated for correctness by two independent research assistants, to assure that noticed or unnoticed repetitions, wrong categories, and morphological variants were not coded as correct.
Word beginnings
Participants were asked to name as many different real words starting with the letter s as possible within 90 seconds. The named words were rated for correctness by two independent research assistants to avoid considering repetitions, morphological variants, and wrong words as correct.
You can read about these and the other tests for the other cognitive abilities, in the paper itself:
Verbal Fluency Selectively Predicts Survival in Old and Very Old Age ← if you’re looking for the test descriptions, scroll to “Method” and then scroll past the table, and you’ll see the test descriptions
They found that of all these metrics, only the two verbal fluency tests (and none of the other tests) showed a significant link to longevity.
Why this is important
Although the study does not prove causality (it could be that people who are predisposed to live longer for other reasons are more verbally fluent because of some common factor that influences both language fluency and longevity), it seems as good a reason as any to develop and maintain language fluency.
This builds on what was found in “The Nun Study“, that followed a convent of nuns (because they are a very homogenous sample in terms of occupation, location, diet, routine, etc, so a lot of confounding factors were already controlled-for) and made numerous major discoveries about things that impact aging (including the relevance of the APOE4 gene! That was The Nun Study).
When it came to nuns and language…
Based on the autobiographies written by the nuns in their youth upon taking their vows, there were two factors that were later correlated with not getting dementia:
- Longer sentences
- Positive outlook
- “Idea density”
That latter item means the relative linguistic density of ideas and complexity thereof, and the fluency and vivacity with which they were expressed (this was not a wishy-washy assessment; there was a hard-science analysis to determine numbers).
Want to spruce up yours? You might like to check out:
Reading, Better: Reading As A Cognitive Exercise
…for specific, evidence-based ways to tweak your reading to fight cognitive decline.
Take care!
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The Autoimmune Cure – by Dr. Sara Gottfried
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We’ve featured Dr. Gottfried before, as well as another of her books (“Younger”), and this one’s a little different, and on the one hand very specific, while on the other hand affecting a lot of people.
You may be thinking, upon reading the subtitle, “this sounds like Dr. Gabor Maté’s ideas” (per: “When The Body Says No”), and 1) you’d be right, and 2) Dr. Gottfried does credit him in the introduction and refers back to his work periodically later.
What she adds to this, and what makes this book a worthwhile read in addition to Dr. Maté’s, is looking clinically at the interactions of the immune system and nervous system, but also the endocrine system (Dr. Gottfried’s specialty) and the gut.
Another thing she adds is more of a focus on what she writes about as “little-t trauma”, which is the kind of smaller, yet often cumulative, traumas that often eventually add up over time to present as C-PTSD.
While “stress increases inflammation” is not a novel idea, Dr. Gottfried takes it further, and looks at a wealth of clinical evidence to demonstrate the series of events that, if oversimplified, seem unbelievable, such as “you had a bad relationship and now you have lupus”—showing evidence for each step in the snowballing process.
The style is a bit more clinical than most pop-science, but still written to be accessible to laypersons. This means that for most of us, it might not be the quickest read, but it will be an informative and enlightening one.
In terms of practical use (and living up to its subtitle promise of “cure”), this book does also cover all sorts of potential remedial approaches, from the obvious (diet, sleep, supplements, meditation, etc) to the less obvious (ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, etc), covering the evidence so far as well as the pros and cons.
Bottom line: if you have or suspect you may have an autoimmune problem, and/or would just like to nip the risk of such in the bud (especially bearing in mind that the same things cause neuroinflammation and thus, putatively, depression and dementia too), then this is one for you.
Click here to check out the Autoimmune Cure, and take care of your body and mind!
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Cool As A Cucumber
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Cucumber Extract Beats Glucosamine & Chondroitin… At 1/135th Of The Dose?!
Do you take glucosamine & chondroitin supplements for your bone-and-joint health?
Or perhaps, like many, you take them intermittently because they mean taking several large tablets a day. Or maybe you don’t take them at all because they generally contain ingredients derived from shellfish?
Cucumber extract has your back! (and your knees, and your hips, and…)
It’s plant-derived (being from botanical cucumbers, not sea cucumbers, the aquatic animal!) and requires only 1/135th of the dosage to produce twice the benefits!
Distilling the study to its absolute bare bones for your convenience:
- Cucumber extract (10mg) was pitted against glucosamine & chondroitin (1350mg)
- Cucumber extract performed around 50% better than G&C after 30 days
- Cucumber extract performed more than 200% better than G&C after 180 days
In conclusion, this study indicates that, in very lay terms:
Cucumber extract blows glucosamine & chondroitin out of the water as a treatment and preventative for joint pain
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