Is Ant Oil Just “Snake Oil”?
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.
We Tested Out “Ant Egg Oil”
Did you know?! There’s a special protein found only in the eggs of a particular species of ant found in Turkey, that can painlessly and permanently stop (not just slow!) hair regrowth in places you’d rather not have hair.
Neither did we, and when we heard about it, we did our usual research, and discovered a startling secret.
…there probably isn’t.
We decided to dig deeper, and the plot (unlike the hair in question) thickens:
We could not find any science for or against (or even generally about) the use of ant egg oil to prevent hair regrowth. Not a peep. What we did find though was a cosmetic chemist who did an analysis of the oil as sold, and found its main ingredient appears to be furan-2-carbaldehyde, or Furfural, to its friends.
Surprise! There’s also no science that we could find about the effect of Furfural (we love the name, though! Fur for all!) on hair, except that it’s bad for rodents (and their hair) if they eat a lot of it. So please don’t eat it. Especially if you’re a mouse.
And yet, many ostensibly real reviews out in the wild claim it works wonders. So, we took the investigative reporting approach and tried it ourselves.
That’s right, a plucky member of our team tried it, and she reports:
❝ At first glance, it seems like olive oil. There’s something else though, adding a darker colour and a slight bitterness to the smell.
After waxing, I applied a little every few days. When the hair eventually regrew (and it did), it grew back thinner, and removing the new hairs was a strangely easy experience, like pulling hairs out of soft soap instead of out of skin. It didn’t hurt at all, either.
I had more of the oil, so I kept going with the treatment, and twelve weeks later there are very few hairs regrowing at all; probably there will be none left soon. Whatever’s in this, be it from ant eggs or wheat bran or something else entirely, it worked for me!❞
So in short: it remains a mystery for now! If you try it, let us know how it went for you.
Here’s the “interesting” website that sells it, though you may find it for less on eBay or similar. (Note, we aren’t earning any commissions from these links. We just wanted to make it easier for you to dive deeper).
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
The Best Form Of Sugar During Exercise
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? We love to hear from you!
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 😎
❝What is the best form of sugar for an energy kick during exercise? Both type of sugar eg glicoae fructose dextrose etc and medium, ie drink, gel, solids etc❞
Great question! Let’s be clear first that we’re going to answer this specifically for the context of during exercise.
Because, if you’re not actively exercising strenuously right at the time when you’re taking the various things we’re going to be talking about, the results will not be the same.
For scenarios that are anything less than “I am exercising right now and my muscles (not joints, or anything else) are feeling the burn”, then instead please see this:
Snacks & Hacks: Eating For Energy (In Ways That Actually Work)
Because, to answer your question, we’re going to be going 100% against the first piece of advice in that article, which was “Skip the quasi-injectables”, i.e., anything marketed as very quick release. Those things are useful for diabetics to have handy just in case of needing to urgently correct a hypo, but for most people most of the time, they’re not. See also:
Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
However…
When strenuously exercising in a way that is taxing our muscles, we do not have to worry about the usual problem of messing up our glucose metabolism by overloading our body with sugars faster than it can use it (thus: it has to hurriedly convert glucose and shove it anywhere it’ll fit to put it away, which is very bad for us), because right now, in the exercise scenario we’re describing, the body is already running its fastest metabolism and is grabbing glucose anywhere it can find it.
Which brings us to our first key: the best type of sugar for this purpose is glucose. Because:
- glucose: the body can use immediately and easily convert whatever’s spare to glycogen (a polysaccharide of glucose) for storage
- fructose: the body cannot use immediately and any conversion of fructose to glycogen has to happen in the liver, so if you take too much fructose (without anything to slow it down, such as the fiber in whole fruit), you’re not only not going to get usable energy (the sugar is just going to be there in your bloodstream, circulating, not getting used, because it doesn’t trigger insulin release and insulin is the gatekeeper that allows sugar to be used), but also, it’s going to tax the liver, which if done to excess, is how we get non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
- sucrose: is just a disaccharide of glucose and fructose, so it first gets broken down into those, and then its constituent parts get processed as above. Other disaccharides you’ll see mentioned sometimes are maltose and lactose, but again, they’re just an extra step removed from useful metabolism, so to save space, we’ll leave it at that for those today.
- dextrose: is just glucose, but when the labeller is feeling fancy. It’s technically informational because it specifies what isomer of glucose it is, but basically all glucose found in food is d-glucose, i.e. dextrose. Other isomers of glucose can be synthesized (very expensively) in laboratories or potentially found in obscure places (the universe is vast and weird), but in short: unless someone’s going to extreme lengths to get something else, all glucose we encounter is dextrose, and all (absolutely all) dextrose is glucose.
We’d like to show scientific papers contesting these head-to-head for empirical proof, but since the above is basic chemistry and physiology, all we could find is papers taking this for granted and stating in their initial premise that sports drinks, gels, bars usually contain glucose as their main sugar, potentially with some fructose and sucrose. Like this one:
A Comprehensive Study on Sports and Energy Drinks
As for how to take it, again this is the complete opposite of our usual health advice of “don’t drink your calories”, because in this case, for once…
(and again, we must emphasize: only while actively doing strenuous exercise that is making specifically your muscles burn, not your joints or anything else; if your joints are burning you need to rest and definitely don’t spike your blood sugars because that will worsen inflammation)
…just this once, we do want those sugars to be zipping straight into the blood. Which means: liquid is best for this purpose.
And when we say liquid: gel is the same as a drink, so far as the body is concerned, provided the body in question is adequately hydrated (i.e., you are also drinking water).
Here are a pair of studies (by the same team, with the same general methodology), testing things head-to-head, with endurance cyclists on 6-hour stationary cycle rides:
CHO Oxidation from a CHO Gel Compared with a Drink during Exercise
Meanwhile, liquid beat solid, but only significantly so from the 90-minute mark onwards, and even that significant difference was modest (i.e. it’s clinically significant, it’s a statistically reliable result and improbable as random happenstance, but the actual size of the difference was not huge):
Oxidation of Solid versus Liquid CHO Sources during Exercise
We would hypothesize that the reason that liquids only barely outperformed solids for this task is precisely because the solids in question were also designed for the task. When a company makes a fast-release energy bar, they don’t load it with fiber to slow it down. Which differentiates this greatly from, say, getting one’s sugars from whole fruit.
If the study had compared apples to apple juice, we hypothesize the results would have been very different. But alas, if that study has been done, we couldn’t find it.
Today has been all about what’s best during exercise, so let’s quickly finish with a note on what’s best before and after:
Before: What To Eat, Take, And Do Before A Workout
After: Overdone It? How To Speed Up Recovery After Exercise
Take care!
Share This Post
-
The Oh She Glows Cookbook – by Angela Liddon
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.
Let’s get the criticism out of the way first: notwithstanding the subtitle promising over 100 recipes, there are about 80-odd here, if we discount recipes that are no-brainer things like smoothies, sides such as for example “roasted garlic”, or meta-ingredients such as oat flour (instructions: blend the oats and you get oat flour).
The other criticism is more subjective: if you are like this reviewer, you will want to add more seasonings than recommended to most of the recipes. But that’s easy enough to do.
As for the rest: this is a very healthy cookbook, and quite wide-ranging and versatile, with recipes that are homely, with a lot of emphasis on comfort foods (but still, healthy), though certainly some are perfectly worthy of entertaining too.
A nice bonus of this book is that it offers a lot of available substitutions (much like we do at 10almonds), and also ways of turning the recipe into something else entirely with just a small change. This trait more than makes up for the slight swindle in terms of number of recipes, since some of the recipes have bonus recipes snuck in.
Bottom line: if you’d like to broaden your plant-based cooking range, this book is a fine option for expanding your repertoire.
Click here to check out The Oh She Glows Cookbook, and indeed glow!
Share This Post
-
With all this bird flu around, how safe are eggs, chicken or milk?
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.
Enzo Palombo, Swinburne University of Technology
Recent outbreaks of bird flu – in US dairy herds, poultry farms in Australia and elsewhere, and isolated cases in humans – have raised the issue of food safety.
So can the virus transfer from infected farm animals to contaminate milk, meat or eggs? How likely is this?
And what do we need to think about to minimise our risk when shopping for or preparing food?
AS Foodstudio/Shutterstock How safe is milk?
Bird flu (or avian influenza) is a bird disease caused by specific types of influenza virus. But the virus can also infect cows. In the US, for instance, to date more than 80 dairy herds in at least nine states have been infected with the H5N1 version of the virus.
Investigations are under way to confirm how this happened. But we do know infected birds can shed the virus in their saliva, nasal secretions and faeces. So bird flu can potentially contaminate animal-derived food products during processing and manufacturing.
Indeed, fragments of bird flu genetic material (RNA) were found in cow’s milk from the dairy herds associated with infected US farmers.
However, the spread of bird flu among cattle, and possibly to humans, is likely to have been caused through contact with contaminated milking equipment, not the milk itself.
The test used to detect the virus in milk – which uses similar PCR technology to lab-based COVID tests – is also highly sensitive. This means it can detect very low levels of the bird flu RNA. But the test does not distinguish between live or inactivated virus, just that the RNA is present. So from this test alone, we cannot tell if the virus found in milk is infectious (and capable of infecting humans).
It’s best to stick with pasteurised milk. Amnixia/Shutterstock Does that mean milk is safe to drink and won’t transmit bird flu? Yes and no.
In Australia, where bird flu has not been reported in dairy cattle, the answer is yes. It is safe to drink milk and milk products made from Australian milk.
In the US, the answer depends on whether the milk is pasteurised. We know pasteurisation is a common and reliable method of destroying concerning microbes, including influenza virus. Like most viruses, influenza virus (including bird flu virus) is inactivated by heat.
Although there is little direct research on whether pasteurisation inactivates H5N1 in milk, we can extrapolate from what we know about heat inactivation of H5N1 in chicken and eggs.
So we can be confident there is no risk of bird flu transmission via pasteurised milk or milk products.
However, it’s another matter for unpasteurised or “raw” US milk or milk products. A recent study showed mice fed raw milk contaminated with bird flu developed signs of illness. So to be on the safe side, it would be advisable to avoid raw milk products.
How about chicken?
Bird flu has caused sporadic outbreaks in wild birds and domestic poultry worldwide, including in Australia. In recent weeks, there have been three reported outbreaks in Victorian poultry farms (two with H7N3 bird flu, one with H7N9). There has been one reported outbreak in Western Australia (H9N2).
The strains of bird flu identified in the Victorian and Western Australia outbreaks can cause human infection, although these are rare and typically result from close contact with infected live birds or contaminated environments.
Therefore, the chance of bird flu transmission in chicken meat is remote.
Nonetheless, it is timely to remind people to handle chicken meat with caution as many dangerous pathogens, such as Salmonella and Campylobacter, can be found on chicken carcasses.
Always handle chicken meat carefully when shopping, transporting it home and storing it in the kitchen. For instance, make sure no meat juices cross-contaminate other items, consider using a cool bag when transporting meat, and refrigerate or freeze the meat within two hours.
Avoid washing your chicken before cooking to prevent the spread of disease-causing microbes around the kitchen.
Finally, cook chicken thoroughly as viruses (including bird flu) cannot survive cooking temperatures.
Are eggs safe?
The recent Australian outbreaks have occurred in egg-laying or mixed poultry flocks, so concerns have been raised about bird flu transmission via contaminated chicken eggs.
Can flu viruses contaminate chicken eggs and potentially spread bird flu? It appears so. A report from 2007 said it was feasible for influenza viruses to enter through the eggshell. This is because influenza virus particles are smaller (100 nanometres) than the pores in eggshells (at least 200 nm).
So viruses could enter eggs and be protected from cleaning procedures designed to remove microbes from the egg surface.
Therefore, like the advice about milk and meat, cooking eggs is best.
The US Food and Drug Administration recommends cooking poultry, eggs and other animal products to the proper temperature and preventing cross-contamination between raw and cooked food.
In a nutshell
If you consume pasteurised milk products and thoroughly cook your chicken and eggs, there is nothing to worry about as bird flu is inactivated by heat.
The real fear is that the virus will evolve into highly pathogenic versions that can be transmitted from human to human.
That scenario is much more frightening than any potential spread though food.
Enzo Palombo, Professor of Microbiology, Swinburne University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Share This Post
-
Stop Cancer 20 Years Ago
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.
Get Abreast And Keep Abreast
This is Dr. Jenn Simmons. Her specialization is integrative oncology, as she—then a breast cancer surgeon—got breast cancer, decided the system wasn’t nearly as good from the patients’ side of things as from the doctors’ side, and took to educate herself, and now others, on how things can be better.
What does she want us to know?
Start now
If you have breast cancer, the best time to start adjusting your lifestyle might be 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now. We realize our readers with breast cancer (or a history thereof) probably have indeed started already—all strength to you.
What this means for those of us without breast cancer (or a history therof) is: start now
Even if you don’t have a genetic risk factor, even if there’s no history of it in your family, there’s just no reason not to start now.
Start what, you ask? Taking away its roots. And how?
Inflammation as the root of cancer
To oversimplify: cancer occurs because an accidentally immortal cell replicates and replicates and replicates and takes any nearby resources to keep on going. While science doesn’t know all the details of how this happens, it is a factor of genetic mutation (itself a normal process, without which evolution would be impossible), something which in turn is accelerated by damage to the DNA. The damage to the DNA? That occurs (often as not) as a result of cellular oxidation. Cellular oxidation is far from the only genotoxic thing out there, and a lot of non-food “this thing causes cancer” warnings are usually about other kinds of genotoxicity. But cellular oxidation is a big one, and it’s one that we can fight vigorously with our lifestyle.
Because cellular oxidation and inflammation go hand-in-hand, reducing one tends to reduce the other. That’s why so often you’ll see in our Research Review Monday features, a line that goes something like:
“and now for those things that usually come together: antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, and anti-aging”
So, fight inflammation now, and have a reduced risk of a lot of other woes later.
See: How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation
Don’t settle for “normal”
People are told, correctly but not always helpfully, such things as:
- It’s normal to have less energy at your age
- It’s normal to have a weaker immune system at your age
- It’s normal to be at a higher risk of diabetes, heart disease, etc
…and many more. And these things are true! But that doesn’t mean we have to settle for them.
We can be all the way over on the healthy end of the distribution curve. We can do that!
(so can everyone else, given sufficient opportunity and resources, because health is not a zero-sum game)
If we’re going to get a cancer diagnosis, then our 60s are the decade where we’re most likely to get it. Earlier than that and the risk is extant but lower; later than that and technically the risk increases, but we probably got it already in our 60s.
So, if we be younger than 60, then now’s a good time to prepare to hit the ground running when we get there. And if we missed that chance, then again, the second-best time is now:
See: Focusing On Health In Our Sixties
Fast to live
Of course, anything can happen to anyone at any age (alas), but this is about the benefits of living a fasting lifestyle—that is to say, not just fasting for a 4-week health kick or something, but making it one’s “new normal” and just continuing it for life.
This doesn’t mean “never eat”, of course, but it does mean “practice intermittent fasting, if you can”—something that Dr. Simmons strongly advocates.
See: Intermittent Fasting: We Sort The Science From The Hype
While this calls back to the previous “fight inflammation”, it deserves its own mention here as a very specific way of fighting it.
It’s never too late
All of the advices that go before a cancer diagnosis, continue to stand afterwards too. There is no point of “well, I already have cancer, so what’s the harm in…?”
The harm in it after a diagnosis will be the same as the harm before. When it comes to lifestyle, preventing a cancer and preventing it from spreading are very much the same thing, which is also the same as shrinking it. Basically, if it’s anticancer, it’s anticancer, no matter whether it’s before, during, or after.
Dr. Simmons has seen too many patients get a diagnosis, and place their lives squarely in the hands of doctors, when doctors can only do so much.
Instead, Dr. Simmons recommends taking charge of your health as best you are able, today and onwards, no matter what. And that means two things:
- Knowing stuff
- Doing stuff
So it becomes our responsibility (and our lifeline) to educate ourselves, and take action accordingly.
Want to know more?
We recently reviewed her book, and heartily recommend it:
The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer – by Dr. Jenn Simmons
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Why We Get Sick – by Dr. Benjamin Bikman
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.
There’s a slightly buried lede here in that the title doesn’t offer this spoiler, but we will: the book is about insulin resistance.
However, unlike the books we’ve reviewed about blood sugar management, this time the focus is really and truly on insulin itself—and that makes some important differences:
Dr. Bikman makes the case that while indeed hyper- or hypoglycemia bring their problems, mostly these are symptoms rather than causes, and the real culprit is insulin resistance, and this is important for two main reasons:
- Insulin resistance occurs well before the other symptoms set in (which means: it is the thing that truly needs to be nipped in the bud; if your fasting blood sugars are rising, then you missed “nipping it in the bud” likely by a decade or more)
- Insulin resistance causes more problems than “mere” hyperglycemia (the most commonly-known result of insulin resistance) does, so again, it really needs to be considered separately from blood sugar management.
This latter, Dr. Bikman goes into in great detail, linking insulin resistance (even if blood sugar levels are normal) to all manner of diseases (hence the title).
You may be wondering: how can blood sugar levels be normal, if we have insulin resistance?
And the answer is that for as long as it is still able, your pancreas will just faithfully crank out more and more insulin to deal with the blood sugar levels that would otherwise be steadily rising. Since people measure blood sugar levels much more regularly than anyone checks for actual insulin levels, this means that one can be insulin resistant for years without knowing it, until finally the pancreas is no longer able to keep up with the demand—then that’s when people finally notice.
The book is divided into sections:
- The Problem: What Is Insulin Resistance
- The Cause: What Makes Us Insulin Resistant
- How We Can Fight Insulin Resistance
The first two parts are essential for the reader’s understanding, but the third part is the practical part, with appropriately practical advice on the most insulin-friendly ways to exercise, eat, fast, and more. He also talks drugs, and discusses the pros and cons of various interventions—but of course, far better is the lifestyle management of insulin.
The style is mostly very pop-science in overall presentation, and then occasionally gets very dense at times, but when that happens, he will then tend to follow it with an easier-to-understand explanation, to ensure that nothing remains opaque.
Bottom line: if you care about your metabolic health and don’t mind reading a book where you may have to read a paragraph or two twice sometimes, then this is a top-tier book on insulin resistance and how to prevent/reverse it.
Click here to check out Why We Get Sick, and stay well instead!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Sticky Jackfruit Burgers
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.
All the taste and experience of pulled pork, without the increased risk of cancer and metabolic disease. On the contrary, jackfruit introduces lots of fiber, vitamins, carotenoids, and flavanones. We’ll have to do a main feature about jackfruit sometime; it’s an unusual fruit especially for its protein content, but for now, let’s get cooking!
You will need
- 1 can (14oz/400g) green jackfruit, drained (the flesh will not, in fact, be green—this is referring to the fruit being unripe and thus still firm in texture, which is what we want. The outside of the fruit, which will not be in the can, will have been green)
- 1/4 red cabbage, thinly sliced
- 1/2 carrot, grated
- 6 mangetout, thinly sliced
- 2 tbsp mayonnaise (your preference what kind, and yes, vegan is fine too)
- 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 1 tbsp gochujang paste (if you can’t find gochujang paste locally, you can either order it online (here it is on Amazon) or substitute with harissa paste, which is not the same—it uses different spices—but will do the same job here re texture, umami taste, and level of spiciness)
- 1 tbsp soy sauce
- 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
- 1 tsp apple cider vinegar
- 1 tsp garlic paste
- 1 tsp tomato paste
- 1 tsp ginger paste
- 1 tsp chili flakes
- 3½ fl oz water
- 2 burger buns (unless you make them yourself, burger buns will probably not be healthy; you can, however, also look for small round wholemeal breads—the name of which varies far too much by region for us to try to get a catch-all name here—and use them in place of burger buns)
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Combine the garlic paste, ginger paste, tomato paste, gochujang paste, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, and chili flakes in a saucepan
2) Boil the 3½ fl oz water we mentioned; add it to the saucepan, mixing well, turn on the heat and let it simmer for 5 minutes or until it is thick and sticky (it will thicken more as it cools, too, so don’t worry if it doesn’t seem thick enough yet). Set it aside.
3) Dry the jackfruit (using strong kitchen paper should be fine), add the olive oil to a skillet and bring it to a high heat; add the jackfruit and fry on both sides for a few minutes, until it looks cooked (remember, while this may look like animal meat, it’s not, so there’s no danger of undercooking here).
4) When the jackfruit looks a nice golden-brown, add two thirds of the sauce from the saucepan, and break apart the jackfruit a bit (this can be done with a wooden/bamboo spatula, so as to not damage your pan), When it all looks how you’d expect pulled jackfruit (or pulled pork) to look, take it off the heat.
5) Combine the carrot, cabbage, and mangetout in a small bowl, adding the apple cider vinegar and mixing well; this will be the coleslaw element
6) Mix the remaining sauce with the mayonnaise
7) (optional) toast the burger buns
8) Assemble the burgers; we recommend the following order: bottom bun, pulled jackfruit, coleslaw, gochujang mayo, top bun
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Level-Up Your Fiber Intake, The Fun Way!
- 10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
