Apple vs Blackberries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing apple to blackberries, we picked the blackberries.
Why?
It wasn’t close today:
In terms of macros, apples have slightly more carbs while blackberries have 2x the fiber, so that’s an easy win for blackberries in this category.
In the category of vitamins, apples have slightly more vitamin B6, while blackberries have considerably more of vitamins A, B1, B3, B5, B7, B9, C, E, and K, winning easily again.
Looking at minerals, apples are not higher in any minerals, while blackberries have a lot more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, sweeping a third category.
Lastly, blackberries also have much more abundant polyphenols, so that’s another point in their favor.
Adding up the sections makes for an overwhelming overall win for blackberries, but by all means do enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Are You Getting The Right Kinds Of Flavonoids?
Enjoy!
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When A Period Is Very Late (Post-Menopause)
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Knowledge Is
PowerSafety, Post-Menopause TooNote: this article will be most relevant for a subset of our subscribership, but it’s a very large subset, so we’re going to go ahead and address the reader as “you”.
If, for example, you are a man and this doesn’t apply to you, we hope it will interest you anyway (we imagine there are women in your life).
PS: the appendicitis check near the end, works for anyone with an appendix
We’ve talked before about things that come with (and continue after) menopause:
- What You Should Have Been Told About The Menopause Beforehand
- What Menopause Does To The Heart
- Alzheimer’s Sex Differences May Not Be What They Appear
But what’s going on if certain menstrual symptoms reappear post-menopause (e.g. after more than a year with no menstruation)?
Bleeding
You should not, of course, be experiencing vaginal bleeding post-menopause. You may have seen “PSA” style posts floating around social media warning that this is a sign of cancer. And, it can be!
But it’s probably not.
Endometrial cancer (the kind that causes such bleeding) affects 2–3% of women, and of those reporting post-menopausal bleeding, the cause is endometrial cancer only 9% of those times.
So in other words, it’s not to be ignored, but for 9 people out of 10 it won’t be cancer:
Read more: Harvard Health | Postmenopausal bleeding: Don’t worry—but do call your doctor
Other more likely causes are uterine fibroids or polyps. These are unpleasant but benign, and can be corrected with surgery if necessary.
The most common cause, however is endometrial and/or vaginal atrophy resulting in tears and bleeding.
Tip: Menopausal HRT will often correct this.
Read more: The significance of “atrophic endometrium” in women with postmenopausal bleeding
(“atrophic endometrium” and “endometrial atrophy” are the same thing)
In summary: no need to panic, but do get it checked out at your earliest convenience. This is not one where we should go “oh that’s weird” and ignore.
Cramps
If you are on menopausal HRT, there is a good chance that these are just period cramps. They may feel different than they did before, because you didn’t ovulate and thus you’re not shedding a uterine lining now, but your body is going to do its best to follow the instructions given by the hormones anyway (hormones are just chemical messengers, after all).
If it is just this, then they will probably settle down to a monthly cycle and become quite predictable.
Tip: if it’s the above, then normal advice for period cramps will go here. We recommend ginger! It’s been found to be as effective as Novafen (a combination drug of acetaminophen (Tylenol), caffeine, and ibuprofen), in the task of relieving menstrual pain:
See: Effect of Ginger and Novafen on menstrual pain: A cross-over trial
It could also be endometriosis. Normally this affects those of childbearing age, but once again, exogenous hormones (as in menopausal HRT) can fool the body into doing it.
If you are not on menopausal HRT (or sometimes even if you are), uterine fibroids (as discussed previously) are once again a fair candidate, and endometriosis is also still possible, though less likely.
Special last note
Important self-check: if you are experiencing a sharp pain in that general area and are worrying if it is appendicitis (also a possibility), then pressing on the appropriately named McBurney’s point is a first-line test for appendicitis. If, after pressing, it hurts a lot more upon removal of pressure (rather than upon application of pressure), this is considered a likely sign of appendicitis. Get thee to a hospital, quickly.
And if it doesn’t? Still get it checked out at your earliest convenience, of course (better safe than sorry), but you might make an appointment instead of calling an ambulance.
Take care!
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Currants vs Grapes – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing currants to grapes, we picked the currants.
Why?
First, a note on nomenclature: when we say “currants”, we are talking about actual currants, of the Ribes genus, and in this case (as per the image) red ones. We are not talking about “currants” that are secretly tiny grapes that also get called currants in the US. So, there are important botanical differences here, beyond how they have been cultivated; they are literally entirely different plants.
So, about those differences…
In terms of macros, currants have nearly 5x the fiber, while grapes are slightly higher in carbs. So there’s an easy choice here in terms of fiber and on the glycemic index front; currants win easily.
In the category of vitamins, currants have more of vitamins B5, B9, C, and choline, while grapes have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, E, and K. So, a win for grapes in this round.
When it comes to minerals, currants have more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while grapes have more manganese. A win, therefore, for currants again this time.
In terms of polyphenols, currants have a lot more in terms of total polyphenols, including (as a matter of interest) approximately 5x the resveratrol content compared to grapes—and that’s compared to black grapes, which are the “best” kind of grapes for such. Grapes really aren’t a very good source of resveratrol; people just really like the idea of red wine being a health food, so it has been talked up a lot and got a popular reputation despite its extreme paucity of nutritional value.
In any case, adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for currants, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
21 Most Beneficial Polyphenols & What Foods Have Them
Enjoy!
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How loneliness affects your health
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In 2023, the U.S. surgeon general issued an advisory on the “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” He cited that about half of U.S. adults report feeling lonely, and people are spending increasingly more time alone.
For young adults ages 15 to 24, time spent in person with friends has declined by nearly 70 percent over the past two decades. Experts attribute increasing isolation across age groups to social media use, declining marriage rates, and early COVID-19 lockdowns disrupting social ties.
Loneliness has been linked to depression and anxiety, and it also increases the risk of health problems like heart disease and dementia.
Read on to learn how loneliness impacts your health and what you can do to prevent it.
What is the difference between loneliness and social isolation?
Loneliness is feeling disconnected from others. If your relationships don’t feel fulfilling or if you lack a sense of belonging, you might feel lonely, even if you spend time with friends, family, and coworkers.
Social isolation is rarely interacting with others and lacking social support.
“Someone who’s socially isolated and doesn’t have a lot of social contacts may not feel lonely at all, but someone else may feel lonely even when they’re surrounded by lots of people,” said psychologist Amy Sullivan in a 2024 Cleveland Clinic article.
Both loneliness and social isolation can have negative health impacts.
Who is at risk of loneliness or social isolation?
Anyone can feel lonely or isolated, but some people are at increased risk. You are more likely to feel lonely or isolated if you:
- Have a chronic physical or mental health condition
- Experience discrimination or abuse
- Live alone
- Live in a rural area
- Face language barriers within your community
- Are coping with a major life change, such as unemployment, the loss of loved one, or divorce
If you wish you felt closer to others, you’re not alone.
“It is easy to feel you’re the only one who needs social connectedness, but that is not true,” said Dr. Tiffani Bell Washington, a psychiatrist, in a 2023 American Medical Association article. “There is no shame in being lonely. We were built for connection.”
Why does loneliness impact physical health?
Long-term loneliness increases cortisol, a stress hormone. Chronically high cortisol levels can cause widespread inflammation, which can weaken your immune system and increase your risk of certain health conditions. Plus, loneliness and social isolation can prevent you from making lifestyle choices that help you stay healthy, like getting enough sleep, exercising, and eating nutritious meals.
Even short-term loneliness can cause health consequences. A 2024 study published in Health Psychology found that even people who report temporary or variable loneliness are more likely to experience symptoms like fatigue, headaches, and nausea.
What health problems are you at risk of if you’re lonely?
Loneliness and social isolation can increase your risk of health problems like:
- Cold and flu
- High blood pressure
- Stroke
- Heart disease
- Type 2 diabetes
- Dementia
People who are lonely or isolated are also at an increased risk of early death, as well as mental health symptoms like anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts.
Taking steps to prevent and reduce loneliness and isolation is an important way to help protect against health problems at any age.
“People assume if someone is doing well, making money and has a family that they can’t be lonely, but that is not true,” said Bell Washington. “We all benefit from having a deeper connection with others, no matter what stage of life we’re in.”
How can you manage loneliness and isolation?
Schedule quality time with loved ones.
Prioritizing in-person time with friends and family can create a deeper sense of connection. Even a phone call can help you feel closer to others.
Don’t use social media as a substitute for socializing.
“When we look at social media, it’s this sense of a connection but it’s not that deep. We’re missing that personal interaction that we can only get when we’re together,” said psychologist Adam Borland in the Cleveland Clinic article. You may have a lot of ‘friends’ on social media, however, there’s no depth to that.”
You may also want to take a break from social media to prioritize in-person connections.
Seek small connections in daily life.
While conversations with strangers, neighbors, and coworkers might not provide you with adequate support, these brief interactions can improve your social skills, which can help you feel more confident in seeking closer connections.
Ask for help.
Loneliness can be a symptom of depression, so it’s important to take your feelings seriously.
“If you notice that you are sad or worried more days than not, that would be a sign that you probably should check in with someone,” said Bell Washington. “In addition to confiding in a trusted family friend, I’d recommend reaching out to your personal physician.”
If you’re looking for additional mental health resources, Public Good News has compiled this list, including a guide to finding treatment.
If you or anyone you know is considering suicide or self-harm or is anxious, depressed, or upset, or needs to talk, call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741. For international resources, here is a good place to begin.
This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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Why Rheumatoid Arthritis Often Defies Drugs (& What Else you Can Try)
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Arthritis is the umbrella term for a cluster of joint diseases involving inflammation of the joints, hence “arthr-” (joint) “-itis” (suffix used to denote inflammation). These are mostly, but not all, autoimmune diseases, in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks our own joints.
Rheumatoid arthritis is one of those. Indeed, it’s the common of the autoimmune forms of arthritis. Some quick facts:
- Approximately one third of people stop work within two years of its onset, and this increases thereafter.
- It affects a little under 1% of the global population, but the older we get, the more likely it becomes
- Early onset of rheumatoid arthritis is most likely to show up around the age of 50 (but it can show up at any age)
- However, incidence (not onset) of rheumatoid arthritis peaks in the 70s age bracket
- It is 2–4 times more common in women than in men
When meds don’t work (and why)
There are three main kinds:
- Pain relief (always hit-and-miss, unless going for literal anaesthetic)
- Anti-inflammatory (can rarely go too far wrong, although some can give different problems)
- Arthritis-specific, which are usually also anti-inflammatory in their own way, but deserve a special mention
For example, a lot of arthritis medications act via the interleukin-17 pathways.
However, researchers (Dr. Martina Zoccheddu et al.) found that in rheumatoid arthritis, the immune cells that normally make IL-17 gradually stop producing it, which explains why IL-17-targeted drugs lose effectiveness as the disease progresses.
Even worse, once these cells stop making IL-17, they turn into aggressive forms that can still sustain joint inflammation independently of IL-17, meaning that the meds can end up doing more harm than good in the long-run!
To quote Dr. Joyce So when asked about this,
❝This important new insight contributes to shifting the paradigm of how we understand rheumatoid arthritis progression and why IL-17 treatments haven’t worked as well as expected. Only with a precise understanding of the biological mechanisms of disease can effective, precision therapies be developed.
In the meantime, clinicians can help patients in early or presymptomatic stages make the most of treatments that may lose effectiveness over time.❞
You can find the paper itself, here: TH17 cells converted into exTH17 cells sustain rheumatoid-like IL-17–independent inflammatory arthritis
About those early or presymptomatic stages…
Another team of researchers (Dr. Marla Glass et al.) recently found that rheumatoid arthritis begins long before pain, with people who carry a particular kind of antibodies showing body-wide inflammation, malfunctioning immune cells, and gene-regulation changes for at least seven years before symptoms show up.
In other words, the immune system is behaving as though rheumatoid arthritis is already active, and so, in a way, arguably it is already active.
This is all going on in ways that you wouldn’t see without doing blood tests, though.
For example (we will quote these key points directly):
- Widespread inflammation: The researchers observed that people at risk for RA already showed signs of systemic inflammation throughout the body. This inflammation was not limited to the joints. Instead, it resembled the body-wide inflammatory pattern commonly seen in individuals with active RA.
- Immune cell dysfunction: Multiple immune cell types showed unusual behavior.
- B cells, which normally create protective antibodies, were found in a heightened pro-inflammatory state.
- T helper cells, especially those similar to Tfh17 cells, had expanded far beyond typical levels. These cells help coordinate immune responses, including the creation of autoantibodies (antibodies that attack the body’s own tissues). Their expansion helps explain why the immune system begins targeting healthy tissue.
- Cellular reprogramming: One of the most striking discoveries was that even “naive” T cells, which have not yet encountered pathogens, showed epigenetic changes. Although their DNA sequence remained intact, the regulation of their genes had shifted. This altered gene activity suggests these cells were being reprogrammed before encountering any threats.
- Joint-like inflammation detected in blood: The team also found that monocytes (a type of white blood cell) circulating in the bloodstream were producing high amounts of inflammatory molecules. Remarkably, these cells closely resembled the macrophages typically found in the inflamed joints of RA patients, indicating that the immune system was already setting the stage for joint inflammation.
You can find this paper itself, here: Progression to rheumatoid arthritis in at-risk individuals is defined by systemic inflammation and by T and B cell dysregulation
What that means in practical terms
If you get a rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis, even if it feels like you got it quickly, chances are you’ve technically had it for a long time already.
So, if you don’t have such a diagnosis, it is good to behave as though you did (aside from the pain relief component, of course, if you have no pain), because honestly, the advice for managing arthritis is very good advice anyway, since it tends to target improving joint health and reducing chronic inflammation.
With that in mind, do check out:
And for a very deep dive into excellent exercise vs arthritis, see:
Yoga Therapy for Arthritis – by Dr. Steffany Moonaz & Erin Byron
…which is a particularly good book, much better than most of its kind, because:
- One of the problems with arthritis and exercise is that arthritis can often impede exercise.
- Another of the problems with arthritis and exercise is that some kinds of exercise can exacerbate arthritis.
This book deals with both of those issues, by providing yoga specifically tailored to living with arthritis. Indeed, the first-listed author’s PhD in public health was the result of 8 years of study developing an evidence-based yoga program for people with arthritis, including osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.
The authors take the view that arthritis is a whole-person disease (i.e. it affects all parts of you), and so addressing it requires a whole-person approach, which is what this book delivers, and so that’s why we highly recommend it.
And if you do have the pain component already…
We’ve written quite a bit about pain management, including:
- Before You Reach For That Tylenol…
- How To Stop Pain Spreading
- How To Dial Down Your Pain
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
- Get The Right Help For Your Pain
- The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
- Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief (When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might)
Take care!
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The Wrist-Worn Device That Detects Depression!
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Fitness trackers are great—in some regards. There are things they do well, and things they do badly, and those things are not always the way around you might expect!
We wrote about this, here: What Your Fitness Tracker Is Best & Worst At
In that article, we mentioned that one of the things it’s best at is tracking and establishing patterns.
Can you guess where this is going today?
Actionable actigraphy
Researchers (Dr. Adile Nexha et al.) looked at whether actigraphy*-derived sleep and rest-activity rhythms are associated with relapse in major depressive disorder (MDD).
*actigraphy = activity as plotted on a graph
What they did: 93 adults in remission from MDD across Canada wore a research-grade wrist actigraphy device for 1–2 years, generating approximately 32,000 days of sleep and activity data.
And what did that data tell Dr. Nexha and her team?
In few words: people with more irregular sleep and weaker day–night activity contrast had about a twofold higher risk of depressive relapse, often detectable weeks to months before symptoms returned.
In more words:
- Most important factor: lower relative amplitude—meaning less difference between daytime activity and nighttime rest—remained predictive even after adjusting for concurrent Montgomery–Åsberg Depression Rating Scale scores.
- Other predictors: lower sleep regularity and sleep efficiency, higher wake after sleep onset, higher nighttime activity, and increasingly erratic sleep schedules before relapse.
This is a huge breakthrough because it shows that passive (easy!) continuous monitoring can flag risk earlier than symptom-based check-ins between appointments and could help people get the timely care they need.
Which is especially meaningful in cases of depression, where people struggling with depression are famously one of the hardest demographics to get to actively do something (including: tests).
You can find the paper itself, here: One-Year Actigraphy Study of Sleep and Rest-Activity Rhythms as Markers of Relapse in Depression
Another reason this is particularly important is that depression is sometimes astonishingly well-hidden. A person can be very very depressed, but they’re still switching into “performance mode” for things, sometimes even having a semblance of happiness while doing stuff in the company of others, but it’s all empty inside and lost in an instant once the mask can be allowed to slip, as it must, because keeping up appearances is very draining to someone who already doesn’t have a lot of energy due to the depression.
You can read more about that, here: How To Recognize Perfectly Hidden Depression
Want to learn more?
Some important reads:
- How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To) ← this one’s about as serious as it can get, and we mean it.
- The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← no, we’re not going to ask you to name 5 things you can see and all that. That’s more to do with anxiety and disassociative disorders in any case. But what this article does have, is a lot of genuinely practical advice that actually works, and yes, even when your motivation is through the floor.
- Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety ← this one builds on the previous one, and can make use of your health tracker too 😎
Take care!
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Hold Me Tight – by Dr. Sue Johnson
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A lot of relationship books are quite wishy-washy. This one isn’t.
This one is evidenced-based (and heavily referenced!), and yet at the same time as being deeply rooted in science, it doesn’t lose the human touch.
Dr. Johnson has spent her career as a clinical psychologist and researcher; she’s the primary developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), which has demonstrated its effectiveness in over 35 years of peer-reviewed clinical research. In other words, it works.
EFT—and thus also this book—finds roots in Attachment Theory. As such, topics this book covers include:
- Recognizing and recovering from attachment injury
- How fights in a relationship come up, and how they can be avoided
- How lot of times relationships end, it’s not because of fights, but a loss of emotional connection
- Building a lifetime of love instead, falling in love again each day
This book lays the groundwork for ensuring a strong, secure, ongoing emotional bond, of the kind that makes/keeps a relationship joyful and fulfilling.
Dr. Johnson has been recognized in her field with a Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Order of Canada.
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