Apples vs Bananas – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing apples to bananas, we picked the bananas.
Why?
Both apples and bananas contain lots of vitamins, but bananas contain far more of Vitamins A, B, and C.
Apples beat bananas only for vitamins E and K.
This may seem like “well that’s 2 vs 3; that’s pretty close” until one remembers that vitamin B is actually eight vitamins in a trenchcoat. Bananas have more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, and B9.
If you’re wondering about the other numbers: neither fruit contains vitamins B7 (biotin) or B12 (cobalamins of various kinds). Vitamins B4, B8, B10, and B11 do not exist as such (due to changes in how vitamins are classified).
Both apples and bananas contain lots of minerals, but bananas contain far more of iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, copper, manganese, and selenium.
Apples beat bananas only for calcium (and then, only very marginally)
Both apples and bananas have plenty of fiber.
Apples have marginally less sugar, but given the fiber content, this is pretty much moot when it comes to health considerations, and apples are higher in fructose in any case.
In short, both are wonderful fruits (and we encourage you to enjoy both!), and/but bananas beat apples healthwise in almost all measures.
PS: top tip if you find it challenging to get bananas at the right level of ripeness for eating… Try sun-dried! Not those hard chip kinds (those are mechanically and/or chemically dried, and usually have added sugar and preservatives), but sun-dried.
Here’s an example product on Amazon
Warning: since there aren’t many sun-dried bananas available on Amazon, double-check you haven’t been redirected to mechanically/chemically dried ones, as Amazon will try that sometimes!
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Cold Weather Health Risks
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Many Are Cold; Few Are Frozen
Many of those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are getting hit with a cold spell around now. How severe that may be depends on more precisely where we are, but it’s affecting a lot of people. So, with apologies to our readers in Australia, we’re going to do a special on that today.
Acute cold is, for most people, good for the health:
A Cold Shower A Day Keeps The Doctor Away?
Persistent cold, not so much. Let’s look at the risks, and what can be done about them…
Hypothermia
It kills. Don’t let it kill you or your loved ones.
And, this is really important: it doesn’t care whether you’re on a mountain or not.
In other words: a lot of people understand (correctly!) that hypothermia is a big risk to hikers, climbers, and the like. But if the heating goes out in your house and the temperature drops for long enough before the heating is fixed, you can get hypothermia there too just the same if you’re not careful.
How cold is too cold? It doesn’t even have to be sub-zero. According to the CDC, temperatures of 4℃ (40℉) can be low enough to cause hypothermia if other factors combine:
CDC | Prevent Hypothermia & Frostbite ← you can also see the list of symptoms to watch out for, there!
Skin health
Not generally an existential risk, but we may as well stay healthy as not!
Cold air often means dry air, so use a moisturizer with an oil base (if you don’t care for fancy beauty products, ordinary coconut oil is top-tier).
Bonus if you do it after a warming bath/shower!
Heart health
Cold has a vasconstricting effect; that is to say, it causes the body’s vasculature to shrink, increasing localized blood pressure. If it’s a cold shower as above, that can be very invigorating. If it’s a week of sub-zero temperatures, it can become a problem.
❝Shoveling a little snow off your sidewalk may not seem like hard work. However, […] combined with the fact that the exposure to cold air can constrict blood vessels throughout the body, you’re asking your heart to do a lot more work in conditions that are diminishing the heart’s ability to function at its best.❞
Source: Snow shoveling, cold temperatures combine for perfect storm of heart health hazards
If you have a heart condition, please do not shovel snow. Let someone else do it, or stay put.
And if you are normally able to exercise safely? Unless you’re sure your heart is in good order, exercising in the warmth, not the cold, seems to be the best bet.
See also: Heart Attack: His & Hers (Be Prepared!) ← can you remember which symptoms are for which sex? If not, now’s a good time to refresh that knowledge.
Immune health
We recently discussed how cold weather indirectly increases the risk of respiratory viral infection:
The Cold Truth About Respiratory Infections
So, now’s the time to be extra on-guard about that.
See also: Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!
Balance
Icy weather increases the risk of falling. If you think “having a fall” is something that happens to other/older people, please remember that there’s a first time for everything. Some tips:
- Walk across icy patches with small steps in a flat-footed fashion like a penguin.
- It may not be glamorous, but neither is going A-over-T and breaking (or even just spraining) things.
- Use a handrail if available, even if you don’t think you need to.
You can also check out our previous article about falling (avoiding falling, minimizing the damage of falling, etc):
Fall Special: Some Fall-Themed Advice
Take care!
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- Walk across icy patches with small steps in a flat-footed fashion like a penguin.
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The Worst Cookware Lurking In Your Kitchen (Toxicologist Explains)
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Dr. Yvonne Burkart gives us a rundown of the worst offenders, and what to use instead:
Hot mess
The very worst offender is non-stick cookware, the kind with materials such as Teflon. These are the most toxic, due to PFAS chemicals.
Non-stick pans release toxic gases, leach chemicals into food, and release microplastic particles, which can accumulate in the body.
One that a lot of people don’t think about, in that category, is the humble air-fryer, which often as not has a non-stick cooking “basket”. These she describes as highly toxic, as they combine plastic, non-stick coatings, and high heat, which can release fumes and other potentially dangerous chemicals into the air and food.
You may be wondering: how bad is it? And the answer is, quite bad. PFAS chemicals are linked to infertility, hypertension in pregnancy, developmental issues in children, cancer, weakened immune systems, hormonal disruption, obesity, and intestinal inflammation.
Dr. Burkart’s top picks for doing better:
- Pure ceramic cookware: top choice for safety, particularly brands like Xtrema, which are tested for heavy metal leaching.
- Carbon steel & cast iron: durable and safe; can leach iron in acidic foods (for most people, this is a plus, but some may need to be aware of it)
- Stainless steel: lightweight and affordable but can leach nickel and chromium in acidic foods at high temperatures. Use only if nothing better is available.
And specifically as alternatives to air-fryers: glass convection ovens or stainless steel ovens are safer than conventional air fryers. The old “combination oven” can often be a good choice here.
For more on all of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- PFAS Exposure & Cancer: The Numbers Are High
- It’s Not Fantastic To Be Plastic ← for the closely related topic of microplastics and nanoplastics
Take care!
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Master Your Core – by Dr. Bohdanna Zazulak
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In the category of “washboard abs”, this one isn’t particularly interested in how much or how little fat you have. What it’s more interested in is a strong, resilient, and stable core. Including your abs yes, but also glutes, hips, and back.
Nor is the focus on superhuman feats of strength, though certainly one could use these exercises to work towards that. Rather, here we see importance placed on functional performance, mobility, and stability.
Lest mobility and stability seem at odds with each other, understand:
- By mobility we mean the range of movement we are able to accomplish.
- By stability, we mean that any movement we make is intentional, and not because we lost our balance.
Functional performance, meanwhile, is a function of those two things, plus strength.
How does the book deliver on this?
There are exercises to do. Exercises of the athletic kind you might expect, and also exercises including breathing exercises, which gets quite a bit of attention too. Not just “do abdominal breathing”, but quite an in-depth examination of such. There are also habits to form, and lifestyle tweaks to make.
Of course, you don’t have to do all the things she suggests. The more you do, the better results you are likely to get, but if you adopt even some of the practices she recommends, you’re likely to see some benefits. And, perhaps most importantly, reduce age-related loss of mobility, stability, and strength.
Bottom line: a great all-rounder book of core strength, mobility, and stability.
Click here to check out Master Your Core and enjoy the more robust health that comes with it!
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Beyond Burger vs Beef Burger – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing the Beyond Burger to a grass-fed beef burger, we picked the Beyond Burger—but it was very close.
Why?
The macronutrient profiles of the two are almost identical, including the amount of protein, the amount of fat, and the amount of that fat that’s saturated.
Where they stand apart is in two ways:
1) Red meat is classed as a group 2A carcinogen
2) The Beyond Burger contains more sodium (about 1/5 of the daily allowance according to the AHA, or 1/4 of the daily allowance according to the WHO)Neither of those things are great, so how to decide which is worse?
• Cancer and heart disease are both killers, with heart disease claiming more victims.
• However, we do need some sodium to live, whereas we don’t need carcinogens to live.Tie-breaker: the sodium content in the Beyond Burger is likely to be offset by the fact that it’s a fully seasoned burger and will be eaten as-is, whereas the beef burger will doubtlessly have seasonings added before it’s eaten—which may cause it to equal or even exceed the salt content of the Beyond Burger.
The cancer risk for the beef burger, meanwhile, stays one-sided.
One thing’s for sure though: neither of them are exactly a cornerstone of a healthy diet, and either are best enjoyed as an occasional indulgence.
Some further reading:
• Lesser-Known Salt Risks
• Food Choices And Cancer Risk
• Hypertension: Factors Far More Relevant Than SaltDon’t Forget…
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How To Grow In Comfort
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How To Grow (Without Leaving Your Comfort Zone)
“You have to get out of your comfort zone!” we are told, from cradle to grave.
When we are young, we are advised (or sometimes more forcefully instructed!) that we have to try new things. In our middle age, we are expected to be the world’s greatest go-getters, afraid of nothing and always pushing limits. And when we are old, people bid us “don’t be such a dinosaur”.
It is assumed, unquestioned, that growth can only occur through hardship and discomfort.
But what if that’s a discomforting lie?
Butler (2023) posited an idea: “We never achieve success faster and with less effort than when we are in our comfort zone”
Her words are an obvious callback to the ideas of Csikszentmihalyi (1970) in the sense of “flow”, in the sense in which that word is used in psychology.
Flow is: when a person is in a state of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment of an activity.
As a necessary truth (i.e: a function of syllogistic logic), the conditions of “in a state of flow” and “outside of one’s comfort zone” cannot overlap.
From there, we can further deduce (again by simple logic) that if flow can be found, and/but cannot be found outside of the comfort zone, then flow can only be found within the comfort zone.
That is indeed comforting, but what about growth?
Imagine you’ve never gone camping in your life, but you want to get outside of your comfort zone, and now’s the time to do it. So, you check out some maps of the Yukon, purchase some camping gear, and off you go into the wilderness. In the event that you survive to report it, you will indeed be able to say “it was not comfortable”.
But, did growth occur? Maybe, but… it’s a folly to say “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” as a reason to pursue such things. Firstly, there’s a high chance it may kill us. Secondly, what doesn’t kill us often leaves us incredibly weakened and vulnerable.
When Hannibal famously took his large army of mostly African mercenaries across the Alps during winter to march on Rome from the other side, he lost most of his men on the way, before proceeding to terrorize Northern Italy convincingly with the small remainder. But! Their hard experience hadn’t made them stronger; it had just removed the weaker soldiers, making the resultant formations harder to break.
All this to say, please do not inflict hardship and discomfort and danger in the hopes it’ll make you stronger; it will probably do the opposite.
But…
If, instead of wilderness trekking in the Yukon…
- You start off with a camper van holiday, then you’ll be taking a fair amount of your comfort with you. In effect, you will be stretching and expanding your comfort zone without leaving it.
- Then maybe another year you might try camping in a tent on a well-catered camping site.
- Later, you might try “roughing it” at a much less well-catered camping site.
- And so on.
Congratulations, you have tried new things and undergone growth, taking your comfort zone with you all the way!
This is more than just “easing yourself into” something
It really is about taking your comfort with you too. If you want to take up running, don’t ask “how can I run just a little bit first” or “how can I make it easier” (well, feel free to ask those things too, but) ask yourself: how can I bring my comfort with me? Comfortable shoes, perhaps, an ergonomic water bottle, shade for your head, maybe.
❝Any fool can rough it, but a good soldier can make himself comfortable in any circumstances❞
~ British Army maxim
This goes for more than just physical stuff, too
If you want to learn a new skill, the initial learning curve can be anxiety-inducing, especially if you are taking a course and worried about keeping up or “not being good enough”.
So, “secretly” study in advance, at your leisure, get yourself a head start. Find a degree of comfort in what you’ve learned so far, and then bring that comfort with you into your entry-level course that is now less intimidating.
Discomfort isn’t a badge of honor (and impedes growth)
Take that extra rest stop on the highway. Bring your favorite coffee with you. Use that walking stick, if it helps.
Whatever it takes to bring your comfort with you, bring it.
Trust us, you’ll get further that way.
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Tight Hamstrings? Here’s A Test To Know If It’s Actually Your Sciatic Nerve
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Tight hamstrings are often not actually due to hamstring issues, but rather, are often being limited by the sciatic nerve. This video offers a home test to determine if the sciatic nerve is causing mobility problems (and how to improve it, if so):
The Connection
Try this test:
- Sit down with a slumped posture.
- Extend one leg with the ankle flexed.
- Note any stretching or pulling sensation behind the knee or in the calf.
- Bring your head down to your chest
If this increases the sensation, it likely indicates sciatic nerve involvement.
If only the hamstrings are tight, head movement won’t change the stretch sensation.
This is because the nervous system is a continuous structure, so head movement can affect nerve tension throughout the body. While this can cause problems, it can also be integral in the solution. Here are two ways:
- Flossing method: sit with “poor” slumped posture, extend the knee, keep the ankle flexed, and lift the head to relieve nerve tension. This movement helps the sciatic nerve slide without stretching it.
- Even easier method: lie on your back, grab behind the knee, and extend the leg while extending the neck. This position avoids compression in the gluteal area, making it suitable for severely compromised nerves. Perform the movement without significant stretching or pain.
In both cases: move gently to avoid straining the nerve, which can worsen muscle tension. Do 10 repetitions per leg, multiple times a day; after a week, increase to 20 reps.
A word of caution: speak with your doctor before trying these exercises if you have underlying neurological diseases, cut or infected nerves, or other severe conditions.
For more on all of this, plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Exercises for Sciatica Pain Relief
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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