Artichoke vs Brussels Sprouts – Which is Healthier?

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Our Verdict

When comparing artichoke to Brussels sprouts, we picked the sprouts.

Why?

Finally, a vegetable that beats artichoke—after it previously beat heart-of-palm, asparagus, and even cabbage! It was still close though, which is impressive for artichoke, considering what a nutritional powerhouse Brussels sprouts are:

In terms of macros, the only meaningful difference is that artichoke has slightly more carbs and fiber, so artichoke gets the most marginal of nominal wins in this category.

In the category of vitamins, however, artichoke has more of vitamins B3, B9, and choline, while Brussels sprouts have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, C, E, and K, giving sprouts the clear victory here, especially with much higher margins of difference (e.g. 58x more vitamin A, as well as 7x more vitamin C, and 10x more vitamin K).

When it comes to minerals, artichoke has more copper, magnesium, phosphorus, and zinc, while Brussels sprouts have more iron, manganese, potassium, and selenium, resulting in a 4:4 tie, and the small margins of difference are mostly comparable, with the exception that sprouts have 8x more selenium. So, Brussels sprouts win this category very marginally on that tie-breaker.

Adding up the sections we see that macros and minerals gave a small win each to artichoke and sprouts respectively, while the vitamins category was an overwhelming win for sprouts, so—with this deciding factor in mind—sprouts win the day today.

Want to learn more?

You might like to read:

Sprout Your Seeds, Grains, Beans, Etc

Enjoy!

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    Prunes vs. Dates: In a head-to-head nutritional showdown, prunes outshine dates with a broader vitamin and mineral win!

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  • Can You Step Backwards Without Your Foot Or Torso Turning Out?

    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.

    Walking backwards is often overlooked, but research shows it can enhance forward walking, especially in stroke patients; it has other benefits for everyone else, too. The physiotherapists at Fitness4Life Physical Therapy explain:

    …and one step back

    How it works: walking backwards heightens proprioception and stimulates muscles, improving balance and posture. Additionally, our daily lives tend to involve forward-leaning postures, causing upper back bending, and walking backwards helps counterbalance this.

    Extra benefits: training to walk backwards can reduce the risk of falls, as stepping back is a common movement that is often untrained.

    Exercise: try doing backwards lunges, to assess your skill and balance while moving backward. If foot rotation or torso rotation occurs during the exercise, then there’s room for improvement. Correcting these movements is then simply a matter of practicing backward lunges without turning.

    10almonds tip: any exercise is only as good as your will to actually do it. For this reason, dancing is a great exercise in this case, as almost all forms of dance involve stepping backwards (in order to have steps without travelling somewhere, forwards steps are usually balanced with backwards ones)

    For more on all this, plus a visual demonstration of the exercise, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Fall Special ← About how to avoid falling, and how to avoid (and failing that, at least minimize) injury if you do fall. If you think this only happens to other/older people, remember, there’s a first time for everything, so it is better to be prepared in advance!

    Take care!

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  • Unlimited Memory – by Kevin Horsley

    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.

    Premise: there are easily learnable techniques to rapidly (and greatly) improve one’s memory. We’ve touched on some of these methods before at 10almonds, but being a newsletter rather than a book, we’ve not been able to go as deeply into it as Horsley!

    Your memory is far, far, far more powerful than you might realize, and this book will help unlock that. To illustrate…

    Some of the book is given over to what are for most purposes “party tricks”, such as remembering pi to 10,000 places. Those things are fun, even if not as practical in today’s world of rarely needing to even know the actual digits of a phone number. However, they do also serve as a good example of just how much of “super memory” isn’t a matter of hard work, so much as being better organized about it.

    Most of the book is focused on practical methods to improve the useful aspects of memory—including common mistakes!

    If the book has any flaw it’s that the first chapter or so is spent persuading the reader of things we presumably already believe, given that we bought the book. For example, that remembering things is a learnable skill and that memory is functionally limitless. However, we still advise to not skip those chapters as they do contain some useful reframes as well.

    Bottom line: if you read this book you will be astonished by how much you just learned—because you’ll be able to recall whole sections in detail! And then you can go apply that whatever areas of your life you wanted to when you bought the book.

    Get your copy of Unlimited Memory from Amazon today!

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  • Can You Gain Muscle & Lose Fat At The Same Time?

    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 😎

    ❝Is it possible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, or do we need to focus on one and then the other, and if so, which order is best?❞

    Contrary to popular belief, you can do both simultaneously! However, it’s not as easy as doing just one or the other, which is why most bodybuilders, for example, have a “building phase” and a “cutting phase”.

    The reason it’s difficult is because of the diet. Growing muscle doesn’t just take protein and micronutrients; it takes energy as well, which must come from carbohydrates and/or fats. Therefore, it is tricky to eat enough to build muscle and to fuel the workouts that are required to build the muscle (you can’t hit the gym in a state of rabbit starvation* and expect to perform well at your workout), while at the same time not eating enough carbs/fats to have any excess to store as fat.

    *So-called because rabbit-meat is very lean, such that when during times of famine, European peasants tried to subsist off mostly rabbits, their health quickly plummeted for lack of energy. It’s also been called “salmon starvation”, apparently, for the same reason:

    How ancestral subsistence strategies solve salmon starvation and the “protein problem” of Pacific Rim resources

    In French it’s called “Mal de caribou” (caribou sickness), by the way. But you get the idea: eat too much lean protein without enough carbs/fats, and woe shall befall.

    So, if you want to do both at once, you need to be incredibly on top of your macros, and the bad news is, only you (or a coach working directly with you) can work out what precise macros requirements your body has, because it depends on your body and your activities.

    The easier “half-way house”

    We will get to the “building phase” and “cutting phase” of bodybuilders, but first, here’s an option that’s very worthy of consideration, and it is: forget about your weight and just focus on health while incidentally doing regular resistance exercises and HIIT.

    What will happen if you do this (assuming a healthy balanced diet, nothing special and without counting anything, but we’re talking at least mostly whole-foods, and at least mostly plants; the Mediterranean diet is great for this, as it is for most things) is:

    • The dietary approach described will gradually improve your metabolic health if it wasn’t already good. If it was already good, it’ll likely just maintain it, rather than improve it.
    • The resistance exercises will, if engaged with seriously (it has to be difficult to do, or your muscles won’t have any reason to grow), gradually build muscle. This will be very gradual, because you’re not eating for bodybuilding, nor optimizing your general lifestyle for same. Historically many women have feared lifting weights because they don’t want to “look like a weightlifter”, but the kinds of bodies that word brings to mind are not the kind that happen by accident (especially for women, with our different hormones guiding our bodies to a different composition); it takes a lot of single-minded dedication to specifically optimize size gains, for a long time.
    • The high-intensity interval training (HIIT) will more rapidly improve your metabolic health, and unlike most forms of exercise, it will actually result in a gradual reduction of fat, if you have superfluous fat to lose. This is because whereas most forms of cardio exercise increase the heartrate for a while but then have a corresponding metabolic slump afterwards to make up for it, HIIT confuses the heart (in a good way) which results in it having to grow stronger, and not doing any compensatory metabolic slump:

    How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body) ← as well as the “how to”, this also gives some of the science behind it, too

    This will, thus, result in gradual gain of muscle and loss of fat—or if you take it easier with the exercise, then you can easily settle into just maintaining your body composition as it is, but that wasn’t the question today.

    So, there you have it, that’s how to do both at once! Now, if you want more dramatic results, then more dramatic methods are called for:

    What bodybuilders (mostly) do

    Matters of genetic predisposition and commonplace use of steroids aside, here’s how bodybuilders get that “lots of muscle, no fat” figure:

    1. First, get into “moderate” shape if not already there.
    2. Bulk up: eat amounts of food that will seem unreasonable to a non-bodybuilder; eating 2x or even 3x the “recommended” daily calorie amount is common; focus is typically on getting adequate (for bodybuilding purposes) protein while also carb-loading for workouts and getting at least enough fats for fat-soluble vitamins to work. In the gym, focus on doing sets of very few reps with the heaviest weights one can safely lift, while doing minimal cardio, and also sleeping a lot (9–12hrs per day), which is essential because this is putting a huge strain on the body and it needs a chance to recover and rebuild.
    3. Cut down: maintain protein intake (to at least mostly maintain muscles) while keeping carbs and fats low, doing cardio work (HIIT is still ideal) and running a calorie deficit for a short while (there is no use in trying to maintain a long-term calorie deficit; your body will try to save you from starvation by storing any fat it can and slowing your metabolism).

    Phases 2 and 3 are then cycled, alternating every month, or every 6 weeks, or every 2 months or so, depending on personal preferences and scheduling considerations (bodybuilders will often have competitions they are working towards, so they need to time things to be at the end of a cutting phase to look their “best” by bodybuilder standards).

    Disclaimer: bodybuilding is complex, and can be ruinous to the health if practised inexpertly, because of its extreme nature. We don’t recommend serious bodybuilding per se in general, but if you are going to do it, please consult with a professional bodybuilding coach, and do not rely on a few paragraphs from us that are intended only to give the most basic overview of how bodybuilders can approach the “gain muscle, lose fat” problem.

    Want to know more?

    We’ve written on some related topics previously; here’s a three-part series:

    1. How To Lose Weight (Healthily!)
    2. How To Build Muscle (Healthily!)
    3. How To Gain Weight (Healthily!) ← this one’s specifically about gaining healthy levels of fat, for any who want/need that

    And also:

    Can We Do Fat Redistribution? ← yes we can, but there are caveats

    Take care!

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Related Posts

  • Carrot vs Kale – Which is Healthier?
  • Broad Beans vs Sweetcorn – 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 broad beans to sweetcorn, we picked the broad beans.

    Why?

    Firstly, you may be wondering: “aren’t broad beans fava beans?”, and yes, yes they are, but by convention, broad beans are the young green beans, while fava beans are the mature beans of the plant. Similar situation to the relationship between edamame and soybeans. And, in both cases, you’re more likely to put the young green beans in a salad, thus making the broad beans the more reasonable vegetable to compare to the sweetcorn. On which note…

    In terms of macros, the broad beans have more protein and fiber, while the sweetcorn has more carbs. We call that a win for the beans.

    Looking at the vitamins, the broad beans have (barely) more vitamin B6, while the sweetcorn has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B5, B9, E, and choline. An easy win for the corn this time.

    In the category of minerals, the situation is reversed: broad beans have more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while sweetcorn is not higher in any minerals. So, a clear win for the beans.

    Adding up the sections gives a 2:1 win for the beans over the corn, but by all means enjoy either or both—together is great, and diversity is good!

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?

    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

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  • The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook for Beginners – by Jessica Aledo

    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 are a lot of Mediterranean Diet books on the market, and not all of them actually stick to the Mediterranean Diet. There’s a common mistake of thinking “Well, this dish is from the Mediterranean region, so…”, but that doesn’t make, for example, bacon-laden carbonara part of the Mediterranean Diet!

    Jessica Aledo does better, and sticks unwaveringly to the Mediterranean Diet principles.

    First, she gives a broad introduction, covering:

    • The Mediterranean Diet pyramid
    • Foods to eat on the Mediterranean Diet
    • Foods to avoid on the Mediterranean Diet
    • Benefits of the Mediterranean Diet

    Then, it’s straight into the recipes, of which there are 201 (as with many recipe books, the title is a little misleading about this).

    They’re divided into sections, thus:

    • Breakfasts
    • Lunches
    • Snacks
    • Dinners
    • Desserts

    The recipes are clear and simple, one per double-page, with high quality color illustrations. They give ingredients/directions/nutrients. There’s no padding!

    Helpfully, she does include a shopping list as an appendix, which is really useful!

    Bottom line: if you’re looking to build your Mediterranean Diet repertoire, this book is an excellent choice.

    Get your copy of The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook for Beginners from Amazon today!

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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  • How gender-affirming care improves trans mental health

    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.

    In recent years, a growing number of states have passed laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for transgender people, particularly minors. As conversations about gender-affirming care increase, so do false narratives about it, with some opponents falsely suggesting that it’s harmful to mental health.

    Despite widespread attacks against gender-affirming care, research clearly shows that it improves mental health outcomes for transgender people.

    Read on to learn more about what gender-affirming care is, how it benefits mental well-being, and how you can access it.

    What is gender-affirming care?

    Gender-affirming care describes a range of medical interventions that help align people’s bodies with their gender identities. While anyone can seek gender-affirming care in the form of laser hair removal, breast augmentation, erectile dysfunction medication, or hormone therapy, among other treatments, most conversations about gender-affirming care center around transgender people, whose gender identity or gender expression does not conform to their sex assigned at birth.

    Gender-affirming care for trans people varies based on age. For example, some trans adults seek hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or gender-affirming surgeries that help their bodies match their internal sense of gender.

    Trans kids entering adolescence might be prescribed puberty blockers, which temporarily delay the production of hormones that initiate puberty, to give them more time to figure out their gender identities before deciding on next steps. This is the same medication given to cisgender kids—whose gender identities match the sex they were assigned at birth—experiencing early puberty.

    What is gender dysphoria?

    Gender dysphoria describes a feeling of unease that some trans people experience when their perceived gender doesn’t match their gender identity. This can lead to a range of mental health conditions that affect their quality of life

    Some trans people may manage gender dysphoria by wearing gender-affirming clothing, opting for a gender-affirming hairstyle, or asking others to refer to them by a name and pronouns that authentically represent them. Others may need gender-affirming care to feel at home in their bodies.

    Trans people who desire gender-affirming care and have not been able to access it experience psychological distress, including depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. The Trevor Project’s 2023 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ Young People found that roughly half of trans youth “seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.”

    A grid shows 10 drawings of people in black and white. Seven of the people are highlighted in purple squares. Text on the image reads,

    How does gender-affirming care improve mental health?

    For trans adults, gender-affirming care can alleviate gender dysphoria, which has been shown to improve both short-term and long-term mental health. A 2018 study found that trans adults who do not undergo HRT are four times more likely to experience depression than those who do, although not all trans people desire HRT.

    Extensive research has shown that gender-affirming care also alleviates gender dysphoria and improves mental health outcomes in trans kids, teens, and young adults. A 2022 study found that access to HRT and puberty blockers lowered the odds of depression in trans people between the ages of 13 and 20 by 60 percent and reduced the risk of self-harm and suicidal thoughts by 73 percent.

    Both the Endocrine Society—which aims to advance hormone research—and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend that trans kids and teens have access to developmentally appropriate gender-affirming care.

    How can I access gender-affirming care?

    If you’re a trans adult seeking gender-affirming care or a guardian of a trans kid or teen who’s seeking gender-affirming care, talk to your health care provider about your options. You can find a trans-affirming provider by searching the World Professional Association for Transgender Health directory or visiting your local LGBTQ+ health center or Planned Parenthood.

    Some gender-affirming care may not be covered by insurance. Learn how to make the most of your coverage from the National Center for Transgender Equality. Find insurance plans available through the Marketplace that cover gender-affirming care in some states through Out2Enroll.

    Some states restrict or ban gender-affirming care. Learn about the laws in your state by visiting the Trans Legislation Tracker.

    Where can trans people and their families find mental health support?

    In addition to working with a trans-affirming therapist, trans people and their families can find mental health support through these free services:

    • PFLAG offers resources for families and friends of LGBTQ+ people. Find a PFLAG chapter near you.
    • The Trevor Project’s hotline has trained counselors who help LGBTQ+ youth in crisis. Call the TrevorLifeline 1-866-488-7386 or text START to 678-678.
    • The Trans Lifeline was created by and for the trans community to support trans people in crisis. You can reach the Trans Lifeline hotline at 1-877-565-8860.

    For more information, talk to your health care provider.

    If you or anyone you know is considering suicide or self-harm or is anxious, depressed, 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 license.

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