Bamboo Shoots vs Green Beans – 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 bamboo shoots to green beans, we picked the beans.
Why?
It was close!
In terms of macros, bamboo has slightly more protein and green beans have slightly more fiber, which not only balances but also there’s not much between them in either case, so all things considered, we’re calling this first round a tie.
In the category of vitamins, bamboo has more of vitamins B1, B3, B5, B6, and E, while green beans have more of vitamins A, B2, B7, B9, C, and K, winning marginally in this second round.
Looking at minerals, bamboo has more copper, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc, while green beans have more calcium, iron, magnesium, and manganese, tying 4:4 here.
In other considerations, green beans have more polyphenols, so that’s an extra point in their favor.
Adding up the sections makes for an overall win for green beans, but as we say, it was close, so by all means do enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Don’t Be Bamboozled By Bamboo! ← including how to eat bamboo, for those unfamiliar with such, as we have been asked about it 🙂
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Can I drive when taking medicinal cannabis? Is it safe?
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.
Your doctor has just prescribed medicinal cannabis. You think it’s helping. But you rely on your car to get to work and pick up the kids.
Are you allowed to drive? And more importantly, is it safe?
Here’s what the evidence says and what it means for you.
Medicinal cannabis is now widely prescribed in Australia for conditions such as chronic pain, anxiety and sleep disorders.
You can take it in a variety of different ways – for instance, by inhaling it using a vaporiser, or by ingesting an oil. There are many different active compounds. However, the main ones – known as cannabinoids – are delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD).
THC is also the intoxicating part of cannabis that gets you “stoned”. So this is where things get complicated.
What happens when you take medicinal cannabis?
When cannabis is inhaled, the effects peak in the first hour. They taper off over two to three hours, but can last for up to four to six hours.
When taken orally – for example as an oil – the effects don’t start straight away and can last for up to 8 to 12 hours. That’s because the cannabinoids are absorbed by your gut and metabolised more slowly.
THC negatively impacts cognitive functions, such as attention and memory. It impairs driving in a simulator and in the real world on a highway.
The effects of THC on driving are roughly comparable to low blood alcohol concentrations. But this depends on the dose and how often someone uses cannabis.
Medicinal cannabis used for insomnia does not cause impairment the next day, and regular cannabis users show no driving impairment after 48 hours or more of abstinence.
CC BY-NC Medicinal cannabis prescriptions have skyrocketed in Australia, mostly for legal but unapproved products we don’t even know work or are safe. In this series, experts tease out what’s fuelling the rise of medicinal cannabis, the fallout, and what needs to happen next.
Unlike alcohol, THC can make people more cautious behind the wheel. So drivers sometimes try to drive more carefully or leave a larger gap behind the car ahead.
However, such strategies may not be enough to offset the impairing effects of THC, and they become less effective under more complex driving conditions.
CBD does not impair cognition or driving.
Most cannabis and driving studies have used healthy volunteers and deliberately intoxicating doses of THC. So we don’t know whether people are as impaired when using prescribed medicinal cannabis to manage a chronic health condition.
In theory, a patient is likely to be less impaired if they use a low dose of THC, if they use the exact same amount of medicinal cannabis on a regular basis, or if medicinal cannabis relieves symptoms that can affect normal functioning, such as chronic pain.
Can I legally drive after taking it?
In every Australian state and territory, except Tasmania, it is illegal to drive with any detectable amount of THC in your system.
Roadside drug testing, which checks for the presence of THC in saliva rather than impairment, cannot distinguish between prescribed medicinal cannabis and illicit cannabis.
In Tasmania, you can lawfully drive with THC in your system so long as you are unimpaired and your medicinal cannabis was prescribed and dispensed in Tasmania.
Other medications that can impair driving – such as opioids and benzodiazepines – do not carry the same prohibition on driving. You can drive with these medications in your system so long as you are unimpaired and using your medication as prescribed.
Driving while impaired (as opposed to driving with the presence of a drug in your system) is a separate offence and applies to both medicinal cannabis and other medications.
The discrepancy between how medicinal cannabis and other impairing medications are treated has been the focus of a parliamentary inquiry in New South Wales and broader law reform discussions.
Victoria has now amended its road safety act to give magistrates the power to decide whether or not to cancel someone’s licence if they test positive for THC, are unimpaired, and have a valid medicinal cannabis prescription. Nonetheless, it remains illegal to drive in Victoria with THC in your system.
You can lawfully drive if you are using a CBD-only medication, so long as you are not impaired.
How can I drive safely?
If you have been prescribed medicinal cannabis, there are practical steps you can take to reduce your risk when driving.
First, speak to your doctor. Let them know you drive, especially if you rely on driving for work or caring responsibilities, or if you work in a safety-sensitive environment, such as construction. Together, you can discuss whether a product containing THC is appropriate, or whether a CBD-only product might be more suitable.
Second, don’t just rely on how you feel when determining whether you are safe to drive. Even if you feel completely normal, your driving ability may still be compromised.
Even if you are unimpaired, you can still test positive on a roadside drug test for hours after taking medicinal cannabis. The length of time is highly variable and depends on factors such as the dose, route of administration, and how often you take medicinal cannabis.
The penalties for driving with THC in your system vary by state and territory. They range from fines to licence disqualifications and potential jail time for repeat offences.
A blood test can detect THC days after taking it. So if you are involved in a crash and have THC in your blood, you could face severe legal penalties, and your car insurance may be voided.
Roadside drug tests do not check for CBD.
What don’t we yet know?
Studies are underway to look at how medicinal cannabis impacts driving in people who take it for long-term health conditions, such as chronic pain. Researchers are also testing to see if sensors can detect cannabis impairment in real time while driving.
Once these and other studies are complete, we’ll have a clearer picture of how medicinal cannabis affects drivers who take it for long-term medical conditions.
To find out more about medicinal cannabis and driving, visit the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s medicinal cannabis hub or ask your health-care practitioner.
Tom Arkell, NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow, School of Health Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Share This Post
-
What Length Of Walk Is Best?
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 is not shocking news that walking is good for the health.
See for example: Top 8 Habits Of The Top 1% Healthiest Over-50s ← walking is #3 on the list!
And a lot of research has been done into how many steps per day are important. Of which, the general consensus is:
- Under 5,000 steps = bad; one needs to walk more than this if possible
- 5,000 to 8,000 steps = good, with more being better than fewer
- Over 8,000 steps = also good, but with diminishing marginal returns
Some research has even been done with regard to when it is best to get these steps in!
See: The Japanese Health Initiative That Lowers Blood Sugars
But today we’ll look at the question: is it better to get many short walks, or a few long ones?
The road goes ever on and on
The above heading is a nod to a line from Tolkien, and while it’s not necessary to walk all the way to Mordor for good for health (in fact, we recommend against walking to Mordor specifically; famously risky for the health), as it turns out, one long walk may be better than many short ones.
Researchers (Dr. Borja del Pozo Cruz et al.) examined whether step accumulation patterns—not just total steps—affect long-term health in low-activity adults (defined as walking fewer than 8,000 steps per day).
How these were sorted: 33,560 adults averaging 5,165 steps daily were followed for 9.5 years, grouped by typical walking bout length from under 5 minutes to 15 minutes or longer.
What they found, in few words: people who bundled steps into longer, uninterrupted walks had substantially lower risks of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease than those whose steps came in short, scattered bursts.
There was a clear dose-dependent gradient to this; all-cause mortality risk fell steadily as walking bouts lengthened, from 4.36% in bouts under 5 minutes to about 0.8% in bouts lasting 15 minutes or longer. In other words, more than a 5x difference in mortality!
Not only that, but cardiovascular disease risk (not just mortality, but any CVD incidence) showed a steep decline too, dropping from 13.03% with under-5-minute bouts to 4.39% with walks of 15 minutes or longer.
If you’re on the low end of activity, there’s good news: the benefits were most pronounced among people taking fewer than 5,000 steps per day, suggesting longer walks matter most when overall activity is low.
Note: this isn’t an argument for “walk less to get greater benefits”; that’d be the opposite of the correct interpretation of these statistics. The take-away here is “longer walks matter even more when overall activity is low“.
There is an important cited limitation, namely:
❝Observational design with potential residual confounding and reverse causation❞
In other words, the results could also be at least partly explained by the alternative hypothesis “people who are healthier and have healthier hearts, walk for longer because of their good health, whereas people who are less health and have weaker hearts, walk for shorter durations only”.
However, even if this may be true, it is clear which group one should aim to be in.
You can find the paper itself here: Step Accumulation Patterns and Risk for Cardiovascular Events and Mortality Among Suboptimally Active Adults
Want to learn more?
You might like this very good book we reviewed a while back:
In Praise Of Walking – by Dr. Shane O’Mara
…and, for that matter:
52 Ways To Walk – by Annabel Streets
Enjoy!
Share This Post
-
Papaya vs Plum – 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 papaya to plum, we picked the papaya.
Why?
It was close in most categories!
In terms of macros, there’s nothing much between them; papaya has slightly more fiber, while carbs and protein are close enough to be within the margin of rounding errors. So, a marginal win for papaya, or a tie.
In the category of vitamins, papaya has more of vitamins A, B2, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, E, and choline, while plums have more of vitamins B1, B3, and K, giving this round to papaya.
Looking at minerals, papaya has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, potassium, and selenium, while plum has more copper, manganese, phosphorus, and zinc, making this a marginal 5:4 victory for papaya.
When it comes to other considerations, plum has some anticancer properties that papaya can’t boast, so that’s a point in plums’ favor.
Adding up the sections makes for an overall win for papaya, but by all means enjoy either or both, as diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Top 8 Fruits That Prevent & Kill Cancer
Enjoy!
Share This Post
Related Posts
-
How The FDA Can Let Potentially Dangerous Chemicals Into Your Food
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.
If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you might have noticed the FDA being more than a bit beleaguered this year, for example:
After The Recent Wave Of Food Recalls…
So, it’s not the all-powerful regulatory titan it was once popularly considered, and its resources are getting thinner.
This is part of why we are seeing such stories as: Is Your Medication Made in a Contaminated Factory? The FDA Won’t Tell You.
So, what’s going on with food ingredients?
Hear no, see no, speak no…
The crux of this comes in two parts:
- Companies rely on the “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) labelling system, created in the 1950s, which allows ingredients considered obviously safe (such as salt or vinegar) to be used without formal FDA review.
- Manufacturers can declare their own ingredients safe without notifying the FDA, meaning regulators may never examine the scientific evidence behind some additives.
So in other words, there are a lot of cases where FDA didn’t find a problem with the ingredients because they simply didn’t look!
You may be wondering whether this is more of an issue for obscure brands, but as it turns out substances lacking FDA review appear in foods from brands sold at retailers such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.
So, how much of an issue is this?
It can vary wildly. For example, food products containing tara flour, previously treated as GRAS, were linked to more than 300 illnesses and 113 hospitalizations over the course of a year.
And there are a lot of mysteries, for example, a review of US regulatory records by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found 111 food substances used in common products that were never reviewed for safety by the FDA.
Of those, cross-referencing with the USDA FoodData Central database (that’s what we use for our “This or That” comparisons, by the way, we pull the numbers from that database), found that 49 of those 111 substances had not even been reported to regulators. That is to say, they went a level lower than liberally self-certifying as safe, and just went with a “what they don’t know can’t hurt them” approach, and just proceeded as if they weren’t putting them in their foods.
Sometimes, the ingredient itself is not the problem, ontologically. Rather, it’s what’s happened to it along the way!
For example the EWG report identified 22 plant extracts—themselves perfectly innocuous and even healthful things such as green tea, mushroom, cinnamon, cocoa, and aloe vera—whose extraction processes can alter their chemistry and can introduce solvents or toxins.
So it matters not just what the thing is, but also how it got to be there.
You can read about this from the EWG itself, here: Secret GRAS: How 100+ food chemicals bypassed government safety review
And for background context: Almost all new food chemicals greenlighted by industry, not the FDA ← this is from last year
Want to keep yourself safe?
Or for a much deeper dive into the broader topic of avoiding the toxins the industrial world is keen to throw our way, you might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:
Healthy Living in a Contaminated World – by Dr. Donald Hoernschemeyer
You might also consider this simpler, practical guide: Unprocess Your Life – by Rob Hobson
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:
-
6 Signs Of A Heart Attack… A Month In Advance
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.
Many people know the signs of a heart attack when it’s happening, but how about before it’s too late to avoid it?
The signs
- Unusual fatigue: persistent tiredness that doesn’t improve with rest
- Shortness of breath: unexplained breathlessness during light activities or rest, which can be caused by fluid buildup in the lungs (because the heart isn’t circulating blood as well as it should)
- Chest discomfort: pain, pressure, tightness, or aching in the chest due to reduced blood flow to the heart muscle—often occurring during physical exertion or emotional stress
- Frequent indigestion: means that heartburn could be heart-related! This is about persistently reoccurring discomfort or pain in the upper abdomen
- Sleep disturbances: difficulties falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking up abruptly
- Excessive sweating: unexplained cold sweats or sudden sweating without physical exertion or excessive heat, can be a response to the decreased oxygen levels caused by less efficient blood flow
Note: this is a list of warning signs, not a diagnostic tool. Any or even all of these could be caused by something else. Just, don’t ignore the signs and do get yourself checked out.
For more details on each of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
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:
-
Rethinking Pain – by Dr. Helena Miranda
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.
This is about about managing pain, not merely reducing it. Of course, reducing it is good and the book does cover that too, but oftentimes it cannot be banished entirely, or at least not in any useful fashion (for example, anesthetic may remove all pain, but it is not a way to go through life). So instead: first how to cope, and then how to do better than just coping.
Dr. Miranda (a medical doctor, pain specialist, and chronic pain sufferer) gives us 18 tools for pain management, advising on how to make them work as well as possible given the situation—without which, the more superficial versions of the advice are often useless.
For example, if you are chronically suffering pain, then the superficial advice “value your sleep” is not, in and of itself, helpful—because you already know that you sure do value the little sleep you get, wish you got more, and wish it didn’t (in the case of many kinds of chronic pain) result in things being worse, rather than better, when you wake up (because of the immobility). But instead, here we get advice on how to indeed make the most of things, make them better, and minimize the downsides.
In a similar vein, some of the tools recommended like “manage your weight” and “try yoga” may, based on the headings alone, make a reader want to throw the book out of the nearest window, on account of having heard a bajillion times already that something (often something that’s not even accessible) will be a magical panacea and that not doing the thing being recommended means that you are making no effort and therefore deserve any suffering that comes as a result. And yet! Dr. Miranda does go on to give actually useful advice in each of these and many more.
The style is easy-reading pop-science, without any hard science along the way, nor psychological jargon either. There is a bibliography at the back, but the main part of the book just assume that we can take all statements at face value, and will not need reassuring with citation markers.
Bottom line: there’s a lot of good advice in here, from someone who knows the terrain well as both a doctor and a patient, and as a result, this book goes quite a bit deeper than a quick glance at it might make you think.
Click here to check out Rethinking Pain, and live well despite chronic pain!
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:
