Beetroot vs Cucumber – Which is Healthier?

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Our Verdict

When comparing beetroot to cucumber, we picked the beetroot.

Why?

While they’re both mostly-water vegetables that can go in salads, soups, and sauces, they have some notable differences:

In terms of macros, beetroot has nearly 3x the carbs and/but also nearly 6x the fiber, so we say beetroot wins this category.

On the vitamins front, beetroot has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B6, B7, B9, C, and E, while cucumber has more of vitamins A, B5, and K. In short, a clear win for beetroot.

In the category of minerals, beetroot has more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while cucumber is not richer in any minerals.

When it comes to beneficial phytochemicals, both have good things to offer, though we say beetroot has more. Notably, cucumber extract beats glucosamine and chondroitin for reducing joint inflammation, at 1/135th of the dose. On the other hand, beetroot’s phytochemical benefits are so numerous we’ll not list them here, and just recommend checking out the link below!

In short, a win in all categories for beetroot, but cucumbers are great too, so by all means enjoy either or both!

Want to learn more?

You might like to read:

Beetroot For More Than Just Your Blood Pressure

Enjoy!

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  • Get Better Sleep: Beyond “Sleep Hygiene”

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    Better Sleep, Better Life!

    This is Arianna Huffington. Yes, that Huffington, of the Huffington Post. But! She’s also the CEO of Thrive Global, a behavior change tech company with the mission of changing the way we work and live—in particular, by challenging the idea that burnout is the required price of success.

    The power of better sleep

    Sleep is a very important, but most often neglected, part of good health. Here are some of Huffington’s top insights from her tech company Thrive, and as per her “Sleep Revolution” initiative.

    Follow your circadian rhythm

    Are you a night owl or a morning lark? Whichever it is, roll with it, and plan around that if your lifestyle allows for such. While it is possible to change from one to the other, we do have a predisposition towards one or the other, and will generally function best when not fighting it.

    This came about, by the way, because we evolved to have half of us awake in the mornings and half in the evenings, to keep us all safe. Socially we’ve marched onwards from that point in evolutionary history, but our bodies are about a hundred generations behind the times, and that’s just what we have to work with!

    Don’t be afraid (or ashamed!) to take naps

    Naps, done right, can be very good for the health—especially if we had a bad night’s sleep the previous night.

    Thrive found that workers are more productive when they have nap rooms, and (following on a little from the previous point) are allowed to sleep in or work from home.

    See also: How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)

    Make sure you have personal space available in bed

    The correlation between relationship satisfaction and sleeping close to one’s partner has been found to be so high that it’s even proportional: the further away a couple sleeps from each other, the less happy they are. But…

    Partners who got good sleep the previous night, will be more likely to want intimacy on any given night—at a rate of an extra 14% per extra hour of sleep the previous night. So, there’s a trade-off, as having more room in bed tends to result in better sleep. Time to get a bigger bed?

    What gets measured, gets done

    This goes for sleep, too! Not only does dream-journaling in the morning cue your subconscious to prepare to dream well the following night, but also, sleep trackers and sleep monitoring apps go a very long way to improving sleep quality, even if no extra steps are consciously taken to “score better”.

    We’ve previously reviewed some of the most popular sleep apps; you can check out for yourself how they measured up:

    Time For Some Pillow Talk: The Head-To-Head Of Google and Apple’s Top Apps For Getting Your Head Down

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  • Walk Yourself Happy – by Dr. Julia Bradbury

    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.

    Notwithstanding her (honorary) doctorate, Dr. Bradbury is not, in fact, a scientist. But…

    • She has a lot of experience walking all around the world, and her walking habit has seen her through all manner of things, from stress and anxiety to cancer and grief and more.
    • She does, throughout this book, consult many scientists and other experts (indeed, some we’ve featured here before at 10almonds), so we still get quite a dose of science too.

    The writing style of this book is… Compelling. Honestly, the biggest initial barrier to you getting out of the door will be putting this book down first.If you have good self-discipline, you might make it last longer by treating yourself to a chapter per day

    Bottom line: you probably don’t need this book to know how to go for a walk, but it will motivate, inspire, and even inform you of how to get the most out of it. Treat yourself!

    Click here to check out Walk Yourself Happy, and prepare for a new healthy habit!

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  • Caffeine: Cognitive Enhancer Or Brain-Wrecker?

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    The Two Sides Of Caffeine

    Bar chart showing varying opinions on caffeine, with the largest number considering it a safe cognitive enhancer, and progressively fewer respondents viewing it as a moderately safe recreational drug, a substance with addictive properties that make

    We asked you for your health-related opinions on caffeine itself, not necessarily the coffee, tea, energy drinks, etc that might contain it.

    We have, by the way previously written about the health effects of coffee and tea specifically:

    As for our question about caffeine itself, though, we got the above-depicted, below-described, set of results:

    • About 59% said “caffeine is a safe stimulant and cognitive enhancer”
    • About 31% said “caffeine is a moderately safe recreational drug”
    • About 8% said “caffeine’s addictive properties make it de facto bad”
    • One (1) person said “caffeine will leave you a trembling exhausted wreck”

    But what does the science say?

    Caffeine is addictive: True or False?

    True, though one will find occasional academics quibbling the definition. Most of the studies into the mechanisms of caffeine addiction have been conducted on rats, but human studies exist too and caffeine is generally considered addictive for humans, for example:

    Caffeine addiction and determinants of caffeine consumption among health care providers: a descriptive national study

    See also:

    The caffeine dilemma: unraveling the intricate relationship between caffeine use disorder, caffeine withdrawal symptoms and mental well-being in adults

    Notwithstanding its addictive status, caffeine is otherwise safe: True or False?

    True-ish, for most people. Some people with heart conditions or a hypersensitivity to caffeine may find it is not safe for them at all, and for the rest of us, the dose makes the poison. For example:

    Can too much caffeine kill you? Although quite rare, caffeine can be fatal in cases of overdose; such circumstances are generally not applicable to healthy individuals who typically consume caffeine via beverages such as tea or coffee.❞

    ~ Dr. Jose Antonio et al.

    Read more: Common questions and misconceptions about caffeine supplementation: what does the scientific evidence really show?

    this paper, by the way, also includes a good example of academics quibbling the definition of addiction!

    Caffeine is a cognitive enhancer: True or False?

    True, but only in the case of occasional use. If you are using it all the time, your physiology will normalize it and you will require caffeine in order to function at your normal level. To attain higher than that, once addicted to caffeine, would now require something else.

    Read more: Caffeine: benefits and drawbacks for technical performance

    Caffeine will leave you a trembling exhausted wreck: True or False?

    True or False depending on usage:

    • The famously moderate 3–5 cups per day will not, for most people, cause any such problems.
    • Using/abusing it to make up for lost sleep (or some other source of fatigue, such as physical exhaustion from exertion), however, is much more likely to run into problems.

    In the latter case, caffeine really is the “payday loan” of energy! It’ll give you an adrenal boost now (in return, you must suffer the adrenal dumping later, along with lost energy expended in the adrenaline surge), and also, the tiredness that you thought was gone, was just caffeine’s adenosine-blocking activities temporarily preventing you from being able to perceive the tiredness. So you’ll have to pay that back later, with interest, because of the extra time/exertion too.

    Want to make caffeine a little more gentle on your system?

    Taking l-theanine alongside caffeine can ameliorate some of caffeine’s less wonderful effects—and as a bonus, l-theanine has some nifty benefits of its own, too:

    L-Theanine: What’s The Tea?

    Enjoy!

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  • Pain Doesn’t Belong on a Scale of Zero to 10

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    Over the past two years, a simple but baffling request has preceded most of my encounters with medical professionals: “Rate your pain on a scale of zero to 10.”

    I trained as a physician and have asked patients the very same question thousands of times, so I think hard about how to quantify the sum of the sore hips, the prickly thighs, and the numbing, itchy pain near my left shoulder blade. I pause and then, mostly arbitrarily, choose a number. “Three or four?” I venture, knowing the real answer is long, complicated, and not measurable in this one-dimensional way.

    Pain is a squirrely thing. It’s sometimes burning, sometimes drilling, sometimes a deep-in-the-muscles clenching ache. Mine can depend on my mood or how much attention I afford it and can recede nearly entirely if I’m engrossed in a film or a task. Pain can also be disabling enough to cancel vacations, or so overwhelming that it leads people to opioid addiction. Even 10+ pain can be bearable when it’s endured for good reason, like giving birth to a child. But what’s the purpose of the pains I have now, the lingering effects of a head injury?

    The concept of reducing these shades of pain to a single number dates to the 1970s. But the zero-to-10 scale is ubiquitous today because of what was called a “pain revolution” in the ’90s, when intense new attention to addressing pain — primarily with opioids — was framed as progress. Doctors today have a fuller understanding of treating pain, as well as the terrible consequences of prescribing opioids so readily. What they are learning only now is how to better measure pain and treat its many forms.

    About 30 years ago, physicians who championed the use of opioids gave robust new life to what had been a niche specialty: pain management. They started pushing the idea that pain should be measured at every appointment as a “fifth vital sign.” The American Pain Society went as far as copyrighting the phrase. But unlike the other vital signs — blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, and breathing rate — pain had no objective scale. How to measure the unmeasurable? The society encouraged doctors and nurses to use the zero-to-10 rating system. Around that time, the FDA approved OxyContin, a slow-release opioid painkiller made by Purdue Pharma. The drugmaker itself encouraged doctors to routinely record and treat pain, and aggressively marketed opioids as an obvious solution.

    To be fair, in an era when pain was too often ignored or undertreated, the zero-to-10 rating system could be regarded as an advance. Morphine pumps were not available for those cancer patients I saw in the ’80s, even those in agonizing pain from cancer in their bones; doctors regarded pain as an inevitable part of disease. In the emergency room where I practiced in the early ’90s, prescribing even a few opioid pills was a hassle: It required asking the head nurse to unlock a special prescription pad and making a copy for the state agency that tracked prescribing patterns. Regulators (rightly) worried that handing out narcotics would lead to addiction. As a result, some patients in need of relief likely went without.

    After pain doctors and opioid manufacturers campaigned for broader use of opioids — claiming that newer forms were not addictive, or much less so than previous incarnations — prescribing the drugs became far easier and were promoted for all kinds of pain, whether from knee arthritis or back problems. As a young doctor joining the “pain revolution,” I probably asked patients thousands of times to rate their pain on a scale of zero to 10 and wrote many scripts each week for pain medication, as monitoring “the fifth vital sign” quickly became routine in the medical system. In time, a zero-to-10 pain measurement became a necessary box to fill in electronic medical records. The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations made regularly assessing pain a prerequisite for medical centers receiving federal health care dollars. Medical groups added treatment of pain to their list of patient rights, and satisfaction with pain treatment became a component of post-visit patient surveys. (A poor showing could mean lower reimbursement from some insurers.)

    But this approach to pain management had clear drawbacks. Studies accumulated showing that measuring patients’ pain didn’t result in better pain control. Doctors showed little interest in or didn’t know how to respond to the recorded answer. And patients’ satisfaction with their doctors’ discussion of pain didn’t necessarily mean they got adequate treatment. At the same time, the drugs were fueling the growing opioid epidemic. Research showed that an estimated 3% to 19% of people who received a prescription for pain medication from a doctor developed an addiction.

    Doctors who wanted to treat pain had few other options, though. “We had a good sense that these drugs weren’t the only way to manage pain,” Linda Porter, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Pain Policy and Planning, told me. “But we didn’t have a good understanding of the complexity or alternatives.” The enthusiasm for narcotics left many varietals of pain underexplored and undertreated for years. Only in 2018, a year when nearly 50,000 Americans died of an overdose, did Congress start funding a program — the Early Phase Pain Investigation Clinical Network, or EPPIC-Net — designed to explore types of pain and find better solutions. The network connects specialists at 12 academic specialized clinical centers and is meant to jump-start new research in the field and find bespoke solutions for different kinds of pain.

    A zero-to-10 scale may make sense in certain situations, such as when a nurse uses it to adjust a medication dose for a patient hospitalized after surgery or an accident. And researchers and pain specialists have tried to create better rating tools — dozens, in fact, none of which was adequate to capture pain’s complexity, a European panel of experts concluded. The Veterans Health Administration, for instance, created one that had supplemental questions and visual prompts: A rating of 5 correlated with a frown and a pain level that “interrupts some activities.” The survey took much longer to administer and produced results that were no better than the zero-to-10 system. By the 2010s, many medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Family Physicians, were rejecting not just the zero-to-10 scale but the entire notion that pain could be meaningfully self-reported numerically by a patient.

    In the years that opioids had dominated pain remedies, a few drugs — such as gabapentin and pregabalin for neuropathy, and lidocaine patches and creams for musculoskeletal aches — had become available. “There was a growing awareness of the incredible complexity of pain — that you would have to find the right drugs for the right patients,” Rebecca Hommer, EPPIC-Net’s interim director, told me. Researchers are now looking for biomarkers associated with different kinds of pain so that drug studies can use more objective measures to assess the medications’ effect. A better understanding of the neural pathways and neurotransmitters that create different types of pain could also help researchers design drugs to interrupt and tame them.

    Any treatments that come out of this research are unlikely to be blockbusters like opioids; by design, they will be useful to fewer people. That also makes them less appealing prospects to drug companies. So EPPIC-Net is helping small drug companies, academics, and even individual doctors design and conduct early-stage trials to test the safety and efficacy of promising pain-taming molecules. That information will be handed over to drug manufacturers for late-stage trials, all with the aim of getting new drugs approved by the FDA more quickly.

    The first EPPIC-Net trials are just getting underway. Finding better treatments will be no easy task, because the nervous system is a largely unexplored universe of molecules, cells, and electronic connections that interact in countless ways. The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to scientists who discovered the mechanisms that allow us to feel the most basic sensations: cold and hot. In comparison, pain is a hydra. A simple number might feel definitive. But it’s not helping anyone make the pain go away.

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

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  • I’ve recovered from a cold but I still have a hoarse voice. What should I do?

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    Cold, flu, COVID and RSV have been circulating across Australia this winter. Many of us have caught and recovered from one of these common upper respiratory tract infections.

    But for some people their impact is ongoing. Even if your throat isn’t sore anymore, your voice may still be hoarse or croaky.

    So what happens to the voice when we get a virus? And what happens after?

    Here’s what you should know if your voice is still hoarse for days – or even weeks – after your other symptoms have resolved.

    Why does my voice get croaky during a cold?

    A healthy voice is normally clear and strong. It’s powered by the lungs, which push air past the vocal cords to make them vibrate. These vibrations are amplified in the throat and mouth, creating the voice we hear.

    The vocal cords are two elastic muscles situated in your throat, around the level of your laryngeal prominence, or Adam’s apple. (Although everyone has one, it tends to be more pronounced in males.) The vocal cords are small and delicate – around the size of your fingernail. Any small change in their structure will affect how the voice sounds.

    When the vocal cords become inflamed – known as laryngitis – your voice will sound different. Laryngitis is a common part of upper respiratory tract infections, but can also be caused through misuse.

    Two drawn circles comparing normal vocal cords with inflamed, red vocal cords.
    Viruses such as the common cold can inflame the vocal cords. Pepermpron/Shutterstock

    Catching a virus triggers the body’s defence mechanisms. White blood cells are recruited to kill the virus and heal the tissues in the vocal cords. They become inflamed, but also stiffer. It’s harder for them to vibrate, so the voice comes out hoarse and croaky.

    In some instances, you may find it hard to speak in a loud voice or have a reduced pitch range, meaning you can’t go as high or loud as normal. You may even “lose” your voice altogether.

    Coughing can also make things worse. It is the body’s way of trying to clear the airways of irritation, including your own mucus dripping onto your throat (post-nasal drip). But coughing slams the vocal cords together with force.

    Chronic coughing can lead to persistent inflammation and even thicken the vocal cords. This thickening is the body trying to protect itself, similar to developing a callus when a pair of new shoes rubs.

    Thickening on your vocal cords can lead to physical changes in the vocal cords – such as developing a growth or “nodule” – and further deterioration of your voice quality.

    Diagram compares healthy vocal cords with cords that have nodules, two small bumps.
    Coughing and exertion can cause inflamed vocal cords to thicken and develop nodules. Pepermpron/Shutterstock

    How can you care for your voice during infection?

    People who use their voices a lot professionally – such as teachers, call centre workers and singers – are often desperate to resume their vocal activities. They are more at risk of forcing their voice before it’s ready.

    The good news is most viral infections resolve themselves. Your voice is usually restored within five to ten days of recovering from a cold.

    Occasionally, your pharmacist or doctor may prescribe cough suppressants to limit additional damage to the vocal cords (among other reasons) or mucolytics, which break down mucus. But the most effective treatments for viral upper respiratory tract infections are hydration and rest.

    Drink plenty of water, avoid alcohol and exposure to cigarette smoke. Inhaling steam by making yourself a cup of hot water will also help clear blocked noses and hydrate your vocal cords.

    Rest your voice by talking as little as possible. If you do need to talk, don’t whisper – this strains the muscles.

    Instead, consider using “confidential voice”. This is a soft voice – not a whisper – that gently vibrates your vocal cords but puts less strain on your voice than normal speech. Think of the voice you use when communicating with someone close by.

    During the first five to ten days of your infection, it is important not to push through. Exerting the voice by talking a lot or loudly will only exacerbate the situation. Once you’ve recovered from your cold, you can speak as you would normally.

    What should you do if your voice is still hoarse after recovery?

    If your voice hasn’t returned to normal after two to three weeks, you should seek medical attention from your doctor, who may refer you to an ear nose and throat specialist.

    If you’ve developed a nodule, the specialist would likely refer you to a speech pathologist who will show you how to take care of your voice. Many nodules can be treated with voice therapy and don’t require surgery.

    You may have also developed a habit of straining your vocal cords, if you forced yourself to speak or sing while they were inflamed. This can be a reason why some people continue to have a hoarse voice even when they’ve recovered from the cold.

    In those cases, a speech pathologist may play a valuable role. They may teach you to exercises that make voicing more efficient. For example, lip trills (blowing raspberries) are a fun and easy way you can learn to relax the voice. This can help break the habit of straining your voice you may have developed during infection.

    Yeptain Leung, Postdoctoral Research and Lecturer of Speech Pathology, School of Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Science of Yoga – by Ann Swanson

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    There are a lot of yoga books out there to say “bend this way, hold this that way” and so forth, but few that really explain what is going on, how, and why. And understanding those things is of course key to motivation and adherence. So that’s what this book provides!

    The book is divided into sections, and in the first part we have a tour of human anatomy and physiology. This may seem almost unrelated to yoga, but is valuable necessary-knowledge to get the most out of the next section:

    The next few parts are given over to yoga asanas (stretches, positions, poses, call them what you will in English) and now we are given a clear idea of what it is doing: we get to understand exactly what’s being stretched, what blood flow is being increased and how, what organs are being settled into their correct place, and many other such things.

    Importantly, this means we also understand why certain things are the way they are, and why they can’t be done in some other slightly different but perhaps superficially easier way.

    The style of the book is like a school textbook, really, but without patronizing the reader. The illustrations, of which there are many, are simple enough to be clear while being detailed enough to be informative.

    Bottom line: if you’re ever doing yoga at home and wondering if you should cut a certain corner, this is the book that will tell you why you shouldn’t.

    Click here to check out Science of Yoga, and optimize your practice!

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