Berberine For Metabolic Health

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Is Berberine Nature’s Ozempic/Wegovy?

Berberine is a compound found in many plants. Of which, some of them are variations of the barberry, hence the name.

It’s been popular this past couple of years, mostly for weight loss. In and of itself, something being good for weight loss doesn’t mean it’s good for the health (just ask diarrhoea, or cancer).

Happily, berberine’s mechanisms of action appear to be good for metabolic health, including:

  • Reduced fasting blood sugar levels
  • Improved insulin sensitivity
  • Reduced LDL and triglycerides
  • Increased HDL levels

So, what does the science say?

It’s (mostly!) not nature’s Wegovy/Ozempic

It’s had that title in a number of sensationalist headlines (and a current TikTok trend, apparently), but while both berberine and the popular weight-loss drugs Wegovy/Ozempic act in part on insulin metabolism, they mostly do so by completely different mechanisms.

Wegovy and Ozempic are GLP-1 agonists, which mean they augment the action of glucagon-like-peptide 1, which increases insulin release, decreases glucagon release, and promotes a more lasting feeling of fullness.

Berberine works mostly by other means, not all of which are understood. But, we know that it activates AMP-activated protein kinase, and on the flipside, inhibits proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9.

In less arcane words: it boosts some enzymes and inhibits others.

Each of these boosts/inhibitions has a positive effect on metabolic health.

However, it does also have a slight GLP-1 agonist effect too! Bacteria in the gut can decompose and metabolize berberine into dihydroberberine, thus preventing the absorption of disaccharides in the intestinal tract, and increasing GLP-1 levels.

See: Effects of Berberine on the Gastrointestinal Microbiota

Does it work for weight loss?

Yes, simply put. And if we’re going to put it head-to-head with Wegovy/Ozempic, it works about half as well. Which sounds like a criticism, but for a substance that’s a lot safer (and cheaper, and easier—if we like capsules over injections) and has fewer side effects.

❝But more interestingly, the treatment significantly reduced blood lipid levels (23% decrease of triglyceride and 12.2% decrease of cholesterol levels) in human subjects.

However, there was interestingly, an increase in calcitriol levels seen in all human subjects following berberine treatment (mean 59.5% increase)

Collectively, this study demonstrates that berberine is a potent lipid-lowering compound with a moderate weight loss effect, and may have a possible potential role in osteoporosis treatment/prevention.❞

(click through to read in full)

Is it safe?

It appears to be, with one special caveat: remember that paper about the effects of berberine on the gastrointestinal microbiota? It also has some antimicrobial effects, so you could do harm there if not careful. It’s recommended to give it a break every couple of months, to be sure of allowing your gut microbiota to not get too depleted.

Also, as with anything you might take that’s new, always consult your doctor/pharmacist in case of contraindications based on medications you are taking.

Where can I get it?

As ever, we don’t sell it, but here’s an example product on Amazon, for your convenience.

Enjoy!

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  • 100 Ways to Change Your Life – by Liz Moody

    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.

    Sometimes we crave changing things up, just to feel something new. This can result in anything from bad haircut decisions or impulsive purchases, to crashing and burning-out of a job, project, or relationship. It doesn’t have to be that way, though!

    This book brings us (as the title suggest) 100 evidence-based ways of changing things up in a good way—small things that can make a big difference in many areas of life.

    In terms of format, these are presented in 100 tiny chapters, each approximately 2 pages long (obviously it depends on the edition, but you get the idea). Great to read in any of at least three ways:

    1. Cover-to-cover
    2. One per day for 100 days
    3. Look up what you need on an ad hoc basis

    Bottom line: even if you already do half of these things, the other half will each compound your health happiness one-by-one as you add them. This is a very enjoyable and practical book!

    Click here to check out 100 Ways to Change Your Life, and level-up yours!

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  • Most adults will gain half a kilo this year – and every year. Here’s how to stop ‘weight creep’

    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.

    As we enter a new year armed with resolutions to improve our lives, there’s a good chance we’ll also be carrying something less helpful: extra kilos. At least half a kilogram, to be precise.

    “Weight creep” doesn’t have to be inevitable. Here’s what’s behind this sneaky annual occurrence and some practical steps to prevent it.

    Allgo/Unsplash

    Small gains add up

    Adults tend to gain weight progressively as they age and typically gain an average of 0.5 to 1kg every year.

    While this doesn’t seem like much each year, it amounts to 5kg over a decade. The slow-but-steady nature of weight creep is why many of us won’t notice the extra weight gained until we’re in our fifties.

    Why do we gain weight?

    Subtle, gradual lifestyle shifts as we progress through life and age-related biological changes cause us to gain weight. Our:

    • activity levels decline. Longer work hours and family commitments can see us become more sedentary and have less time for exercise, which means we burn fewer calories
    • diets worsen. With frenetic work and family schedules, we sometimes turn to pre-packaged and fast foods. These processed and discretionary foods are loaded with hidden sugars, salts and unhealthy fats. A better financial position later in life can also result in more dining out, which is associated with a higher total energy intake
    • sleep decreases. Busy lives and screen use can mean we don’t get enough sleep. This disturbs our body’s energy balance, increasing our feelings of hunger, triggering cravings and decreasing our energy
    Woman sleeps
    Insufficient sleep can increase our appetite. Craig Adderley/Pexels
    • stress increases. Financial, relationship and work-related stress increases our body’s production of cortisol, triggering food cravings and promoting fat storage
    • metabolism slows. Around the age of 40, our muscle mass naturally declines, and our body fat starts increasing. Muscle mass helps determine our metabolic rate, so when our muscle mass decreases, our bodies start to burn fewer calories at rest.

    We also tend to gain a small amount of weight during festive periods – times filled with calorie-rich foods and drinks, when exercise and sleep are often overlooked. One study of Australian adults found participants gained 0.5 kilograms on average over the Christmas/New Year period and an average of 0.25 kilograms around Easter.

    Why we need to prevent weight creep

    It’s important to prevent weight creep for two key reasons:

    1. Weight creep resets our body’s set point

    Set-point theory suggests we each have a predetermined weight or set point. Our body works to keep our weight around this set point, adjusting our biological systems to regulate how much we eat, how we store fat and expend energy.

    When we gain weight, our set point resets to the new, higher weight. Our body adapts to protect this new weight, making it challenging to lose the weight we’ve gained.

    But it’s also possible to lower your set point if you lose weight gradually and with an interval weight loss approach. Specifically, losing weight in small manageable chunks you can sustain – periods of weight loss, followed by periods of weight maintenance, and so on, until you achieve your goal weight.

    People chink wine glasses
    Holidays can also come with weight gain. Zan Lazarevic/Unsplash

    2. Weight creep can lead to obesity and health issues

    Undetected and unmanaged weight creep can result in obesity which can increase our risk of heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis and several types of cancers (including breast, colorectal, oesophageal, kidney, gallbladder, uterine, pancreatic and liver).

    A large study examined the link between weight gain from early to middle adulthood and health outcomes later in life, following people for around 15 years. It found those who gained 2.5 to 10kg over this period had an increased incidence of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, strokes, obesity-related cancer and death compared to participants who had maintained a stable weight.

    Fortunately, there are steps we can take to build lasting habits that will make weight creep a thing of the past.

    7 practical steps to prevent weight creep

    1. Eat from big to small

    Aim to consume most of your food earlier in the day and taper your meal sizes to ensure dinner is the smallest meal you eat.

    A low-calorie or small breakfast leads to increased feelings of hunger, specifically appetite for sweets, across the course of the day.

    We burn the calories from a meal 2.5 times more efficiently in the morning than in the evening. So emphasising breakfast over dinner is also good for weight management.

    Man shops for vegetables
    Aim to consume bigger breakfasts and smaller dinners. Michael Burrows/Pexels

    2. Use chopsticks, a teaspoon or an oyster fork

    Sit at the table for dinner and use different utensils to encourage eating more slowly.

    This gives your brain time to recognise and adapt to signals from your stomach telling you you’re full.

    3. Eat the full rainbow

    Fill your plate with vegetables and fruits of different colours first to support eating a high-fibre, nutrient-dense diet that will keep you feeling full and satisfied.

    Meals also need to be balanced and include a source of protein, wholegrain carbohydrates and healthy fat to meet our dietary needs – for example, eggs on wholegrain toast with avocado.

    4. Reach for nature first

    Retrain your brain to rely on nature’s treats – fresh vegetables, fruit, honey, nuts and seeds. In their natural state, these foods release the same pleasure response in the brain as ultra-processed and fast foods, helping you avoid unnecessary calories, sugar, salt and unhealthy fats.

    5. Choose to move

    Look for ways to incorporate incidental activity into your daily routine – such as taking the stairs instead of the lift – and boost your exercise by challenging yourself to try a new activity.

    Just be sure to include variety, as doing the same activities every day often results in boredom and avoidance.

    Man with tennis racket
    Try new activities or sports to keep your interest up. Cottonbro Studio/Pexels

    6. Prioritise sleep

    Set yourself a goal of getting a minimum of seven hours of uninterrupted sleep each night, and help yourself achieve it by avoiding screens for an hour or two before bed.

    7. Weigh yourself regularly

    Getting into the habit of weighing yourself weekly is a guaranteed way to help avoid the kilos creeping up on us. Aim to weigh yourself on the same day, at the same time and in the same environment each week and use the best quality scales you can afford.

    At the Boden Group, Charles Perkins Centre, we are studying the science of obesity and running clinical trials for weight loss. You can register here to express your interest.

    Nick Fuller, Clinical Trials Director, Department of Endocrinology, RPA Hospital, University of Sydney

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

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  • Hungry? How To Beat Cravings

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    The Science of Hunger, And How To Sate It

    This is Dr. David Ludwig. That’s not a typo; he’s a doctor both ways—MD and PhD.

    Henceforth we’ll just say “Dr. Ludwig”, though! He’s a professor in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center.

    His research focuses on the effects of diet on hormones, metabolism, and body weight, and he’s one of the foremost experts when it comes to carbohydrates, glycemic load, and obesity.

    Why are we putting on weight? What are we getting wrong?

    Contrary to popular belief, Dr. Ludwig says, weight gain is not caused by a lack of exercise. In fact, people tend to overestimate how many calories are burned by exercise.

    A spoonful of sugar may make the medicine go down, but it also contains 60 calories, and that’d take about 1,500 steps for the average person to burn off. Let’s put this another way:

    If you walk 10,000 steps per day, that will burn off 400 calories. Still think you can exercise away that ice cream sundae or plate of fries?

    Wait, this is interesting and all, but what does this have to do with hunger?

    Why we get hungry

    Two important things:

    • All that exercise makes us hungry, because the more we exercise, the more the body speeds up our metabolism accordingly.
    • Empty calories don’t just add weight themselves, they also make us hungrier

    What are empty calories, and why do they make us hungrier?

    Empty calories are calories that are relatively devoid of other nutrition. This especially means simple sugars (especially refined sugar), white flour and white flour products (quick-release starches), and processed seed oils (e.g. canola, sunflower, and friends).

    They zip straight into our bloodstream, and our body sends out an army of insulin to deal with the blood sugar spike. And… that backfires.

    Imagine a person whose house is a terrible mess, and they have a date coming over in half an hour.

    They’re going to zoom around tidying, but they’re going to stuff things out of sight as quickly and easily as possible, rather than, say, sit down and Marie Kondo the place.

    But superficially, they got the job done really quickly!

    Insulin does similarly when overwhelmed by a blood sugar spike like that.

    So, it stores everything as fat as quickly as possible, and whew, the pancreas needs a break now after all that exertion, and the blood is nice and free from blood sugars.

    Wait, the blood is what now?

    The body notices the low blood sugar levels, and it also knows you just stored fat so you must be preparing for starvation, and now the low blood sugar levels indicate starvation is upon us. Quick, we must find food if we want to survive! So it sends a hunger signal to make sure you don’t let the body starve.

    You make a quick snack, and the cycle repeats.

    Dr. Ludwig’s solution:

    First, we need to break out of that cycle, and that includes calming down our insulin response (and thus rebuilding our insulin sensitivity, as our bodies will have become desensitized, after the equivalent of an air-raid siren every 40 minutes or so).

    How to do that?

    First, cut out the really bad things that we mentioned above.

    Next: cut healthy carbs too—we’re talking unprocessed grains here, legumes as well, and also starchy vegetables (root vegetables etc). Don’t worry, this will be just for a short while.

    The trick here is that we are resensitizing our bodies to insulin.

    Keep this up for even just a week, and then gradually reintroduce the healthier carbs. Unprocessed grains are better than root vegetables, as are legumes.

    You’re not going to reintroduce the sugars, white flour, canola oil, etc. You don’t have to be a puritan, and if you go to a restaurant you won’t undo all your work if you have a small portion of fries. But it’s not going to be a part of your general diet.

    Other tips from Dr. Ludwig:

    • Get plenty of high-quality protein—it’s good for you and suppresses your appetite
    • Shop for success—make sure you keep your kitchen stocked with healthy easy snack food
    • Nuts, cacao nibs, and healthy seeds will be your best friends and allies here
    • Make things easy—buy pre-chopped vegetables, for example, so when you’re hungry, you don’t have to wait longer (and work more) to eat something healthy
    • Do what you can to reduce stress, and also eat mindfully (that means paying attention to each mouthful, rather than wolfing something down while multitasking)

    If you’d like to know more about Dr. Ludwig and his work, you can check out his website for coaching, recipes, meal plans, his blog, and other resources!

    Share This Post

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  • He Thinks His Wife Died in an Understaffed Hospital. Now He’s Trying to Change the Industry.

    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.

    For the past year, police Detective Tim Lillard has spent most of his waking hours unofficially investigating his wife’s death.

    The question has never been exactly how Ann Picha-Lillard died on Nov. 19, 2022: She succumbed to respiratory failure after an infection put too much strain on her weakened lungs. She was 65.

    For Tim Lillard, the question has been why.

    Lillard had been in the hospital with his wife every day for a month. Nurses in the intensive care unit had told him they were short-staffed, and were constantly rushing from one patient to the next.

    Lillard tried to pitch in where he could: brushing Ann’s shoulder-length blonde hair or flagging down help when her tracheostomy tube gurgled — a sign of possible respiratory distress.

    So the day he walked into the ICU and saw staff members huddled in Ann’s room, he knew it was serious. He called the couple’s adult children: “It’s Mom,” he told them. “Come now.”

    All he could do then was sit on Ann’s bed and hold her hand, watching as staff members performed chest compressions, desperately trying to save her life.

    A minute ticked by. Then another. Lillard’s not sure how long the CPR continued — long enough for the couple’s son to arrive and take a seat on the other side of Ann’s bed, holding her other hand.

    Finally, the intensive care doctor called it and the team stopped CPR. Time of death: 12:37 p.m.

    Lillard didn’t know what to do in a world without Ann. They had been married almost 25 years. “We were best friends,” he said.

    Just days before her death, nurses had told Lillard that Ann could be discharged to a rehabilitation center as soon as the end of the week. Then, suddenly, she was gone. Lillard didn’t understand what had happened.

    Lillard said he now believes that overwhelmed, understaffed nurses hadn’t been able to respond in time as Ann’s condition deteriorated. And he has made it his mission to fight for change, joining some nursing unions in a push for mandatory ratios that would limit the number of patients in a nurse’s care. “I without a doubt believe 100% Ann would still be here today if they had staffing levels, mandatory staffing levels, especially in ICU,” Lillard said.

    Last year, Oregon became the second state after California to pass hospital-wide nurse ratios that limit the number of patients in a nurse’s care. Michigan, Maine, and Pennsylvania are now weighing similar legislation.

    But supporters of mandatory ratios are going up against a powerful hospital industry spending millions of dollars to kill those efforts. And hospitals and health systems say any staffing ratio regulations, however well-intentioned, would only put patients in greater danger.

    Putting Patients at Risk

    By next year, the United States could have as many as 450,000 fewer nurses than it needs, according to one estimate. The hospital industry blames covid-19 burnout, an aging workforce, a large patient population, and an insufficient pipeline of new nurses entering the field.

    But nursing unions say that’s not the full story. There are now 4.7 million registered nurses in the country, more than ever before.

    The problem, the unions say, is a hospital industry that’s been intentionally understaffing their units for years in order to cut costs and bolster profits. The unions say there isn’t a shortage of nurses but a shortage of nurses willing to work in those conditions.

    The nurse staffing crisis is now affecting patient care. The number of Michigan nurses who say they know of a patient who has died because of understaffing has nearly doubled in recent years, according to a Michigan Nurses Association survey last year.

    Just months before Ann Picha-Lillard’s death, nurses and doctors at the health system where she died had asked the Michigan attorney general to investigate staffing cuts they believed were leading to dangerous conditions, including patient deaths, according to The Detroit News.

    But Lillard didn’t know any of that when he drove his wife to the hospital in October 2022. She had been feeling short of breath for a few weeks after she and Lillard had mild covid infections. They were both vaccinated, but Ann was immunocompromised. She suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, a condition that had also caused scarring in her lungs.

    To be safe, doctors at DMC Huron Valley-Sinai Hospital wanted to keep Ann for observation. After a few days in the facility, she developed pneumonia. Doctors told the couple that Ann needed to be intubated. Ann was terrified but Lillard begged her to listen to the doctors. Tearfully, she agreed.

    With Ann on a ventilator in the ICU, it seemed clear to Lillard that nurses were understaffed and overwhelmed. One nurse told him they had been especially short-staffed lately, Lillard said.

    “The alarms would go off for the medications, they’d come into the room, shut off the alarm when they get low, run to the medication room, come back, set them down, go to the next room, shut off alarms,” Lillard recalled. “And that was going on all the time.”

    Lillard felt bad for the nurses, he said. “But obviously, also for my wife. That’s why I tried doing as much as I could when I was there. I would comb her hair, clean her, just keep an eye on things. But I had no idea what was really going on.”

    Finally, Ann’s health seemed to be stabilizing. A nurse told Lillard they’d be able to discharge Ann, possibly by the end of that week.

    By Nov. 17, Ann was no longer sedated and she cried when she saw Lillard and her daughter. Still unable to speak, she tried to mouth words to her husband “but we couldn’t understand what she was saying,” Lillard said.

    The next day, Lillard went home feeling hopeful, counting down the days until Ann could leave the hospital.

    Less than 24 hours later, Ann died.

    Lillard couldn’t wrap his head around how things went downhill so fast. Ann’s underlying lung condition, the infection, and her weakened state could have proved fatal in the best of circumstances. But Lillard wanted to understand how Ann had gone from nearly discharged to dying, seemingly overnight.

    He turned his dining room table into a makeshift office and started with what he knew. The day Ann died, he remembered her medical team telling him that her heart rate had spiked and she had developed another infection the night before. Lillard said he interviewed two DMC Huron Valley-Sinai nurse administrators, and had his own doctor look through Ann’s charts and test results from the hospital. “Everybody kept telling me: sepsis, sepsis, sepsis,” he said.

    Sepsis is when an infection triggers an extreme reaction in the body that can cause rapid organ failure. It’s one of the leading causes of death in U.S. hospitals. Some experts say up to 80% of sepsis deaths are preventable, while others say the percentage is far lower.

    Lives can be saved when sepsis is caught and treated fast, which requires careful attention to small changes in vital signs. One study found that for every additional patient a nurse had to care for, the mortality rate from sepsis increased by 12%.

    Lillard became convinced that had there been more nurses working in the ICU, someone could have caught what was happening to Ann.

    “They just didn’t have the time,” he said.

    DMC Huron Valley-Sinai’s director of communications and media relations, Brian Taylor, declined a request for comment about the 2022 staffing complaint to the Michigan attorney general.

    Following the Money

    When Lillard asked the hospital for copies of Ann’s medical records, DMC Huron Valley-Sinai told him he’d have to request them from its parent company in Texas.

    Like so many hospitals in recent years, the Lillards’ local health system had been absorbed by a series of other corporations. In 2011, the Detroit Medical Center health system was bought for $1.5 billion by Vanguard Health Systems, which was backed by the private equity company Blackstone Group.

    Two years after that, in 2013, Vanguard itself was acquired by Tenet Healthcare, a for-profit company based in Dallas that, according to its website, operates 480 ambulatory surgery centers and surgical hospitals, 52 hospitals, and approximately 160 additional outpatient centers.

    As health care executives face increasing pressure from investors, nursing unions say hospitals have been intentionally understaffing nurses to reduce labor costs and increase revenue. Also, insurance reimbursements incentivize keeping nurse staffing levels low. “Hospitals are not directly reimbursed for nursing services in the same way that a physician bills for their services,” said Karen Lasater, an associate professor of nursing in the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania. “And because hospitals don’t perceive nursing as a service line, but rather a cost center, they think about nursing as: How can we reduce this to the lowest denominator possible?” she said.

    Lasater is a proponent of mandatory nurse ratios. “The nursing shortage is not a pipeline problem, but a leaky bucket problem,” she said. “And the solutions to this crisis need to address the root cause of the issue, which is why nurses are saying they’re leaving employment. And it’s rooted in unsafe staffing. It’s not safe for the patients, but it’s also not safe for nurses.”

    A Battle Between Hospitals and Unions

    In November, almost one year after Ann’s death, Lillard told a room of lawmakers at the Michigan State Capitol that he believes the Safe Patient Care Act could save lives. The health policy committee in the Michigan House was holding a hearing on the proposed act, which would limit the amount of mandatory overtime a nurse can be forced to work, and require hospitals to make their staffing levels available to the public.

    Most significantly, the bills would require hospitals to have mandatory, minimum nurse-to-patient ratios. For example: one nurse for every patient in the ICU; one for every three patients in the emergency room; a nurse for triage; and one nurse for every four postpartum birthing patients and well-baby care.

    Efforts to pass mandatory ratio laws failed in Washington and Minnesota last year after facing opposition from the hospital industry. In Minnesota, the Minnesota Nurses Association accused the Mayo Clinic of using “blackmail tactics”: Mayo had told lawmakers it would pull billions of dollars in investment from the state if mandatory ratio legislation passed. Soon afterward, lawmakers removed nurse ratios from the legislation.

    While Lillard waited for his turn to speak to Michigan lawmakers about the Safe Patient Care Act in November, members of the Michigan Nurses Association, which says it represents some 13,000 nurses, told lawmakers that its units were dangerously understaffed. They said critical care nurses were sometimes caring for up to 11 patients at a time.

    “Last year I coded someone in an ICU for 10 minutes, all alone, because there was no one to help me,” said the nurses association president and registered nurse Jamie Brown, reading from another nurse’s letter.

    “I have been left as the only specially trained nurse to take care of eight babies on the unit: eight fragile newborns,” said Carolyn Clemens, a registered nurse from the Grand Blanc area of Michigan.

    Nikia Parker said she has left full-time emergency room nursing, a job she believes is her calling. After her friend died in the hospital where she worked, she was left wondering whether understaffing may have contributed to his death.

    “If the Safe Patient Care Act passed, and we have ratios, I’m one of those nurses who would return to the bedside full time,” Parker told lawmakers. “And so many of my co-workers who have left would join me.”

    But not all nurses agree that mandatory ratios are a good idea. 

    While the American Nurses Association supports enforceable ratios as an “essential approach,” that organization’s Michigan chapter does not, saying there may not be enough nurses in the state to satisfy the requirements of the Safe Patient Care Act.

    For some lawmakers, the risk of collateral damage seems too high. State Rep. Graham Filler said he worries that mandating ratios could backfire.

    “We’re going to severely hamper health care in the state of Michigan. I’m talking closed wards because you can’t meet the ratio in a bill. The inability for a hospital to treat an emergent patient. So it feels kind of to me like a gamble we’re taking,” said Filler, a Republican.

    Michigan hospitals are already struggling to fill some 8,400 open positions, according to the Michigan Health & Hospital Association. That association says that complying with the Safe Patient Care Act would require hiring 13,000 nurses.

    Every major health system in the state signed a letter opposing mandatory ratios, saying it would force them to close as many as 5,100 beds.

    Lillard watched the debate play out in the hearing. “That’s a scare tactic, in my opinion, where the hospitals say we’re going to have to start closing stuff down,” he said.

    He doesn’t think legislation on mandatory ratios — which are still awaiting a vote in the Michigan House’s health policy committee — are a “magic bullet” for such a complex, national problem. But he believes they could help.

    “The only way these hospitals and the administrations are gonna make any changes, and even start moving towards making it better, is if they’re forced to,” Lillard said.

    Seated in the center of the hearing room in Lansing, next to a framed photo of Ann, Lillard’s hands shook as he recounted those final minutes in the ICU.

    “Please take action so that no other person or other family endures this loss,” he said. “You can make a difference in saving lives.”

    Grief is one thing, Lillard said, but it’s another thing to be haunted by doubts, to worry that your loved one’s care was compromised before they ever walked through the hospital doors. What he wants most, he said, is to prevent any other family from having to wonder, “What if?”

    This article is from a partnership that includes Michigan Public, NPR, and KFF Health News.

    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.

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    This story can be republished for free (details).

    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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  • The End of Food Allergy – by Dr. Kari Nadeau & Sloan Barnett

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    We don’t usually mention author credentials beyond their occupation/title. However, in this case it bears acknowledging at least the first line of the author bio:

    ❝Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD, is the director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University and is one of the world’s leading experts on food allergy❞

    We mention this, because there’s a lot of quack medicine out there [in general, but especially] when it comes to things such as food allergies. So let’s be clear up front that Dr. Nadeau is actually a world-class professional at the top of her field.

    This book is, by the way, about true allergies—not intolerances or sensitivities. It does touch on those latter two, but it’s not the main meat of the book.

    In particular, most of the research cited is around peanut allergies, though the usual other common allergens are all discussed too.

    The authors’ writing style is that of a science educator (Dr. Nadeau’s co-author, Sloan Barnett, is lawyer and health journalist). We get a clear explanation of the science from real-world to clinic and back again, and are left with a strong understanding, not just a conclusion.

    The titular “End of Food Allergy” is a bold implicit claim; does the book deliver? Yes, actually.

    The book lays out guidelines for safely avoiding food allergies developing in infants, and yes, really, how to reverse them in adults. But…

    Big caveat:

    The solution for reversing severe food allergies (e.g. “someone nearby touched a peanut three hours ago and now I’m in anaphylactic shock”), drug-assisted oral immunotherapy, takes 6–24 months of weekly several-hour-long clinic visits, relies on having a nearby clinic offering the service, and absolutely 100% cannot be done at home (on pain of probable death).

    Bottom line: it’s by no means a magic bullet, but yes, it does deliver.

    Click here to check out The End of Food Allergy to learn more!

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  • Apple vs Pineapple – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing apple to pineapple, we picked the pineapple.

    Why?

    An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but pineapples are heavier and armored and spiky and generally much more intimidating.

    More seriously, apples are great but we say pineapples have the better nutritional and phytochemical properties overall:

    In terms of macros, actually apples win this first round, albeit marginally; the two fruits are equal on carbs, while apple has a little more fiber and pineapple has a (very) little more protein. This makes the fiber content the deciding factor, so apples do win this one, even if by just 1g/100g difference.

    When it comes to vitamins, however, apples have more of vitamins E and K, while pineapple has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, and choline. The margins of difference are equally generous on both sides, so this is a clear and overwhelming win for pineapple (including 10x more vitamin C than apples, which are themselves considered a good source of vitamin C)

    In the category of minerals, apples have slightly more phosphorus, and pineapple has a lot more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, potassium, selenium, and zinc. Another easy win for pineapple.

    Pineapples are not only also higher in polyphenols, but also contain bromelain, a powerful anti-inflammatory group of enzymes that are unique to pineapple—you can read about it in the link below!

    Meanwhile, pineapple wins the day in our head-to-head here, but as ever when it comes to a plurality of healthy things, do enjoy either or both! Diversity is good.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Bromelain vs Inflammation & Much More

    Enjoy!

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