Black Bean & Butternut Balti
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Protein, fiber, and pungent polyphenols abound in this tasty dish that’s good for your gut, heart, brain, and more:
You will need
- 2 cans (each 14 oz or thereabouts) black beans, drained and rinsed (or: 2 cups black beans, cooked, drained, and rinsed)
- 1 butternut squash, peeled and cut into ½” cubes
- 1 cauliflower, cut into florets
- 1 red onion, finely chopped
- 1 can (14 oz or thereabouts) chopped tomatoes
- 1 cup coconut milk
- ½ bulb garlic, crushed
- 1″ piece of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped
- 1 fresh red chili (or multiply per your preference and the strength of your chilis), finely chopped
- 1 tbsp black pepper, coarse ground
- 1 tbsp garam masala
- 2 tsp cumin seeds
- 2 tsp ground coriander
- 1 tsp ground turmeric
- 1 tsp ground paprika
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Juice of ½ lemon
- Extra virgin olive oil
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Preheat the oven to 400℉ / 200℃.
2) Toss the squash and cauliflower in a little olive oil, to coat evenly. No need to worry about seasoning, because these are going into the curry later and will get plenty there.
3) Roast them on a baking tray lined with baking paper for about 25 minutes.
You can enjoy a 10-minute break for the first 10 minutes of that, before continuing, such that the timing will be perfect:
4) Heat a little oil in a sauté pan (or anything that’s suitable for both frying and adding volume; we’re going to be using the space later; everything is going in here!) and fry the onion on medium for about 5 minutes, stirring well.
5) Add the spices/seasonings, including the garlic, ginger, and chili, and stir well to combine.
6) Add the tomatoes, beans, and coconut milk, and simmer for 10 minutes. You can add a little water at any time if it seems to need it.
7) Stir in the roasted vegetables (they should be finished now), and heat through. Add the lemon juice and stir.
8) Serve as-is, or with your preferred carbohydrate (we recommend our Tasty Versatile Rice recipe), or if you have time, keep it warm for a while until you’re ready to use it (the flavors will benefit from this time, if available).
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Chickpeas vs Black Beans – Which is Healthier?
- Butternut Squash vs Pumpkin – Which is Healthier?
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits? ← 5/5 today!
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Air Purifiers & Sleep
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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
❝I’ve read that air pollution has a negative effect on sleep quality and duration. Since I live next to a busy road, I was wondering whether I should invest in an air purifier. What are 10Almonds’s views?❞
Going straight to the science, there are two questions here:
- Does air pollution negatively affect sleep quality and duration?
- Does the use of an air purify actually improve the air quality in the way(s) necessary to make a difference?
We thought we’d have to tackle these questions separately, but we did find one study that addressed your question directly. It was a small study (n=30 if you believe the abstract; n=29 if you read the paper itself—one person dropped out); the results were modest but clear:
❝The purifier filter was associated with increased total sleep time for an average of 12 min per night, and increased total time in bed for an average of 19 min per night relative to the placebo.
There were several sleep and mood outcomes for which no changes were observed, and time awake after sleep onset was higher for the purifier filter. Air quality was better during the high-efficiency particulate air filter condition.
These findings offer positive indications that environmental interventions that improve air quality can have benefits for sleep outcomes in healthy populations who are not exhibiting clinical sleep disturbances.❞
In the above-linked paper’s introduction, it does establish the deleterious effect of air pollution on a wide variety of health metrics, including sleep, this latter evidenced per Caddick et al. (2018): A review of the environmental parameters necessary for an optimal sleep environment
Now, you may be wondering: is an extra 12 minutes per night worth it?
That’s your choice to make, but we would argue that it is. We can make many choices in our lives that affect our health slightly for the better or the worse. If we make a stack of choices in a particular direction, the effects will also stack, if not outright compound.
So in the case of sleep, it might be (arbitrary numbers for the sake of illustration):
- Get good exercise earlier in the day (+3%)
- Get good food earlier in the day (+2.5%)
- Practice mindfulness/meditation before bed (+2.5%)
- Have a nice dark room (+5%)
- Have fresh bedding (+2.5%)
- Have an air purifier running (+3%)
Now, those numbers are, as we said, arbitrary*, but remember that percentages don’t add up; they compound. So that “+3%” starts being a lot more meaningful than if it were just by itself.
*Confession: the figure of 3% for the air purifier wasn’t entirely arbitrary; it was based on 100(12/405) = 80/27 ≈ 3, wherein the 405 figure was an approximation of the average total time (in minutes) spent sleeping with placebo, based on a peep at their results graph. There are several ways the average could be reasonably calculated, but 6h45 (i.e., 405 minutes) was an approximate average of those reasonable approximate averages.
So, 12 minutes is a 3% improvement on that.
Don’t have an air purifier and want one?
We don’t sell them, but here’s an example on Amazon, for your convenience
Take care!
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What are heart rate zones, and how can you incorporate them into your exercise routine?
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If you spend a lot of time exploring fitness content online, you might have come across the concept of heart rate zones. Heart rate zone training has become more popular in recent years partly because of the boom in wearable technology which, among other functions, allows people to easily track their heart rates.
Heart rate zones reflect different levels of intensity during aerobic exercise. They’re most often based on a percentage of your maximum heart rate, which is the highest number of beats your heart can achieve per minute.
But what are the different heart rate zones, and how can you use these zones to optimise your workout?
The three-zone model
While there are several models used to describe heart rate zones, the most common model in the scientific literature is the three-zone model, where the zones may be categorised as follows:
- zone 1: 55%–82% of maximum heart rate
- zone 2: 82%–87% of maximum heart rate
- zone 3: 87%–97% of maximum heart rate.
If you’re not sure what your maximum heart rate is, it can be calculated using this equation: 208 – (0.7 × age in years). For example, I’m 32 years old. 208 – (0.7 x 32) = 185.6, so my predicted maximum heart rate is around 186 beats per minute.
There are also other models used to describe heart rate zones, such as the five-zone model (as its name implies, this one has five distinct zones). These models largely describe the same thing and can mostly be used interchangeably.
What do the different zones involve?
The three zones are based around a person’s lactate threshold, which describes the point at which exercise intensity moves from being predominantly aerobic, to predominantly anaerobic.
Aerobic exercise uses oxygen to help our muscles keep going, ensuring we can continue for a long time without fatiguing. Anaerobic exercise, however, uses stored energy to fuel exercise. Anaerobic exercise also accrues metabolic byproducts (such as lactate) that increase fatigue, meaning we can only produce energy anaerobically for a short time.
On average your lactate threshold tends to sit around 85% of your maximum heart rate, although this varies from person to person, and can be higher in athletes.
Wearable technology has taken off in recent years. Ketut Subiyanto/Pexels In the three-zone model, each zone loosely describes one of three types of training.
Zone 1 represents high-volume, low-intensity exercise, usually performed for long periods and at an easy pace, well below lactate threshold. Examples include jogging or cycling at a gentle pace.
Zone 2 is threshold training, also known as tempo training, a moderate intensity training method performed for moderate durations, at (or around) lactate threshold. This could be running, rowing or cycling at a speed where it’s difficult to speak full sentences.
Zone 3 mostly describes methods of high-intensity interval training, which are performed for shorter durations and at intensities above lactate threshold. For example, any circuit style workout that has you exercising hard for 30 seconds then resting for 30 seconds would be zone 3.
Striking a balance
To maximise endurance performance, you need to strike a balance between doing enough training to elicit positive changes, while avoiding over-training, injury and burnout.
While zone 3 is thought to produce the largest improvements in maximal oxygen uptake – one of the best predictors of endurance performance and overall health – it’s also the most tiring. This means you can only perform so much of it before it becomes too much.
Training in different heart rate zones improves slightly different physiological qualities, and so by spending time in each zone, you ensure a variety of benefits for performance and health.
So how much time should you spend in each zone?
Most elite endurance athletes, including runners, rowers, and even cross-country skiers, tend to spend most of their training (around 80%) in zone 1, with the rest split between zones 2 and 3.
Because elite endurance athletes train a lot, most of it needs to be in zone 1, otherwise they risk injury and burnout. For example, some runners accumulate more than 250 kilometres per week, which would be impossible to recover from if it was all performed in zone 2 or 3.
Of course, most people are not professional athletes. The World Health Organization recommends adults aim for 150–300 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week, or 75–150 minutes of vigorous exercise per week.
If you look at this in the context of heart rate zones, you could consider zone 1 training as moderate intensity, and zones 2 and 3 as vigorous. Then, you can use heart rate zones to make sure you’re exercising to meet these guidelines.
What if I don’t have a heart rate monitor?
If you don’t have access to a heart rate tracker, that doesn’t mean you can’t use heart rate zones to guide your training.
The three heart rate zones discussed in this article can also be prescribed based on feel using a simple 10-point scale, where 0 indicates no effort, and 10 indicates the maximum amount of effort you can produce.
With this system, zone 1 aligns with a 4 or less out of 10, zone 2 with 4.5 to 6.5 out of 10, and zone 3 as a 7 or higher out of 10.
Heart rate zones are not a perfect measure of exercise intensity, but can be a useful tool. And if you don’t want to worry about heart rate zones at all, that’s also fine. The most important thing is to simply get moving.
Hunter Bennett, Lecturer in Exercise Science, University of South Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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How To Reduce Chronic Stress
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.
Sunday Stress-Buster
First, an important distinction:
- Acute stress (for example, when stepping out of your comfort zone, engaging in competition, or otherwise focusing on something that requires your full attention for best performance) is generally a good thing. It helps you do you your best. It’s sometimes been called “eustress”, “good stress”.
- Chronic stress (for example, when snowed under at work and you do not love it, when dealing with a serious illness, and/or faced with financial problems) is unequivocally a bad thing. Our body is simply not made to handle that much cortisol (the stress hormone) all the time.
Know the dangers of too much cortisol
We covered this as a main feature last month: Lower Your Cortisol! (Here’s Why & How)
…but it bears mentioning again and for those who’ve joined us since then:
A little spike of cortisol now and again can be helpful. Having it spiking all the time, or even a perpetual background low-to-moderate level, can be ruinous to the health in so many ways.
The good news is, the physiological impact of stress on the body (which ranges from face-and-stomach fat deposits, to rapid aging), can be reversed—even the biological aging!
Read: Biological age is increased by stress and restored upon recovery ← this study is so hot-of-the-press that it was published literally two days ago
Focus on what you can control
A lot of things that cause you stress may be outside of your control. Focus on what is within your control. Oftentimes, we are so preoccupied with the stress, that we employ coping strategies that don’t actually deal with the problem.
That’s a maladaptive response to an evolutionary quirk—our bodies haven’t caught up with modern life, and on an evolutionary scale, are still priming us to deal with sabre-toothed tigers, not financial disputes, for example.
But, how to deal with the body’s “wrong” response?
First, deal with the tiger. There isn’t one, but your body doesn’t know that. Do some vigorous exercise, or if that’s not your thing, tense up your muscles strongly for a few seconds and then relax them, doing each part of your body. This is called progressive relaxation, and how it works is basically tricking your body into thinking you successfully fled the tiger, or fought the tiger and won.
Next, examine what the actual problem is, that’s causing you stress. You’re probably heavily emotionally attached to the problem, or else it wouldn’t be stressing you. So, imagine what advice you would give to help a friend deal with the same problem, and then do that.
Better yet: enlist an actual friend (or partner, family member, etc) to help you. We are evolved to live in a community, engaged in mutual support. That’s how we do well; that’s how we thrive best.
By dealing with the problem—or sometimes even just having support and/or something like a plan—your stress will evaporate soon enough.
The power of “…and then what?”
Sometimes, things are entirely out of your control. Sometimes, bad things are entirely possible; perhaps even probable. Sometimes, they’re so bad, that it’s difficult to avoid stressing about the possible outcomes.
If something seems entirely out of your control and/or inevitable, ask yourself:
“…and then what?”
Writer’s storytime: when I was a teenager, sometimes I would go out without a coat, and my mother would ask, pointedly, “But what will you do if it rains?!”
I’d reply “I’ll get wet, of course”
This attitude can go just the same for much more serious outcomes, up to and including death.
So when you find yourself stressing about some possible bad outcome, ask yourself, “…and then what?”.
- What if this is cancer? Well, it might be. And then what? You might seek cancer treatment.
- What if I can’t get treatment, or it doesn’t work? Well, you might die. And then what?
In Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT), this is called “radical acceptance” and acknowledges bad possible/probable/known outcomes, allows one to explore the feelings, and come up with a plan for managing the situation, or even just coming to terms with the fact that sometimes, suffering is inevitable and is part of the human condition.
It’ll still be bad—but you won’t have added extra suffering in the form of stress.
Breathe.
Don’t underestimate the power of relaxed deep breathing to calm the rest of your body, including your brain.
Also: we’ve shared this before, a few months ago, but this 8 minute soundscape was developed by sound technicians working with a team of psychologists and neurologists. It’s been clinically tested, and found to have a much more relaxing effect(in objective measures of lowering heart rate and lowering cortisol levels, as well as in subjective self-reports) than merely “relaxing music”.
Try it and see for yourself:
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Carrot vs Kale – 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 carrot to kale, we picked the kale.
Why?
These are both known as carotene-containing heavyweights, but kale emerges victorious:
In terms of macros, carrot has more carbs while kale has more protein and fiber. An easy win there for kale.
When it comes to vitamins, both are great! But, carrots contain more of vitamins A, B5, and choline, whereas kale contains more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B6, B9, C, E, and K. And while carrot’s strongest point is vitamin A, a cup of carrots contains around 10x the recommended daily dose of vitamin A, whereas a cup of kale contains “only” 6x the recommended daily dose of vitamin A. So, did we really need the extra in carrots? Probably not. In any case, kale already won on overall vitamin coverage, by a long way.
In the category of minerals, kale again sweeps. On the one hand, carrots contain more sodium. On the other hand, kale contains a lot more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. Not a tricky choice!
But don’t be fooled: carrots really are a nutritional powerhouse and a great food. Kale is just better—nutritionally speaking, in any case. If you’re making a carrot cake, please don’t try substituting kale; it will not work 😉
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
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Heal Your Stressed Brain
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Rochelle Walsh, therapist, explains the problem and how to fix it:
Not all brain damage is from the outside
Long-term stress and burnout cause brain damage; it’s not just a mindset issue—it impacts the brain physiologically. To compound matters, it also increases the risk of neurodegenerative diseases. While the brain can indeed grow new neurons and regenerate itself, chronic stress damages specific regions, and inhibits that.
There are some effects of chronic stress that can seem positive—the amygdalae and hypothalamus are seen to grow larger and stronger, for instance—but this is, unfortunately, “all the better to stress you with”. In compensation for this, chronic stress deprioritizes the pre-frontal cortex and hippocampi, so there goes your reasoning and memory.
This often results in people not managing chronic stress well. Just like a weak heart and lungs might impede the exercise that could make them stronger, the stressed brain is not good at permitting you to do the things that would heal it—preferring to keep you on edge all day, worrying and twitchy, mind racing and body tense. It also tends to lead to autoimmune diseases, due to the increased inflammation (because the body’s threat-detection system as at “jumping at own shadow” levels so it’s deploying every defense it has, including completely inappropriate ones).
Notwithstanding the “Heal Your Stressed Brain” thumbnail, she doesn’t actually go into this in detail and bids us sign up for her masterclass. We at 10almonds however like to deliver, so you can find useful advice and free resources in our links-drop at the bottom of this article.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to hear more about the neurological woes described above, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Meditation That You’ll Actually Enjoy
- How To Manage/Reduce Chronic Stress
- Lower Your Cortisol! (Here’s Why & How)
- How Healthy People Regulate Their Emotions
- Sleep: Yes, You Really Do Still Need It!
- Give Your Adrenal Glands A Chance
- The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)
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
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How Useful Are Our Dreams
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What’s In A Dream?
We were recently asked:
❝I have a question or a suggestion for coverage in your “Psychology Sunday”. Dreams: their relevance, meanings ( if any) interpretations? I just wondered what the modern psychological opinions are about dreams in general.❞
~ 10almonds subscriber
There are two main schools of thought, and one main effort to reconcile those two. The third one hasn’t quite caught on so far as to be considered a “school of thought” yet though.
The Top-Down Model (Psychoanalysts)
Psychoanalysts broadly follow the theories of Freud, or at least evolved from there. Freud was demonstrably wrong about very many things. Most of his theories have been debunked and ditched—hence the charitable “or at least evolved from there” phrasing when it comes to modern psychoanalytic schools of thought. Perhaps another day, we’ll go into all the ways Freud went wrong. However, for today, one thing he wasn’t bad at…
According to Freud, our dreams reveal our subconscious desires and fears, sometimes directly and sometimes dressed in metaphor.
Examples of literal representations might be:
- sex dreams (revealing our subconscious desires; perhaps consciously we had not thought about that person that way, or had not considered that sex act desirable)
- getting killed and dying (revealing our subconscious fear of death, not something most people give a lot of conscious thought to most of the time)
Examples of metaphorical representations might be:
- dreams of childhood (revealing our subconscious desires to feel safe and nurtured, or perhaps something else depending on the nature of the dream; maybe a return to innocence, or a clean slate)
- dreams of being pursued (revealing our subconscious fear of bad consequences of our actions/inactions, for example, responsibilities to which we have not attended, debts are a good example for many people; or social contact where the ball was left in our court and we dropped it, that kind of thing)
One can read all kinds of guides to dream symbology, and learn such arcane lore as “if you dream of your teeth crumbling, you have financial worries”, but the truth is that “this thing means that other thing” symbolic equations are not only highly personal, but also incredibly culture-bound.
For example:
- To one person, bees could be a symbol of feeling plagued by uncountable small threats; to another, they could be a symbol of abundance, or of teamwork
- One culture’s “crow as an omen of death” is another culture’s “crow as a symbol of wisdom”
- For that matter, in some cultures, white means purity; in others, it means death.
Even such classically Freudian things as dreaming of one’s mother and/or father (in whatever context) will be strongly informed by one’s own waking-world relationship (or lack thereof) with same. Even in Freud’s own psychoanalysis, the “mother” for the sake of such analysis was the person who nurtured, and the “father” was the person who drew the nurturer’s attention away, so they could be switched gender roles, or even different people entirely than one’s parents.
The only real way to know what, if anything, your dreams are trying to tell you, is to ask yourself. You can do that…
- by reflection and personal interrogation (see for example: The Easiest Way To Take Up Journaling)
- or by externalising parts of your subconscious (as in Internal Family Systems therapy)
- or by talking directly to your subconscious where it is, by means of lucid dreaming.
The idea with lucid dreaming is that since any dream character is a facet of your subconscious generated by your own mind, by talking to that character you can ask questions directly of your subconscious (the popular 2010 movie “Inception” was actually quite accurate in this regard, by the way).
To read more about how to do this kind of self-therapy through lucid dreaming, you might want to check out this book we reviewed previously; it is the go-to book of lucid dreaming enthusiasts, and will honestly give you everything you need in one go:
Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life – by Dr. Stephen LaBerge
The Bottom-Up Model (Neuroscientists)
This will take a lot less writing, because it’s practically a null hypothesis (i.e., the simplest default assumption before considering any additional evidence that might support or refute it; usually some variant of “nothing unusual going on here”).
The Bottom-Up model holds that our brains run regular maintenance cycles during REM sleep (a biological equivalent of defragging a computer), and the brain interprets these pieces of information flying by and, because of the mind’s tendency to look for patterns, fills in the rest (much like how modern generative AI can “expand” a source image to create more of the same and fill in the blanks), resulting in the often narratively wacky, but ultimately random, vivid hallucinations that we call dreams.
The Hybrid Model (per Cartwright, 2012)
This is really just one woman’s vision, but it’s an incredibly compelling one, that takes the Bottom-Up model and asks “what if we did all that bio-stuff, and then our subconscious mind influenced the interpretation of the random patterns, to create dreams that are subjectively meaningful, and thus do indeed represent our subconscious?
It’s best explained in her own words, though, so it’s time for another book recommendation (we’ve reviewed this one before, too):
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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