Black Forest Chia Pudding
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This pudding tastes so decadent, it’s hard to believe it’s so healthy, but it is! Not only is it delicious, it’s also packed with nutrients including protein, carbohydrates, healthy fats (including omega-3s), fiber, vitamins, minerals, and assorted antioxidant polyphenols. Perfect dessert or breakfast!
You will need
- 1½ cups pitted fresh or thawed-from-frozen cherries
- ½ cup mashed banana
- 3 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
- 2 tbsp chia seeds, ground
- Optional: 2 pitted dates, soaked in hot water for 10 minutes and then drained (include these if you prefer a sweeter pudding)
- Garnish: a few almonds, and/or berries, and/or cherries and/or cacao nibs
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Blend the ingredients except for the chia seeds and the garnish, with ½ cup of water, until completely smooth
2) Divide into two small bowls or glass jars
3) Add 1 tbsp ground chia seeds to each, and stir until evenly distributed
4) Add the garnish and refrigerate overnight or at least for some hours. There’s plenty of wiggle-room here, so make it at your convenience and serve at your leisure.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Cherries’ Very Healthy Wealth Of Benefits!
- If You’re Not Taking Chia, You’re Missing Out
- Cacao vs Carob – Which is Healthier?
Take care!
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Red Cabbage vs Cauliflower – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing red cabbage to cauliflower, we picked the cabbage.
Why?
In terms of macros, there’s no meaningful difference between them; they’re both mostly water with just enough fiber to hold them together, a small amount of carbs, and an even more trivial amount of protein. So, a tie on macros.
Looking at the vitamins, red cabbage has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, C, E, and K, while cauliflower has more of vitamins B3, B5, B9, and choline. So, a 7:4 win for red cabbage.
In the category of minerals, red cabbage has more calcium, manganese, and iron, while cauliflower has more copper, phosphorus, and potassium. The margins of difference are comparable too, thus, a 3:3 tie on minerals.
It’s always worth taking a look at polyphenols for plants like these, but in this case, once again, there’s not much to set one above the other. However, it’s good to note also that despite them both being Brassica oleracea (same species, different cultivar), there isn’t much overlap in their polyphenol content, meaning they complement each other very well. In particular, red cabbage is a source of luteolin and quercetin, while cauliflower is a source of gallic acid and caffeic acid, for example.
Adding up the three ties and the one win for red cabbage, gives the cabbage the victory today—but do enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
21 Most Beneficial Polyphenols & What Foods Have Them
Enjoy!
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Women’s Strength Training Anatomy Workouts – by Frédéric Delavier
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We’ve previously reviewed another book of Delavier’s, “Women’s Strength Training Anatomy“, which itself is great. This book adds a lot of practical advice to that one’s more informational format, but to gain full benefit of this one does not require having read that one.
A common reason that many women avoid strength-training is because they do not want to look muscular. Largely this is based on a faulty assumption, since you will never look like a bodybuilder unless you also eat like a bodybuilder, for example.
However, for those for whom the concern remains, today’s book is an excellent guide to strength-training with aesthetics in mind as well as functionality.
The exercises are divided into sections, thus: round your glutes / tone your quadriceps / shape your hamstrings / trim your calves / flatten your abs / curve your shoulders / develop a pain-free upper back / protect your lower back / enhance your chest / firm up your arms.
As you can see, a lot of these are mindful of aesthetics, but there’s nothing here that’s antithetical to function, and some (especially for example “develop a pain-free upper back” and “protect your lower back“) are very functional indeed.
Bottom line: Delavier’s anatomy and exercise books are top-tier, and this one is no exception. If you are a woman and would like to strength-train (or perhaps you already do, and would like to refine your training), then this book is an excellent choice.
Click here to check out Women’s Strength Training Anatomy Workouts, and have the body you want!
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Healthy Butternut Macaroni Cheese
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A comfort food classic, healthy and plant-based, without skimping on the comfort.
You will need
- ½ butternut squash, peeled and cut into small pieces (if buying ready-chopped, this should be about 1 lb)
- 1 onion, chopped
- ¼ bulb garlic
- 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 12 oz (or thereabouts) wholegrain macaroni, or similar pasta shape (even penne works fine—which is good, as it’s often easier to buy wholegrain penne than wholegrain macaroni) (substitute with a gluten-free pasta such as buckwheat pasta, if avoiding gluten)
- 6 oz (or thereabouts) cashews, soaked in hot water for at least 15 minutes (but longer is better)
- ½ cup milk (your preference what kind; we recommend hazelnut for its mellow nutty flavor)
- 3 tbsp nutritional yeast
- Juice of ½ lemon
- 2 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
- ½ tsp MSG, or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Optional: smoked paprika, to serve
Note: if you are allergic to nuts, please accept our apologies that there’s no substitution available in this one. Simply put, removing the cashews would mean changing most of the rest of the recipe to compensate, so there’s no easy “or substitute with…” that we can mention. We’ll have to find/develop a good healthy plant-based no-nuts recipe for you at a later date.
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Preheat the oven to 400℉ / 200℃.
2) Combine the butternut squash, onion, and garlic with the olive oil, in a large roasting tin, tossing thoroughly to ensure an even coat of oil. Roast them for about 25 minutes until soft.
3) Cook the macaroni while you wait (this should take about 10 minutes or so in salted water), drain, and rinse thoroughly in cold water, before setting aside. This cooling increases the pasta’s resistant starch content (that’s good, for your gut and for your blood sugars, and thus also for your heart and brain), and it will maintain this benefit even when we reheat it later.
4) Drain the cashews, and tip them into a high-speed blender with the milk, and process until smooth. Add the roasted vegetables and the remaining ingredients apart from the pasta, and continue to process until again smooth. You can add a little more milk if you need to, but go easy with it.
5) Heat the sauce (that you just made in the food processor) gently in a saucepan, and refresh the pasta by pouring a kettle of boiling water through it in a colander.
6) Optional: combine the pasta and sauce in an ovenproof dish or cast iron pan, and give it a few minutes under the hottest grill (or browning iron, if you have such) your oven can muster. Alternatively, use a culinary blowtorch, if you have one.
7) Serve; and if you didn’t do the optional step above, this means combining the pasta and sauce. You can also dust the top with some extra seasonings if you like. Smoked paprika works well for this.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Butternut Squash vs Pumpkin – Which is Healthier?
- Cashew Nuts vs Coconut – Which is Healthier?
- The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic
- Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
- Sea Salt vs MSG – Which is Healthier?
Take care!
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Wakefulness, Cognitive Enhancement, AND Improved Mood?
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Old Drug, New Tricks?
Modafinil (also known by brand names including Modalert and Provigil) is a dopamine uptake inhibitor.
What does that mean? It means it won’t put any extra dopamine in your brain, but it will slow down the rate at which your brain removes naturally-occuring dopamine.
The result is that your brain will get to make more use of the dopamine it does have.
(dopamine is a neutrotransmitter that allows you to feel wakeful and happy, and perform complex cognitive tasks)
Modafinil is prescribed for treatment of excessive daytime sleepiness. Often that’s caused by shift work sleep disorder, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, or narcolepsy.
Read: Overview of the Clinical Uses, Pharmacology, and Safety of Modafinil
Many studies done on humans (rather than rats) have been military experiments to reduce the effects of sleep deprivation:
Click Here To See A Military Study On Modafinil!
They’ve found modafinil to be helpful, and more effective and more long-lasting than caffeine, without the same “crash” later. This is for two reasons:
1) while caffeine works by blocking adenosine (so you don’t feel how tired you are) and by constricting blood vessels (so you feel more ready-for-action), modafinil works by allowing your brain to accumulate more dopamine (so you’re genuinely more wakeful, and you get to keep the dopamine)
2) the biological half-life of modafinil is 12–15 hours, as opposed to 4–8 hours* for caffeine.
*Note: a lot of sources quote 5–6 hours for caffeine, but this average is misleading. In reality, we are each genetically predetermined to be either a fast caffeine metabolizer (nearer 4 hours) or a slow caffeine metabolizer (nearer 8 hours).
What’s a biological half-life (also called: elimination half-life)?
A substance’s biological half-life is the time it takes for the amount in the body to be reduced by exactly half.
For example: Let’s say you’re a fast caffeine metabolizer and you have a double-espresso (containing 100mg caffeine) at 8am.
By midday, you’ll have 50mg of caffeine left in your body. So far, so simple.
By 4pm you might expect it to be gone, but instead you have 25mg remaining (because the amount halves every four hours).
By 8pm, you have 12.5mg remaining.
When midnight comes and you’re tucking yourself into bed, you still have 6.25mg of caffeine remaining from your morning coffee!
Use as a nootropic
Many healthy people who are not sleep-deprived use modafinil “off-label” as a nootropic (i.e., a cognitive enhancer).
Read: Modafinil for cognitive neuroenhancement in healthy non-sleep-deprived subjects: A systematic review
Important Note: modafinil is prescription-controlled, and only FDA-approved for sleep disorders.
To get around this, a lot of perfectly healthy biohackers describe the symptoms of sleep pattern disorder to their doctor, to get a prescription.
We do not recommend lying to your healthcare provider, and nor do we recommend turning to the online “grey market”.
Such websites often use anonymized private doctors to prescribe on an “informed consent” basis, rather than making a full examination. Those websites then dispense the prescribed medicines directly to the patient with no further questions asked (i.e. very questionable practices).
Caveat emptor!
A new mood-brightener?
Modafinil was recently tested head-to-head against Citalapram for the treatment of depression, and scored well:
See its head-to-head scores here!
How does it work? Modafinil does for dopamine what a lot of anti-depressants do for serotonin. Both dopamine and serotonin promote happiness and wakefulness.
This is very promising, especially as modafinil (in most people, at least) has fewer unwanted side-effects than a lot of common anti-depressant medications.
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Gut Health 2.0
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Gene Expression & Gut Health
This is Dr. Tim Spector. After training in medicine and becoming a consultant rheumatologist, he’s turned his attention to medical research, and is these days a specialist in twin studies, genetics, epigenetics, microbiome, and diet.
What does he want us to know?
For one thing: epigenetics are for more than just getting your grandparents’ trauma.
More usefully: there are things we can do to improve epigenetic factors in our body
DNA is often seen as the script by which our body does whatever it’s going to do, but it’s only part of the story. Thinking of DNA as some kind of “magical immutable law of reality” overlooks (to labor the metaphor) script revisions, notes made in the margins, directorial choices, and ad-lib improvizations, as well as the quality of the audience’s hearing and comprehension.
Hence the premise of one of Dr. Spector’s older books, “Identically Different: Why We Can Change Our Genes”
(*in fact, it was his first, from all the way back in 2013, when he’d only been a doctor for 34 years)
Gene expression will trump genes every time, and gene expression is something that can often be changed without getting in there with CRISPR / a big pair of scissors and some craft glue.
How this happens on the micro level is beyond the scope of today’s article; part of it has to do with enzymes that get involved in the DNA transcription process, and those enzymes in turn are despatched or not depending on hormonal messaging—in the broadest sense of “hormonal”; all the body’s hormonal chemical messengers, not just the ones people think of as hormones.
However, hormonal messaging (of many kinds) is strongly influenced by something we can control relatively easily with a little good (science-based) knowledge: the gut.
The gut, the SAD, and the easy
In broad strokes: we know what is good for the gut. We’ve written about it before at 10almonds:
Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
This is very much in contrast with what in scientific literature is often abbreviated “SAD”, the Standard American Diet, which is very bad for the gut.
However, Dr. Spector (while fully encouraging everyone to enjoy an evidence-based gut-healthy diet) wanted to do one better than just a sweeping one-size-fits-all advice, so he set up a big study with 15,000 identical twins; you can read about it here: TwinsUK
The information that came out of that was about a lot more than just gene expression and gut health, but it did provide the foundation for Dr. Spector’s next project, ZOE.
ZOE crowdsources huge amounts of data including individual metabolic responses to standardized meals in order to predict personalized food responses based on individual biology and unique microbiome profile.
In other words, it takes the guesswork out of a) knowing what your genes mean for your food responses b) tailoring your food choices with your genetic expression in mind, and c) ultimately creating a positive feedback loop to much better health on all levels.
Now, this is not an ad for ZOE, but if you so wish, you can…
- Get the free ZOE gut health guide (this is good, but generic, gut health information)
- Take the ZOE home gut health test (quiz followed by offers of lab tests)
- Browse the ZOE Health Academy, its education wing
Want to know more?
Dr. Spector has a bunch of books out, including some that we’ve reviewed previously:
- Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food Is Wrong
- The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat
- Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well
You can also check out our own previous main feature, which wasn’t about Dr. Spector’s work but was very adjacent:
The Brain-Gut Highway: A Two-Way Street
Enjoy!
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Glucomannan For Weight Loss, Gut Health, & More
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Glucomannan is a water-soluble dietary fiber found in the root of the konjac plant.
If you’ve had konjac noodles, also called shirataki, that’s what those are mostly made of, and it’s why they have next-to-no calories.
You may be wondering: if it’s water-soluble, how do the noodles not dissolve in water? And the answer is that the noodle-making process involves making a gel out of the fiber and water, which is then extruded into noodle shapes. In this gelatinous form, they’re fairly stable (it’s one of the most viscous dietary fibers), but yes, if you were to boil them for a long time, they would indeed turn the entire liquid contents of the saucepan into gel.
How it works for weight loss
Because of its viscosity, adding even a small amount of powdered* glucomannan to a glass of water will turn the whole thing into gel in seconds. This means that if you take glucomannan capsules with a glass of water, then so far as your stomach is concerned, you just ate a cup of gel, and the water is now processed as food, staying longer in the stomach than it otherwise would, and promoting feelings of fullness.
*i.e. dry powder, not in a gelatinous form like the noodles
As for its efficacy in weight loss, see for example:
❝Glucomannan was well-tolerated and resulted in significant weight loss in overweight and obese individuals❞
Read more: Glucomannan and obesity: a critical review
So, that covers the basic requirements, but may be wondering: does it have other benefits? And the answer is yes, it does:
❝Glucomannan appears to beneficially affect total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, body weight, and fasting blood glucose❞
To further corroborate that and comment on safety…
❝Results showed a significant mean weight loss using glucomannan over an eight-week period. Serum cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol were significantly reduced in the glucomannan treated group. No adverse reactions to glucomannan were reported.❞
Read more: Effect of glucomannan on obese patients: a clinical study
As to whether other gel-making agents work the same way, the answer is no, they don’t seem to:
❝Glucomannan induced body weight reduction in healthy overweight subjects, whereas the addition of guar gum and alginate did not seem to cause additional loss of weight❞
Read more: Experiences with three different fiber supplements in weight reduction
How it works for gut health
In the words of Dr. Yu Li et al.,
❝Konjaku flour can achieve positive effects on treating obesity, which manifest on reducing BMI, fat mass, blood glucose, and blood lipid, improving hepatic function, and also regulating intestinal microfloral structure.
Therefore, changes in gut microbiota may explain in part the effects of konjaku flour.❞
Read in full: Effects of Konjaku Flour on the Gut Microbiota of Obese Patients
This has extra positive knock-on effects too:
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience are example products on Amazon:
Konjac noodles | Glucomannan capsules
Enjoy!
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