Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal
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Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
Piperine, a compound found in Piper nigrum (black pepper, to its friends), has many health benefits. It’s included as a minor ingredient in some other supplements, because it boosts bioavailability. In its form as a kitchen spice, it’s definitely a superfood.
What does it do?
First, three things that generally go together:
These things often go together for the simple reason that oxidative stress, inflammation, and cancer often go together. In each case, it’s a matter of cellular wear-and-tear, and what can mitigate that.
For what it’s worth, there’s generally a fourth pillar: anti-aging. This is again for the same reason. That said, black pepper hasn’t (so far as we could find) been studied specifically for its anti-aging properties, so we can’t cite that here as an evidence-based claim.
Nevertheless, it’s a reasonable inference that something that fights oxidation, inflammation, and cancer, will often also slow aging.
Special note on the anti-cancer properties
We noticed two very interesting things while researching piperine’s anti-cancer properties. It’s not just that it reduces cancer risk and slows tumor growth in extant cancers (as we might expect from the above-discussed properties). Let’s spotlight some studies:
It is selectively cytotoxic (that’s a good thing)
Piperine was found to be selectively cytotoxic to cancerous cells, while not being cytotoxic to non-cancerous cells. To this end, it’s a very promising cancer-sniper:
Piperine as a Potential Anti-cancer Agent: A Review on Preclinical Studies
It can reverse multi-drug resistance in cancer cells
P-glycoprotein, found in our body, is a drug-transporter that is known for “washing out” chemotherapeutic drugs from cancer cells. To date, no drug has been approved to inhibit P-glycoprotein, but piperine has been found to do the job:
Targeting P-glycoprotein: Investigation of piperine analogs for overcoming drug resistance in cancer
What’s this about piperine analogs, though? Basically the researchers found a way to “tweak” piperine to make it even more effective. They called this tweaked version “Pip1”, because calling it by its chemical name,
((2E,4E)-5-(benzo[d][1,3]dioxol-5-yl)-1-(6,7-dimethoxy-3,4-dihydroisoquinolin-2(1 H)-yl)penta-2,4-dien-1-one)
…got a bit unwieldy.
The upshot is: Pip1 is better, but piperine itself is also good.
Other benefits
Piperine does have other benefits too, but the above is what we were most excited to talk about today. Its other benefits include:
- Neuroprotective effects (against Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and more)
- Blood-sugar balancing / antidiabetic effect
- Good for gut microbiome diversity
- Heart health benefits, including cholesterol-balancing
- Boosts bioavailability of other nutrients/drugs
Enjoy!
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Self-Care for Tough Times – by Suzy Reading
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A note on the author: while not “Dr. Reading”, she is a “CPsychol, B Psych (Hons), M Psych”; a Chartered Psychologist specializing in wellbeing, stress management and facilitation of healthy lifestyle change. So this is coming from a place of research and evidence!
The kinds of “tough times” she has in mind are so numerous that listing them takes two pages in the book, so we won’t try here. But suffice it to say, there are a lot of things that can go wrong for us as humans, and this book addresses how to take care of ourselves mindfully in light of them.
The author takes a “self-care is health care” approach, and goes about things with a clinical mindset and/but a light tone, offering both background information, and hands-on practical advice.
Bottom line: there may be troubles ahead (and maybe you’re in the middle of troubles right now), but there’s always room for a little sunshine too.
Click here to check out Self-Care For Tough Times, and care for yourself in tough times!
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Most People Try The Wrong Way To Unshrimp Their Posture (Here’s How To Do It Better)
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Many people try to correct posture by pulling the shoulders back and tucking in the chin, but that doesn’t work. Happily, there is a way that does! Kinesiologist Kyle Waugh demonstrates:
Defying gravity
The trick is simple, and is about how maintaining good posture needs to be unconscious and natural, not forced. After all, who is maintaining singular focus for 16 waking hours a day?
Instead, pay attention to how the body relates to gravity without excessive muscle tension, aligning the (oft-forgotten!) hips, and maintaining balance. The importance of hip position is really not to be underestimated, since in many ways the hips are a central axis of the body just as the spine is, and the spine itself sits in the hips.
A lot of what holds the body in poor posture tends to be localized muscle tensions, so address those with stretches and relaxation exercises.
For a few quick tests and exercises to try, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
6 Ways To Look After Your Back ← no video on this one, just 6 concepts that you can apply to your daily life
Take care!
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The Dirt Cure – by Dr. Maya Shetreat-Klein
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As we discussed in our article “Stop Sabotaging Your Gut”, there is indeed merit to living a little dirty, in particular when it comes to what we put in our mouths. Having the space of an entire book rather than a small article, Dr. Shetreat-Klein expands on this in great detail.
The subtitle mentions “growing healthy kids with food straight from the soil”; it’s worth noting that all the information here (with the exception of concerning breastfeeding etc) is equally applicable to adults too—so if it’s your own health you’re focused on rather than that of kids or grandkids, then that’s fine too.
You may be wondering: what more is there to say than “don’t scrub your vegetables as though you’re about to perform surgery with them”?
There’s a lot of background information on what things help or harm our bodies in the first place, most notably via our gut, and as an important extra consideration, the gut-brain axis. Incidentally, the author is a neurologist by professional background.
Then she gets more specific, into “include and exclude” recommendations. In this matter we have one criticism: she does recommend raw milk over pasteurized, and that is, by overwhelming scientific consensus, a terrible idea. Raw milk is an abundant source of pathogens and a breeding ground for even more. There is “living dirty” and there is “living dangerously”, and drinking raw milk is the latter. See also: Pasteurization: What It Does And Doesn’t Do
However, for the most part, the rest of her advice is sound, and there’s even a recipes section too.
The style is something of a polemic throughout, but the extensive venting does not take away from there being a lot of genuine information in here too.
Bottom line: please skip the raw milk, but aside from that, if you’d like to improve your diet to improve your gut and immune health, then this book can help with that.
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Feminist narratives are being hijacked to market medical tests not backed by evidence
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Corporations have used feminist language to promote their products for decades. In the 1980s, companies co-opted messaging about female autonomy to encourage women’s consumption of unhealthy commodities, such as tobacco and alcohol.
Today, feminist narratives around empowerment and women’s rights are being co-opted to market interventions that are not backed by evidence across many areas of women’s health. This includes by commercial companies, industry, mass media and well-intentioned advocacy groups.
Some of these health technologies, tests and treatments are useful in certain situations and can be very beneficial to some women.
However, promoting them to a large group of asymptomatic healthy women that are unlikely to benefit, or without being transparent about the limitations, runs the risk of causing more harm than good. This includes inappropriate medicalisation, overdiagnosis and overtreatment.
In our analysis published today in the BMJ, we examine this phenomenon in two current examples: the anti-mullerian hormone (AMH) test and breast density notification.
The AMH test
The AMH test is a blood test associated with the number of eggs in a woman’s ovaries and is sometimes referred to as the “egg timer” test.
Although often used in fertility treatment, the AMH test cannot reliably predict the likelihood of pregnancy, timing to pregnancy or specific age of menopause. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists therefore strongly discourages testing for women not seeking fertility treatment.
The AMH test can’t predict your chance of getting pregnant.
Anastasia Vityukova/UnsplashDespite this, several fertility clinics and online companies market the AMH test to women not even trying to get pregnant. Some use feminist rhetoric promising empowerment, selling the test as a way to gain personalised insights into your fertility. For example, “you deserve to know your reproductive potential”, “be proactive about your fertility” and “knowing your numbers will empower you to make the best decisions when family planning”.
The use of feminist marketing makes these companies appear socially progressive and champions of female health. But they are selling a test that has no proven benefit outside of IVF and cannot inform women about their current or future fertility.
Our recent study found around 30% of women having an AMH test in Australia may be having it for these reasons.
Misleading women to believe that the test can reliably predict fertility can create a false sense of security about delaying pregnancy. It can also create unnecessary anxiety, pressure to freeze eggs, conceive earlier than desired, or start fertility treatment when it may not be needed.
While some companies mention the test’s limitations if you read on, they are glossed over and contradicted by the calls to be proactive and messages of empowerment.
Breast density notification
Breast density is one of several independent risk factors for breast cancer. It’s also harder to see cancer on a mammogram image of breasts with high amounts of dense tissue than breasts with a greater proportion of fatty tissue.
While estimates vary, approximately 25–50% of women in the breast screening population have dense breasts.
Dense breasts can make it harder to detect cancer.
Tyler Olsen/ShutterstockStemming from valid concerns about the increased risk of cancer, advocacy efforts have used feminist language around women’s right to know such as “women need to know the truth” and “women can handle the truth” to argue for widespread breast density notification.
However, this simplistic messaging overlooks that this is a complex issue and that more data is still needed on whether the benefits of notifying and providing additional screening or tests to women with dense breasts outweigh the harms.
Additional tests (ultrasound or MRI) are now being recommended for women with dense breasts as they have the ability to detect more cancer. Yet, there is no or little mention of the lack of robust evidence showing that it prevents breast cancer deaths. These extra tests also have out-of-pocket costs and high rates of false-positive results.
Large international advocacy groups are also sponsored by companies that will financially benefit from women being notified.
While stronger patient autonomy is vital, campaigning for breast density notification without stating the limitations or unclear evidence of benefit may go against the empowerment being sought.
Ensuring feminism isn’t hijacked
Increased awareness and advocacy in women’s health are key to overcoming sex inequalities in health care.
But we need to ensure the goals of feminist health advocacy aren’t undermined through commercially driven use of feminist language pushing care that isn’t based on evidence. This includes more transparency about the risks and uncertainties of health technologies, tests and treatments and greater scrutiny of conflicts of interests.
Health professionals and governments must also ensure that easily understood, balanced information based on high quality scientific evidence is available. This will enable women to make more informed decisions about their health.
Brooke Nickel, NHMRC Emerging Leader Research Fellow, University of Sydney and Tessa Copp, NHMRC Emerging Leader Research Fellow, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Do Breathe – by Michael Williams
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Have you ever felt you could get everything in your life in order, if you could just get a little breathing room first?
Notwithstanding the title, this is mostly not a book about breathing exercises. It does cover that too, but there’s a lot more.
The author’s advices draw from a variety of high quality sources. Well-read readers will certainly recognise sections that are straight from David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”, and Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s “Flow”, for example, as well as Francesco Cirillo’s “Pomodoro Technique”, and James Clear’s “Atomic Habits”.
We also learn about how even simple yoga can help us, and good sleep, and a healthy diet.
In short, if you’ve been reading 10almonds for a while, you might not actually learn much new! But it’s very nice to have all these things in one book, for sure, and it’s a pleasant, easy read too.
Bottom line: if you’d like to streamline your life and not have to buy a whole stack of different books to do it, this book is a great composite that will enable you to get the job done efficiently.
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Is Chiropractic All It’s Cracked Up To Be?
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Is Chiropractic All It’s Cracked Up To Be?
Yesterday, we asked you for your opinions on chiropractic medicine, and got the above-depicted, below-described set of results:
- 38% of respondents said it keeps us healthy, and everyone should do it as maintenance
- 33% of respondents said it can correct some short-term skeletal issues, but that’s all
- 16% of respondents said that it’s a dangerous pseudoscience and can cause serious harm
- 13% of respondents said that it’s mostly just a combination of placebo and endorphins
Respondents also shared personal horror stories of harm done, personal success stories of things cured, and personal “it didn’t seem to do anything for me” stories.
What does the science say?
It’s a dangerous pseudoscience and can cause harm: True or False?
False and True, respectively.
That is to say, chiropractic in its simplest form that makes the fewest claims, is not a pseudoscience. If somebody physically moves your bones around, your bones will be physically moved. If your bones were indeed misaligned, and the chiropractor is knowledgeable and competent, this will be for the better.
However, like any form of medicine, it can also cause harm; in chiropractic’s case, because it more often than not involves manipulation of the spine, this can be very serious:
❝Twenty six fatalities were published in the medical literature and many more might have remained unpublished.
The reported pathology usually was a vascular accident involving the dissection of a vertebral artery.
Conclusion: Numerous deaths have occurred after chiropractic manipulations. The risks of this treatment by far outweigh its benefit.❞
Source: Deaths after chiropractic: a review of published cases
From this, we might note two things:
- The abstract doesn’t note the initial sample size; we would rather have seen this information expressed as a percentage. Unfortunately, the full paper is not accessible, and nor are many of the papers it cites.
- Having a vertebral artery fatally dissected is nevertheless not an inviting prospect, and is certainly a very reasonable cause for concern.
It’s mostly just a combination of placebo and endorphins: True or False?
True or False, depending on what you went in for:
- If you went in for a regular maintenance clunk-and-click, then yes, you will get your clunk-and-click and feel better for it because you had a ritualized* experience and endorphins were released.
- If you went in for something that was actually wrong with your skeletal alignment, to get it corrected, and this correction was within your chiropractor’s competence, then yes, you will feel better because a genuine fault was corrected.
*this is not implying any mysticism, by the way. Rather it means simply that placebo effect is strongest when there is a ritual associated with it. In this case it means going to the place, sitting in a pleasant waiting room, being called in, removing your shoes and perhaps some other clothes, getting the full attention of a confident and assured person for a while, this sort of thing.
With regard to its use to combat specifically spinal pain (i.e., perhaps the most obvious thing to treat by chiropractic spinal manipulation), evidence is slightly in favor, but remains unclear:
❝Due to the low quality of evidence, the efficacy of chiropractic spinal manipulation compared with a placebo or no treatment remains uncertain. ❞
Source: Clinical Effectiveness and Efficacy of Chiropractic Spinal Manipulation for Spine Pain
It can correct some short-term skeletal issues, but that’s all: True or False?
Probably True.
Why “probably”? The effectiveness of chiropractic treatment for things other than short-term skeletal issues has barely been studied. From this, we may wish to keep an open mind, while also noting that it can hardly claim to be evidence-based—and it’s had hundreds of years to accumulate evidence. In all likelihood, publication bias has meant that studies that were conducted and found inconclusive or negative results were simply not published—but that’s just a hypothesis on our part.
In the case of using chiropractic to treat migraines, a very-related-but-not-skeletal issue, researchers found:
❝Pre-specified feasibility criteria were not met, but deficits were remediable. Preliminary data support a definitive trial of MCC+ for migraine.❞
Translating this: “it didn’t score as well as we hoped, but we can do better. We got some positive results, and would like to do another, bigger, better trial; please fund it”
Source: Multimodal chiropractic care for migraine: A pilot randomized controlled trial
Meanwhile, chiropractors’ claims for very unrelated things have been harshly criticized by the scientific community, for example:
Misinformation, chiropractic, and the COVID-19 pandemic
About that “short-term” aspect, one of our subscribers put it quite succinctly:
❝Often a skeletal correction is required for initial alignment but the surrounding fascia and muscles also need to be treated to mobilize the joint and release deep tissue damage surrounding the area. In combination with other therapies chiropractic support is beneficial.❞
This is, by the way, very consistent with what was said in the very clinically-dense book we reviewed yesterday, which has a chapter on the short-term benefits and limitations of chiropractic.
A truism that holds for many musculoskeletal healthcare matters, holds true here too:
❝In a battle between muscle and bone, muscle will always win❞
In other words…
Chiropractic can definitely help put misaligned bones back where they should be. However, once they’re there, if the cause of their misalignment is not treated, they will just re-misalign themselves shortly after you walking out of your session.
This is great for chiropractors, if it keeps you coming back for endless appointments, but it does little for your body beyond give you a brief respite.
So, by all means go to a chiropractor if you feel so inclined (and you do not fear accidental arterial dissection etc), but please also consider going to a physiotherapist, and potentially other medical professions depending on what seems to be wrong, to see about addressing the underlying cause.
Take care!
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