Blind Spots – by Dr. Marty Makary
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From the time the US recommended not giving peanuts to infants for the first three years of life “in order to avoid peanut allergies” (whereupon non-exposure to peanuts early in life led to, instead, an increase in peanut allergies and anaphylactic incidents), to the time the US recommended not taking HRT on the strength of the claim that “HRT causes breast cancer” (whereupon the reduced popularity of HRT led to, instead, an increase in breast cancer incidence and mortality), to many other such incidents of very bad public advice being given on the strength of a single badly-misrepresented study (for each respective thing), Dr. Makary puts the spotlight on what went wrong.
This is important, because this is not just a book of outrage, exclaiming “how could this happen?!”, but rather instead, is a book of inquisition, asking “how did this happen?”, in such a way that we the reader can spot similar patterns going forwards.
Oftentimes, this is a simple matter of having a basic understanding of statistics, and checking sources to see if the dataset really supports what the headlines are claiming—and indeed, whether sometimes it suggests rather the opposite.
The style is a little on the sensationalist side, but it’s well-supported with sound arguments, good science, and clear mathematics.
Bottom line: if you’d like to improve your scientific literacy, this book is an excellent illustrative guide.
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5 Ways To Beat Cancer (And Other Diseases)
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A Systematic Approach To Healthy Eating
This is Dr. William Li. He’s a physician, cancer researcher, and educator. He also founded the Angiogenesis Foundation back in 1994.
We recently reviewed one of his books, “Eat To Beat Disease”.
He has another book that we haven’t reviewed at time of writing, “Eat To Beat Your Diet“, which you might like to check out.
What does he want us to know?
He wants us to know how to eat to beat cancer and other diseases, by means of five specific angles:
Angiogenesis
This is about replacing blood vessels, which of course happens all the time, but it becomes a problem when it is feeding a cancer in the process.
Here, based on Dr. Li’s work, is what can be done about it:
A List of Anti-Angiogenic Foods for a Cancer-Fighting Diet
Regeneration
Generally speaking, we want to replace healthy cells early, because if we wait until they get damaged, then that damage will be copied forwards. As well as intermittent fasting, there are other things we can do to promote this—even, Dr. Li’s research shows, for stem cells:
Doctor’s Tip: Regeneration (stem cells)—one of your body’s five defense systems
Microbiome health
Healthy gut, healthy rest of the body. We’ve written about this before:
Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
DNA protection
DNA gets unravelled and damaged with age, the telomere caps get shorter, and mistakes get copied forward. So there more we can protect our DNA, the longer we can live healthily. There are many ways to do this, but Dr. Li was one of the first to bring to light the DNA-protecting benefits of kiwi fruit:
Immunity
Paradoxically, what’s good for your immune system (making it stronger) also helps to protect against autoimmune diseases (for most people, for the most part).
In short: it’s good to have an immune system that’s powerful not just in its counterattacks, but also in its discerning nature. There are dietary and other lifestyle approaches to both, and they’re mostly the same things:
Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!
and thus see also:
Want to know more?
You might enjoy his blog or podcast, and here’s his TED talk:
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later
Enjoy!
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7 Steps to Get Off Sugar and Carbohydrates – by Susan Neal
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We will not keep the steps a mystery; abbreviated, they are:
- decide to really do this thing
- get knowledge and support
- clean out that pantry/fridge/etc and put those things behind you
- buy in healthy foods while starving your candida
- plan for an official start date, so that everything is ready
- change the way you eat (prep methods, timings, etc)
- keep on finding small ways to improve, without turning back
Particularly important amongst those are starving the candida (the fungus in your gut that is responsible for a lot of carb cravings, especially sugar and alcohol—which latter can be broken down easily into sugar), and changing the “how” of eating as well as the “what”; those are both things that are often overlooked in a lot of guides, but this one delivers well.
Walking the reader by the hand through things like that is probably the book’s greatest strength.
In the category of subjective criticism, the author does go off-piste a little at the end, to take a moment while she has our attention to talk about other things.
For example, you may not need “Appendix 7: How to Become A Christian and Disciple of Jesus Christ”.
Of course if that calls to you, then by all means, follow your heart, but it certainly isn’t a necessary step of quitting sugar. Nevertheless, the diversion doesn’t detract from the good dietary change advice that she has just spent a book delivering.
Bottom line: there’s no deep science here, but there’s a lot of very good, very practical advice, that’s consistent with good science.
Click here to check out 7 Steps to Get Off Sugar, and watch your health improve!
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Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?
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How old do you want to be?
We asked you how old you are, and got an interesting spread of answers. This wasn’t too surprising; of course we have a general idea of who our readership is and we write accordingly.
What’s interesting is the gap for “40s”.
And, this wasn’t the case of a broken poll button, it’s something that crops up a lot in health-related sociological research. People who are most interested in taking extra care of their body are often:
- Younger people full of optimism about maintaining this perfectly healthy body forever
- Older people realizing “if I don’t want to suffer avoidable parts of age-related decline, now is the time to address these things”
In between, we often have a gap whereby people no longer have the optimism of youth, but do not yet feel the pressure of older age.
Which is not to say there aren’t 40-somethings who do care! Indeed, we know for a fact we have some subscribers in their 40s (and some in their 90s, too), just, they evidently didn’t vote in this poll.
Anyway, let’s bust some myths…
Aging is inevitable: True or False?
False, probably. That seems like a bold (and fortune-telling) claim, so let’s flip it to deconstruct it more logically:
Aging is, and always will be, unstoppable: True or False?
That has to be “False, probably”. To say “true” now sounds like an even bolder claim. Just like “the moon will always be out of reach”.
- When CPR was first developed, first-aiders were arrested for “interfering with a corpse”.
- Many diseases used to be death sentences that are now “take one of these in the morning”
- If you think this is an appeal to distant history, HIV+ status was a death sentence in the 90s. Now it’s “take one of these in the morning”.
But, this is an appeal to the past, and that’s not always a guarantee of the future. Where does the science stand currently? How is the research and development doing on slowing, halting, reversing aging?
We can slow aging: True or False?
True! There’s a difference between chronological age (i.e., how much time has passed while we’ve been alive) and biological age (i.e., what our diverse markers of aging look like).
Biological age often gets talked about as a simplified number, but it’s more complex than that, as we can age in different ways at different rates, for example:
- Visual markers of aging (e.g. wrinkles, graying hair)
- Performative markers of aging (e.g. mobility tests)
- Internal functional markers of aging (e.g. tests for cognitive decline, eyesight, hearing, etc)
- Cellular markers or aging (e.g. telomere length)
- …and more, but we only have so much room here
There are things we can do to slow most of those, including:
- Good nutrition (e.g. collagen and lutein, to keep specific parts of the body functioning “like those of a younger person” ranging from the joints to the eyes and brain)
- Anti-oxidant activity (e.g. eating anti-oxidant foods, supplementing with anti-oxidants or other things that mitigate oxidative stress, and avoiding foods that hasten oxidative stress which causes many kinds of aging)
- Getting good sleep (not to be underestimated for its restorative importance)
- Taking care of our cognitive health
- Taking care of our mental health (especially: reducing stress)
- Taking care of our mobility (prevention is better than cure!)
In the case of cognitive decline particularly, check out our previous article:
How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk
It’s too early to worry about… / It’s too late to do anything about… True or False?
False and False!
Many things that affect our health later in life are based on early-life choices and events. So it’s important for young people to take advantage of that. The earlier one adopts a healthy lifestyle, the better, because, and hold onto your hats for the shocker here: aging is cumulative.
However, that doesn’t mean that taking up healthy practices (or dropping unhealthy ones) is pointless later in life, even in one’s 70s and beyond!
Read about this and more from the National Institute of Aging:
What Do We Know About Healthy Aging?
We can halt aging: True or False?
False, for now at least. Our bodies are not statues; they are living organisms, constantly rebuilding themselves, constantly changing, every second of every day, for better or for worse. Every healthy or unhealthy choice you make, every beneficial or adverse experience you encounter, affects your body on a cellular level.
Your body never, ever, stops changing for as long as you live.
But…
We can reverse aging: True or False?
True! Contingently and with limitations, for now at least.
Remember what we said about your body constantly rebuilding itself? That goes for making itself better as well as making itself worse.
- If yesterday you couldn’t touch your toes and today you can, congratulations, you just got younger by a biological marker of aging.
- If you stopped drinking/smoking/eating a certain way last year, and this year your skin has fewer wrinkles, congratulations, you got younger by a biological marker of aging.
- If you’ve been exercising and now your heart rate variability and VO2 max are better than last month, congratulations, you got younger by a biological marker aging.
- If you took supplements that reduce and/or mitigate oxidative stress (e.g. resveratrol, CoQ10, l-theanine, etc), and you took up intermittent fasting, and now your telomeres are longer than they were six months ago, congratulations, you got younger by a biological marker of aging.
But those aren’t really being younger, we’ll still die when our time is up: True or False?
False and True, respectively.
Those kinds of things are really being younger, biologically. What else do you think being biologically younger is?
We may indeed die when our time is up, but (unless we suffer fatal accident or incident first) “when our time is up” is something that is decided mostly by the above factors.
Genetics—the closest thing we have to biological “fate”—accounts for only about 25% of our longevity-related health*.
Genes predispose, but they don’t predetermine.
*Read more: Human longevity: Genetics or Lifestyle? It takes two to tango
(from the Journal of Immunity and Ageing)
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Gut Renovation – by Dr. Roshini Raj, with Sheila Buff
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Unless we actually feel something going on down there, gut health is an oft-neglected part of overall health—which is unfortunate, because invisible as it may often be, it affects so much.
Gastroenterologist Dr. Roshini Raj gives us all the need-to-know information, explanations of why things happen the way they do with regard to the gut, and tips, tricks, and hacks to improve matters.
She also does some mythbusting along the way, and advises about what things don’t make a huge difference, including what medications don’t have a lot of evidence for their usefulness.
The style is easy-reading pop-science, with plenty of high-quality medical content.
Reading between the lines, a lot of the book as it stands was probably written by the co-author, Sheila Buff, who is a professional ghostwriter and specializes in working closely with doctors to produce works that are readable and informative to the layperson while still being full of the doctor’s knowledge and expertise. So a reasonable scenario is that Dr. Raj gave her extensive notes, she took it from there, passed it back to her for medical corrections, and they had a little back and forth until it was done. Whatever their setup, the end result was definitely good!
Bottom line: if you’d like a guide to gut health that’s practical and easy to read, while being quite comprehensive and certainly a lot more than “eat probiotics and fiber”, then this book is a fine choice.
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Head Over Hips
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We’ve written before about managing osteoarthritis (or ideally: avoiding it, but that’s not always an option on the table, of course), so here’s a primer/refresher before we get into the meat of today’s article:
Avoiding/Managing Osteoarthritis
When the head gets in the way
Research shows that the problem with recovery in cases of osteoarthritis of the hip is in fact often not the hip itself, but rather, the head:
❝In fact, the stronger your muscles are, the more protected your joint is, and the less pain you will experience.
Our research has shown that people with hip osteoarthritis were unable to activate their muscles as efficiently, irrespective of strength.
Basically, people with hip arthritis are unable to activate their muscles properly because the brain is actively putting on the brake to stop them from using the muscle.❞
This is a case of a short-term protective response being unhelpful in the long-term. If you injure yourself, your brain will try to inhibit you from exacerbating that injury, such as by (for example) disobliging you from putting weight on an injured joint.
This is great if you merely twisted an ankle and just need to sit back and relax while your body works its healing magic, but it’s counterproductive if it’s a chronic issue like osteoarthritis. In such (i.e. chronic) cases, avoidance of use of the joint will simply cause atrophy of the surrounding muscle and other tissues, leading to more of the very wear-and-tear that led to the osteoarthritis in the first place.
So… How to deal with that?
You probably can exercise
It’s easy to get caught between the dichotomy of “exercise and inflame your joints” vs “rest and your joints seize up”, which is not pleasant.
However, the trick lies in how you exercise, per joint type:
When Bad Joints Stop You From Exercising (5 Things To Change)
…which to be clear, isn’t a case of “avoid using the joint that’s bad”, but is rather “use it in this specific way, so that it gets stronger without doing it more damage in the process”.
Which is exactly what is needed!
Further resources
For those who like learning from short videos, here’s a trio of helpers (along with our own text-based overview for each):
- The Most Underrated Hip Mobility Exercise (Not Stretching)
- Overcome Front-Of-Hip Pain
- 10 Tips To Reduce Morning Pain & Stiffness With Arthritis
And for those who prefer just reading, here’s a book we reviewed on the topic:
11 Minutes to Pain-Free Hips – by Melinda Wright
Take care!
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Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!
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Time to go nuts for nuts!
Nuts, in popular perception, range from “basically the healthiest food anyone can eat” to “basically high calorie salty snacks”. And, they can be either!
Some notes, then:
- Raw is generally better that not
- Dry roasted is generally better than the kind with added oils
- Added salt is neither necessary nor good
Quick tip: if “roasted salted” are the cheapest or most convenient to buy, you can at least mitigate that by soaking them in warm water for 5 minutes, before rinsing and (if you don’t want wet nuts) drying.
You may be wondering: who does want wet nuts? And the answer is, if for example you’re making a delicious cashew and chickpea balti, the fact you didn’t dry them before throwing them in won’t make a difference.
Now, let’s do a quick run-down; we don’t usually do “listicles” but it seemed a good format here, so we’ve picked a top 5 for nutritional potency:
Almonds
We may have a bias. We accept it. But almonds are also one of the healthiest nuts around, and generally considered by most popular metrics the healthiest.
Not only are they high in protein, healthy fat, fiber, vitamins, and minerals, but they’re even a natural prebiotic that increases the populations of healthy gut bacteria, while simultaneously keeping down the populations of gut pathogens—what more can we ask of a nut?
Read more: Prebiotic effects of almonds and almond skins on intestinal microbiota in healthy adult humans
Pistachios
Not only are these super tasty and fun to eat (and mindful eating is all but guaranteed, as shelling them by hand slows us down and makes us more likely to eat them one at a time rather than by the handful), but also they contain lots of nutrients and are lower in calories than most nuts, so they’re a great option for anyone who’d like to eat more nuts but is doing a calorie-controlled diet and doesn’t want to have half a day’s calories in a tiny dish of nuts.
Walnuts
Popularly associated with brain health (perhaps easy to remember because of their appearance), they really are good for the brain:
Check it out: Beneficial Effects of Walnuts on Cognition and Brain Health
Cashews
A personal favorite of this writer for their versatility in cooking, food prep, or just as a snack, they also do wonders for metabolic health:
Brazil nuts
The most exciting thing about these nuts is that they’re an incredibly potent source of selenium, which is important not just for hair/skin/nails as popularly marketed, but also for thyroid hormone production and DNA synthesis.
But don’t eat too many, because selenium is definitely one of those “you can have too much of a good thing” nutrients, and selenium poisoning can make your hair (however beautiful and shiny it got because of the selenium) fall out if you take too much.
Know the numbers: Brazil nuts and selenium—health benefits and risks
Bottom line on nuts:
- Nuts are a great and healthful part of almost anyone’s diet
- Obviously, if you have a nut allergy, then we’re sorry; this one won’t have helped you so much
- Almonds are one of the most healthful nuts out there
- Brazil nuts are incredibly potent, to the point where moderation is recommended
- A handful of mixed nuts per day is a very respectable option—when it comes to food and health, diversity is almost always good!
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