Blood and Water
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Q&A with the 10almonds Team
Q: I really loved the information about macular degeneration! I was wondering if you have any other advice about looking after eye health?
A: We may well do a full feature on it sometime! Meanwhile, some top tips include:
- Eat your greens (as you know from this last Tuesday’s edition of 10almonds)!
- Exercise! Generally. We’re not talking about eye exercises here, we’re talking about exercises that will support:
- Healthy heart rate
- Healthy blood pressure
- Healthy blood oxygenation
- Healthy blood sugar levels
- Healthy blood flow in general (so keep hydrated too! There’s a reason phlebotomists ask you to be well-hydrated before they take blood)
Eye health is a good indicator for a lot of other things, and that’s because whether or not the eyes are the window to your soul, they’re definitely the window to what your blood’s like, and that affects (and is affected by) so many other things.
- On that note, don’t smoke!
- Protect your eyes physically, too. This means:
- UV-blocking sunglasses when appropriate
- Protective eye-wear when appropriate
You think safety glasses are for laboratories and construction sites, then you go and do comparable tasks in your home? Your eyes are just as damageable in your kitchen or garden as they would be in a lab or workshop.
Some bits and bobs that can help:
- Safety sunglasses! Because a thing can do two jobs (useful in the garden now the days are brightening up!)
- Pulse oximeter! Check your own heart rate, pulse strength, and blood oxygenation at home!
- Blood pressure monitor! Because it’s so important for a lot of things and you really should have one.
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Beat The Heat, With Fat
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Surviving Summer
Summer is upon us, for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere anyway, and given that nowadays each year tends to be hotter than the one before, on average, it pays to be prepared.
We’ve talked about dealing with the heat before:
Sun, Sea, And Sudden Killers To Avoid
All the above advice stands this summer too, but today we’re going to speak a little extra on not having a “default body”.
For much of medical literature and common health advice, the default body is that of a slim and/or athletic white cis man aged 25–35 with no disabilities.
When it comes to “women’s health”, this is often confined to “the bikini zone” and everything else is commonly treated based on research conducted with men.
Today we’ll be looking at a particular challenge for a wide variety of people, when it comes to heat…
Beating the heat, with fat
If you are fat, and/or have a bit of a tummy, and/or have breasts, this one’s for you.
Fat acts as an insulator, which naturally does no favors in hot weather. Carrying the weight around is also extra exercise, which also becomes a problem in hot weather. Fat people usually sweat more than thin people do, as a result.
Sweat is great for cooling down the body, because it takes heat with it when it evaporates off. However, that only works if it can evaporate off, and it can’t evaporate off if it’s trapped in a skin fold / fat roll.
If you’re fat, you may have plenty of those; if you have a bit of a tummy (if you’re not fat generally, this might be a leftover from pregnancy, or weight loss, or something else; how it got there doesn’t matter for our purposes today), you’ll have at least one under it, and if you have breasts, unless they’re quite small, you’ll have one under each breast, and potentially your cleavage may become an issue too.
Note: if you are perhaps a man who has fat in the place where breasts go, then medically this goes for you too, except that there’s not a societal expectation that you wear bra. Use today’s information as you see fit.
Sweat-wicking hacks
We don’t want sweat to stay in those folds—both because then it’s not doing its cooling-down job, and also, because it can cause a rash, and even yeast infections and/or bacterial infections.
So, we want there to be some barrier there. You could use something like vaseline or baby powder, as to prevent chafing, but fat better (more effective, and less messy) is to have some kind of cloth there that can wick the sweat away.
There are made-for-purpose curved cotton bands that exist, called “tummy liners”; here’s an example product on Amazon, or you could make your own if you’re so inclined. They’re breathable, absorbent, and reduce friction too, making everything a lot more comfortable.
And for breasts? Same deal, there are made-for-purpose cotton bra-liners that exist; here’s an example product on Amazon, or again, you could make your own if you feel so inclined. The important part is that it makes things so much comfortable, because let’s face it: wearing a bra in the summer is not comfortable.
So with these, it can become more comfortable (and the cotton liners are flat, so they’re not visible if one’s wearing a t-shirt or similar-coverage garment). You could go braless, of course, but then you’re back to having sweaty folds, so if you’re doing something other than swimming or lying on your back, you might want something there.
Different hydration rules
“People should drink this much per day” and guess what, those guidelines were based on, drumroll please, not fat people.
Sweating more means needing to hydrate more, and even without breaking a sweat, having a larger body than average (be it muscle, fat, or both) means having more body to hydrate. That’s simple math.
So instead, a good general guideline is half an ounce of water per your weight in pounds, per day:
How much water do I need each day?
Another good general guideline is to simply drink “little and often”, that is to say, always have a (hydrating!) drink on the go.
Take care!
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The Sprout Book – by Doug Evans
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Sprouting seeds are more nutritious than most people think, and “seeds” is also a much broader category than people think. Beyond even chia and sunflower and such, this book bids us remember that onions do not just appear on supermarket shelves fully formed (to give just one example of many); most plants come from seeds and of those, most can be usefully sprouted.
The author, most well-known for his tech companies, here is selling us a very low-tech health kick with very little profit to be found except for our health. By sprouting seeds of many kinds at home, we can enjoy powerful superfoods that are not only better than, but also cheaper than, most supplements.
Nor are the benefits of sprouting things marginal; we’re not talking about a 1–10% increase in bioavailable so much as what’s often a 100–1000% increase.
After explaining the science and giving a primer on sprouting things for oneself, there is a wide selection of recipes, but the biggest benefit of the book is in just getting the reader up-and-running with at-home sprouting.
Bottom line: if you like the idea of letting food be your medicine and even like the idea of essentially growing your own food with zero gardening skills, then this is an excellent book for you.
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11 Minutes to Pain-Free Hips – by Melinda Wright
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If hips don’t lie, what are yours saying to you? If what they’re saying to you sounds like a cry for help sometimes, this is the book to get you onto a better track.
The hip is the largest joint in your body, and it bears a lot of weight. So it’s little wonder if sometimes they’d like a word with the boss. The question is: what will you do about it? Melinda Wright has suggestions to keep your hips—and you—happy.
She spends the first couple of chapters introducing key concepts, and some anatomy and physiology that’ll be good to know.
Then we’re into resistance stretching, basic hip exercises, all the way through to more advanced stuff. There are very clear photos for each. One thing that stands out about this book is each exercise is not just explained simply and clearly, but also offers “easing oneself in” exercises. After all, we’re not all at the same starting point.
The book finishes off with some more holistic advice about chronic pain management, based on her personal experience with scoliosis, and some dietary tips to reduce joint pain and inflammation too.
All in all, a very helpful book!
Pick up 11 “Minutes to Pain-Free Hips” at Amazon today!
^You will also see options for pain-free back, and pain-free neck, by the same author
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Superfood Broccoli Pesto
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Cruciferous vegetables have many health benefits of their own (especially: a lot of anticancer benefits). But, it can be hard to include them in every day’s menu, so this is just one more way that’ll broaden your options! It’s delicious mixed into pasta, or served as a dip, or even on toast.
You will need
- 4 cups small broccoli florets
- 1 cup fresh basil leaves
- ½ cup pine nuts
- ¼ bulb garlic
- 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 2 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
- 1 tsp red pepper flakes
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Steam the broccoli for 3–5 minutes. Allow to cool.
2) Blend the pine nuts, garlic, lemon juice, and nutritional yeast.
3) Add the broccoli, basil, olive oil, black pepper, red pepper, and MSG or salt, and blend in the food processor again until well-combined.
4) Serve:
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Broccoli vs Cauliflower – Which is Healthier?
- Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)
- Herbs for (Evidence-Based) Health & Healing ← Basil features here! It’s easy to think that medicinal herbs have to be some kind of arcane obscurity, but it’s often not so.
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits? ← Black pepper, red pepper, and garlic all feature here
- All About Olive Oil: Is “Extra Virgin” Worth It?
- Monosodium Glutamate: Sinless Flavor-Enhancer Or Terrible Health Risk?
Take care!
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The Sucralose News: Scaremongering Or Serious?
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What’s the news on sucralose?
These past days the press has been abuzz with frightening tales:
- This Common Artificial Sweetener Can Break Down DNA, Scientists Warn
- Sucralose Damages DNA, Linked to Leaky Gut
- Chemical found in common sweetener damages DNA
- Chemical found in widely used sweetener breaks up DNA
- Chemical from Splenda breaks up DNA
How true and/or serious is this?
Firstly, let’s manage expectations. Pineapple juice also breaks down DNA, but is not generally considered a health risk. So let’s keep that in mind, while we look into the science.
Is sucralose as scary as pineapple juice, or is it something actually dangerous?
The new study (that sparked off these headlines)
The much-referenced study is publicly available to read in full—here it is:
You may notice that this doesn’t have quite the snappy punchiness of some of the headlines, but let’s break this down, if you’ll pardon the turn of phrase:
- Toxicological: pertaining to whether or not it has toxic qualities
- Pharmacokinetic: the science of asking, of chemicals in bodies, “where did it come from; where did it go; what could it do there; what can we know?”
- Sucralose-6-acetate: an impurity that can be found in sucralose. For perspective, the study found that the sucralose in Splenda contained “up to” 0.67% sucralose-6-acetate.
- Sucralose: a modified form of sucrose, that makes it hundreds of times sweeter, and non-caloric because the body cannot break it down so it’s treated as a dietary fiber and just passes through
- In vitro: things are happening in petri dishes, not in animals (human or otherwise), which would be called “in vivo”
- Screening assays: “we set up a very closed-parameters chemical test, to see what happens when we add this to this” ⇽ oversimplification, but this is the basic format of a screening assay
Great, now we understand the title, but what about the study?
Researchers looked primarily at the effects of sucralose-6-acetate and sucralose (together and separately) on epithelial cells (these are very simple cells that are easy to study; conveniently, they are also most of what makes up our intestinal walls). For this, they used a fancy way of replicating human intestinal walls, that’s actually quite fascinating but beyond the scope of today’s newsletter. Suffice it to say: it’s quite good, and/but has its limitations too. They also looked at some in vivo rat studies.
What they found was…
Based on samples from the rat feces (somehow this didn’t make it into the headlines), it appears that sucralose may be acetylated in the intestines. What that means is that we, if we are like the rats (definitely not a given, but a reasonable hypothesis), might convert up to 10% of sucralose into sucralose-6-acetate inside us. Iff we do, the next part of the findings become more serious.
Based on the in vitro simulations, both sucralose and sucralose-6-acetate reduced intestinal barrier integrity at least a little, but sucralose-6-acetate was the kicker when it came to most of the effects—at least, so we (reasonably!) suppose.
Basically, there’s a lot of supposition going on here but the suppositions are reasonable. That’s how science works; there’s usually little we can know for sure from a single study; it’s when more studies roll in that we start to get a more complete picture.
What was sucralose-6-acetate found to do? It increased the expression of genes associated with inflammation, oxidative stress, and cancer (granted those three things generally go together). So that’s a “this probably has this end result” supposition.
More concretely, and which most of the headlines latched onto, it was found (in vitro) to induce cytogenic damage, specifically, of the clastogenic variety (produces DNA strand breaks—so this is different than pineapple’s bromelain and DNA-helicase’s relatively harmless unzipping of genes).
The dose makes the poison
So, how much is too much and is that 0.67% something to worry about?
- Remembering the rat study, it may be more like 10% once our intestines have done their thing. Iff we’re like rats.
- But, even if it’s only 0.67%, this will still be above the “threshold of toxicological concern for genotoxicity”, of 0.15µg/person/day.
- On the other hand, the fact that these were in vitro studies is a serious limitation.
- Sometimes something is very dangerous in vitro, because it’s being put directly onto cells, whereas in vivo we may have mechanisms for dealing with that.
We won’t know for sure until we get in vivo studies in human subjects, and that may not happen any time soon, if ever, depending on the technical limitations and ethical considerations that sometimes preclude doing certain studies in humans.
Bottom line:
- The headlines are written to be scary, but aren’t wrong; their claims are fundamentally true
- What that means for us as actual humans may not be the same, however; we don’t know yet
- For now, it is probably reasonable to avoid sucralose just in case
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What you need to know about FLiRT, an emerging group of COVID-19 variants
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What you need to know
- COVID-19 wastewater levels are currently low, but a recent group of variants called FLiRT is making headlines.
- KP.2 is one of several FLiRT variants, and early lab tests suggest that it’s more infectious than JN.1.
- Getting infected with any COVID-19 variant can cause severe illness, heart problems, and death.
KP.2, a new COVID-19 variant, is now dominant in the United States. Lab tests suggest that it may be more infectious than JN.1, the variant that was dominant earlier this year.
Fortunately, there’s good news: Current wastewater data shows that COVID-19 infection rates are low. Still, experts are closely watching KP.2 to see if it will lead to an uptick in infections.
Read on to learn more about KP.2 and how to stay informed about COVID-19 cases in your area.
Where can I find data on COVID-19 cases in my area?
Hospitals are no longer required to report COVID-19 hospital admissions or hospital capacity to the Department of Health and Human Services. However, wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) estimates the number of COVID-19 infections in a community based on the amount of COVID-19 viral particles detected in local wastewater.
View this map of wastewater data from the CDC to visualize COVID-19 infection rates throughout the U.S., or look up COVID-19 wastewater trends in your state.
What do we know so far about the new variant?
Early lab tests suggest that KP.2—one of a group of emerging variants called FLiRT—is similar to the previously dominant variant, JN.1, but it may be more infectious. If you had JN.1, you may still get reinfected with KP.2, especially if it’s been several months or longer since your last COVID-19 infection.
A CDC spokesperson said they have no reason to believe that KP.2 causes more severe illness than other variants. Experts are closely watching KP.2 to see if it will lead to an uptick in COVID-19 cases.
How can I protect myself from COVID-19 variants?
Staying up to date on COVID-19 vaccines reduces your risk of severe illness, long COVID, heart problems, and death. The CDC recommends that people 65 and older and immunocompromised people receive an additional dose of the updated COVID-19 vaccine this spring.
Wearing a high-quality, well-fitting mask reduces your risk of contracting COVID-19 and spreading it to others. At indoor gatherings, improving ventilation by opening doors and windows, using high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters, and building your own Corsi-Rosenthal box can also reduce the spread of COVID-19.
This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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