Blueberries vs Cranberries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing blueberries to cranberries, we picked the blueberries.
Why?
It’s close!
In terms of macros, blueberries have slightly more protein and carbs, while cranberries have slightly more fiber. We say the extra fiber’s more important than the (even more minimally) extra protein, so this is the slightest of marginal wins for cranberries in this category.
In the category of vitamins, blueberries have much more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B9, K, and choline, while cranberries have slightly more of vitamins A, B5, B6, C, and E. That’s a 6:5 win for blueberries, and also, the margins of difference were much greater for blueberries’ vitamins, making this a clearer win for blueberries.
When it comes to minerals, blueberries have slightly more iron, manganese, phosphorus, and zinc, while cranberries have slightly more calcium. The margins of difference are small in both cases, but this is a 4:1 win for blueberries.
Both of these berries are famously full of antioxidants; blueberries have more antioxidant power overall, though cranberries have some specific benefits such as being better than antibiotics against UTIs—though there are some contraindications too; check out the link below for more on that!
All in all, meanwhile, we say that adding up the sections here makes for a win for blueberries, but by all means, enjoy either or both (unless one of the contraindications below applies to you).
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Health Benefits Of Cranberries (But: You’d Better Watch Out)
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6 Worst Foods That Cause Dementia
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How many do you consume?
The hit list
Dr. Li bids us avoid:
High carb, low fiber foods: consuming a diet high in carbohydrates, particularly refined carbs like cakes, white bread, pizza, and sugary syrups, can significantly harm brain health. Over time, imbalanced (i.e. not balanced with fiber) carbohydrate consumption leads to the growth of visceral fat (not the same as subcutaneous fat, which is the squishy bits just under your skin; visceral fat is further underneath, around your viscera), , which triggers systemic inflammation and oxidative stress. These processes disrupt communication between brain cells, impair memory, and increase the risk of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. High carb diets can also contribute to metabolic syndrome—a cluster of conditions, including diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure—that damage blood vessels, leading to strokes and vascular dementia.
Trans fats: these are region-bound, as they’re banned in some places and not others—check your local regulations. Found in processed foods such as fried items, baked goods, packaged snacks, and margarine, trans fats are created through hydrogenation, which makes fats more stable at room temperature. These artificial fats raise bad cholesterol, lower good cholesterol, and promote atherosclerosis. This damages the brain by reducing oxygen supply, triggering chronic inflammation, and increasing the risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Sodas: regular consumption of sodas, whether sugary or artificially sweetened, is harmful to brain health. A single can of soda contains around 9 teaspoons of sugar, which overwhelms metabolism, contributes to insulin resistance, and leads to inflammation. These effects damage blood vessels and brain tissue, disrupt neuron function, and increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and dementia. Furthermore, insulin resistance caused by excessive sugar intake can impair neuronal survival, activate immune responses, and exacerbate cognitive decline. As for the artificial sweeteners, the mechanism of harm depends on the sweetener (and some can also mess up insulin response, for reasons that are not entirely clear yet, but they measurably do), but even picking the healthiest artificial sweetener, training your palate to enjoy hyper-sweetened things will tend to lead to more sugar-laden food choices in other parts of one’s diet.
Processed foods: arguably a broad category that encompasses some of the above, but it’s important to consider it separately for catch-all purposes: these convenience foods, laden with artificial preservatives, colors, and sweeteners, harm brain health through chronic inflammation and usually a lack of essential nutrients. Processed foods are also a significant source of microplastics, which have been found to accumulate in the arteries, contributing to plaque build-up, atherosclerosis, and reduced blood flow to the brain. This combination of inflammation and oxidative stress from microplastics damages brain cells, paving the way for cognitive decline and dementia.
Seafood with high mercury levels: large fish such as tuna, swordfish, sharks, and tilefish accumulate high amounts of mercury, a potent neurotoxin. Fish that are larger, older, and/or higher up the food chain will have the most mercury (and other cumulative contaminants, for that matter, but we’re considering mercury here). Mercury disrupts essential brain chemicals like dopamine and serotonin, triggering oxidative stress and damaging brain cells. Chronic exposure to mercury leads to inflammation and neuroinflammation, both of which increase the risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Alcohol: contrary to popular belief, any amount of alcohol is detrimental to brain health. While red wine is often promoted for its health benefits, the purported positive effects come from polyphenols, not the alcohol itself, and (for example) resveratrol from red wine cannot be delivered in meaningful doses without drinking an impossibly large quantity. Alcohol is a neurotoxin that can damage or kill brain cells, impair neuronal communication, and lead to cognitive decline. Excessive drinking results in hangover symptoms like headaches and brain fog, which are indicators of its harmful impact on the brain. Chronic alcohol consumption exacerbates neuron death, increases inflammation, and raises the risk of dementia.
As for what to eat instead?
Dr. Li recommends including foods such as:
- foods rich in omega-3s that aren’t mercury-laden fish, e.g. flaxseeds, chia seeds, walnuts, and hemp seeds, as they reduce inflammation, protect blood vessel linings, and prevent vascular dementia.
- berries, and in particular he recommends organic strawberries, which are rich in ellagic acid and anthocyanins, which improve memory, reduce depressive symptoms, and enhance cognitive function.
For more on all of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Take care!
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Anti-Inflammatory Cookbook for Beginners – by Melissa Jefferson
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For some of us, avoiding inflammatory food is a particularly important consideration. For all of us, it should be anyway.
Sometimes, we know what’s good against inflammation, and we know what’s bad for inflammation… but we might struggle to come up with full meals of just-the-good, especially if we want to not repeat meals every day!
The subtitle is slightly misleading! It says “Countless Easy and Delicious Recipes”, but this depends on your counting ability. Melissa Jefferson gives us 150 anti-inflammatory recipes, which can be combined for a 12-week meal plan. We think that’s enough to at least call it “many”, though.
First comes an introduction to inflammation, inflammatory diseases, and a general overview of what to eat / what to avoid. After that, the main part of the book is divided into sections:
- Breakfasts (20)
- Soups (15)
- Beans & Grains (20)
- Meat (20)
- Fish (20)
- Vegetables (20)
- Sides (15)
- Snacks (10)
- Desserts (10)
If you’ve a knowledge of anti-inflammation diet already, you may be wondering how “Meat” and “Desserts” works.
- The meat section is a matter of going light on the meat and generally favoring white meats, and certainly unprocessed.
- Of course, if you are vegetarian or vegan, substitutions may be in order anyway.
As for the dessert section? A key factor is that fruits and chocolate are anti-inflammatory foods! Just a matter of not having desserts full of sugar, flour, etc.
The recipes themselves are simple and to-the-point, with ingredients, method, and nutritional values. Just the way we like it.
All in all, a fine addition to absolutely anyone’s kitchen library… And doubly so if you have a particular reason to focus on avoiding/reducing inflammation!
Get your copy of “Anti-Inflammatory Cookbook for Beginners” from Amazon today!
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The Truth About Handwashing
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Washing Our Hands Of It
In Tuesdays’s newsletter, we asked you how often you wash your hands, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of self-reported answers:
- About 54% said “More times per day than [the other options]”
- About 38% said “Whenever using the bathroom or kitchen
- About 5% said “Once or twice per day”
- Two (2) said “Only when visibly dirty”
- Two (2) said “I prefer to just use sanitizer gel”
What does the science have to say about this?
People lie about their handwashing habits: True or False?
True and False (since some people lie and some don’t), but there’s science to this too. Here’s a great study from 2021 that used various levels of confidentiality in questioning (i.e., there were ways of asking that made it either obvious or impossible to know who answered how), and found…
❝We analysed data of 1434 participants. In the direct questioning group 94.5% of the participants claimed to practice proper hand hygiene; in the indirect questioning group a significantly lower estimate of only 78.1% was observed.❞
Note: the abstract alone doesn’t make it clear how the anonymization worked (it is explained later in the paper), and it was noted as a limitation of the study that the participants may not have understood how it works well enough to have confidence in it, meaning that the 78.1% is probably also inflated, just not as much as the 94.5% in the direct questioning group.
Here’s a pop-science article that cites a collection of studies, finding such things as for example…
❝With the use of wireless devices to record how many people entered the restroom and used the pumps of the soap dispensers, researchers were able to collect data on almost 200,000 restroom trips over a three-month period.
The found that only 31% of men and 65% of women washed their hands with soap.❞
Source: Study: Men Wash Their Hands Much Less Often Than Women (And People Lie About Washing Their Hands)
Sanitizer gel does the job of washing one’s hands with soap: True or False?
False, though it’s still not a bad option for when soap and water aren’t available or practical. Here’s an educational article about the science of why this is so:
UCI Health | Soap vs. Hand Sanitizer
There’s also some consideration of lab results vs real-world results, because while in principle the alcohol gel is very good at killing most bacteria / inactivating most viruses, it can take up to 4 minutes of alcohol gel contact to do so, as in this study with flu viruses:
In contrast, 20 seconds of handwashing with soap will generally do the job.
Antibacterial soap is better than other soap: True or False?
False, because the main way that soap protects us is not in its antibacterial properties (although it does also destroy the surface membrane of some bacteria and for that matter viruses too, killing/inactivating them, respectively), but rather in how it causes pathogens to simply slide off during washing.
Here’s a study that found that handwashing with soap reduced disease incidence by 50–53%, and…
❝Incidence of disease did not differ significantly between households given plain soap compared with those given antibacterial soap.❞
Read more: Effect of handwashing on child health: a randomised controlled trial
Want to wash your hands more than you do?
There have been many studies into motivating people to wash their hands more (often with education and/or disgust-based shaming), but an effective method you can use for yourself at home is to simply buy more luxurious hand soap, and generally do what you can to make handwashing a more pleasant experience (taking a moment to let the water run warm is another good thing to do if that’s more comfortable for you).
Take care!
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Are Waist Trainers Just A Waste, And Are Posture Fixers A Quick Fix?
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Are Waist Trainers Just A Waste, And Are Posture Fixers A Quick Fix?
Yesterday, we asked you for your opinions on waist trainers and posture-fixing harnesses, and got the above-depicted, below-described set of results:
- The most popular response was “Waist trainers are purely cosmetic, so useless. Posture-fixers have merit”, with a little over a quarter of the votes.
- The least popular response was “Both are great tools to help us to optimal waist size and posture, respectively!”
- The other three answers each got a little under a quarter of the vote. In terms of discrete data, these were all 7±1, so basically, there was nothing in it.
The sample size was smaller than usual—perhaps the cluster of American holiday dates yesterday and today kept people busy! But, pressing on…
What does the science say?
Waist trainers are purely cosmetic, so, useless. True or False?
True, simply. Honestly, they’re not even that great for cosmetic purposes. They will indeed cinch in your middle, and this shape will be retained for a (very) short while after uncinching, because your organs have been squished inwards and may take a short while to get back to where they are supposed to be.
The American Board of Cosmetic Surgery may not be an unbiased source, but we’re struggling to find scientists who will even touch one of these, so, let’s see what these doctors have to say:
- Waist training can damage vital organs
- You will be slowly suffocating yourself
- Waist training simply doesn’t work
- You cannot drastically change your body shape with a piece of fabric*
Read: ABCS | 4 Reasons to Throw Your Waist Trainer in the Trash
*”But what about foot-binding?”—feet have many bones, whose growth can be physically restricted. Your waist has:
- organs: necessary! (long-term damage possible, but they’re not going away)
- muscles: slightly restrictable! (temporary restriction; no permanent change)
- fat: very squeezable! (temporary muffin; no permanent change)
Posture correctors have merit: True or False?
True—probably, and as a stepping-stone measure only.
The Ergonomics Health Association (a workplace health & safety organization) says:
❝Looking at the clinical evidence of posture correctors, we can say without a doubt that they do work, just not for everyone and not in the same way for all patients.❞
Source: Do Posture Correctors Work? Here’s What Our Experts Think
That’s not very compelling, so we looked for studies, and found… Not much, actually. However, what we did find supported the idea that “they probably do help, but we seriously need better studies with less bias”:
That is also not a compelling title, but here is where it pays to look at the studies and not just the titles. Basically, they found that the results were favorable to the posture-correctors—the science itself was just trash:
❝ The overall findings were that posture-correcting shirts change posture and subjectively have a positive effect on discomfort, energy levels and productivity.
The quality of the included literature was poor to fair with only one study being of good quality. The risk of bias was serious or critical for the included studies. Overall, this resulted in very low confidence in available evidence.❞
Since the benefit of posture correctors like this one is due to reminding the wearer to keep good posture, there is a lot more (good quality!) science for wearable biofeedback tech devices, such as this one:
Spine Cop: Posture Correction Monitor and Assistant
Take care!
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Beat Osteoporosis with Exercise – by Dr. Karl Knopf
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There are a lot of books about beating osteoporosis, and yet when it comes to osteoporosis exercises, it took us some work to find a good one. But, this one’s it!
A lot of books give general principles and a few sample exercises. This one, in contrast, gives:
- An overview of osteopenia and osteoporosis, first
- A brief overview of non-exercise osteoporosis considerations
- Principles for exercising a) to reduce one’s risk of osteoporosis b) if one has osteoporosis
- Clear explanations of about 150 exercises that fit both categories
This last item’s important, because a lot of popular advice is exercises that are only good for one or the other (given that a lot of things that strengthen a healthy person’s bones can break the bones of someone with osteoporosis), so having 150 exercises that are safe and effective in both cases, is a real boon.
That doesn’t mean you have to do all 150! If you want to, great. But even just picking and choosing and putting together a little program is good.
Bottom line: if you’d like a comprehensive guide to exercise to keep you strong in the face of osteoporosis, this is a great one.
Click here to check out Beat Osteoporosis With Exercise, and stay strong!
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6 Ways To Look After Your Back
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Back To Back
When people think about looking after their back, often thought does not go much further than sitting with good posture, and perhaps even standing with good posture. And those things are important, but:
1) People’s efforts to have good posture often result in overcorrecting creating an anterior pelvic tilt that causes lower back problems.
Quick tip: if you’re sticking your butt out, you’re doing it wrong (no matter how great your butt is). Instead, to find the correct posture, go up on your tip-toes for a moment, then imagine a plumb-line down the center of your body, thus perpendicular to the floor, going all the way down to the ground. Now, slowly return your heels to the ground, but as you do so, keep your spine aligned to the plumb-line, so you’re not moving backwards as you drop, just directly down. This will land you in perfect posture.
Unless you have scoliosis. In which case, it’ll get you as close to good posture as is likely attainable from any quick tip.
2) There’s a lot more to looking after our back than just good posture!
Here are 5 other important things to do:
Be strong
Do strength-training for your back. How to do that is beyond the scope of today’s feature, but there are many good guides and also personal trainers that can be found.
Start off easy and work up, but do start. The stronger your back is, the less likely a momentary lapse in concentration is to throw out your back because you picked something up with imperfect form.
See also: Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)
Stretch intentionally
Many back injuries occur as a result of stretching and/or twisting awkwardly, so if you ensure your basic mobility and range of motion is good, the less likely it is that unthinkingly twisting around 270° to see where that wasp was going will slip a disk.
The more you stretch intentionally (carefully, please), the more you will be able to stretch unintentionally without injury.
See also: Building & Maintaining Mobility
Stand when you can, walk when you can
We humans have outrun our evolution in a lot of ways, and/but one thing our bodies are definitely not well-adapted for is sitting. Unless we are sitting in a low squat the way you might often see an orang-utan sitting, sitting is not a good way of being for us. Even sitting seiza-style or cross-legged is passable for a short while, not for too long.
So, while there sure are times we need to sit (especially if you’re driving!) minimizing those times is ideal. There are a lot of activities that are traditionally done sitting, where there’s no need for it to be so. For example, your writer here sits for the day’s main meal, but takes any smaller meal standing (and when guests visit for a coffee or such, I’ll offer them the couch while I myself prop up the fireplace). Standing desks are also great if you spend a lot of time at the computer for any reason.
See also: The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less & Move More
Rest when you need to
You can’t stand all the time! But know this: if you want to rest your legs, lying down is a lot better for your back (and internal organs) than sitting.
Taking a 5 minute break lying on your couch, or bed, or floor, is a perfectly good option and only social convention says otherwise.
If you want a compromise option, though? A recliner chair, in the reclined position, is a better for your back than being scrunched up in the Economy Class Flight position.
PS: About that bed situation…
What Mattress Is Best, By Science?
Kill pain before it kills you
Painkillers aren’t great for the health per se, but pain (or rather, our bodily responses to such) can be worse. Half the time, when it comes to musculoskeletal problems, things get a lot worse a lot more quickly because of how we overcompensate due to the pain. So, take your pain seriously, and remember, the right amount of pain is zero.
If you’re thinking “but pain relief option xyz isn’t good for me”, we strongly recommend checking out:
The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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