This week in health news sees some pretty varied topics:

One more reason to care about the gut-brain axis

Stroke is a top killer in much of the industrialized world, usually making it into the top-few list on a per-country basis. And, it’s rising in prevalence, too. This is partly because our longevity is increasing so age-related things kill us more often, statistically, than age-unrelated things. But that’s only part of the reason; another is that our lifestyle (on the national level) is becoming more conducive to stroke. Diet is a large contributor to that, and gut health has now been identified as a key factor.

What recent research has shown is that minutes after a stroke occurs, normal gut anatomy is disrupted, and cells responsible for gut barrier integrity are eroded, and bugs from the gut get into the blood, and arrive at the (newly damaged) brain vasculature, where the blood-brain barrier is often also compromised on account of the stroke.

Because of this, critical to reducing post-stroke neuroinflammation (something that makes stroke damage more severe and recovery a lot harder) is improving the gut’s ability to heal itself quickly.

This can be helped with a dose of Insulin-like Growth Factor (IGF-1), but there are other things that can help or hinder, and those other things are modifiable by us as individuals in our lifestyle choices (e.g. a gut-healthy diet with plenty of fiber, and avoiding gut-unhealthy things like sugar and alcohol that feed C. albicans growths that will put roots through your intestines and make holes as they do), because the better/worse your gut barrier integrity is to start with, the easier/harder it will be for your gut to repair itself quickly:

Read in full: Healing the gut can reduce long-term impact of stroke

Related: Stop Sabotaging Your Gut

How about that seasonal lead-spiced hot drink?

Lead contamination in ground spices has become a bit of an issue, ground turmeric has had quite some flak in this regard, and now the spotlight is on cinnamon.

These reports, by the way, do not specify what kind of cinnamon (i.e. cassia vs Ceylon), however, clicking through to assorted sources and then doing our own digging finds that all cinnamon products we found listed as contaminated, were cassia cinnamon. This is unsurprising, as a) it’s cheaper b) it’s the kind most readily found on shelves in the US. That said, when it comes to Ceylon (sweet) cinnamon, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so that doesn’t mean they got the all-clear on lead contamination, but rather, that they haven’t received the same scrutiny as yet.

It’s worth noting that cinnamon sticks have been found to have less contamination than ground cinnamon, though.

It’s also worth noting that since some adulterated products have had lead added deliberately in increase the weight and darken the color, this is more likely to happen to cassia cinnamon than sweet cinnamon because cassia cinnamon is visibly darker, so adding a darkening agent to sweet cinnamon would just make it look like cassia (which no seller would want to do since cassia is the cheaper of the two).

Read in full: Why lead-tainted cinnamon products have turned up on shelves, and what questions consumers should ask

Related: Sweet Cinnamon vs Regular Cinnamon – Which is Healthier? ← this also covers toxicity issues, by the way

A matter of life and death

Assisted dying is currently legal in 10/40 US states, and Canada. Over in the UK, it’s being debated (and voted on) in Parliament today, at time of writing.

While bodily autonomy discussions are usually quite straightforward arguments between the very separate camps of

• “my body, my choice” vs
• “they shouldn’t be allowed to do that”,

…this one comes with a considerable middleground, because

• “people should have to right to end things without extra suffering and on their own terms”, and
• “many disabled people fear being placed in a position of having justify why they are not exercising their right to die when it might be cheaper and easier for others if they did”

…are positions with a lot of potential overlap.

In any case, we know most of our readers are in the US, but with a 10/40 split in US states (and some recent controversies in Canada), it’s likely a topic that’ll come up for most people at some point, so it’s good to understand it, and this is as good an opportunity as any:

Read in full: How would the assisted dying bill work and what issues might it create?

Related: Managing Your Mortality ← this talks about psychological/social considerations, as well as end-of-life care, palliative care (which is not quite the same thing!) and euthanasia in various forms, including the unofficial kind that you might want to be aware of if you want to avoid that happening.

Take care!