Brain Food – by Dr. Lisa Mosconi
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We know that we should eat for brain health, but often that knowledge doesn’t go a lot further than “we should eat some nuts… but also not the wrong nuts, which would be bad”.
However, as Dr. Lisa Mosconi lays out for us, there’s a lot more than that!
This book is as much a treatise of brain health in the context of nutrition, as it is a “eat this and avoid that” guide.
Which is good, because our brains don’t exist in isolation, and nor do the nutrients that we consume. Put it this way:
We have a tendecy to think of our diets as a set of slider-bars, “ok, that’s 104% of my daily intake of fiber, I need another 10g protein and that’ll be at 100%, I’ve had 80% of the vitamin C that I need, and…”
Whereas in reality: much of what we eat interacts positively or negatively with other things, and thus needs to be kept in balance. And not only that, but other peri-nutritional factors play a big part too! From obvious things like hydration, to less obvious things like maintaining good gut microbiota, our brains rely on us to do a lot of things for them.
This book is very easy-reading, though a weakness is it doesn’t tend to summarise key ideas much, give cheat-sheets, that sort of thing. We recommend reading this book with a notebook to the side, to jot down things you want to attend to in your own dietary habits.
Bottom line: this is an excellent overview of brain health in the context of nutrition, and is more comprehensive than most “eat this for good brain health and avoid that” books.
Click here to check out “Brain Food” on Amazon and treat your brain like it deserves!
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Tempeh vs Tofu – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing tempeh to tofu, we picked the tempeh.
Why?
Per 100g, tempeh has about 1.5x as many calories, about 2x as much protein, about 3x as much fiber, and about 4x the carbohydrates.
Which latter sounds like a lot, but really, the amounts here are small—tempeh is under 12% carbohydrates, and most of that is treated by the body as fiber (e.g. it’s a resistant starch).
Both have no sugar, and both have more or less the same (tiny) amount of fat.
Micronutrients, you ask? As they’re both made from soybeans, the micronutrient profiles are similar, but exact amounts will depend on the method used, so by all means check labels if comparing products in store. By and large, there’s usually not much difference, though.
You can see sample stats here:
In summary
Both are great, and/but tempeh is the more nutrient-dense of the two.
Therefore, tempeh is the healthier option, unless you are on a very strictly calorie-controlled diet, in which case, tofu will give you more quantity per calorie.
Enjoy!
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Zucchini & Oatmeal Koftas
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These vegetarian (and with one tweak, vegan) koftas are delicious as a snack, light lunch, or side to a larger meal. Healthwise, they contain the healthiest kind of fiber, as well as omega-3 fatty acids, and beneficial herbs and spices.
You will need
- ¼ cup oatmeal
- 1 large zucchini, grated
- 1 small carrot, grated
- ¼ cup cheese (your preference; vegan is also fine)
- 2 tbsp ground flaxseed
- 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
- ¼ bulb garlic, minced
- 2 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Small handful fresh parsley, chopped
- Extra virgin olive oil, for frying
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Soak the flaxseed in 2 oz hot water for at least 5 minutes
2) Combine all of the ingredients except the olive oil (and including the water that the flax has been soaking in) in a big bowl, mixing thoroughly
3) Shape into small balls, patties, or sausage shapes, and fry until the color is golden and the structural integrity is good. If doing patties, you’ll need to gently flip them to cook both sides; otherwise, rolling them to get all sides is fine.
4) Serve! Traditional is with some kind of yogurt dip, but we’re not the boss of you, so enjoy them how you like:
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- The Best Kind Of Fiber For Overall Health? ← it’s β-glucan, as found in oats
- What Omega-3 Fatty Acids Really Do For Us ← as in the flax
- The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic
- Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
- Monosodium Glutamate: Sinless Flavor-Enhancer Or Terrible Health Risk? ← it’s healthier than table salt
Take care!
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You’ve Got Questions? We’ve Got Answers!
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From Cucumbers To Kindles
Q: Where do I get cucumber extract?
A: You can buy it from BulkSupplements.com (who, despite their name, start at 100g packs)
Alternatively: you want it as a topical ointment (for skin health) rather than as a dietary supplement (for bone and joint health), you can extract it yourself! No, it’s not “just juice cucumbers”, but it’s also not too tricky.
Click Here For A Quick How-To Guide!
Q: Tips for reading more and managing time for it?
A: We talked about this a little bit in yesterday’s edition, so you may have seen that, but aside from that:
- If you don’t already have one, consider getting a Kindle or similar e-reader. They’re very convenient, and also very light and ergonomic—no more wrist strain as can occur with physical books. No more eye-strain, either!
- Consider making reading a specific part of your daily routine. A chapter before bed can be a nice wind-down, for instance! What’s important is it’s a part of your day that’ll always, or at least almost always, allow you to do a little reading.
- If you drive, walk, run, or similar each day, a lot of people find that’s a great time to listen to an audiobook. Please be safe, though!
- If your lifestyle permits such, a “reading retreat” can be a wonderful vacation! Even if you only “retreat” to your bedroom, the point is that it’s a weekend (or more!) that you block off from all other commitments, and curl up with the book(s) of your choice.
Q: Any study tips as we approach exam season? A lot of the productivity stuff is based on working life, but I can’t be the only student!
A: We’ve got you covered:
- Be passionate about your subject! We know of no greater study tip than that.
- Find a willing person and lecture them on your subject. When one teaches, two learn!
- Your mileage may vary depending on your subject, but, find a way of studying that’s fun to you!
- If you can get past papers, get as many as you can, and use those as your “last minute” studying in the week before your exam(s). This will prime you for answering exam-style questions (and leverage state-dependent memory). As a bonus, it’ll also help ease any anxiety, because by the time of your exam it’ll be “same old, same old”!
Q: Energy drinks for biohacking, yea or nay?
A: This is definitely one of those “the dose makes the poison” things!
- Caffeine, in and of itself, can be healthy in moderation for most people.
- Taurine has assorted benefits at safe dosages:
- Other ingredients often have health benefits too.
But… The generally agreed safe dose of taurine is around 3g/day for most people; a standard Red Bull contains 1g.
That math would be simple, but… if you eat meat (including poultry or fish), that can also contain 10–950mg per 100g. For example, tuna is at the high end of that scale, with a standard 12oz (340g) tin already containing up to 3.23g of taurine!
And sweetened carbonated beverages in general have so many health issues that it’d take us a full article to cover them.
Short version? Enjoy in moderation if you must, but there are definitely better ways of getting the benefits they may offer.
Q: Best morning routine?
A: The best morning routine is whatever makes you feel most ready to take on your day!
This one’s going to vary a lot—one person’s morning run could be another person’s morning coffee and newspaper, for example.
In a nutshell, though, ask yourself these questions:
- How long does it take me to fully wake up in the morning, and what helps or hinders that?
- When I get out of bed, what do I really need before I can take on my day?
- If I could have the perfect morning, what would it look like?
- What can evening me do, to look after morning me’s best interests? (Semi-prepare breakfast ready? Lay out clothes ready? Running shoes? To-Do list?)
Q: I’m curious how much of these things you actually use yourselves, and are there any disagreements in the team? In a lot of places things can get pretty heated when it’s paleo vs vegan / health benefits of tea/coffee vs caffeine-abstainers / you need this much sleep vs rise and grinders, etc?
A: We are indeed genuinely enthusiastic about health and productivity, and that definitely includes our own! We may or may not all do everything, but between us, we probably have it all covered. As for disagreements, we’ve not done a survey, but if you take an evidence-based approach, any conflict will tend to be minimized. Plus, sometimes you can have the best of both!
- You could have a vegan paleo diet (you’d better love coconut if you do, though!
- There is decaffeinated coffee and tea (your taste may vary)
- You can get plenty of sleep and rise early (so long as an “early to bed, early to rise” schedule suits you!)
Interesting note: humans are social creatures on an evolutionary level. Evolution has resulted in half of us being “night owls” and the other half “morning larks”, the better to keep each other safe while sleeping. Alas, modern life doesn’t always allow us to have the sleep schedule that’d suit each of us best individually!
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Breakfasting For Health?
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Breakfast Time!
In yesterday’s newsletter, we asked you for your health-related opinions on the timings of meals.
But what does the science say?
Quick recap on intermittent fasting first:
Today’s article will rely somewhat on at least a basic knowledge of intermittent fasting, what it is, and how and why it works.
Armed with that knowledge, we can look at when it is good to break the fast (i.e. breakfast) and when it is good to begin the fast (i.e. eat the last meal of the day).
So, if you’d like a quick refresher on intermittent fasting, here it is:
Intermittent Fasting: We Sort The Science From The Hype
And now, onwards!
One should eat breakfast first thing: True or False?
True! Give or take one’s definition of “first thing”. We did a main feature about this previously, and you can read a lot about the science of it, and see links to studies:
The Circadian Rhythm: Far More Than Most People Know
In case you don’t have time to read that now, we’ll summarize the most relevant-to-today’s-article conclusion:
The optimal time to breakfast is around 10am (this is based on getting sunlight around 8:30am, so adjust if this is different for you)
It doesn’t matter when we eat; calories are calories & nutrients are nutrients: True or False?
Broadly False, for practical purposes. Because, indeed calories are calories and nutrients are nutrients at any hour, but the body will do different things with them depending on where we are in the circadian cycle.
For example, this study in the Journal of Nutrition found…
❝Our results suggest that in relatively healthy adults, eating less frequently, no snacking, consuming breakfast, and eating the largest meal in the morning may be effective methods for preventing long-term weight gain.
Eating breakfast and lunch 5-6 h apart and making the overnight fast last 18-19 h may be a useful practical strategy.❞
Read in full: Meal Frequency and Timing Are Associated with Changes in Body Mass Index
We should avoid eating too late at night: True or False?
False per se, True in the context of the above. Allow us to clarify:
There is nothing inherently bad about eating late at night; there is no “bonus calorie happy hour” before bed.
However…
If we are eating late at night, that makes it difficult to breakfast in the morning (as is ideal) and still maintain a >16hr fasting window as is optimal, per:
❝the effects of the main forms of fasting, activating the metabolic switch from glucose to fat and ketones (G-to-K), starting 12-16 h after cessation or strong reduction of food intake❞
~ Dr. Françoise Wilhelmi de Toledo et al.
So in other words: since the benefits of intermittent fasting start at 12 hours into the fast, you’re not going to get them if you’re breakfasting at 10am and also eating in the evening.
Summary:
- It is best to eat breakfast around 10am, generally (ideally after some sunlight and exercise)
- While there’s nothing wrong with eating in the evening per se, doing so means that a 10am breakfast will eliminate any fasting benefits you might otherwise get
- If a “one meal a day, and that meal is breakfast” lifestyle doesn’t suit you, then one possible good compromise is to have a large breakfast, and then a smaller meal in the late afternoon / early evening.
One last tip: the above is good, science-based information. Use it (or don’t), as you see fit. We’re not the boss of you:
- Maybe you care most about getting the best circadian rhythm benefits, in which case, prioritizing breakfast being a) in the morning and b) the largest meal of the day, is key
- Maybe you care most about getting the best intermittent fasting benefits, in which case, for many people’s lifestyle, a fine option is skipping eating in the morning, and having one meal in the late afternoon / early evening.
Take care!
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Immunity – by Dr. William Paul
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This book gives a very person-centric (i.e., focuses on the contributions of named individuals) overview of advances in the field of immunology—up to its publication date in 2015. So, it’s not cutting edge, but it is very good at laying the groundwork for understanding more recent advances that occur as time goes by. After all, immunology is a field that never stands still.
We get a good grounding in how our immune system works (and how it doesn’t), the constant arms race between pathogens and immune responses, and the complexities of autoimmune disorders and—which is functionally in an overlapping category of disease—cancer. And, what advances we can expect soon to address those things.
Given the book was published 8 years ago, how did it measure up? Did we get those advances? Well, for the mostpart yes, we have! Some are still works in progress. But, we’ve also had obvious extra immunological threats in years since, which have also resulted in other advances along the way!
If the book has a downside, it’s that sometimes the author can be a little too person-centric. It’s engaging to focus on human characters, and helps us bring information to life; name-dropping to excess, along with awards won, can sometimes feel a little like the book was co-authored by Tahani Al-Jamil.
Nevertheless, it certainly does keep the book from getting too dry!
Bottom line: this book is a great overview of immunology and immunological research, for anyone who wants to understand these things better.
Click here to check out Immunity, and boost your knowledge of yours!
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Are GMOs Good Or Bad For Us?
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Unzipping Our Food’s Genes
In yesterday’s newsletter, we asked you for your (health-related) views on GMOs.
But what does the science say?
First, a note on terms
Technically, we (humans) have been (g)enetically (m)odifying (o)rganisms for thousands of years.
If you eat a banana, you are enjoying the product of many generations of artificial selection, to change its genes to produce a fruit that is soft, sweet, high in nutrients, and digestible without cooking. The original banana plant would be barely recognizable to many people now (and also, barely edible). We’ve done similarly with countless other food products.
So in this article, we’re going to be talking exclusively about modern genetic modification of organisms, using exciting new (ish, new as in “in the last century”) techniques to modify the genes directly, in a copy-paste fashion.
For more details on the different kinds of genetic modification of organisms, and how they’re each done (including the modern kinds), check out this great article from Sciencing, who explain it in more words than we have room for here:
Sciencing | How Are GMOs Made?
(the above also offers tl;dr section summaries, which are great too)
GMOS are outright dangerous (cancer risks, unknown risks, etc): True or False?
False, so far as we know, in any direct* fashion. Obviously “unknown risks” is quite a factor, since those are, well, unknown. But GMOs on the market undergo a lot of safety testing, and have invariably passed happily.
*However! Glyphosate (the herbicide), on the other hand, has a terrible safety profile and is internationally banned in very many countries for this reason.
Why is this important? Because…
- in the US (and two out of ten Canadian provinces), glyphosate is not banned
- In the US (and we may hypothesize, those two Canadian provinces) one of the major uses of genetic modification of foodstuffs is to make it resistant to glyphosate
- Consequently, GMO foodstuffs grown in those places have generally been liberally doused in glyphosate
So… It’s not that the genetic modification itself makes the food dangerous and potentially carcinogenic (it doesn’t), but it is that the genetic modification makes it possible to use a lot more glyphosate without losing crops to glyphosate’s highly destructive properties.
Which results in the end-consumer eating glyphosate. Which is not good. For example:
❝Following the landmark case against Monsanto, which saw them being found liable for a former groundskeeper, 46 year old Dewayne Johnson’s cancer, 32 countries have to date banned the use of Glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer. The court awarded Johnson R4.2 billion in damages finding Monsanto “acted with malice or oppression”.❞
Source: see below!
You can read more about where glyphosate is and isn’t banned, here:
33 countries ban the use of Glyphosate—the key ingredient in Roundup
For the science of this (and especially the GMO → glyphosate use → cancer pipeline), see:
Use of Genetically Modified Organism (GMO)-Containing Food Products in Children
GMOs are extra healthy because of the modifications (they were designed for that, right?): True or False?
True or False depending on who made them and why! As we’ve seen above, not all companies seem to have the best interests of consumer health in mind.
However, they can be! Here are a couple of great examples:
❝Recently, two genome-edited crops targeted for nutritional improvement, high GABA tomatoes and high oleic acid soybeans, have been released to the market.
Nutritional improvement in cultivated crops has been a major target of conventional genetic modification technologies as well as classical breeding methods❞
Source: Drs. Nagamine & Ezura
Read in full: Genome Editing for Improving Crop Nutrition
(note, they draw a distinction of meaning between genome editing and genetic modification, according to which of two techniques is used, but for the purposes of our article today, this is under the same umbrella)
Want to know more?
If you’d like to read more about this than we have room for here, here’s a great review in the Journal of Food Science & Nutrition:
Should we still worry about the safety of GMO foods? Why and why not? A review
Take care!
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