Brazil Nuts vs Cashews – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing Brazil nuts to cashews, we picked the cashews.
Why?
Looking at the macros first, Brazil nuts have more fat and fiber, while cashews have more carbs and protein. So, it really comes down to what you want to prioritize. We’d generally consider fiber the tie-breaker, making this category a subjective marginal win for Brazil nuts—and especially marginal since they are both low glycemic index foods in any case.
When it comes to vitamins, Brazil nuts have more of vitamins C, E, and choline, while cashews have more of vitamins B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, and K, so while both are great, this category is a clear by-the-numbers win for cashews.
The category of minerals is an interesting one. Brazil nuts have more calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and selenium, while cashews have more copper, iron, manganese, and zinc. That would be a 4:4 tie, but let’s take a closer look at those selenium levels:
- A cup of cashews contains 109% of the RDA of selenium. Your hair will be luscious and shiny.
- A cup of Brazil nuts contains 10,456% of the RDA of selenium. This is way past the point of selenium toxicity, and your (luscious, shiny) hair will fall out.
For this reason, it’s recommended to eat no more than 3–4 Brazil nuts per day.
We consider that a point against Brazil nuts.
Adding up the section makes for a win for cashews. Of course, enjoy Brazil nuts too if you will, but in careful moderation please!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
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The Inflammation Spectrum – by Dr. Will Cole
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We’ve previously reviewed Dr. Cole’s other book “Gut Feelings”, and now he’s back, this time to tackle inflammation.
The focus here is on understanding what things trigger inflammation in your body—personally yours, not someone else’s—by something close to the usual elimination process yes, but he offers a way of sliding into it gently instead of simply quitting all the things and gradually adding everything back in.
The next step he takes the reader through is eating not just to avoid triggering inflammation, but to actively combat it. From there, it should be possible for the reader to build an anti-inflammatory cookbook, that’s not only one’s own personal repertoire of cooking, but also specifically tailored to one’s own personal responses to different ingredients.
The style of this book is very pop-science, helpful, walking-the-reader-by-the-hand through the processes involved. Dr. Cole wants to make everything as easy as possible.
Bottom line: if your diet could use an anti-inflammatory revamp, this is a top-tier guidebook for doing just that.
Click here to check out The Inflammation Spectrum, find your food triggers and reset your system!
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Health Care AI, Intended To Save Money, Turns Out To Require a Lot of Expensive Humans
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Preparing cancer patients for difficult decisions is an oncologist’s job. They don’t always remember to do it, however. At the University of Pennsylvania Health System, doctors are nudged to talk about a patient’s treatment and end-of-life preferences by an artificially intelligent algorithm that predicts the chances of death.
But it’s far from being a set-it-and-forget-it tool. A routine tech checkup revealed the algorithm decayed during the covid-19 pandemic, getting 7 percentage points worse at predicting who would die, according to a 2022 study.
There were likely real-life impacts. Ravi Parikh, an Emory University oncologist who was the study’s lead author, told KFF Health News the tool failed hundreds of times to prompt doctors to initiate that important discussion — possibly heading off unnecessary chemotherapy — with patients who needed it.
He believes several algorithms designed to enhance medical care weakened during the pandemic, not just the one at Penn Medicine. “Many institutions are not routinely monitoring the performance” of their products, Parikh said.
Algorithm glitches are one facet of a dilemma that computer scientists and doctors have long acknowledged but that is starting to puzzle hospital executives and researchers: Artificial intelligence systems require consistent monitoring and staffing to put in place and to keep them working well.
In essence: You need people, and more machines, to make sure the new tools don’t mess up.
“Everybody thinks that AI will help us with our access and capacity and improve care and so on,” said Nigam Shah, chief data scientist at Stanford Health Care. “All of that is nice and good, but if it increases the cost of care by 20%, is that viable?”
Government officials worry hospitals lack the resources to put these technologies through their paces. “I have looked far and wide,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said at a recent agency panel on AI. “I do not believe there’s a single health system, in the United States, that’s capable of validating an AI algorithm that’s put into place in a clinical care system.”
AI is already widespread in health care. Algorithms are used to predict patients’ risk of death or deterioration, to suggest diagnoses or triage patients, to record and summarize visits to save doctors work, and to approve insurance claims.
If tech evangelists are right, the technology will become ubiquitous — and profitable. The investment firm Bessemer Venture Partners has identified some 20 health-focused AI startups on track to make $10 million in revenue each in a year. The FDA has approved nearly a thousand artificially intelligent products.
Evaluating whether these products work is challenging. Evaluating whether they continue to work — or have developed the software equivalent of a blown gasket or leaky engine — is even trickier.
Take a recent study at Yale Medicine evaluating six “early warning systems,” which alert clinicians when patients are likely to deteriorate rapidly. A supercomputer ran the data for several days, said Dana Edelson, a doctor at the University of Chicago and co-founder of a company that provided one algorithm for the study. The process was fruitful, showing huge differences in performance among the six products.
It’s not easy for hospitals and providers to select the best algorithms for their needs. The average doctor doesn’t have a supercomputer sitting around, and there is no Consumer Reports for AI.
“We have no standards,” said Jesse Ehrenfeld, immediate past president of the American Medical Association. “There is nothing I can point you to today that is a standard around how you evaluate, monitor, look at the performance of a model of an algorithm, AI-enabled or not, when it’s deployed.”
Perhaps the most common AI product in doctors’ offices is called ambient documentation, a tech-enabled assistant that listens to and summarizes patient visits. Last year, investors at Rock Health tracked $353 million flowing into these documentation companies. But, Ehrenfeld said, “There is no standard right now for comparing the output of these tools.”
And that’s a problem, when even small errors can be devastating. A team at Stanford University tried using large language models — the technology underlying popular AI tools like ChatGPT — to summarize patients’ medical history. They compared the results with what a physician would write.
“Even in the best case, the models had a 35% error rate,” said Stanford’s Shah. In medicine, “when you’re writing a summary and you forget one word, like ‘fever’ — I mean, that’s a problem, right?”
Sometimes the reasons algorithms fail are fairly logical. For example, changes to underlying data can erode their effectiveness, like when hospitals switch lab providers.
Sometimes, however, the pitfalls yawn open for no apparent reason.
Sandy Aronson, a tech executive at Mass General Brigham’s personalized medicine program in Boston, said that when his team tested one application meant to help genetic counselors locate relevant literature about DNA variants, the product suffered “nondeterminism” — that is, when asked the same question multiple times in a short period, it gave different results.
Aronson is excited about the potential for large language models to summarize knowledge for overburdened genetic counselors, but “the technology needs to improve.”
If metrics and standards are sparse and errors can crop up for strange reasons, what are institutions to do? Invest lots of resources. At Stanford, Shah said, it took eight to 10 months and 115 man-hours just to audit two models for fairness and reliability.
Experts interviewed by KFF Health News floated the idea of artificial intelligence monitoring artificial intelligence, with some (human) data whiz monitoring both. All acknowledged that would require organizations to spend even more money — a tough ask given the realities of hospital budgets and the limited supply of AI tech specialists.
“It’s great to have a vision where we’re melting icebergs in order to have a model monitoring their model,” Shah said. “But is that really what I wanted? How many more people are we going to need?”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Trout vs Haddock – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing trout to haddock, we picked the trout.
Why?
It wasn’t close.
In terms of macros, trout has more protein and more fat, although the fat is mostly healthy (some saturated though, and trout does have more cholesterol). This category could be a win for either, depending on your priorities. But…
When it comes to vitamins, trout has a lot more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B12, C, D, and E, while haddock is not higher in any vitamins.
In the category of minerals, trout has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, potassium, and zinc, while haddock has slightly more selenium. Given that a 10oz portion of trout already contains 153% of the RDA of selenium, however, the same size portion of haddock having 173% of the RDA isn’t really a plus for haddock (especially as selenium can cause problems if we get too much). Oh, and haddock is also higher in sodium, but in industrialized countries, most people most of the time need less of that, not more.
On balance, the overwhelming nutritional density of trout wins the day.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Farmed Fish vs Wild Caught: It Makes Quite A Difference!
Take care!
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How To Build a Body That Lasts – by Adam Richardson
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This book is written on a premise, and that premise is: “your age doesn’t define your mobility; your mobility defines your age”.
To this end, we are treated to 328 pages of why and how to improve our mobility (mostly how; just enough on the “why” to keep the motivation flowing).
Importantly, Richardson doesn’t expect that every reader is a regular gym-bunny or about to become one, doesn’t expect you to have several times your bodyweight in iron to life at home, and doesn’t expect that you’ll be doing the vertical splits against a wall any time soon.
Rather, he expects that we’d like to not dislocate a shoulder while putting the groceries away, would like to not slip a disk while being greeted by the neighbor’s dog, and would like to not need a 7-step plan for putting our socks on.
What follows is a guide to “on the good end of normal” mobility that is sustainable for life. The idea is that you might not be winning Olympic gymnastics gold medals in your 90s, but you will be able to get in and out of a car door as comfortably as you did when you were 20, for example.
Bottom line: if you want to be a superathlete, then you might need something more than this book; if you want to be on the healthy end of average when it comes to mobility, and maintain that for the rest of your life, then this is the book for you.
Click here to check out How To Build A Body That Lasts, and build a body that lasts!
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What Harm Can One Sleepless Night Do?
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We’ll not bury the lede: a study found that just one night of 24-hour sleep deprivation can alter immune cell profiles in young, lean, healthy people to resemble those of people with obesity and chronic inflammation.
Chronic inflammation, in turn, causes very many other chronic diseases, and worsens most of the ones it doesn’t outright cause.
The reason this happens is because in principle, inflammation is supposed to be good for us—it’s our body’s defenses coming to the rescue. However, if we imagine our immune cells as firefighters, then compare:
- A team of firefighters who are in great shape and ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, are mostly allowed to rest, sometimes get training, and get called out to a fire from time time, just enough to keep them on their toes. Today, something in your house caught fire, and they showed up in 5 minutes and put it out safely.
- A team of firefighters who have been pulling 24-hour shifts every day for the past 20 years, getting called out constantly for lost cats, burned toast, wrong numbers, the neighbor’s music, a broken fridge, and even the occasional fire. Today, your printer got jammed so they broke down your door and also your windows just for good measure, and blasted your general desk area with a fire hose, which did not resolve the problem but now your computer itself is broken.
Which team would you rather have?
The former team is a healthy immune system; the latter is the immune system of someone with chronic inflammation.
But if it’s one night, it’s not chronic, right?
Contingently true. However, the problem is that because the immune profile was made to be like the bad team we described (imagine that chaos in your house, now remember that for this metaphor, it’s your body that that’s happening to), the immediate strong negative health impact will already have knock-on effects, which in turn make it more likely that you’ll struggle to get your sleep back on track quickly.
For example, the next night you may oversleep “to compensate”, but then the following day your sleep schedule is now slid back considerably; one thing leads to another, and a month later you’re thinking “I really must sort my sleep out”.
See also: How Regularity Of Sleep Can Be Even More Important Than Duration ← A recent, large (n=72,269) 8-year prospective* observational study of adults aged 40-79 found a strong association between irregular sleep and major cardiovascular events, to such an extent that it was worse than undersleeping.
*this means they started the study at a given point, and measured what happened for the next eight years—as opposed to a retrospective study, which would look at what had happened during the previous 8 years.
What about sleep fragmentation?
In other words: getting sleep, but heavily disrupted sleep.
The answer is: basically the same deal as with missed sleep.
Specifically, elevated proinflammatory cytokines (in this context, that’s bad) and an increase in nonclassical monocytes—as are typically seen in people with obesity and chronic inflammation.
Remember: these were young, lean, healthy participants going into the study, who signed up for a controlled sleep deprivation experiment.
This is important, because the unhealthy inflammatory profile means that people with such are a lot more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and many more things besides. And, famously, most people in the industrialized world are not sleeping that well.
Even amongst 10almonds readers, a health-conscious demographic by nature, 62% of 10almonds readers do not regularly get the prescribed 7–9 hours sleep (i.e. they get under 7 hours).
You can see the data on this one, here: Why You Probably Need More Sleep ← yes, including if you are in the older age range; we bust that myth in the article too!*
*Unless you have a (rare!) mutated ADRB1 gene, which reduces that. But we also cover that in the article, and how to know whether you have it.
With regard to “most people in the industrialized world are not sleeping that well”, this means that most people in the industrialized world are subject to an unseen epidemic of sleep-deprivation-induced inflammation that is creating vulnerability to many other diseases. In short, the lifestyle of the industrialized world (especially: having to work certain hours) is making most of the working population sick.
Dr. Fatema Al-Rashed, lead researcher, concluded:
❝In the long term, we aim for this research to drive policies and strategies that recognize the critical role of sleep in public health.
We envision workplace reforms and educational campaigns promoting better sleep practices, particularly for populations at risk of sleep disruption due to technological and occupational demands.
Ultimately, this could help mitigate the burden of inflammatory diseases like obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.❞
You can read the paper in full here: Impact of sleep deprivation on monocyte subclasses and function
What can we do about it?
With regard to sleep, we’ve written so much about this, but here are three key articles that contain a lot of valuable information:
- Get Better Sleep: Beyond The Basics
- Calculate (And Enjoy) The Perfect Night’s Sleep
- Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors
…and with regard to inflammation, a good concise overview of how to dial it down is:
How To Prevent Or Reduce Inflammation
Take care!
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Hearing voices is common and can be distressing. Virtual reality might help us meet and ‘treat’ them
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Have you ever heard something that others cannot – such as your name being called? Hearing voices or other noises that aren’t there is very common. About 10% of people report experiencing auditory hallucinations at some point in their life.
The experience of hearing voices can be very different from person to person, and can change over time. They might be the voice of someone familiar or unknown. There might be many voices, or just one or two. They can be loud or quiet like a whisper.
For some people these experiences are positive. They might represent a spiritual or supernatural experience they welcome or a comforting presence. But for others these experiences are distressing. Voices can be intrusive, negative, critical or threatening. Difficult voices can make a person feel worried, frightened, embarrassed or frustrated. They can also make it hard to concentrate, be around other people and get in the way of day-to-day activities.
Although not everyone who hears voices has a mental health problem, these experiences are much more common in people who do. They have been considered a hallmark symptom of schizophrenia, which affects about 24 million people worldwide.
However, such experiences are also common in other mental health problems, particularly in mood- and trauma-related disorders (such as bipolar disorder or depression and post-traumatic stress disorder) where as many as half of people may experience them.
Rawpixel/Shutterstock Why do people hear voices?
It is unclear exactly why people hear voices but exposure to prolonged stress, trauma or depression can increase the chances.
Some research suggests people who hear voices might have brains that are “wired” differently, particularly between the hearing and speaking parts of the brain. This may mean parts of our inner speech can be experienced as external voices. So, having the thought “you are useless” when something goes wrong might be experienced as an external person speaking the words.
Other research suggests it may relate to how our brains use past experiences as a template to make sense of and make predictions about the world. Sometimes those templates can be so strong they lead to errors in how we experience what is going on around us, including hearing things our brain is “expecting” rather than what is really happening.
What is clear is that when people tell us they are hearing voices, they really are! Their brain perceives voice experiences as if someone were talking in the room. We could think of this “mistake” as working a bit like being susceptible to common optical tricks or visual illusions.
There may be differences in the brains of people who hear voices. Triff/Shutterstock Coping with hearing voices
When hearing voices is getting in the way of life, treatment guidelines recommend the use of medications. But roughly a third of people will experience ongoing distress. As such, treatment guidelines also recommend the use of psychological therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy.
The next generation of psychological therapies are beginning to use digital technologies and virtual reality offers a promising new medium.
Avatar therapy allows a person to create a virtual representation of the voice or voices, which looks and sounds like what they are experiencing. This can help people regain power in the “relationship” as they interact with the voice character, supported by a therapist.
Jason’s experience
Aged 53, Jason (not his real name) had struggled with persistent voices since his early 20s. Antipsychotic medication had helped him to some extent over the years, but he was still living with distressing voices. Jason tried out avatar therapy as part of a research trial.
He was initially unable to stand up to the voices, but he slowly gained confidence and tested out different ways of responding to the avatar and voices with his therapist’s support.
Jason became more able to set boundaries, such as not listening to them for periods throughout the day. He also felt more able to challenge what they said and make his own choices.
Over a couple of months, Jason started to experience some breaks from the voices each day and his relationship with them started to change. They were no longer like bullies, but more like critical friends pointing out things he could consider or be aware of.
A screenshot from HekaVR, the software used in the Australian AMETHYST trial. HekaVR, CC BY-ND Gaining recognition
Following promising results overseas and its recommendation by the United Kingdom’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, our team has begun adapting the therapy for an Australian context.
We are trialling delivering avatar therapy from our specialist voices clinic via telehealth. We are also testing whether avatar therapy is more effective than the current standard therapy for hearing voices, based on cognitive behavioural therapy.
As only a minority of people with psychosis receive specialist psychological therapy for hearing voices, we hope our trial will support scaling up these new treatments to be available more routinely across the country.
We would like to acknowledge the advice and input of Dr Nadine Keen (consultant clinical psychologist at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, UK) on this article.
Leila Jameel, Trial Co-ordinator and Research Therapist, Swinburne University of Technology; Imogen Bell, Senior Research Fellow and Psychologist, The University of Melbourne; Neil Thomas, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Swinburne University of Technology, and Rachel Brand, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, University of the Sunshine Coast
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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