Buckwheat vs Rye – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing buckwheat to rye, we picked the buckwheat.
Why?
Both are good, wholegrain options for most people! On which note, yes, we are comparing whole groats* vs whole grains here, respectively.
*buckwheat is, you may remember, a flowering plant and not technically a grain or even a grass (and is very unrelated to wheat; it’s as closely related to wheat as a lionfish is to a lion).
In terms of macros, buckwheat has more protein, while rye has more carbs and fiber, the ratios of which mean that rye has the higher glycemic index. All in all, we’re calling this category a win for buckwheat on the basis of those things, but really, both are fine.
When it comes to vitamins, buckwheat has more of vitamins B1, B3, B6, B7, B9, K, and choline, while rye has more of vitamins B2, B5, and E. An easy win for buckwheat here.
In the category of minerals, buckwheat has more copper, calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc, while rye has more manganese and selenium. Another clear win for buckwheat.
Lastly. it’s worth noting that while buckwheat does not contain gluten, rye does. So, if you’re avoiding gluten, buckwheat is the option to choose here for that reason too.
If you don’t have celiac disease, wheat allergy, gluten intolerance, or something like that, then rye is still very worthwhile; buckwheat may have won on numbers in each category, but rye wasn’t far behind on anything; the margins of difference were quite small today.
Still, buckwheat is the best all-rounder here!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Grains: Bread Of Life, Or Cereal Killer?
- Gluten: What’s The Truth?
- Eat More (Of This) For Lower Blood Pressure
Take care!
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Wasting Your Vitamins?
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Are you flushing away your vitamins?
Most likely…but you don’t have to.
We all know what a wasteful expense supplements can sometimes be, but you can optimise your intake to get more bang for your buck!
Top Tips for Getting Your Money’s Worth:
- Liquids are better than tablets—the body can’t absorb nutrients from tablets anywhere as easily as it can from liquids, with some saying as low as a 50% absorption rate for tablets, so if your supplement can come in drinkable form, take it that way!
- Capsules are better than tablets—capsules, depending on the kind, contain either a powder (true capsules) or a liquid (softgels). Once the capsule/softgel is broken down in the stomach, it releases its contents, which will now be absorbed as though you took it as a drink.
- Stay hydrated—on that note, your body can only make use of nutrients that it can easily transport, and if you’re dehydrated, the process is sluggish! Having a big glass of water with your supplements will go a long way to helping your body get them where they’re needed.
- Take with black pepper—studies disagree on exactly how much black pepper improves absorption of nutrients. Some say it improves it by 50%, others say as much as 7x better. The truth is probably that it varies from one nutrient to the next, but what is (almost) universally accepted is that black pepper helps you absorb many nutrients you take orally.
- Take with a meal—bonus if you seasoned it with black pepper! But also: many nutrients are best absorbed alongside food, and many are specifically fat-soluble (so you want to take a little fat around the same time for maximum absorption)
- Consider split doses—a lot of nutrients are best absorbed when spread out a bit. Why? Your body can often only absorb so much at once, and what it couldn’t absorb can, depending on the nutrient, pass right through you. So better to space out the doses—breakfast and dinner make for great times to take them.
- Consider cycling—no, not the two-wheeled kind, though feel free to do that too! What cycling means when it comes to supplements is to understand that your body can build a tolerance to some supplements, so you’ll get gradually less effect for the same dose. Combat this by scheduling a break—five days on, two days off is a common schedule—allowing your body to optimise itself in the process!
- Check Medications—and, as is always safe, make sure you check whether any medications you take can interrupt your supplement absorption!
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Why Adult ADHD Often Leads To Anxiety & Depression
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ADHD’s Knock-On Effects On Mental Health
We’ve written before about ADHD in adult life, often late-diagnosed because it’s not quite what people think it is:
In women in particular, it can get missed and/or misdiagnosed:
Miss Diagnosis: Anxiety, ADHD, & Women
…but what we’re really here to talk about today is:
It’s the comorbidities that get you
When it comes to physical health conditions:
- if you have one serious condition, it will (usually) be taken seriously
- if you have two, they will still be taken seriously, but people (friends and family members, as well as yes, medical professionals) will start to back off, as it starts to get too complicated for comfort
- if you have three, people will think you are making at least one of them up for attention now
- if you have more than three, you are considered a hypochondriac and pathological liar
Yet, the reality is: having one serious condition increases your chances of having others, and this chance-increasing feature compounds with each extra condition.
Illustrative example: you have fibromyalgia (ouch) which makes it difficult for you to exercise much, shop around when grocery shopping, and do much cooking at home. You do your best, but your diet slips and it’s hard to care when you just want the pain to stop; you put on some weight, and get diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, which in time becomes diabetes with high cardiovascular risk factors. Your diabetes is immunocompromising; you get COVID and find it’s now Long COVID, which brings about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, when you barely had the spoons to function in the first place. At this point you’ve lost count of conditions and are just trying to get through the day.
If this is you, by the way, we hope at least something in the following might ease things for you a bit:
- Stop Pain Spreading
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
- Eat To Beat Chronic Fatigue (While Having The Limitations Of Chronic Fatigue)
- When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might
- The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
It’s the same for mental health
In the case of ADHD as a common starting point (because it’s quite common, may or may not be diagnosed until later in life, and doesn’t require any external cause to appear), it is very common that it will lead to anxiety and/or depression, to the point that it’s perhaps more common to also have one or more of them than not, if you have ADHD.
(Of course, anxiety and/or depression can both pop up for completely unrelated reasons too, and those reasons may be physiological, environmental, or a combination of the above).
Why?
Because all the good advice that goes for good mental health (and/or life in general), gets harder to actuate when one had ADHD.
- “Strong habits are the core of a good life”, but good luck with that if your brain doesn’t register dopamine in the same way as most people’s do, making intentional habit-forming harder on a physiological level.
- “Plan things carefully and stick to the plan”, but good luck with that if you are neurologically impeded from forming plans.
- “Just do it”, but oops you have the tendency-to-overcommitment disorder and now you are seriously overwhelmed with all the things you tried to do, when each of them alone were already going to be a challenge.
Overwhelm and breakdown are almost inevitable.
And when they happen, chances are you will alienate people, and/or simply alienate yourself. You will hide away, you will avoid inflicting yourself on others, you will brood alone in frustration—or distract yourself with something mind-numbing.
Before you know it, you’re too anxious to try to do things with other people or generally show your face to the world (because how will they react, and won’t you just mess things up anyway?), and/or too depressed to leave your depression-lair (because maybe if you keep playing Kingdom Vegetables 2, you can find a crumb of dopamine somewhere).
What to do about it
How to tackle the many-headed beast? By the heads! With your eyes open. Recognize and acknowledge each of the heads; you can’t beat those heads by sticking your own in the sand.
Also, get help. Those words are often used to mean therapy, but in this case we mean, any help. Enlist your partner or close friend as your support in your mental health journey. Enlist a cleaner as your support in taking that one thing off your plate, if that’s an option and a relevant thing for you. Set low but meaningful goals for deciding what constitutes “good enough” for each life area. Decide in advance what you can safely half-ass, and what things in life truly require your whole ass.
Here’s a good starting point for that kind of thing:
When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
And this is an excellent way to “get the ball rolling” if you’re already in a bit of a prison of your own making:
Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety
If things are already bad, then you might also consider:
- How To Set Anxiety Aside and
- The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← this is about getting out of depression
And if things are truly at the worst they can possibly be, then:
How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)
Take care!
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Military Secrets (Ssh!)
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Can you keep a secret?
When actor Christopher Lee was asked about his time as a British special forces operative, he would look furtively around, and ask “can you keep a secret?” Upon getting a yes, he would reply:
“So can I”
We can’t, though! We just can’t help sharing cool, useful information that changes people’s lives. Never is that more critical than now, as the end of January has been called the most depressing time of year, according to Dr. Cliff Arnall at the University of Cardiff. It doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom, though:
Today we’re going to share a trick… It’s called the “secret of eternal happiness” (yes, we know… we didn’t come up with the name!) and is taught to soldiers to fend off the worst kinds of despair.
The soldiers would be ordered to take a moment to reflect on the sheer helplessness of their situation, the ridiculous impossibility of the odds against them, all and any physical pain they might suffer, the weakness of their faltering body… and just when everything feels as bad is it can possibly feel, they’re told to say out loud—as sadly as possible—this single word:
“Boop”
It all but guarantees to result in cracking a smile, no matter the situation.
Now this knowledge is yours too! Keep it secret! Or don’t. Sharing is caring.
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Sweet Potato vs Cassava – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing sweet potato to cassava, we picked the sweet potato.
Why?
For any unfamiliar with cassava, it’s also called manioc or yuca/yucca, and it’s a tuber that can be used a lot like sweet potato. It’s popular in S. America, often in recipes that aren’t the healthiest (deep-fried chunky “cassava chips” are popular in Brazil, for example, and farofa, a flour made from cassava, is less healthy even than refined white flour from wheat), but today we’re going to judge it on its own merit—since after all, almost anything can be deep-fried and many things can be turned into flour, but it doesn’t mean we have to do that.
Let’s talk macros first: sweet potato has nearly 2x the protein, while cassava has nearly 2x the carbs. As for fiber to soften those carbs’ impact on our blood sugars, well, sweet potato has about 2x the fiber. All in all for macros, a clear and easy win for sweet potato.
Important note: as for the impact that has on glycemic index: the exact glycemic index will depend on what you do with it (different cooking methods change the GI), but broadly speaking, sweet potatoes are considered a medium GI food, while cassava is a very high GI food, to the point that it’s higher than sucrose, and nearly equal to pure glucose. Which is impressive, for a tuber.
In terms of vitamins, sweet potato’s famously high vitamin A content raises the bar, but it’s not all it has to offer: sweet potato has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, E, and K, while cassava has more of vitamins B9 and choline. Just for amusement’s sake, let’s note that the sweet potato has over 1,478x the vitamin A content. In any case, the vitamins category is another clear win for sweet potato.
When it comes to minerals, it’s again quite one-sided: sweet potato has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and potassium, while cassava has more selenium. So, sweet potato wins yet again.
In short: definitely a case of “the less widely-available option is not necessarily the healthier”!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Glycemic Index vs Glycemic Load vs Insulin Index
Take care!
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Breathing For Pain Relief & Core Strength (How To Reconnect Your Breath & Body)
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Dr. Amy Konvalin explains how to do it and why it works:
Take a deep breath…
A lot of people people overuse neck and shoulder “accessory” muscles due to stress, posture, and habits like mouth breathing, which leads to tension and increasingly shallow breathing. In contrast, using your diaphragm improves movement, reduces pain, supports your core, and helps calm your nervous system via the vagus nerve.
So, let’s do this in stages:
- First, diaphragmatic breathing: lie on your back to start, as this reduces strain and prevents dizziness while learning the pattern. Breathe in through your nose and let your belly rise, then breathe out through your mouth slowly but purposefully, like blowing out a candle. Let your belly expand on the inhale and fall on the exhale, using your hands for feedback if you need to.
- Next, abdominal control: allow your abdominals to relax and lengthen on the inhale, then gently contract them on the exhale to push air out. Your strongest abdominal engagement should happen at the end of the exhale when your belly is flat. Don’t flatten or move your lower back yet, and don’t lift your glutes yet either; keep your spine in a neutral position throughout.
- Next, integrating with movement: once breathing and abdominal control improve, add leg movement (for example a bridge) to train breathing during activity. Exhale, contract your abdominals, then lift your hips using your glutes, keeping control of your breathing. Breathe in as you lower yourself back down, and continue controlled breathing while moving, but do prioritize breathing quality over movement.
- Finally, back-body breathing: the diaphragm also expands your back ribs, so full breathing includes movement in both the front (belly) and back (rib cage). You can use a hands-and-knees position with a neutral spine, to better feel your back ribs expand. Start the inhale with belly expansion, then take a little more air to expand your back ribs, before exhaling with abdominal contraction. Dr. Konvalin notes that the rib motion is subtle, and so urges us to focus on the sensation rather than expecting large visible movement.
The idea of all of this is to retrain your body so diaphragmatic breathing happens all day, reducing tension and improving overall function.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might like this book we reviewed a little while back:
The Oxygen Advantage – by Patrick McKeown
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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The Compass of Pleasure – by Dr. David Linden
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There are a lot of books about addiction, so what sets this one apart?
Mostly, it’s that this one maintains that addiction is neither good nor bad per se—just, some behaviors and circumstances are. Behaviors and circumstances caused, directly or indirectly, by addiction.
But, Dr. Linden argues, not every addiction has to be so. Especially behavioral addictions; the rush of dopamine one gets from a good session at the gym or learning a new language, that’s not a bad thing, even if they can fundamentally be addictions too.
Similarly, we wouldn’t be here as a species without some things that rely on some of the same biochemistry as addictions; orgasms and eating food, for example. Yet, those very same urges can also inconvenience us, and in the case of foods and other substances, can harm our health.
In this book, the case is made for shifting our addictive tendencies to healthier addictions, and enough information is given to help us do so.
Bottom line: if you’d like to understand what is going on when you get waylaid by some temptation, and how to be tempted to better things, this book can give the understanding to do just that.
Click here to check out The Compass of Pleasure, and make yours work in your favor!
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