Cabbage vs Kale – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing cabbage to kale, we picked the kale.
Why?
Here we go again, pitting Brassica oleracea vs Brassica oleracea. One species, many cultivars! Notwithstanding being the same species, there are important nutritional differences:
In terms of macros, kale has more protein, carbs, and fiber, and even has the lower glycemic index, not that cabbage is bad at all, of course. But nominally, kale gets the win on all counts in this category.
In the category of vitamins, cabbage has more of vitamins B5 and choline, while kale has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, B7, B9, C, E, and K. An easy win for kale!
When it comes to minerals, it’s even more decisive: cabbage is not higher in any minerals, while kale has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc. Another clear win for kale.
Adding up the sections makes it very clear that kale wins the day, but we’d like to mention that cabbage was good in all of these metrics too; kale was just better!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
21 Most Beneficial Polyphenols & What Foods Have Them
Enjoy!
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The Exercises That Can Fix Sinus Problems (And More)
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Who nose what benefits you will gain today?
This is James Nestor, a science journalist and author. He’s written for many publications, including Scientific American, and written a number of books, most notably Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art.
Today we’ll be looking at what he has to share about what has gone wrong with our breathing, what problems this causes, and how to fix it.
What has gone wrong?
When it comes to breathing, we humans are the pugs of the primate world. In a way, we have the opposite problem to the squashed-faced dogs, though. But, how and why?
When our ancestors learned first tenderize food, and later to cook it, this had two big effects:
- We could now get much more nutrition for much less hunting/gathering
- We now did not need to chew our food nearly so much
Getting much more nutrition for much less hunting/gathering is what allowed us to grow our brains so large—as a species, we have a singularly large brain-to-body size ratio.
Not needing to chew our food nearly so much, meanwhile, had even more effects… And these effects have become only more pronounced in recent decades with the rise of processed food making our food softer and softer.
It changed the shape of our jaw and cheekbones, just as the size of our brains taking up more space in our skull moved our breathing apparatus around. As a result, our nasal cavities are anatomically ridiculous, our sinuses are a crime against nature (not least of all because they drain backwards and get easily clogged), and our windpipes are very easily blocked and damaged due to the unique placement of our larynx; we’re the only species that has it there. It allowed us to develop speech, but at the cost of choking much more easily.
What problems does this cause?
Our (normal, to us) species-wide breathing problems have resulted in behavioral adaptations such as partial (or in some people’s cases, total or near-total) mouth-breathing. This in turn exacerbates the problems with our jaws and cheekbones, which in turn exacerbates the problems with our sinuses and nasal cavities in general.
Results include such very human-centric conditions as sleep apnea, as well as a tendency towards asthma, allergies, and autoimmune diseases. Improper breathing also brings about a rather sluggish metabolism for how many calories we consume.
How are we supposed to fix all that?!
First, close your mouth if you haven’t already, and breathe through your nose.
In and out.
Both are important, and unless you are engaging in peak exercise, both should be through your nose. If you’re not used to this, it may feel odd at first, but practice, and build up your breathing ability.
Six seconds in and six seconds out is a very good pace.
If you’re sitting doing a breathing exercise, also good is four seconds in, four seconds hold, four seconds out, four seconds hold, repeat.
But those frequent holds aren’t practical in general life, so: six seconds in, six seconds out.
Through your nose only.
This has benefits immediately, but there are other more long-term benefits from doing not just that, but also what has been called (by Nestor, amongst many others), “Mewing”, per the orthodontist, Dr. John Mew, who pioneered it.
How (and why) to “mew”:
Place your tongue against the roof of your mouth. It should be flat against the palate; you’re not touching it with the tip here; you’re creating a flat seal.
Note: if you were mouth-breathing, you will now be unable to breathe. So, important to make sure you can breathe adequately through your nose first.
This does two things:
- It obliges nose-breathing rather than mouth-breathing
- It creates a change in how the muscles of your face interact with the bones of your face
In a battle between muscle and bone, muscle will always win.
Aim to keep your tongue there as much as possible; make it your new best habit. If you’re not eating, talking, or otherwise using your tongue to do something, it should be flat against the roof of your mouth.
You don’t have to exert pressure; this isn’t an exercise regime. Think of it more as a postural exercise, just, inside your mouth.
Quick note: read the above line again, because it’s important. Doing it too hard could cause the opposite problems, and you don’t want that. You cannot rush this by doing it harder; it takes time and gentleness.
Why would we want to do that?
The result, over time, will tend to be much healthier breathing, better sinus health, freer airways, reduced or eliminated sleep apnea, and, as a bonus, what is generally considered a more attractive face in terms of bone structure. We’re talking more defined cheekbones, straighter teeth, and a better mouth position.
Want to learn more?
This is the “Mewing” technique that Nestor encourages us to try:
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Yoga Safety: Simple Guidelines
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝I was wondering whether there were very simple, clear bullet points or instructions on things to be wary of in Yoga.❞
That’s quite a large topic, and not one that lends itself well to being conveyed in bullet points, but first we’ll share the article you sent us when sending this question:
Tips for Avoiding Yoga Injuries
…and next we’ll recommend the YouTube channel @livinleggings, whose videos we feature here from time to time. She (Liv) has a lot of good videos on problems/mistakes/injuries to avoid.
Here’s a great one to get you started:
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Altered Traits – by Dr. Daniel Goleman & Dr. Richard Davidson
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We know that meditation helps people to relax, but what more than that?This book explores the available science.
We say “explore the available science”, but it’d be remiss of us not to note that the authors have also expanded the available science, conducting research in their own lab.
From stress tests and EEGs to attention tests and fMRIs, this book looks at the hard science of what different kinds of meditation do to the brain. Not just in terms of brain state, either, but gradual cumulative anatomical changes, too. Powerful stuff!
The style is very pop-science in presentation, easily comprehensible to all. Be aware though that this is an “if this, then that” book of science, not a how-to manual. If you want to learn to meditate, this isn’t the book for that.
Bottom line: if you’d like to understand more about how different kinds of meditation affect the brain differently, this is the book for you.
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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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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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Stretching & Mobility – by James Atkinson
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“I will stretch for just 10 minutes per day”, we think, and do our best. Then there are a plethora of videos saying “Stretching mistakes that you are making!” and it turns out we haven’t been doing them in a way that actually helps.
This book fixes that. Unlike some books of the genre, it’s not full of jargon and you won’t need an anatomy and physiology degree to understand it. It is, however, dense in terms of the information it gives—it’s not padded out at all; it contains a lot of value.
The stretches are all well-explained and well-illustrated; the cover art will give you an idea of the anatomical illustration style contained with in.
Atkinson also gives workout plans, so that we know we’re not over- or under-training or trying to do too much or missing important things out.
Bottom line: if you’re looking to start a New Year routine to develop better suppleness, this book is a great primer for that.
Click here to check out Stretching and Mobility, and improve yours!
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