
Cacao vs Carob – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing cacao to carob, we picked the cacao.
Why?
It’s close, and may depend a little on your priorities!
In terms of macros, the cacao has more protein and fat, while the carob has more carbohydrates, mostly sugar. Since people will not generally eat this by the spoonful, and will instead either make drinks or cook with it, we can’t speak for the glycemic index or general health impact of the sugars. As for the fats, on the one hand the cacao does contain saturated fat; on the other, this merely means that different saturated fat will usually be added to the carob if making something with it. Still, slight win for the carob on the fat front. Protein, of course, is entirely in cacao’s favor.
In the category of vitamins and minerals, they’re about equal on vitamins, while cacao wins easily on the mineral front, boasting more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, and phosphorus.
While both have a generous antioxidant content, this one’s another win for cacao, with about 3x the active polyphenols and flavonoids.
In short: both are good, consumed in moderation and before adding unhealthy extra ingredients—but we say cacao comes out the winner.
If you’re looking specifically for the above-depicted products, by the way, here they are:
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain
- Chocolate & Health
- The Truth About Chocolate & Skin Health
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The Breathing Cure – by Patrick McKeown
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We’ve previously reviewed this author’s “The Oxygen Advantage”, which as you might guess from the title, was also about breathing. So, what’s different here?
While The Oxygen Advantage was mostly about improving good health with optimized breathing, and with an emphasis on sports too, The Breathing Cure is more about the two-way relationship between ill health and disordered breathing (and how to fix it).
Many kinds of illnesses can affect our breathing, and our breathing can affect many types of illness; McKeown covers a lot of these, including the obvious things like respiratory diseases (including COVID and Long COVID, as well as non-infectious respiratory conditions like asthma), but also things like diabetes and heart disease, as well as peri-disease things like chronic pain, and demi-disease things like periods and menopause.
In each case (and more), he examines what things make matters better or worse, and how to improve them.
While the style itself is just as pop-science as The Oxygen Advantage, this time it relies less on anecdote (though there are plenty of anecdotes too), and leans more heavily on a generous chapter-by-chapter scientific bibliography, with plenty of citations to back up claims.
Bottom line: if you’d like to breathe better, this book can help in very many ways.
Click here to check out The Breathing Cure, and breathe easy!
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Anxiety Attack vs Panic Attack: Do You Know The Difference?
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The terms are sometimes used incorrectly, but have quite different meanings. Dr. Julie Smith, psychologist, explains in this short video:
Important distinctions
Anxiety attacks are not clinically recognized terms and lack a clear definition, often used to describe a build-up of anxiety before anticipated stressful events (e.g. social gatherings, medical appointments, etc, though of course what it is will vary from person to person—not everyone finds the same things stressful, or has the same kinds of anticipations around things).
Panic attacks, in contrast, are sudden surges of intense fear or discomfort that peak within minutes. They are characterized by symptoms including at least 4 of:
- palpitations
- sweating
- shortness of breath
- chest pain
- dizziness
- fear of losing control or dying
There’s a misconception that panic attacks never have identifiable triggers while anxiety attacks always do.
In reality, both can occur with or without a clear cause. Panic attacks can arise from various conditions, including trauma, OCD, or phobias, and don’t necessarily mean you have a panic disorder. They can also occur as a drug response, without any known underlying psychological condition.
You may also notice that that list of symptoms has quite a bit of overlap with the symptoms of a heart attack, which a) does not help people to calm down b) can, on the flipside, cause a heart attack to be misdiagnosed as a panic attack.
In terms of management:
- In the moment: breathing exercises, like extending your exhalation (a common example is the “7-11” method, inhaling for 7 seconds and exhaling for 11 seconds), can calm the body and reduce panic symptoms.
- More generally: to prevent panic attacks from becoming more frequent, avoid avoiding safe environments that triggered an attack, like supermarkets or social gatherings. Gradual exposure helps reduce anxiety over time, while avoidance can worsen it.
If panic attacks persist, Dr. Smith advises to seek help from a doctor or psychologist to understand their root causes and develop effective coping strategies.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
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The Gut Revolution – by Dr. Christine Bishara
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You may be wondering: what sets this apart from other books about gut health?
And one answer is: the author discusses her own published study, with regard to the connection between a deficiency in Bifidobacterium sp., and COVID infection risk/severity. However, this is not an entire book to say “supplement Bifidobacterium sp.”; rather, there are many other things at hand too.
And indeed, supplementing with probiotics will be useless if your gut is not an environment conducive to them thriving. If you take probiotics on an otherwise “Standard American Diet”, then this is approximately the equivalent of paradropping firefighters naked into a raging fire. It will not help. It isn’t the thought that counts.
Instead, Dr. Bishara talks us through what is required for beneficial gut bacteria to thrive, and how to go about making our gut an ideal place for them. In return, they will produce important biochemical metabolites for us, they will improve our immune response, regulate our emotions, help us maintain a healthy weight, heal our skin, and make us smell nice too. In short, they’re a trillions-strong clean-up and maintenance team, if only we treat our workforce well.
Another thing that Dr. Bishara brings of value here that’s not found in a lot of gut health books is the benefits (for gut health) of intermittent fasting, and specifically, a very useful timeline of what happens when, to ensure we do not sabotage our efforts by breaking our fast too early or too late.
The style is easy-reading pop-science, albeit with scientific references throughout for those who want to delve deeper.
Bottom line: this is a gut health book that stands out from the crowd in several ways, and is well worth the investment of reading it!
Click here to check out Gut Revolution, and help yours to help you!
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20 Easy Ways To Lose Belly Fat (Things To *Not* Do)
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Waist circumference (and hip to waist ratio) has been found to be a much better indicator of metabolic health than BMI. So, while at 10almonds we generally advocate for not worrying too much about one’s BMI, there are good reasons why it can be good to trim up specifically the visceral belly fat. But how?
What not to do…
Autumn Bates is a nutritionist, and her tips include nutrition and other lifestyle factors; here are some that we agree with:
- Do less cardio! Unless it’s High-Intensity Interval Training, cardio will cause a metabolic slow-down to compensate afterwards.
- Stop adding sugar to coffee, or anything else, really!
- Stop buying smoothies; they spike blood sugars; eat fresh fruit instead
- Stop eating bread; a drastic move, but as a general rule of thumb, it helps a lot of people
- Stop having more than 2 cups of coffee (this is actually about the caffeine, not the coffee; caffeine spikes cortisol in most people, and chronically high cortisol can cause fat to be redistributed to the belly and face)
- Stop sitting for more than an hour; spend more time on your feet
- Stop having more than 1 alcoholic drink per day (we’d advise stop having more than zero alcoholic drinks per day, but that may be a difficult immediate change for some)
- Stop eating “protein” bars; the rest of their contents are usually not good, to say the least.
For more, including to learn what she has against peanut butter, enjoy her video:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically
Want to know more?
Check out our previous main feature:
Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It
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Dogs Paired With Providers at Hospitals Help Ease Staff and Patient Stress
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DENVER — Outside HCA HealthONE Rose medical center, the snow is flying. Inside, on the third floor, there’s a flurry of activity within the labor and delivery unit.
“There’s a lot of action up here. It can be very stressful at times,” said Kristina Fraser, an OB-GYN in blue scrubs.
Nurses wheel a very pregnant mom past.
“We’re going to bring a baby into this world safely,” Fraser said, “and off we go.”
She said she feels ready in part due to a calming moment she had just a few minutes earlier with some canine colleagues.
A pair of dogs, tails wagging, had come by a nearby nursing station, causing about a dozen medical professionals to melt into a collective puddle of affection. A yellow Lab named Peppi showered Fraser in nuzzles and kisses. “I don’t know if a human baby smells as good as that puppy breath!” Fraser had said as her colleagues laughed.
The dogs aren’t visitors. They work here, too, specifically for the benefit of the staff. “I feel like that dog just walks on and everybody takes a big deep breath and gets down on the ground and has a few moments of just decompressing,” Fraser said. “It’s great. It’s amazing.”
Hospital staffers who work with the dogs say there is virtually no bite risk with the carefully trained Labradors, the preferred breed for this work.
The dogs are kept away from allergic patients and washed regularly to prevent germs from spreading, and people must wash their hands before and after petting them.
Doctors and nurses are facing a growing mental health crisis driven by their experiences at work. They and other health care colleagues face high rates of depression, anxiety, stress, suicidal ideation, and burnout. Nearly half of health workers reported often feeling burned out in 2022, an increase from 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the percentage of health care workers who reported harassment at work more than doubled over that four-year period. Advocates for the presence of dogs in hospitals see the animals as one thing that can help.
That includes Peppi’s handler, Susan Ryan, an emergency medicine physician at Rose.
Ryan said years working as an emergency room doctor left her with symptoms of PTSD. “I just was messed up and I knew it,” said Ryan, who isolated more at home and didn’t want to engage with friends. “I shoved it all in. I think we all do.”
She said doctors and other providers can be good at hiding their struggles, because they have to compartmentalize. “How else can I go from a patient who had a cardiac arrest, deal with the family members telling them that, and go to a room where another person is mad that they’ve had to wait 45 minutes for their ear pain? And I have to flip that switch.”
To cope with her symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, Ryan started doing therapy with horses. But she couldn’t have a horse in her backyard, so she got a Labrador.
Ryan received training from a national service dog group called Canine Companions, becoming the first doctor trained by the group to have a facility dog in an emergency room. Canine Companions has graduated more than 8,000 service dogs.
The Rose medical center gave Ryan approval to bring a dog to work during her ER shifts. Ryan’s colleagues said they are delighted that a dog is part of their work life.
“When I have a bad day at work and I come to Rose and Peppi is here, my day’s going to be made better,” EMT Jasmine Richardson said. “And if I have a patient who’s having a tough day, Peppi just knows how to light up the room.”
Nursing supervisor Eric Vaillancourt agreed, calling Peppi “joyful.”
Ryan had another dog, Wynn, working with her during the height of the pandemic. She said she thinks Wynn made a huge difference. “It saved people,” she said. “We had new nurses that had never seen death before, and now they’re seeing a covid death. And we were worried sick we were dying.”
She said her hospital system has lost a couple of physicians to suicide in the past two years, which HCA confirmed to KFF Health News and NPR. Ryan hopes the canine connection can help with trauma. “Anything that brings you back to the present time helps ground you again. A dog can be that calming influence,” she said. “You can get down on the ground, pet them, and you just get calm.”
Ryan said research has shown the advantages. For example, one review of dozens of original studies on human-animal interactions found benefits for a variety of conditions including behavioral and mood issues and physical symptoms of stress.
Rose’s president and CEO, Casey Guber, became such a believer in the canine connection he got his own trained dog to bring to the hospital, a black Lab-retriever mix named Ralphie.
She wears a badge: Chief Dog Officer.
Guber said she’s a big morale booster. “Phenomenal,” he said. “It is not uncommon to see a surgeon coming down to our administration office and rolling on the ground with Ralphie, or one of our nurses taking Ralphie out for a walk in the park.”
This article is from a partnership that includes CPR News, NPR, and KFF Health News.
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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Pistachios vs Peanuts – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing pistachios to peanuts, we picked the peanuts.
Why?
The choice might be surprising; after all, peanuts are usually the cheapest and most readily available nuts, popularly associated with calories and not much else. However! This one was super-close, and peanuts won very marginally, as you’ll see.
In terms of macros, pistachios have slightly more fiber and nearly 2x the carbs, while peanuts have slightly more protein and fats. What we all as individuals might prioritize more there is subjective, but this could arguably be considered a tie. About the fiber and carbs: peanuts have the lower glycemic index, but not by much. And about those fats: yes, they are healthy, and the fat breakdown for each is almost identical: pistachios have 53% monounsaturated, 33% polyunsaturated, and 14% saturated, while peanuts have 53% monounsaturated, 34% polyunsaturated, and 14% saturated. Yes, that adds up to 101% in the case of peanuts, but that’s what happens with rounding things to integers. However, the point is clear: both of these nuts have almost identical fats.
In the category of vitamins, pistachios have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, and C, while peanuts have more of vitamins B3, B5, B9, E, and choline, So, a 5:5 tie on vitamins.
When it comes to minerals, pistachios have more calcium, copper, phosphorus, and potassium, while peanuts have more iron, magnesium, manganese, selenium, and zinc. So, a marginal victory for peanuts (and yes, the margins of difference were similar in each case).
Adding up the tie, the other tie, and the marginal victory for peanuts, means a marginal victory for peanuts in total.
A quick note in closing though: this was comparing raw unsalted nuts in both cases, so do take that into account when buying nuts, and at the very least, skip the salted, unless you are deficient in sodium. Or if you’re using them for cooking, then buying salted nuts because they’re usually cheaper is fine; just soak and rinse them to remove the salt.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
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