Cardiac Failure Explained – by Dr. Warrick Bishop
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The cover of this book makes it look like it’ll be a flashy semi-celebrity doctor keen to sell his personalized protocol, along with eleventy-three other books, but actually, what’s inside this one is very different:
We (hopefully) all know the basics of heart health, but this book takes it a lot further. Starting with the basics, then the things that it’s easy to feel like you should know but actually most people don’t, then into much more depth.
The format is much more like a university textbook than most pop-science books, and everything about the way it’s written is geared for maximum learning. The one thing it does keep in common with pop-science books as a genre is heavy use of anecdotes to illustrate points—but he’s just as likely to use tables, diagrams, callout boxes, emboldening of key points, recap sections, and so forth. And for the most part, this book is very information-dense.
Dr. Bishop also doesn’t just stick to what’s average, and talks a lot about aberrations from the norm, what they mean and what they do and yes, what to do about them.
On the one hand, it’s more information dense than the average reader can reasonably expect to need… On the other hand, isn’t it great to finish reading a book feeling like you just did a semester at medical school? No longer will you be baffled by what is going on in your (or perhaps a loved one’s) cardiac health.
Bottom line: if you’d like to know cardiac health inside out, this book is an excellent place to start.
Click here to check out Cardiac Failure Explained, and get to the heart of things!
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Gut Health and Anxiety
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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’d like to read articles on gut health and anxiety❞
We hope you caught yesterday’s edition of 10almonds, which touched on both of those! Other past editions you might like include:
We’ll be sure to include more going forward, too!
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The Growing Inequality in Life Expectancy Among Americans
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The life expectancy among Native Americans in the western United States has dropped below 64 years, close to life expectancies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Haiti. For many Asian Americans, it’s around 84 — on par with life expectancies in Japan and Switzerland.
Americans’ health has long been unequal, but a new study shows that the disparity between the life expectancies of different populations has nearly doubled since 2000. “This is like comparing very different countries,” said Tom Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations and an author of the study.
Called “Ten Americas,” the analysis published late last year in The Lancet found that “one’s life expectancy varies dramatically depending on where one lives, the economic conditions in that location, and one’s racial and ethnic identity.” The worsening health of specific populations is a key reason the country’s overall life expectancy — at 75 years for men and 80 for women — is the shortest among wealthy nations.
To deliver on pledges from the new Trump administration to make America healthy again, policymakers will need to fix problems undermining life expectancy across all populations.
“As long as we have these really severe disparities, we’re going to have this very low life expectancy,” said Kathleen Harris, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina. “It should not be that way for a country as rich as the U.S.”
Since 2000, the average life expectancy of many American Indians and Alaska Natives has been steadily shrinking. The same has been true since 2014 for Black people in low-income counties in the southeastern U.S.
“Some groups in the United States are facing a health crisis,” Bollyky said, “and we need to respond to that because it’s worsening.”
Heart disease, car fatalities, diabetes, covid-19, and other common causes of death are directly to blame. But research shows that the conditions of people’s lives, their behaviors, and their environments heavily influence why some populations are at higher risk than others.
Native Americans in the West — defined in the “Ten Americas” study as more than a dozen states excluding California, Washington, and Oregon — were among the poorest in the analysis, living in counties where a person’s annual income averages below about $20,000. Economists have shown that people with low incomes generally live shorter lives.
Studies have also linked the stress of poverty, trauma, and discrimination to detrimental coping behaviors like smoking and substance use disorders. And reservations often lack grocery stores and clean, piped water, which makes it hard to buy and cook healthy food.
About 1 in 5 Native Americans in the Southwest don’t have health insurance, according to a KFF report. Although the Indian Health Service provides coverage, the report says the program is weak due to chronic underfunding. This means people may delay or skip treatments for chronic illnesses. Postponed medical care contributed to the outsize toll of covid among Native Americans: About 1 of every 188 Navajo people died of the disease at the peak of the pandemic.
“The combination of limited access to health care and higher health risks has been devastating,” Bollyky said.
At the other end of the spectrum, the study’s category of Asian Americans maintained the longest life expectancies since 2000. As of 2021, it was 84 years.
Education may partly underlie the reasons certain groups live longer. “People with more education are more likely to seek out and adhere to health advice,” said Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and an author of the paper. Education also offers more opportunities for full-time jobs with health benefits. “Money allows you to take steps to take care of yourself,” Mokdad said.
The group with the highest incomes in most years of the analysis was predominantly composed of white people, followed by the mainly Asian group. The latter, however, maintained the highest rates of college graduation, by far. About half finished college, compared with fewer than a third of other populations.
The study suggests that education partly accounts for differences among white people living in low-income counties, where the individual income averaged less than $32,363. Since 2000, white people in low-income counties in southeastern states — defined as those in Appalachia and the Lower Mississippi Valley — had far lower life expectancies than those in upper midwestern states including Montana, Nebraska, and Iowa. (The authors provide details on how the groups were defined and delineated in their report.)
Opioid use and HIV rates didn’t account for the disparity between these white, low-income groups, Bollyky said. But since 2010, more than 90% of white people in the northern group were high school graduates, compared with around 80% in the southeastern U.S.
The education effect didn’t hold true for Latino groups compared with others. Latinos saw lower rates of high school graduation than white people but lived longer on average. This long-standing trend recently changed among Latinos in the Southwest because of covid. Hispanic or Latino and Black people were nearly twice as likely to die from the disease.
On average, Black people in the U.S. have long experienced worse health than other races and ethnicities in the United States, except for Native Americans. But this analysis reveals a steady improvement in Black people’s life expectancy from 2000 to about 2012. During this period, the gap between Black and white life expectancies shrank.
This is true for all three groups of Black people in the analysis: Those in low-income counties in southeastern states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama; those in highly segregated and metropolitan counties, such as Queens, New York, and Wayne, Michigan, where many neighborhoods are almost entirely Black or entirely white; and Black people everywhere else.
Better drugs to treat high blood pressure and HIV help account for the improvements for many Americans between 2000 to 2010. And Black people, in particular, saw steep rises in high school graduation and gains in college education in that period.
However, progress stagnated for Black populations by 2016. Disparities in wealth grew. By 2021, Asian and many white Americans had the highest incomes in the study, living in counties with per capita incomes around $50,000. All three groups of Black people in the analysis remained below $30,000.
A wealth gap between Black and white people has historical roots, stretching back to the days of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and policies that prevented Black people from owning property in neighborhoods that are better served by public schools and other services. For Native Americans, a historical wealth gap can be traced to a near annihilation of the population and mass displacement in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Inequality has continued to rise for several reasons, such as a widening pay gap between predominantly white corporate leaders and low-wage workers, who are disproportionately people of color. And reporting from KFF Health News shows that decisions not to expand Medicaid have jeopardized the health of hundreds of thousands of people living in poverty.
Researchers have studied the potential health benefits of reparation payments to address historical injustices that led to racial wealth gaps. One new study estimates that such payments could reduce premature death among Black Americans by 29%.
Less controversial are interventions tailored to communities. Obesity often begins in childhood, for example, so policymakers could invest in after-school programs that give children a place to socialize, be active, and eat healthy food, Harris said. Such programs would need to be free for children whose parents can’t afford them and provide transportation.
But without policy changes that boost low wages, decrease medical costs, put safe housing and strong public education within reach, and ensure access to reproductive health care including abortion, Harris said, the country’s overall life expectancy may grow worse.
“If the federal government is really interested in America’s health,” she said, “they could grade states on their health metrics and give them incentives to improve.”
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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Top 8 Fruits That Prevent & Kill Cancer
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Dr. Amy Dee, pharmacist and cancer survivor herself, lays out the best options for anticancer fruits:
The fruits
Without further ado, they are:
- Kiwi: promotes cancer cell death while sparing healthy cells
- Plums & peaches: an interesting choice to list these similar fruits together as one item, but they both also induce cell death in cancer cells while sparing healthy ones
- Dragon fruit: this does the same, while also inhibiting cancer cell growth
- Figs: these have antitumor effects specifically, while removing carcinogens too, and additionally sensitizing cancer cells to light therapy
- Cranberries: disrupt cancer cell adhesion, breaking down tumors, while protecting non-cancerous cells against DNA damage
- Citrus fruits: inhibit tumor growth and kill cancer cells; regular consumption is also associated with a lower cancer risk (be warned though, grapefruit interacts with some medications)
- Cherries: induce cancer cell death; protect healthy cells against DNA damage
- Tomatoes: don’t often make it into lists of fruits, but lycopene reduces cancer risk, and slows the growth of cancer cells (10almonds note: watermelon has more lycopene than tomatoes, and is more traditionally considered a fruit in all respects, so could have taken the spot here).
We would also argue that apricots could have had a spot on the list, both for their lycopene content (comparable to tomatoes) and their botanical (and this phytochemical) similarities to peaches and plums.
For more information on each of these (she also talks about the different polyphenols and other nutrients that constitute the active compounds delivering these anticancer effects), enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Food Choice & Cancer Risk: Eat To Beat Cancer
- Beat Cancer Kitchen: Deliciously Simple Plant-Based Anticancer Recipes (book)
Take care!
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Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers – by Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky
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The book does kick off with a section that didn’t age well—he talks of the stress induced globally by the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, and how that kind of thing just doesn’t happen any more. Today, we have much less existentially dangerous stressors!
However, the fact we went and had another pandemic really only adds weight to the general arguments of the book, rather than detracting.
We are consistently beset by “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as Shakespeare would put it, and there’s a reason (or twenty) why many people go grocery-shopping with the cortisol levels of someone being hunted for sport.
So, why don’t zebras get ulcers, as they actually are hunted for food?
They don’t have rent to pay or a mortgage, they don’t have taxes, or traffic, or a broken washing machine, or a project due in the morning. Their problems come one at a time. They have a useful stress response to a stressful situation (say, being chased by lions), and when the danger is over, they go back to grazing. They have time to recover.
For us, we are (usually) not being chased by lions. But we have everything else, constantly, around the clock. So, how to fix that?
Dr. Sapolsky comprehensively describes our physiological responses to stress in quite different terms than many. By reframing stress responses as part of the homeostatic system—trying to get the body back into balance—we find a solution, or rather: ways to help our bodies recover.
The style is “pop-science” and is very accessible for the lay reader while still clearly coming from a top-level academic who is neck-deep in neuroendocrinological research. Best of both worlds!
Bottom line: if you try to take very day at a time, but sometimes several days gang up on you at once, and you’d like to learn more about what happens inside you as a result and how to fix that, this book is for you!
Click here to check out “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” and give yourself a break!
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Water-based Lubricant vs Silicon-based Lubricant – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing water-based lubricant to silicon-based lubricant, we picked the silicon-based.
Why?
First, some real talk about vaginas, because this is something not everyone knows, so let’s briefly cover this before moving onto the differences:
Yes, vaginas are self-lubricating, but a) not always and b) not always sufficiently, especially as we get older. Much like with penile hardness (or lack thereof), there’s a lot of stigma associated with vaginal dryness, and there really needn’t be, because the simple reality is that we don’t live in the fictitious world of porn, and here in the real world, anatomy and physiology can be quite arbitrary at times.
It is this writer’s firm opinion that everyone (or: everyone who is sexual, anyway) should have good quality lube at home—regardless of one’s gender, relationship status, or anything else.
Ok, with that in mind, onwards:
The water-based lube has nine ingredients: water, glycerin, cytopentasioxane, propylene glycol, xantham gum, phenoxyethanol, dimethiconol, triethanolamine, and ethylhexylglycerine.
All of these ingredients are considered body-safe in the doses present, and/but most of them will be absorbed into the skin, especially via the relatively permeable membrane that is the inside of the vagina (or anus—while the microbiome is very different, tissue-wise these are very similar).
While this is not meaningfully toxic, there’s a delicate balance going on in there, and this can upset that balance a little.
Also, because the lube is absorbed into the skin, you’ll then need more, which means either a moment’s inconvenience to add more, or else the risk of chafing, which isn’t fun.
The silicon lube has four ingredients: dimethicone, dimethiconol, cyclomethicone, and tocopheryl acetate.
Note: “tocopheryl acetate” is vitamin E
…which reminds us: just because something is hard to spell, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad for us.
What are the other three ingredients, though? They are all silicon compounds, all inert, and all with molecules too big to be absorbed into our skin. Basically they all slide right off, which is entirely the point of lube, after all.
It not being absorbed into our skin is good for our health; it’s also convenient as it means a tiny bit of lube goes a long way.
Any downsides to silicon-based lube?
There are two, and neither are health-related:
- It can damage silicon toys if not cleaned quickly and thoroughly, the silicon of the lube may bond with the silicon of the toy after a while.
- Because it doesn’t just disappear like water-based lube, you might want to put a towel down if you don’t want your bed to be slippy afterwards! The towel can then be put in the laundry as normal.
Want to try it out? Here it is on Amazon
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What to Eat When – by Drs. Michael Roizen and Michael Crupain
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Here at 10almonds, we cover a lot of the “what to eat”, but tend to only sometimes touch on the “when”—and indeed, this is a reflection of a popular focus. But what if we were to pay a little more attention to that “when”; what would it get us?
According to Drs. Roizen and Crupain… Quite a bit!
In this work, they take into account the various factors affecting the benefit (or harm!) of what we eat when:
- in the context of our circadian rhythm
- in the context of our insulin responses
- in the context of intermittent fasting
The style throughout is very focused on practical actionable advice. For example, amongst other lifestyle-adjustment suggestions, the authors make the case for front-loading various kinds of food earlier in the day, and eating more attentively and mindfully when we do eat.
They also offer a lot of “quick tips” of the kind we love here at 10almonds! Ranging from “how about this breakfast idea” to “roasting chickpeas like this makes a great snack” to “this dessert is three healthy foods disguised as a sundae”
All in all, if you’d like a stack of small tweaks that can add up to a big difference in your overall health, this is a book for you.
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