Carrots vs Broccoli – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing carrots to broccoli, we picked the broccoli.
Why?
These are both excellent candidates that should be in everyone’s diet, but there’s a clear winner:
In terms of macros, carrots have 50% more carbs for the same fiber (giving carrots the relatively higher glycemic index, though really, nobody is getting metabolic disease from eating carrots, which are a low-GI food already), while broccoli has more protein. By the numbers, it’s a nominal win for broccoli here, but really, both are great.
In the category of vitamins, carrots have more of vitamins A and B3, while broccoli has more of vitamins B1, B2, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, E, K, and choline. An easy win for broccoli. We’d like to emphasize, though, that this doesn’t mean carrots don’t have lots of vitamins—they do—it’s just that broccoli has even more!
When it comes to minerals, carrots are genuinely great, and/but not higher in any minerals than broccoli, while broccoli has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc. So again, a clear win for broccoli, despite carrots’ fortitude.
All in all, an overwhelming win for broccoli, though once again, enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
What Do The Different Kinds Of Fiber Do? 30 Foods That Rank Highest
Enjoy!
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Celeriac vs Celery – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing celeriac to celery, we picked the celeriac.
Why?
Yes, these are essentially the same plant, but there are important nutritional differences:
In terms of macros, celeriac has more than 2x the protein, and slightly more carbs and fiber. Both are very low glycemic index, so the higher protein and fiber makes celeriac the winner in this category.
In the category of vitamins, celeriac has more of vitamins B1, B3, B5, B6, C, E, K, and choline, while celery has more of vitamins A and B9. An easy win for celeriac.
When it comes to minerals, celeriac has more copper, calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while celery is not higher in any minerals. Another obvious win for celeriac.
Adding these sections up makes for a clear overall win for celeriac, but by all means enjoy either or both!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
Take care!
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Pistachios vs Walnuts – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing pistachios to walnuts, we picked the pistachios.
Why?
Pistachios have more protein and fiber, while walnuts have more fat (though the fats are famously healthy, the same is true of the fats in pistachios).
In the category of vitamins, pistachios have several times more* of vitamins A, B1, B6, C, and E, while walnuts boast only a little more of vitamin B9. They are approximately equal on other vitamins they both contain.
*actually 25x more vitamin A, but the others are 2x, 3x, 4x more.
When it comes to minerals, things are more even; pistachios have more iron, phosphorus, potassium, and selenium, while walnuts have more copper, magnesium, manganese, and zinc. So this category’s a tie.
So given two clear wins for pistachios, and one tie, it’s evident that pistachios win the day.
However! Do enjoy both of these nuts; we often mention that diversity is good in general, and in this case, it’s especially true because of the different mineral profiles, and also because in terms of the healthy fats that they offer, pistachios offer more monounsaturated fats and walnuts offer more polyunsaturated fats; both are healthy, just different.
They’re about equal on saturated fat, in case you were wondering, as it makes up about 6% of the total fats in both cases.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
Take care!
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What Can Moderate Drinking Mean For Healthy Longevity?
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Alcohol is, of course, unhealthy. Not even the famous “small glass of red” is recommended:
Can We Drink To Good Health? ← this was mostly about the purported heart health benefits, and the answer to the question is: no, we cannot, and as WHO has declared, “the only safe amount of alcohol is zero”)
See also: How Much Alcohol Does It Take To Increase Cancer Risk? ← the answer is “any” (although, the risk is dose-dependent, so if not abstaining completely, less is still better than more)
A lot of why people think that moderate drinking is healthy, that widespread popular belief stems from flawed associative studies that compared the following two categories of people:
- non-drinkers, including many former heavy drinkers who stopped because they realized the harm they were doing to themselves
- light drinkers, who have been able to continue drinking because of their otherwise good health
In other words, they looked at now-teetotal former alcoholics whose health was ruined by drinking and concluded “aha, non-drinkers have bad health; clearly some drinking is best”.
You can read more about this and how that flawed research was later disproven once the confounding variables were removed, here: Are You Making This Alcohol Mistake?
But that’s background history. Now here’s for…
The latest evidence that makes things clearer
Researchers (Dr. Sinead George et al.) wanted to know the lifetime risk of alcohol-attributable death and illness in the US based on average weekly alcohol consumption, using evidence from more than 7,200 pre-existing research papers as well as national survey, census, mortality, and morbidity data.
So, can there be any benefit from moderate drinking?
In few words: no overall protective health effect was found at low levels of alcohol consumption, and even what is commonly considered moderate drinking was associated with increased risks of premature death and chronic disease.
In numbers: estimated lifetime alcohol-attributable mortality risk exceeded 1 in 1,000 at more than 6.5 drinks per week for men and more than 7.0 drinks per week for women, rose above 1 in 100 at more than 8.5 drinks per week for everyone and reached 1 in 25 (4%) at 14 drinks per week for men.
As for disease risk:
- Chronic disease in general: alcohol consumption increased the risk of multiple conditions, including cancers of the esophagus, mouth, and breast, cardiovascular disease, liver disease, and alcohol-related injuries.
- Heart disease in particular: although low alcohol intake was associated with a lower risk of ischemic heart disease and stroke, these potential benefits were outweighed by increased risks of cancer and other alcohol-related diseases when all health outcomes were considered together.
If you’d like to read the paper in full, here it is: Moderate alcohol consumption linked to premature death and chronic illness
If you’d like to rethink drinking for yourself, then feel free to check out: Rethinking Drinking: How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol
Worried you’ve already done too much harm?
It’s never too early to quit drinking, but it’s also never too late:
What Happens To Your Body When You Stop Drinking Alcohol ← for a detailed timeline which parts of your body recover when
Take care!
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Aging Is Inevitable… Or is it?
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Aging is inevitable… Or is it?
We’ve talked before about how and why aging happens. We’ve also talked about the work to tackle aging as basically an engineering problem, with the premise that our bodies are biological machines, and machines can be repaired. We also recommended a great book about this, by the way. But that’s about interfering with the biological process of aging. What about if the damage is already done?
“When the damage is done, it’s done”
We can do a lot to try to protect ourselves from aging, and we might be able to slow down the clock, but we can’t stop it, and we certainly can’t reverse it… right?
Wrong! Or at least, so we currently understand, in some respects. Supplementation with phosphatidylserine, for example, has shown promise for not just preventing, but treating, neurodegeneration (such as that caused by Alzheimer’s disease). It’s not a magic bullet and so far the science is at “probably” and “this shows great promise for…” and “this appears to…”
Phosphatidylserene does help slow neurodegeneration
…because of its role in allowing your cells to know whether they have permission to die.
This may seem a flippant way of putting it, but it’s basically how cell death works. Cells do need to die (if they don’t, that’s called cancer) and be replaced with new copies, and those copies need to be made before too much damage is accumulated (otherwise the damage is compounded with each new iteration). So an early cell death-and-replacement is generally better for your overall health than a later one.
However, neurons are tricky to replace, so phosphatidylserine effectively says “not you, hold on” to keep the rate of neuronal cell death nearer to the (slow) rate at which they can be replaced.
One more myth to bust…
For the longest time we thought that adults, especially older adults, couldn’t make new brain cells at all, that we grew a certain number, then had to hang onto them until we died… suffering diminished cognitive ability with age, on account of losing brain cells along the way.
It’s partly true: it’s definitely easier to kill brain cells than to grow them… Mind you, that’s technically true of people, too, yet the population continues to boom!
Anyway, new research showing that adults do, in fact, grow new braincells was briefly challenged by a 2018 study that declared: Human hippocampal neurogenesis drops sharply in children to undetectable levels in adults after all, never mind, go back to your business.
So was adult neurogenesis just a myth to be busted after all? Nope.
It turned out, the 2018 study had a methodological flaw!
To put it in lay terms: they had accidentally melted the evidence.
A 2019 study overcame this flaw by using a shorter fixation time for the cell samples they wanted to look at, and found that there were tens of thousands of “baby neurons” (again with the lay terms), newly-made brain cells, in samples from adults ranging from 43 to 87.
Now, there was still a difference: the samples from the youngest adult had 30% more newly-made braincells than the 87-year-old, but given that previous science thought brain cell generation stopped in childhood, the fact that an 87-year-old was generating new brain cells 30% less quickly than a 43-year-old is hardly much of a criticism!
As an aside: samples from patients with Alzheimer’s also had a 30% reduction in new braincell generation, compared to samples from patients of the same age without Alzheimer’s. But again… Even patients with Alzheimer’s were still growing some new brain cells.
Read it for yourself: Adult hippocampal neurogenesis is abundant in neurologically healthy subjects and drops sharply in patients with Alzheimer’s disease
In a nutshell…
- We can’t fully hit pause on aging just yet, but we can definitely genuinely slow it
- We can also, in some very specific ways, reverse it
- We can slow the loss of brain cells
- We can grow new brain cells
- We can reduce our risk of Alzheimer’s, and at least somewhat mitigate it if it appears
- We know that phosphatidylserine supplementation may help with most (if not all) of the above
- We don’t sell that (or anything else) but for your convenience, here it is on Amazon if you’re interested
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The Rest Revolution: – by Amanda Littlejohn
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Whether you are working all hours around the clock, or retired and now expected to tend to everyone else’s needs as well as your own increasing amount of time spent on medical appointments and the like, as a general rule the world commonly asks of us more than we are reasonably able to give. And yet so often, we try anyway.
This book covers where this societal push came from, and why it’s been perpetuated despite ultimately serving very few people’s interests. How it results in “back-burnering” things that matter, and how we can recalibrate to put what matters back on the front burner.
Ultimately, she argues, overworking is not even best for personal productivity (because of burnout and diminishing marginal returns on the way to burnout), and thus neither is it even best for achieving personal ambitions. Her prescribed antidote for this covers realigning our time and space, restoring our connections where they are important, and—yes, we can still be productive—working with what we find is working for us, rather than what isn’t.
The style is personal at the same time as being delivered with professional skill and clarity.
Bottom line: if ever you feel like you’re not enough for all that is expected (or “needed”) of you, this book may be an important reset-point.
Click here to check out The Rest Revolution, and reclaim your energy!
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Vitamin K2 And The Calcium Paradox – by Kate Rhéaume-Bleue
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The premise of this book is that many people get enough calcium and vitamin D, but then a lot of that calcium doesn’t make it past the arteries.
Thus, the calcium paradox: we want to get (usually: more) calcium, but we want it building our bones, not lining our arteries. How, then, to resolve this problem, and simultaneously fight the dual threats of calcium deficiency (osteoporosis) and calcium excess (atherosclerosis)?
The answer, the author argues, is in vitamin K2, of which most people do not get enough, and which is needed to get calcium to where it’s supposed to be.
You may be wondering whether this is somehow 288 pages to say “take vitamin K2”. And, it somewhat is, but there are a lot of details when it comes to things that have historically raised or lowered the amount of vitamin K2 in our diet, what can be done about it in dietary terms if preferring to go all-natural (hint: nattō is an excellent option, but far from the only one), and what other effects vitamin K2 (or its deficiency) can have on us, in many of the body’s systems, far beyond just bone health (and including things as varied as fertility and avoidance of Alzheimer’s).
The style is very easy-reading pop-science, making this quite a quick read, but no less informative. There’s a fair bibliography at the back.
Bottom line: if you’d like to build/maintain your bone density, then the role of vitamin K2 is an important thing to take into account, and if you’re the sort of person who likes to understand things rather than just take them on faith, this book can explain it all very clearly.
Click here to check out Vitamin K2 And The Calcium Paradox, and look after your bones and more!
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