Cauliflower vs Carrot – Which is Healthier?

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Our Verdict

When comparing cauliflower to carrot, we picked the cauliflower.

Why?

In terms of macros, cauliflower has nearly 2x the protein while carrot has nearly 2x the carbs and slightly more fiber; we’re calling it a tie in this category.

When it comes to vitamins, cauliflower has more of vitamins B2, B5, B6, B9, C, K, and choline, while carrot has more of vitamins A, B1, B3, and E. Thus, a 7:4 win for cauliflower here.

In the category of minerals, cauliflower has more iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc, while carrot has more calcium, copper, and potassium. So, a 6:3 win for cauliflower here.

In short, for overall nutritional density, adding up the sections makes for a clear win for cauliflower, but of course, enjoy either or (preferably) both; diversity is good!

Want to learn more?

You might like to read:

What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?

Take care!

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  • Acorns vs Chestnuts – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing acorns to chestnuts, we picked the acorns.

    Why?

    In terms of macros, chestnuts are mostly water, so it’s not surprising that acorns have a lot more carbs, fat, protein, and fiber. Thus, unless you have personal reasons for any of those to be a problem, acorns are the better choice, offering a lot more nutritional value.

    In the category of vitamins, acorns lead with a lot more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B5, B6, and B9, while chestnuts have more of vitamins B1 and C. However, that vitamin C is useless to us, because it is destroyed in the cooking process (by boiling or roasting), and both of these nuts can be harmful if consumed raw, so that cooking does need to be done. That leaves acorns with a 6:1 lead.

    When it comes to minerals, things are more even; acorns have more copper, magnesium, manganese, and zinc, while chestnuts have more calcium, iron, phosphorus, and potassium. Thus, a 4:4 tie (and yes, the margins of difference are approximately equal too).

    We mentioned “both of these nuts can be harmful if consumed raw”, so a note on that: it’s because, while both contain an assortment of beneficial phytochemicals, they also both contain tannins that, if consumed raw, chelate with iron, essentially taking it out of our diet and potentially creating an iron deficiency. Cooking tannins stops this from being an issue, and the same cooking process renders the tannins actively beneficial to the health, for their antioxidant powers.

    You may have heard that acorns are poisonous; that’s not strictly speaking true, except insofar as anything could be deemed poisonous in excess (including such things as water, and oxygen). Rather, it’s simply the above-described matter of the uncooked tannins and iron chelation. Even then, you’re unlikely to suffer ill effects unless you consume them raw in a fair quantity. While acorns have fallen from popular favor sufficient that one doesn’t see them in supermarkets, the fact is they’ve been enjoyed as an important traditional part of the diet by various indigenous peoples of N. America for centuries*, and provided they are cooked first, they are a good healthy food for most people.

    *(going so far as to cultivate natural oak savannah areas, by burning out young oaks to leave the old ones to flourish without competition, to maximize acorn production, and then store dried acorns in bulk sufficient to cover the next year or so in case of a bad harvest later—so these was not just an incidental food, but very important “our life may depend on this” food. Much like grain in many places—and yes, acorns can be ground into flour and used to make bread etc too)

    Do note: they are both still tree nuts though, so if you have a tree nut allergy, these ones aren’t for you.

    Otherwise, enjoy both; just cook them first!

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts

    Take care!

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  • Unlock Your Menopause Type – by Dr. Heather Hirsch

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    We featured Dr. Hirsch before, here, and mentioned this book which, at the time, we had not yet reviewed. So, here it is:

    What sets this apart from a lot of menopause books is that there’s a lot less “eat these foods and your body will magically stop exhibiting symptoms of menopause” and a lot more clinical observations and then evidence-based recommendations.

    Which is not to say don’t eat broccoli and almonds; by all means, they’re great foods and contain valuable nutrients that will help. But it is to say that if your doctor’s prescription is just broccoli and almonds, maybe have those as a snack while you’re looking for a second opinion.

    Dr. Hirsch goes through various “menopause types”, but it’s not so much “astrology for gynecologists” and more “here are clusters of menopause symptoms set against timeline of presentation, and they can be categorized into six main ways that between them, cover pretty much all my patients, which have been many”.

    So if you, dear reader, are menopausal (including peri- or post-), then the chances are very good that you will see yourself in one of those six sets.

    She then goes about how to prioritize relief and safety, and personalize a treatment plan, and maintain the best menopausal care for you, going forward.

    The style is easy-reading pop-science, punctuated by clinical science and 35 pages of references. She’s also, unlike a lot of authors in the genre, manifestly not invested in being a celebrity or making a personality cult out of her recommendations; she’s happy to stick to the science and put out good advice.

    Bottom line: if you or someone you love is menopausal (including peri- or post-), this is a top-tier book.

    Click here to check out Unlock Your Menopause Type, and get the best care for you!

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  • Managing Your Mortality

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    When Planning Is a Matter of Life and Death

    Barring medical marvels as yet unrevealed, we are all going to die. We try to keep ourselves and our loved ones in good health, but it’s important to be prepared for the eventuality of death.

    While this is not a cheerful topic, considering these things in advance can help us manage a very difficult thing, when the time comes.

    We’ve put this under “Psychology Sunday” as it pertains to processing our own mortality, and managing our own experiences and the subsequent grief that our death may invoke in our loved ones.

    We’ll also be looking at some of the medical considerations around end-of-life care, though.

    Organizational considerations

    It’s generally considered good to make preparations in advance. Write (or update) a Will, tie up any loose ends, decide on funerary preferences, perhaps even make arrangements with pre-funding. Life insurance, something difficult to get at a good rate towards the likely end of one’s life, is better sorted out sooner rather than later, too.

    Beyond bureaucracy

    What’s important to you, to have done before you die? It could be a bucket list, or it could just be to finish writing that book. It could be to heal a family rift, or to tell someone how you feel.

    It could be more general, less concrete: perhaps to spend more time with your family, or to engage more with a spiritual practice that’s important to you.

    Perhaps you want to do what you can to offset the grief of those you’ll leave behind; to make sure there are happy memories, or to make any requests of how they might remember you.

    Lest this latter seem selfish: after a loved one dies, those who are left behind are often given to wonder: what would they have wanted? If you tell them now, they’ll know, and can be comforted and reassured by that.

    This could range from “bright colors at my funeral, please” to “you have my blessing to remarry if you want to” to “I will now tell you the secret recipe for my famous bouillabaisse, for you to pass down in turn”.

    End-of-life care

    Increasingly few people die at home.

    • Sometimes it will be a matter of fighting tooth-and-nail to beat a said-to-be-terminal illness, and thus expiring in hospital after a long battle.
    • Sometimes it will be a matter of gradually winding down in a nursing home, receiving medical support to the end.
    • Sometimes, on the other hand, people will prefer to return home, and do so.

    Whatever your preferences, planning for them in advance is sensible—especially as money may be a factor later.

    Not to go too much back to bureaucracy, but you might also want to consider a Living Will, to be enacted in the case that cognitive decline means you cannot advocate for yourself later.

    Laws vary from place to place, so you’ll want to discuss this with a lawyer, but to give an idea of the kinds of things to consider:

    National Institute on Aging: Preparing A Living Will

    Palliative care

    Palliative care is a subcategory of end-of-life care, and is what occurs when no further attempts are made to extend life, and instead, the only remaining goal is to reduce suffering.

    In the case of some diseases including cancer, this may mean coming off treatments that have unpleasant side-effects, and retaining—or commencing—pain-relief treatments that may, as a side-effect, shorten life.

    Euthanasia

    Legality of euthanasia varies from place to place, and in some times and places, palliative care itself has been considered a form of “passive euthanasia”, that is to say, not taking an active step to end life, but abstaining from a treatment that prolongs it.

    Clearer forms of passive euthanasia include stopping taking a medication without which one categorically will die, or turning off a life support machine.

    Active euthanasia, taking a positive action to end life, is legal in some places and the means varies, but an overdose of barbiturates is an example; one goes to sleep and does not wake up.

    It’s not the only method, though; options include benzodiazepines, and opioids, amongst others:

    Efficacy and safety of drugs used for assisted dying

    Unspoken euthanasia

    An important thing to be aware of (whatever your views on euthanasia) is the principle of double-effect… And how it comes to play in palliative care more often than most people think.

    Say a person is dying of cancer. They opt for palliative care; they desist in any further cancer treatments, and take medication for the pain. Morphine is common. Morphine also shortens life.

    It’s common for such a patient to have a degree of control over their own medication, however, after a certain point, they will no longer be in sufficient condition to do so.

    After this point, it is very common for caregivers (be they medical professionals or family members) to give more morphine—for the purpose of reducing suffering, of course, not to kill them.

    In practical terms, this often means that the patient will die quite promptly afterwards. This is one of the reasons why, after sometimes a long-drawn-out period of “this person is dying”, healthcare workers can be very accurate about “it’s going to be in the next couple of days”.

    The take-away from this section is: if you would like for this to not happen to you or your loved one, you need to be aware of this practice in advance, because while it’s not the kind of thing that tends to make its way into written hospital/hospice policies, it is very widespread and normalized in the industry on a human level.

    Further reading: Goods, causes and intentions: problems with applying the doctrine of double effect to palliative sedation

    One last thing…

    Planning around our own mortality is never a task that seems pressing, until it’s too late. We recommend doing it anyway, without putting it off, because we can never know what’s around the corner.

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Related Posts

  • Butter vs Ghee – Which is Healthier?
  • With Medical Debt Burdening Millions, a Financial Regulator Steps In to Help

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    When President Barack Obama signed legislation in 2010 to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he said the new agency had one priority: “looking out for people, not big banks, not lenders, not investment houses.”

    Since then, the CFPB has done its share of policing mortgage brokers, student loan companies, and banks. But as the U.S. health care system turns tens of millions of Americans into debtors, this financial watchdog is increasingly working to protect beleaguered patients, adding hospitals, nursing homes, and patient financing companies to the list of institutions that regulators are probing.

    In the past two years, the CFPB has penalized medical debt collectors, issued stern warnings to health care providers and lenders that target patients, and published reams of reports on how the health care system is undermining the financial security of Americans.

    In its most ambitious move to date, the agency is developing rules to bar medical debt from consumer credit reports, a sweeping change that could make it easier for Americans burdened by medical debt to rent a home, buy a car, even get a job. Those rules are expected to be unveiled later this year.

    “Everywhere we travel, we hear about individuals who are just trying to get by when it comes to medical bills,” said Rohit Chopra, the director of the CFPB whom President Joe Biden tapped to head the watchdog agency in 2021.

    “American families should not have their financial lives ruined by medical bills,” Chopra continued.

    The CFPB’s turn toward medical debt has stirred opposition from collection industry officials, who say the agency’s efforts are misguided. “There’s some concern with a financial regulator coming in and saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to sweep this problem under the rug so that people can’t see that there’s this medical debt out there,’” said Jack Brown III, a longtime collector and member of the industry trade group ACA International.

    Brown and others question whether the agency has gone too far on medical billing. ACA International has suggested collectors could go to court to fight any rules barring medical debt from credit reports.

    At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering a broader legal challenge to the agency’s funding that some conservative critics and financial industry officials hope will lead to the dissolution of the agency.

    But CFPB’s defenders say its move to address medical debt simply reflects the scale of a crisis that now touches some 100 million Americans and that a divided Congress seems unlikely to address soon.

    “The fact that the CFPB is involved in what seems like a health care issue is because our system is so dysfunctional that when people get sick and they can’t afford all their medical bills, even with insurance, it ends up affecting every aspect of their financial lives,” said Chi Chi Wu, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.

    CFPB researchers documented that unpaid medical bills were historically the most common form of debt on consumers’ credit reports, representing more than half of all debts on these reports. But the agency found that medical debt is typically a poor predictor of whether someone is likely to pay off other bills and loans.

    Medical debts on credit reports are also frequently riddled with errors, according to CFPB analyses of consumer complaints, which the agency found most often cite issues with bills that are the wrong amount, have already been paid, or should be billed to someone else.

    “There really is such high levels of inaccuracy,” Chopra said in an interview with KFF Health News. “We do not want to see the credit reporting system being weaponized to get people to pay bills they may not even owe.”

    The aggressive posture reflects Chopra, who cut his teeth helping to stand up the CFPB almost 15 years ago and made a name for himself going after the student loan industry.

    Targeting for-profit colleges and lenders, Chopra said he was troubled by an increasingly corporate higher-education system that was turning millions of students into debtors. Now, he said, he sees the health care system doing the same thing, shuttling patients into loans and credit cards and reporting them to credit bureaus. “If we were to rewind decades ago,” Chopra said, “we saw a lot less reliance on tools that banks used to get people to pay.”

    The push to remove medical bills from consumer credit reports culminates two years of intensive work by the CFPB on the medical debt issue.

    The agency warned nursing homes against forcing residents’ friends and family to assume responsibility for residents’ debts. An investigation by KFF Health News and NPR documented widespread use of lawsuits by nursing homes in communities to pursue friends and relatives of nursing home residents.

    The CFPB also has highlighted problems with how hospitals provide financial assistance to low-income patients. Regulators last year flagged the dangers of loans and credit cards that health care providers push on patients, often saddling them with more debt.

    And regulators have gone after medical debt collectors. In December, the CFPB shut down a Pennsylvania company for pursuing patients without ensuring the debts were accurate.

    A few months before that, the agency fined an Indiana company working with medical debt for violating collection laws. Regulators said the company had “risked harming consumers by pressuring or inducing them to pay debts they did not owe.”

    With their business in the crosshairs, debt collectors are warning that cracking down on credit reporting and other collection tools may prompt more hospitals and doctors to demand patients pay upfront for care.

    There are some indications this is happening already, as hospitals and clinics push patients to enroll in loans or credit cards to pay their medical bills.

    Scott Purcell, CEO of ACA International, said it would be wiser for the federal government to focus on making medical care more affordable. “Here we’re coming up with a solution that only takes money away from providers,” Purcell said. “If Congress was involved, there could be more robust solutions.”

    Chopra doesn’t dispute the need for bigger efforts to tackle health care costs.

    “Of course, there are broader things that we would probably want to fix about our health care system,” he said, “but this is having a direct financial impact on so many Americans.”

    The CFPB can’t do much about the price of a prescription or a hospital bill, Chopra continued. What the federal agency can do, he said, is protect patients if they can’t pay their bills.

    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.

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    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.

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  • Low-Dose Aspirin & Anemia

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    We recently wrote about…

    How To Survive A Heart Attack When You’re Alone

    …and one of the items was “if you have aspirin readily available, then after calling an ambulance is the time to take it—but don’t exert yourself trying to find some”.

    But what of aspirin as a preventative?

    Many people take low-dose aspirin daily as a way to reduce the risk of atherothrombosis specifically (and thus, indirectly, they hope to reduce the risk of heart attacks).

    The science of how helpful this is both clear and complicated—that is to say, the stats are not ambiguous*, but there are complicating factors of which many people are unaware.

    *it will reduce the overall risk of cardiovascular events, but will not affect CVD mortality; in other words, it may improve your recovery from minor cardiac events, but is not likely to save you from major ones.

    And also, it has unwanted side effects that can constitute a more relevant threat for many people. We’ll share more on that at the end of today’s article, but first…

    A newly identified threat from daily aspirin use

    A large (n=313,508) study of older adults (median age 73) were sorted into those who used low-dose aspirin as a preventative, and those who did not.

    The primary outcome was incidence of anemia sufficient to require treatment, and the secondary outcome was major bleeding. And, at least 1 in 5 of those who experienced anemia also experienced bleeding.

    The bleeding issue was not “newly identified” and will not surprise many people; after all, the very reason that aspirin is taken as a CVD preventative is for its anti-clotting property of allowing blood to flow more freely.

    The anemia, however, has been getting increasing scientific scrutiny lately, after long going unnoticed in the wild. Given that anemia also gives the symptom “dizziness”, this is also a significant threat for increasing the incidence of falls in the older population, too, which can of course lead to serious complications and ultimately death.

    Here’s the paper itself:

    Low-Dose Aspirin and Risk of Anaemia in Older Adults: Insights from a Danish Register-based Cohort Study

    Want to know more?

    As promised, here’s what we wrote previously about some of aspirin’s other risks:

    Aspirin, CVD Risk, & Potential Counter-Risks

    Take care!

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  • Pinch of Nom – by Kate Allinson & Kay Allinson

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    “Home-style recipes”, because guess where most readers live!

    And: slimming, because trimming the waistline a little is a goal for many after holiday indulgences.

    The key idea here is healthy recipes that “don’t taste like diet food”—often by just switching out a couple of key ingredients, to give a significantly improved nutritional profile while remaining just as tasty, especially when flavors are enhanced with clever spicing and seasoning.

    The food is simple to prepare, while being “special” enough that it could be used very credibly for entertaining too. For that matter, a strength of the book is its potential for use as a creative springboard, if you’re so inclined—there are lots of good ideas in here.

    The recipes themselves are all you’d expect them to be, and presented clearly in an easy-to-follow manner.

    Bottom line: if you’ve ever wanted to cook healthily but you need dinner on the table in the very near future and are stuck for ideas, this book is exactly what you need.

    Click here to check out Pinch of Nom, and liven up your healthy cooking!

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