Cauliflower vs Green Beans – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing cauliflower to green beans, we picked the green beans.
Why?
Both are certainly great! However…
In terms of macros, green beans have slightly more fiber and carbs for the same protein, so get a small, nominal win in this first category.
In the category of vitamins, cauliflower has more of vitamins B5, B6, B9, and C, while green beans have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, E, and K, for another marginal win.
Looking at minerals next, cauliflower has more phosphorus and potassium, while green beans have more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, and manganese, winning more compellingly in this round.
In other considerations, both are great sources of polyphenols, and cauliflower has sulforaphane, so that’s a round slightly in cauliflower’s favor.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for cauliflower, but by all means do enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Broccoli Sprouts & Sulforaphane ← this article talks mostly about broccoli sprouts rather than cauliflower sprouts, but sprouts of any cultivar of Brassica oleracea (e.g. Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, etc) are great for sulforaphane
Enjoy!
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Chickpeas vs Edamame – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing chickpeas to edamame, we picked the edamame.
Why?
Both are great! But there are some important nutritional differences:
In terms of macros, chickpeas have slightly more fiber and 3x the carbs, while edamame has slightly more protein. We’ll call this category a tie, but subjectively you could swing it either way, depending on how you feel about the carbs, since they’re the main difference.
In the category of vitamins, chickpeas have slightly more vitamin B6, while edamame has a lot more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B7, B9, C, E, K, and choline. A very clear win for edamame here.
When it comes to minerals, chickpeas have more iron, selenium, and zinc, while edamame has more calcium, magnesium, and potassium. That’s a 3:3 tie, and they’re equal in the other minerals they both contain, so this round’s indeed tied.
Looking at phytochemicals, edamame is vastly superior for polyphenols (by several orders of magnitude), winning this round easily.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for edamame, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Why You Can’t Skimp On Amino Acids
Enjoy!
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The Protein Mistake That’s Sabotaging Your Progress
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Many Americans consume too much protein and also don’t get enough. And no, it’s not even about protein “quality”.
Here’s the real reason:
The numbers game
Protein protein is important, especially as we get older. It’s critical for muscle repair, connective tissue, hormones, and structural tissues, and without enough of it your body can’t rebuild when it needs to (spoiler: it needs to literally all the time).
From our 30s onwards, our bodies will tend towards sarcopenia (muscle loss), if we don’t take great care to maintain our muscle mass.
Now, maybe you are not planning on entering any bodybuilding competitions (this writer neither!), but higher muscle mass is associated with lower mortality risk, meaning adequate protein and strength training contribute not just to lifespan but to maintaining independence and quality of life. And that’s something that’s important for all of us!
As for how much: research suggests about 1.2–2.0g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day for people with normal* body fat levels, though many benefit from aiming closer to 1.6 g/kg or higher.
*Which for this purpose is “normal healthy”, which for most people is in the ballpark of 15% for men and 21% for women. If you have more body fat than that, you will still need to get your protein in to keep your lean muscle mass levels up, but you can (after the 15% or 21% cutoff) disregard the rest of your bodyweight that comes from additional fat after that, because your body doesn’t need protein to maintain fat!
The mistake: a lot of people, if trying to get enough protein in, will get most of it in one sitting to “get it out of the way” for the day. However, the body simply cannot make use of that much protein at once, so it needs to be spread out more, with 30g/meal being generally considered ideal.
That does of course mean that if you weigh more than 45kg (99 lbs, Americans), then you’ll need more than 3 “meals”, but that’s fine, because a “meal” containing 30g of protein can easily be a high-protein snack, or a protein supplement, between meals (this writer eats so many nuts that you might be tempted to tell me I am what I eat!).
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
- Protein: How Much Do We Need, Really?
- Why You Can’t Skimp On Amino Acids
- Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy? ← this covers which animal products are definitely very health-risky, and which are probably fine according to current best science
Take care!
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The Other Circadian Rhythms
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We’ve talked before about how circadian rhythm pertains not just to when it is ideal for us to sleep or be awake, but also at what times it is best to eat, exercise, and so forth:
The Circadian Rhythm: Far More Than Most People Know
Most people just know about the light consideration, per for example:
- How light can shift your mood and mental health, and
- How light tells you when to sleep, focus and poo
When your body parts clock on and off at the wrong time…
Now, new research has brought attention to how these things and more are governed by different physiological clocks within our bodies—and what this means for our health. In other words, if you are doing the various things at different times than you “should”, you will be training the different parts of your body (each with their independent clocks) to be on a different schedule, and so the different parts of your body will out of temporal sync with each other.
To put this in jet-lag terms: if your brain is in New York, while your heart is in Istanbul (not Constantinople) and your gut is in Tokyo, then this arrangement is not good for the health.
As for how it is not good for your health (i.e. the consequences) there’s still research to be done on some of the longer-term implications, but in the short term, one of the biggest effects is on our mood—most notably, increasing depression scores significantly.
And even more importantly, this is in the real world. That is to say, until quite recently, most data we had from studies on the circadian rhythm was from sleep clinic laboratories, which is great for RCTs but will always have as a limitation that someone sleeping in a lab is going to have some differences than someone sleeping in their own bed at home.
As the researchers said:
❝A critical step to addressing this is the noninvasive collection of physiological time-series data outside laboratory settings in large populations. Digital tools offer promise in this endeavor. Here, using wearable data, we first quantify the degrees of circadian disruption, both between different internal rhythms and between each internal rhythm and the sleep-wake cycle. Our analysis, based on over 50,000 days of data from over 800 first-year training physicians, reveals bidirectional links between digital markers of circadian disruption and mood both before and after they began shift work, while accounting for confounders such as demographic and geographic variables. We further validate this by finding clinically relevant changes in the 9-item Patient Health Questionnaire score.❞
Read in full: The real-world association between digital markers of circadian disruption and mental health risks
That questionnaire by the way sounds like an arbitrary thing they just made up, but the PHQ-9 (as it is known to its friends) is in fact the current intentional gold standard for measuring depression; we share it at the top of our article about depression, here:
The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← the test takes 2 minutes and you get immediate results
Want to know more?
For more about getting one’s entire self back into temporal sync (hey, wasn’t that the plot of a Star Trek episode?), sleep specialist Dr. Michael Breus wrote this excellent book that we reviewed a little while back:
Enjoy!
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Antibiotics? Think Thrice
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Antibiotics: Useful Even Less Often Than Previously Believed (And Still Just As Dangerous)
You probably already know that antibiotics shouldn’t be taken unless absolutely necessary. Not only does taking antibiotics frivolously increase antibiotic resistance (which is bad, and kills people), but also…
It’s entirely possible for the antibiotics to not only not help, but instead wipe out your gut’s “good bacteria” that were keeping other things in check.
Those “other things” can include fungi like Candida albicans.
Candida, which we all have in us to some degree, feeds on sugar (including the sugar formed from breaking down alcohol, by the way) and refined carbs. Then it grows, and puts its roots through your intestinal walls, linking with your neural system. Then it makes you crave the very things that will feed it and allow it to put bigger holes in your intestinal walls.
Don’t believe us? Read: Candida albicans-Induced Epithelial Damage Mediates Translocation through Intestinal Barriers
(That’s scientist-speak for “Candida puts holes in your intestines, and stuff can then go through those holes”)
And as for how that comes about, it’s like we said:
See also: Candida albicans as a commensal and opportunistic pathogen in the intestine
That’s not all…
And that’s just C. albicans, never mind things like C. diff. that can just outright kill you easily.
We don’t have room to go into everything here, but you might like to check out:
Four Ways Antibiotics Can Kill You
It gets worse (now comes the new news)
So, what are antibiotics good for? Surely, for clearing up chesty coughs, lower respiratory tract infections, right? It’s certainly one of the two things that antibiotics are most well-known for being good at and often necessary for (the other being preventing/treating sepsis, for example in serious and messy wounds).
But wait…
A large, nationwide (US) observational study of people who sought treatment in primary or urgent care settings for lower respiratory tract infections found…
(drumroll please)
…the use of antibiotics provided no measurable impact on the severity or duration of coughs even if a bacterial infection was present.
Read for yourself:
And in the words of the lead author of that study,
❝Lower respiratory tract infections tend to have the potential to be more dangerous, since about 3% to 5% of these patients have pneumonia. But not everyone has easy access at an initial visit to an X-ray, which may be the reason clinicians still give antibiotics without any other evidence of a bacterial infection.❞
So, what’s to be done about this? On a large scale, Dr. Merenstein recommends:
❝Serious cough symptoms and how to treat them properly needs to be studied more, perhaps in a randomized clinical trial as this study was observational and there haven’t been any randomized trials looking at this issue since about 2012.❞
This does remind us that, while not a RCT, there is a good ongoing observational study that everyone with a smartphone can participate in:
Dr. Peter Small’s medical AI: “The Cough Doctor”
In the meantime, he advises that when COVID and SARS have been ruled out, then “basic symptom-relieving medications plus time brings a resolution to most people’s infections”.
You can read a lot more detail here:
Antibiotics aren’t effective for most lower tract respiratory infections
In summary…
Sometimes, antibiotics really are a necessary and life-saving medication. But most of the time they’re not, and given their great potential for harm, they may be best simultaneously viewed as the very dangerous threat they also are, and used only when those “heavy guns” are truly what’s required.
Take care!
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8 Critical Signs Of Blood Clots That You Shouldn’t Ignore
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Blood clots can form as part of deep vein thrombosis or for other reasons; wherever they form (unless they are just doing their job healing a wound) they can cause problems. But how to know what’s going on inside our body?
Telltale signs
Our usual medical/legal disclaimer applies here, and we are not doctors, let alone your doctors, and even if we were we couldn’t diagnose from afar… But for educational purposes, here are the eight signs from the video:
- Swelling: especially if only on one leg (assuming you have no injury to account for it), which may feel tight and uncomfortable
- Warmness: does the area warmer to the touch? This may be because of the body’s inflammatory response trying to deal with a blood clot
- Tenderness: again, caused by the inflammation in response to the clot
- Discolored skin: it could be reddish, or bruise-like. This could be patchy or spread over a larger area, because of a clot blocking the flow of blood
- Shortness of breath: if a clot makes it to the lungs, it can cause extra problems there (pulmonary embolism), and shortness of breath is the first sign of this
- Coughing up blood: less common than the above but a much more serious sign; get thee to a hospital
- Chest pain: a sharp or stabbing pain, in particular. The pain may worsen with deep breaths or coughing. Again, seek medical attention.
For more on recognizing these signs (including helpful visuals), and more on what to do about them and how to avoid them in the first place, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Further reading
You might like to read:
Dietary Changes for Artery Health
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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How to Eat to Change How You Drink – by Dr. Brooke Scheller
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.
Whether you want to stop drinking or just cut down, this book can help. But what makes it different from the other reduce/stop drinking books we’ve reviewed?
Mostly, it’s about nutrition. This book focuses on the way that alcohol changes our relationship to food, our gut, our blood sugars, and more. The author also explains how reducing/stopping drinking, without bearing these things in mind, can be unnecessarily extra hard.
The remedy? To bear them in mind, of course, but that requires knowing them. So what she does is explain the physiology of what’s going on in terms of each of the above things (and more), and how to adjust your diet to make up for what alcohol has been doing to you, so that you can reduce/quit without feeling constantly terrible.
The style is very pop-science, light in tone, readable. She makes reference to a lot of hard science, but doesn’t discuss it in more depth than is necessary to convey the useful information. So, this is a practical book, aimed at all people who want to reduce/quit drinking.
Bottom line: if you feel like it’s hard to drink less because it feels like something is missing, it’s probably because indeed something is missing, and this book can help you bridge that gap!
Click here to check out How To Eat To Change How You Drink, and do just that!
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