Chicken or Fish – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing chicken to fish, we picked the fish.
Why?
To understand the choice, we have to start a bit earlier on the decision tree. For most people most of the time, when it comes to a diet high in plants or high in animals, the plant-centric diet will generally be best:
Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy?
When it comes to animal meats, red meat is a fairly uncontroversial first thing to strike off the list:
…with pork and some other meats not being much better.
But chicken? Poultry in general appears to be quite health-neutral. The jury is out and the science has mixed results, but the data is leaning towards “it’s probably fine”.
See for example this huge (n=29,682) study:
this same paper shows that…
❝higher intake of processed meat, unprocessed red meat, or poultry, but not fish, was significantly associated with a small increased risk of incident CVD, whereas higher intake of processed meat or unprocessed red meat, but not poultry or fish, was significantly associated with a small increased risk of all-cause mortality❞
So, since poultry isn’t significantly increasing all-cause mortality, and fish isn’t significantly increasing all-cause mortality or cardiovascular disease, fish comes out as the hands-down (fins-down?) winner.
One more (this time, easy) choice to make, though!
While fish in general (please, not fried, though!) is generally considered quite healthy, there is a big difference (more than you might think, and for reasons that are quite alarming), between…
Health Risks & Nutrition: Farmed Fish vs Wild-Caught
Enjoy, and take care!
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Dr. Patrick Walsh’s Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer – by Dr. Patrick Walsh & Janet Farrar Worthington
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Prostate cancer is not glamorous or fun, and neither is this book.
Nevertheless, it’s a disease that affects 12% of men in general, and 60% of men aged 60+, with that percentage climbing every year after that.
So, if you have a prostate or love someone who has one, this book is worthwhile reading—yes, even as a preventative.
Like many cancers, prostate cancer is easy to treat if caught very early, becomes harder to treat as it goes, and almost impossible to cure if it gets as far as metastasis (i.e., it spread). Like all cancers, it’s better off avoided entirely if possible.
This book covers all the stages:
- How to avoid it
- How to check for it
- How to “nip it in the bud”
- Why some might want to delay treatment (!)
- What options are available afterwards
This latter is quite extensive, and covers not just surgery, but radiation, thermo- or cryoablation, and hormone therapy.
And as for surgery, not just “remove the tumor”, but other options like radical prostatectomy, and even orchiectomy. Not many men will choose to have their testicles removed to stop them from feeding the prostate, but the point is that this book is comprehensive.
It’s asking whenever possible “is there another option?” and exploring all options, with information and without judgment, at each stage.
The writing style (likely co-author Worthington’s influence; she is an award-winning science-writer) is very “for the layman”, and that’s really helpful in demystifying a lot of what can be quite opaque in the field of oncology.
Bottom line: absolutely not an enjoyable read, but a potentially lifesaving one, especially given the odds we mentioned up top.
Click here to check out Dr. Patrick Walsh’s Guide To Surviving Prostate Cancer, and be prepared!
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Statins: Study Insights
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Q: Can you let us know about more studies that have been done on statins? Are they really worth taking?
That is a great question! We imagine it might have been our recent book recommendation that prompted it? It’s quite a broad question though, so we’ll do that as a main feature in the near future!
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How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol
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Rethinking Drinking
When we’re looking at certain health risks, there are often five key lifestyle factors that have a big impact; they are:
- Have a good diet
- Get good exercise
- Get good sleep
- Reduce (or eliminate) alcohol
- Don’t smoke
Today, we’re focussing the alcohol bit. Maybe you’d like to quit, maybe just cut down, maybe the topic just interests you… So, here’s a quick rundown of some things that will help make that a lot easier:
With a big enough “why”, you can overcome any “how”
Research and understand the harm done by drinking, including:
And especially as we get older, memory problems:
Alcohol-related dementia: an update of the evidence
And as for fear of missing out, or perhaps even of no longer being relaxed/fun… Did you ever, while sober, have a very drunk person try to converse with you, and you thought “I wish that were me”?
Probably not
Know your triggers
Why do you drink? If your knee-jerk response is “because I like it”, dig deeper. What events prompt you to have a drink?
- Some will be pure habit born of convention—perhaps with a meal, for example
- Others may be stress-management—after work, perhaps
- Others may be pseudo-medicinal—a nightcap for better* sleep, for instance
*this will not work. Alcohol may make us sleepy but it will then proceed to disrupt that very sleep and make it less restorative
Become mindful
Now that you know why you’d like to drink less (or quit entirely), and you know what triggers you to drink, you can circumvent that a little, by making deals with yourself, for example
- “I can drink alcohol, if and only if I have consumed a large glass of water first” (cuts out being thirsty as a trigger to drink)
- “I can drink alcohol, if and only if I meditate for at least 5 minutes first” (reduces likelihood of stress-drinking)
- “I can drink alcohol, if and only if it is with the largest meal of the day” (minimizes total alcohol consumption)
Note that these things also work around any FOMO, “Fear Of Missing Out”. It’s easier to say “no” when you know you can have it later if you still want it.
Get a good replacement drink
There are a lot of alcohol-free alcohol-like drinks around these days, and many of them are very good. Experiment and see. But!
It doesn’t even have to be that. Sometimes what we need is not even an alcohol-like drink, but rather, drinkable culinary entertainment.
If you like “punch-in-the-face” flavors (as this writer does), maybe strong black coffee is the answer. If you like “crisp and clear refreshment” (again, same), maybe your favorite herbal tea will do it for you. Or maybe for you it’ll be lemon-water. Or homemade ginger ale.
Whatever it is… make it fun, and make it yours!
Bonus item: find replacement coping strategies
This one goes if you’ve been using alcohol to cope with something. Stress, depression, anxiety, whatever it may be for you.
The thing is, it feels like it helps briefly in the moment, but it makes each of those things progressively worse in the long-run, so it’s not sustainable.
Consider instead things like therapy, exercise, and/or a new hobby to get immersed in; whatever works for you!
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The BAT-pause!
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When Cold Weather & The Menopause Battle It Out
You may know that (moderate, safe) exposure to the cold allows our body to convert our white and yellow fat into the much healthier brown fat—also called brown adipose tissue, or “BAT” to its friends.
If you didn’t already know that, then well, neither did scientists until about 15 years ago:
The Changed Metabolic World with Human Brown Adipose Tissue: Therapeutic Visions
You can read more about it here:
Cool Temperature Alters Human Fat and Metabolism
This is important, especially because the white fat that gets converted is the kind that makes up most visceral fat—the kind most associated with all-cause mortality:
Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It ← this is not the same as your subcutaneous fat, the kind that sits directly under your skin and keeps you warm; this is the fat that goes between your organs and of which we should only have a small amount!
The BAT-pause
It’s been known (since before the above discovery) that BAT production slows considerably as we get older. Not too shocking—after all, many metabolic functions slow as we get older, so why should fat regulation be any different?
But! Rodent studies found that this was tied less to age, but to ovarian function: rats who underwent ovariectomies suffered reduced BAT production, regardless of their age.
Naturally, it’s been difficult to recreate such studies in humans, because it’s difficult to find a large sample of young adults willing to have their ovaries whipped out (or even suppressed chemically) to see how badly their metabolism suffers as a result.
Nor can an observational study (for example, of people who incidentally have ovaries removed due to ovarian cancer) usefully be undertaken, because then the cancer itself and any additional cancer treatments would be confounding factors.
Perimenopausal study to the rescue!
A recent (published last month, at time of writing!) study looked at women around the age of menopause, but specifically in cohorts before and after, measuring BAT metabolism.
By dividing the participants into groups based on age and menopausal status, and dividing the post-menopausal group into “takes HRT” and “no HRT” groups, and dividing the pre-menopausal group into “normal ovarian function” and “ovarian production of estrogen suppressed to mimic slightly early menopause” groups (there’s a drug for that), and then having groups exposed to warm and cold temperatures, and measuring BAT metabolism in all cases, they were able to find…
It is about estrogen, not age!
You can read more about the study here:
“Good” fat metabolism changes tied to estrogen loss, not necessarily to aging, shows study
…and the study itself, here:
Brown adipose tissue metabolism in women is dependent on ovarian status
What does this mean for men?
This means nothing directly for (cis) men, sorry.
But to satisfy your likely curiosity: yes, testosterone does at least moderately suppress BAT metabolism—based on rodent studies, anyway, because again it’s difficult to find enough human volunteers willing to have their testicles removed for science (without there being other confounding variables in play, anyway):
Testosterone reduces metabolic brown fat activity in male mice
So, that’s bad per se, but there isn’t much to be done about it, since the rest of your (addressing our male readers here) metabolism runs on testosterone, as do many of your bodily functions, and you would suffer many unwanted effects without it.
However, as men do typically have notably less body fat in general than women (this is regulated by hormones), the effects of changes in BAT metabolism are rather less pronounced in men (per testosterone level changes) than in women (per estrogen level changes), because there’s less overall fat to convert.
In summary…
While menopausal HRT is not necessarily a silver bullet to all metabolic problems, its BAT-maintaining ability is certainly one more thing in its favor.
See also:
Dr. Jen Gunter | What You Should Have Been Told About The Menopause Beforehand
Take care!
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Anise vs Diabetes & Menopause
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What A Daily Gram Of Anise Can Do
Anise, specifically the seed of the plant, also called aniseed, is enjoyed for its licorice taste—as well as its medicinal properties.
Let’s see how well the science lives up to the folk medicine…
What medicinal properties does it claim?
The main contenders are:
- Reduces menopause symptoms
- Reduces blood sugar levels
- Reduces inflammation
Does it reduce menopause symptoms?
At least some of them! Including hot flashes and bone density loss. This seems to be due to the estrogenic-like activity of anethole, the active compound in anise that gives it these effects:
Estrogenic activity of isolated compounds and essential oils of Pimpinella species
1g of anise/day yielded a huge reduction in frequency and severity of hot flashes, compared to placebo*:
*you may be wondering what the placebo is for 1g of a substance that has a very distinctive taste. The researchers used capsules, with 3x330g as the dose, either anise seed or potato starch.
❝In the experimental group, the frequency and severity of hot flashes before the treatment were 4.21% and 56.21% and, after that, were 1.06% and 14.44% at the end of the fourth week respectively. No change was found in the frequency and severity of hot flashes in the control group. The frequency and severity of hot flashes was decreased during 4 weeks of follow up period. P. anisum is effective on the frequency and severity of hot flashes in postmenopausal women. ❞
See for yourself: The Study on the Effects of Pimpinella anisum on Relief and Recurrence of Menopausal Hot Flashes
As for bone mineral density, we couldn’t find a good study for anise, but we did find this one for fennel, which is a plant of the same family and also with the primary active compound anethole:
The Prophylactic Effect of Fennel Essential Oil on Experimental Osteoporosis
That was a rat study, though, so we’d like to see studies done with humans.
Summary on this one: it clearly helps against hot flashes (per the very convincing human study we listed above); it probably helps against bone mineral density loss.
Does it reduce blood sugar levels?
This one got a flurry of attention all so recently, on account of this research review:
Review on Anti-diabetic Research on Two Important Spices: Trachyspermum ammi and Pimpinella anisum
If you read this (and we do recommend reading it! It has a lot more information than we can squeeze in here!) one of the most interesting things about the in vivo anti-diabetic activity of anise was that while it did lower the fasting blood glucose levels, that wasn’t the only effect:
❝Over a course of 60 days, study participants were administered seed powders (5 g/d), which resulted in significant antioxidant, anti-diabetic, and hypolipidemic effects.
Notably, significant reductions in fasting blood glucose levels were observed. This intervention also elicited alterations in the lipid profile, LPO, lipoprotein levels, and the high-density lipoprotein (HDL) level.
Moreover, the serum levels of essential antioxidants, such as beta carotene, vitamin C, vitamin A, and vitamin E, which are typically decreased in diabetic patients, underwent a reversal.❞
That’s just one of the studies cited in that review (the comments lightly edited here for brevity), but it stands out, and you can read that study in its entirety (it’s well worth reading).
Rajeshwari et al, bless them, added a “tl;dr” at the top of their already concise abstract; their “tl;dr” reads:
❝Both the seeds significantly influenced almost all the parameters without any detrimental effects by virtue of a number of phytochemicals, vitamins and minerals present in the seeds having therapeutic effects.❞
Shortest answer: yes, yes it does
Does it fight inflammation?
This one’s quick and simple enough: yes it does; it’s full of antioxidants which thus also have an anti-inflammatory effect:
Review of Pharmacological Properties and Chemical Constituents of Pimpinella anisum
…which can also be used an essential oil, applied topically, to fight both pain and the inflammation that causes it—at least in rats and mice:
❝Indomethacin and etodolac were treated reference drugs for the anti-inflammatory activity. Aspirin and morphine hydrochloride were treated reference drugs for the analgesic activity. The results showed that fixed oil of P. anisum has an anti-inflammatory action more than etodolac and this effect was as strong as indomethacin. P. anisum induces analgesic effect comparable to that of 100 mg/kg Aspirin and 10 mg/kg morphine at 30 th min. of the study❞
Summary of this section:
- Aniseeds are a potent source of antioxidants, which fight inflammation.
- Anise essential oil is probably also useful as a topical anti-inflammatory and analgesic agent, but we’d like to see human tests to know for sure.
Is it safe?
For most people, enjoyed in moderation (e.g., within the dosage parameters described in the above studies), anise is safe. However:
- If you’re allergic to it, it won’t be safe
- Its estrogen-mimicking effects could cause problems if you have (or have a higher risk factor for) breast cancer, ovarian cancer, or endometriosis.
- For most men, the main concern is that it may lower sperm count.
Where to get it?
As ever, we don’t sell it (or anything else), but for your convenience, you can buy the seeds in bulk on Amazon, or in case you prefer it, here’s an example of it available as an essential oil.
Enjoy!
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Rethinking Exercise: The Workout Paradox
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The notion of running a caloric deficit (i.e., expending more calories than we consume) to reduce bodyfat is appealing in its simplicity, but… we’d say “it doesn’t actually work outside of a lab”, but honestly, it doesn’t actually work outside of a calculator.
Why?
For a start, exercise calorie costs are quite small numbers compared to metabolic base rate. Our brain alone uses a huge portion of our daily calories, and the rest of our body literally never stops doing stuff. Even if we’re lounging in bed and ostensibly not moving, on a cellular level we stay incredibly busy, and all that costs (and the currency is: calories).
Since that cost is reflected in the body’s budget per kg of bodyweight, a larger body (regardless of its composition) will require more calories than a smaller one. We say “regardless of its composition” because this is true regardless—but for what it’s worth, muscle is more “costly” to maintain than fat, which is one of several reasons why the average man requires more daily calories than the average woman, since on average men will tend to have more muscle.
And if you do exercise because you want to run out the budget so the body has to “spend” from fat stores?
Good luck, because while it may work in the very short term, the body will quickly adapt, like an accountant seeing your reckless spending and cutting back somewhere else. That’s why in all kinds of exercise except high-intensity interval training, a period of exercise will be followed by a metabolic slump, the body’s “austerity measures”, to balance the books.
You may be wondering: why is it different for HIIT? It’s because it changes things up frequently enough that the body doesn’t get a chance to adapt. To labor the financial metaphor, it involves lying to your accountant, so that the compensation is not made. Congratulations: you’re committing calorie fraud (but it’s good for the body, so hey).
That doesn’t mean other kinds of exercise are useless (or worse, necessarily counterproductive), though! Just, that we must acknowledge that other forms of exercise are great for various aspects of physical health (strengthening the body, mobilizing blood and lymph, preventing disease, enjoying mental health benefits, etc) that don’t really affect fat levels much (which are decided more in the kitchen than the gym—and even in the category of diet, it’s more about what and how and when you eat, rather than how much).
For more information on metabolic balance in the context of exercise, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Are You A Calorie-Burning Machine?
- Burn! How To Boost Your Metabolism
- How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
- Lose Weight, But Healthily
- Build Muscle (Healthily!)
- How To Gain Weight (Healthily!)
Take care!
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