Chipotle Chili Wild Rice
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.
This is a very gut-healthy recipe that’s also tasty and filling, and packed with polyphenols too. What’s not to love?
You will need
- 1 cup cooked wild rice (we suggest cooking it with 1 tbsp chia seeds added)
- 7 oz cooked sweetcorn (can be from a tin or from frozen or cook it yourself)
- 4 oz charred jarred red peppers (these actually benefit from being from a jar—you can use fresh or frozen if necessary, but only jarred will give you the extra gut-healthy benefits from fermentation)
- 1 avocado, pitted, peeled, and cut into small chunks
- ½ red onion, thinly sliced
- 6–8 sun-dried tomatoes, chopped
- 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 2 tsp chipotle chili paste (adjust per your heat preferences)
- 1 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Juice of 1 lime
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Mix the cooked rice, red onion, sweetcorn, red peppers, avocado pieces, and sun-dried tomato, in a bowl. We recommend to do it gently, or you will end up with guacamole in there.
2) Mix the olive oil, lime juice, chipotle chili paste, black pepper, and MSG/salt, in another bowl. If perchance you have a conveniently small whisk, now is the time to use it. Failing that, a fork will suffice.
3) Add the contents of the second bowl to the first, tossing gently but thoroughly to combine well, and serve.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Brown Rice vs Wild Rice – Which is Healthier?
- Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
- Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
Melatonin: A Safe, Natural Sleep Aid?
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.
Melatonin: A safe sleep supplement?
Melatonin is a hormone normally made in our pineal gland. It helps regulate our circadian rhythm, by making us sleepy.
It has other roles too—it has a part to play in regulating immune function, something that also waxes and wanes as a typical day goes by.
Additionally, since melatonin and cortisol are antagonistic to each other, a sudden increase in either will decrease the other. Our brain takes advantage of this, by giving us a cortisol spike in the morning to help us wake up.
As a supplement, it’s generally enjoyed with the intention of inducing healthy, natural, restorative sleep.
Does it really induce healthy, natural, restorative, sleep?
Yes! Well, “natural” is a little subject and relative, if you’re taking it as a supplement, but it’s something your body produces naturally anyway.
Contrast with, for example, benzodiazepines (that whole family of medications with names ending in -azopan or -alozam), or other tranquilizing drugs that do not so much induce healthy sleep, but rather reduce your brain function and hopefully knock you out, and/but often have unwanted side effects, and a tendency to create dependency.
Melatonin, unlike most of those drugs, does not create dependency, and furthermore, we don’t develop tolerance to it. In other words, the same dose will continue working (we won’t need more and more).
In terms of benefits, melatonin not only reduces the time to fall asleep and increases total sleep time, but also (quite a bonus) improves sleep quality, too:
Meta-Analysis: Melatonin for the Treatment of Primary Sleep Disorders
Because it is a natural hormone rather than a drug with many side effects and interactions, it’s also beneficial for those who need good sleep and/but don’t want tranquilizing:
Any other benefits?
Yes! It can also help guard against Seasonal Affective Disorder, also called seasonal depression. Because SAD is not just about “not enough light = not enough serotonin”, but also partly about circadian rhythm and (the body is not so sure what time of day it is when there are long hours of darkness, or even, in the other hemisphere / other time of year, long hours of daylight), melatonin can help, by giving your brain something to “anchor” onto, provided you take it at the same time each day. See:
- Is seasonal affective disorder a disorder of circadian rhythms?
- The circadian basis of winter depression: the case for low-dose melatonin use
As a small bonus, melatonin also promotes HGH production (important for maintaining bone and muscle mass, especially in later life):
Anything we should worry about?
Assuming taking a recommended dose only (0.5mg–10mg per day), toxicity is highly unlikely, especially given that it has a half-life of only 40–60 minutes, so it’ll be eliminated quite quickly.
However! It does indeed induce sleepiness, so for example, don’t take melatonin and then try to drive or operate heavy machinery—or, ideally, do anything other than go to bed.
It can interfere with some medications. We mentioned that melatonin helps regulate immune function, so for example that’s something to bear in mind if you’re on immunosuppressants or otherwise have an autoimmune disorder. It can also interfere with blood pressure medications and blood thinners, and may make epilepsy meds less effective.
As ever, if in doubt, please speak with your doctor and/or pharmacist.
Where to get it?
As ever, we don’t sell it (or anything else), but for your convenience, here is an example product on Amazon.
Enjoy!
Share This Post
The Telomere Effect – by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Elissa Epel
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.
Telomeres can be pretty mystifying to the person with a lay interest in longevity. Beyond “they’re the little caps that sit on the end of your DNA, and longer is better, and when they get short, damage occurs, and aging”, how do they fit into the big picture?
Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Elissa Epel excel at explaining the marvelous world of telomeres…
- how they work
- what affects them
- and how and why
…and the extent to which changes are or aren’t reversible.
For some of us, the ship has sailed on avoiding a lot of early-life damage to our telomeres, and now we have a damage-mitigation task ahead. That’s where the authors get practical.
Indeed, the whole third part of the book is titled “Help Your Body Protect Its Cells“, and indeed covers not just “from now on” protection, but undoing some of the damage already done (yes, telomeres can be lengthened—it gets harder as we get older, but absolutely can be done).
In short: if you’d like to avoid further damage to your telomeres where possible, and reverse some of the damage done already, this book will set you on the right track.
Share This Post
6 Signs Of Stroke (One Month In Advance)
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.
Most people can recognise the signs of a stroke when it’s just happened, but knowing the signs that appear a month beforehand would be very useful. That’s what this video’s about!
The Warning Signs
- Persistently elevated blood pressure: one more reason to have an at-home testing kit and use it regularly! Or a smartwatch or similar that’ll do it for you. The reason this is relevant is because high blood pressure can lead to damaging blood vessels, causing a stroke.
- Excessive fatigue: of course, this one can have many possible causes, but one of them is a “transient ischemic attack” (TIA), which is essentially a micro-stroke, and can be a precursor to a more severe stroke. So, we’re not doing the Google MD thing here of saying “if this, then that”, but we are saying: paying attention to the overall patterns can be very useful. Rather than fretting unduly about a symptom in isolation, see how it fits into the big picture.
- Vision problems: especially if sudden-onset with no obvious alternative cause can be a sign of neural damage, and may indicate a stroke on the way.
- Speech problems: if there’s not an obvious alternative explanation (e.g. you’ve just finished your third martini, or was this the fourth?), then speech problems (e.g. slurred speech, trouble forming sentences, etc) are a very worrying indicator and should be treated as a medical emergency.
- Neurological problems: a bit of a catch-all category, but memory issues, loss of balance, nausea without an obvious alternative cause, are all things that should get checked out immediately just in case.
- Numbness or weakness in the extremities: especially if on one side of the body only, is often caused by the TIA we mentioned earlier. If it’s both sides, then peripheral neuropathy may be the culprit, but having a neurologist take a look at it is a good idea either way.
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Two Things You Can Do To Improve Stroke Survival Chances
Take care!
Share This Post
Related Posts
A Deeper Dive Into Seaweed
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.
We wrote briefly about nori yesterday, when we compared it with well-known superfood spirulina. In nutritional terms, it blew spirulina out of the water:
Spirulina vs Nori – Which Is Healthier?
We also previously touched on it here:
21% Stronger Bones in a Year at 62? Yes, It’s Possible (No Calcium Supplements Needed!) ← nori was an important part of the diet enjoyed here
What is nori?
Nori is a seaweed, but that can mean lots of different things. In nori’s case, it’s an aggregate of several kinds of red algae that clump together in the sea.
When dried and/or toasted (which processes improve* the nutritional value rather than diminishing it, by the way), it looks dark green or dark purple to black in color.
*Effects of pan- and air fryer-roasting on volatile and umami compounds and antioxidant activity of dried laver (Porphyra dentata) ← this is nori, by another name
If you enjoy sushi, nori is the dark flat sheety stuff that other things are often wrapped in.
The plant that has animal nutrients
As established in the head-to-head we linked above, nori is a nutritional powerhouse. But not only is it very full of the perhaps-expected vitamins and minerals, it also contains:
Omega-3 fatty acids, including EPA, which plants do not normally have (plants usually have just ALA, which the body can convert into other forms including EPA). While ALA is versatile, having EPA in food saves the body the job of converting it, and thus makes it more readily bioavailable. For more on the benefits of this, see:
What Omega-3 Fatty Acids Really Do For Us
Iodine, which land plants don’t generally have, but seaweed usually does. However, nori contains less iodine than other kinds of seaweed, which is (counterintuitively) good, since other kinds of seaweed often contain megadoses that go too far the other way and can cause different health problems.
- Recommended daily amount of iodine: 150µg ← note that’s micrograms, not milligrams
- One 10g serving of dried nori contains: 232µg ← this is good
- Tolerable daily upper limit of iodine: 1,100µg (i.e: 1.1mg)
- One 10g serving of dried kombu (kelp) contains: 13,270µg (i.e: 13.3mg) ← this is far too much; not good!
So: a portion of nori puts us into the healthiest spot of the range, whereas a portion of another example seaweed would put us nearly 13x over the tolerable upper limit.
For why this matters, see:
- 8 Signs Of Iodine Deficiency You Might Not Expect
- Foods For Managing Hypothyroidism (incl. Hashimoto’s)
- Eat To Beat Hyperthyroidism!
As you might note from the mentions of both hypo- and hyperthyroidism, (which are exacerbated by too little and too much iodine, respectively) hitting the iodine sweet spot is important, and nori is a great way to do that.
Vitamin B12, again not usually found in plants (most vegans supplement, often with nutritional yeast, which is technically neither an animal nor a plant). However, nori scores even higher:
Vitamin B12-Containing Plant Food Sources for Vegetarians
Beyond nutrients
Nori is also one of the few foods that actually live up the principle of a “detox diet”, as it can help remove toxins such as dioxins:
Detox diets for toxin elimination and weight management: a critical review of the evidence
It’s also been…
❝revealed to have anti-aging, anti-cancer, anti-coagulant, anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial, anti-oxidant, anti-diabetic, anti-Alzheimer and anti-tuberculose activities.❞
~ Dr. Şükran Çakir Arica et al.
Read: A study on the rich compounds and potential benefits of algae: A review
(for this to make sense you will need to remember that nori is, as we mentioned, an aggregate of diverse red algae species; in that paper, you can scroll down to Table 1, and see which species has which qualities. Anything whose name starts with “Porphyra” or “Porphridum” is found in nori)
Is it safe?
Usually! There are two potential safety issues:
- Seaweed can, while it’s busy absorbing valuable minerals from the sea, also absorb heavy metals if there are such pollutants in the region. For this reason, it is good to buy a product with trusted certifications, such that it will have been tested for such along the way.
- Seaweed can, while it’s busy absorbing things plants don’t usually have from the sea, also absorb allergens from almost-equally-small crustaceans. So if you have a seafood allergy, seaweed could potentially trigger that.
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
The Science and Technology of Growing Young – by Sergey Young
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.
There are a lot of very optimistic works out there that promise the scientific breakthroughs that will occur very soon. Even amongst the hyperoptimistic transhumanism community, there is the joke of “where’s my flying car?” Sometimes prefaced with “Hey Ray, quick question…” as a nod to (or sometimes, direct address to) Ray Kurzweil, the Google computer scientist and futurist.
So, how does this one measure up?
Our author, Sergey Young, is not a scientist, but an investor with fingers in many pies. Specifically, pies relating to preventative medicine and longevity. Does that make him an unreliable narrator? Not necessarily, but it means we need to at least bear that context in mind.
But, also, he’s investing in those fields because he believes in them, and wants to benefit from them himself. In essense, he’s putting his money where his mouth is. But, enough about the author. What of the book?
It’s a whirlwind tour of the main areas of reseach and development, in the recent past, the present, and the near future. He talks about problems, and compelling solutions to problems.
If the book has a weak point, it’s that it doesn’t really talk about the problems to those solutions—that is, what can still go wrong. He’s excited about what we can do, and it’s somebody else’s job to worry about pitfalls along the way.
As to the “and what you can do now?” We’ll summarize:
- Mediterranean diet, mostly plant-based
- Get moderate exercise daily
- Get good sleep
- Don’t drink or smoke
- Get your personal health genomics data
- Get regular medical check-ups
- Look after your mental health too
Bottom line: this is a great primer on the various avenues of current anti-aging research and development, with discussion ranging from the the technological to the sociological. It has some health tips too, but the real meat of the work is the insight into the workings of the longevity industry.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
Lyme Disease At-A-Glance
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.
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
❝Good info as always…was wondering if you have any recommendations for fighting Lyme disease naturally along wDr advice? Dr’s aren’t real keen on alternatives so always interested. Thanks❞
That depends on whether we’re looking at prevention or cure!
Prevention:
- Try not to get bitten by Lyme-disease-carrying ticks. Boots and long socks are your friends. As are long-gauntletted gloves for gardening.
- If you are in a high-risk area and/or engage in high-risk activities, check your body daily.
- This is because it usually takes 36–48 hours of being attached for a tick to cause an infection
- Obviously best if you can get a partner or close friend to help you with this, unless you have mastered some advanced pretzel positions of yoga.
- Contrary to many folk remedies, the safest way to remove a tick is with tweezers (carefully!).
- If you find and remove a tick, or otherwise suspect you have developed symptoms, go to your doctor immediately (not next week; today; time really counts for this).
Cure:
- No. Sorry. Regretfully, antibiotics are the only known effective treatment.
However! As with almost any kind of recovery, getting good rest, including good quality sleep, will hasten things. Also sensible is reducing stress if possible, and anything that could worsen inflammation.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
