A Tale Of Two Cinnamons

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Cinnamon’s Health Benefits (But Watch Out!)

Cinnamon is enjoyed for its sweet and punchy flavor. It also has important health properties!

Let’s take a look at the science…

A Tale Of Two Cinnamons

In your local supermarket, there is likely “cinnamon” and if you’re lucky, also “sweet cinnamon”. The difference between these is critical to understand before we continue:

“Cinnamon” = Cinnamomum cassia or Cinnamomum aromaticum. This is cheapest and most readily available. It has a relatively high cinnamaldehyde content, and a high coumarin content.

“Sweet cinnamon” Cinnamomum verum or Cinnamomum zeylanicum. It has a lower cinnamaldehyde content, and/but a much lower (almost undetectable) coumarin content.

You may be wondering: what’s with the “or” in both of those cases? Each simply has two botanical names in use. It’s inconvenient and confusing, but that’s how it is.

Great! What’s cinnamaldehyde and what’s coumarin?

Cinnamaldehyde is what gives cinnamon its “spice” aspect; it’s strong and fragrant. It also gives cinnamon most of its health benefits.

As a quick aside: it’s also used as the flavoring element in cinnamon flavored vapes, and in that form, it can cause health problems. So do eat it, but we recommend not to vape it.

Coumarin is toxic in large quantities.

The recommended safe amount is 0.1mg/kg, so you could easily go over this with a couple of teaspoons of cassia cinnamon:

Toxicology and risk assessment of coumarin: focus on human data

…while in Sweet/True/Ceylon cinnamon, those levels are almost undetectable:

Medicinal properties of ‘true’ cinnamon (Cinnamomum zeylanicum): a systematic review

If you have a cinnamon sensitivity, it is likely, but not necessarily, tied to the coumarin content rather than the cinnamaldehyde content.

Summary of this section before moving on:

“Cinnamon”, or cassia cinnamon, has about 50% stronger health benefits than “Sweet Cinnamon”, also called Ceylon cinnamon.

“Cinnamon”, or cassia cinnamon, has about 250% stronger health risks than “Sweet Cinnamon”, also called Ceylon cinnamon.

The mathematics here is quite simple; sweet cinnamon is the preferred way to go.

The Health Benefits

We spent a lot of time/space today looking at the differences. We think this was not only worth it, but necessary. However, that leaves us with less time/space for discussing the actual benefits. We’ll summarize, with links to supporting science:

“Those three things that almost always go together”:

Heart and blood benefits:

Neuroprotective benefits:

The science does need more testing in these latter two, though.

Where to get it?

You may be able to find sweet cinnamon in your local supermarket, or if you prefer capsule form, here’s an example product on Amazon

Enjoy!

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  • Their First Baby Came With Medical Debt. These Illinois Parents Won’t Have Another.

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    JACKSONVILLE, Ill. — Heather Crivilare was a month from her due date when she was rushed to an operating room for an emergency cesarean section.

    The first-time mother, a high school teacher in rural Illinois, had developed high blood pressure, a sometimes life-threatening condition in pregnancy that prompted doctors to hospitalize her. Then Crivilare’s blood pressure spiked, and the baby’s heart rate dropped. “It was terrifying,” Crivilare said.

    She gave birth to a healthy daughter. What followed, though, was another ordeal: thousands of dollars in medical debt that sent Crivilare and her husband scrambling for nearly a year to keep collectors at bay.

    The Crivilares would eventually get on nine payment plans as they juggled close to $5,000 in bills.

    “It really felt like a full-time job some days,” Crivilare recalled. “Getting the baby down to sleep and then getting on the phone. I’d set up one payment plan, and then a new bill would come that afternoon. And I’d have to set up another one.”

    Crivilare’s pregnancy may have been more dramatic than most. But for millions of new parents, medical debt is now as much a hallmark of having children as long nights and dirty diapers.

    About 12% of the 100 million U.S. adults with health care debt attribute at least some of it to pregnancy or childbirth, according to a KFF poll.

    These people are more likely to report they’ve had to take on extra work, change their living situation, or make other sacrifices.

    Overall, women between 18 and 35 who have had a baby in the past year and a half are twice as likely to have medical debt as women of the same age who haven’t given birth recently, other KFF research conducted for this project found.

    “You feel bad for the patient because you know that they want the best for their pregnancy,” said Eilean Attwood, a Rhode Island OB-GYN who said she routinely sees pregnant women anxious about going into debt.

    “So often, they may be coming to the office or the hospital with preexisting debt from school, from other financial pressures of starting adult life,” Attwood said. “They are having to make real choices, and what those real choices may entail can include the choice to not get certain services or medications or what may be needed for the care of themselves or their fetus.”

    Best-Laid Plans

    Crivilare and her husband, Andrew, also a teacher, anticipated some of the costs.

    The young couple settled in Jacksonville, in part because the farming community less than two hours north of St. Louis was the kind of place two public school teachers could afford a house. They saved aggressively. They bought life insurance.

    And before Crivilare got pregnant in 2021, they enrolled in the most robust health insurance plan they could, paying higher premiums to minimize their deductible and out-of-pocket costs.

    Then, two months before their baby was due, Crivilare learned she had developed preeclampsia. Her pregnancy would no longer be routine. Crivilare was put on blood pressure medication, and doctors at the local hospital recommended bed rest at a larger medical center in Springfield, about 35 miles away.

    “I remember thinking when they insisted that I ride an ambulance from Jacksonville to Springfield … ‘I’m never going to financially recover from this,’” she said. “‘But I want my baby to be OK.’”

    For weeks, Crivilare remained in the hospital alone as covid protocols limited visitors. Meanwhile, doctors steadily upped her medications while monitoring the fetus. It was, she said, “the scariest month of my life.”

    Fear turned to relief after her daughter, Rita, was born. The baby was small and had to spend nearly two weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit. But there were no complications. “We were incredibly lucky,” Crivilare said.

    When she and Rita finally came home, a stack of medical bills awaited. One was already past due.

    Crivilare rushed to set up payment plans with the hospitals in Jacksonville and Springfield, as well as the anesthesiologist, the surgeon, and the labs. Some providers demanded hundreds of dollars a month. Some settled for monthly payments of $20 or $25. Some pushed Crivilare to apply for new credit cards to pay the bills.

    “It was a blur of just being on the phone constantly with all the different people collecting money,” she recalled. “That was a nightmare.”

    Big Bills, Big Consequences

    The Crivilares’ bills weren’t unusual. Parents with private health coverage now face on average more than $3,000 in medical bills related to a pregnancy and childbirth that aren’t covered by insurance, researchers at the University of Michigan found.

    Out-of-pocket costs are even higher for families with a newborn who needs to stay in a neonatal ICU, averaging $5,000. And for 1 in 11 of these families, medical bills related to pregnancy and childbirth exceed $10,000, the researchers found.

    “This forces very difficult trade-offs for families,” said Michelle Moniz, a University of Michigan OB-GYN who worked on the study. “Even though they have insurance, they still have these very high bills.”

    Nationwide polls suggest millions of these families end up in debt, with sometimes devastating consequences.

    About three-quarters of U.S. adults with debt related to pregnancy or childbirth have cut spending on food, clothing, or other essentials, KFF polling found.

    About half have put off buying a home or delayed their own or their children’s education.

    These burdens have spurred calls to limit what families must pay out-of-pocket for medical care related to pregnancy and childbirth.

    In Massachusetts, state Sen. Cindy Friedman has proposed legislation to exempt all these bills from copays, deductibles, and other cost sharing. This would parallel federal rules that require health plans to cover recommended preventive services like annual physicals without cost sharing for patients. “We want … healthy children, and that starts with healthy mothers,” Friedman said. Massachusetts health insurers have warned the proposal will raise costs, but an independent state analysis estimated the bill would add only $1.24 to monthly insurance premiums.

    Tough Lessons

    For her part, Crivilare said she wishes new parents could catch their breath before paying down medical debt.

    “No one is in the right frame of mind to deal with that when they have a new baby,” she said, noting that college graduates get such a break. “When I graduated with my college degree, it was like: ‘Hey, new adult, it’s going to take you six months to kind of figure out your life, so we’ll give you this six-month grace period before your student loans kick in and you can get a job.’”

    Rita is now 2. The family scraped by on their payment plans, retiring the medical debt within a year, with help from Crivilare’s side job selling resources for teachers online.

    But they are now back in debt, after Rita’s recurrent ear infections required surgery last year, leaving the family with thousands of dollars in new medical bills.

    Crivilare said the stress has made her think twice about seeing a doctor, even for Rita. And, she added, she and her husband have decided their family is complete.

    “It’s not for us to have another child,” she said. “I just hope that we can put some of these big bills behind us and give [Rita] the life that we want to give her.”

    About This Project

    “Diagnosis: Debt” is a reporting partnership between KFF Health News and NPR exploring the scale, impact, and causes of medical debt in America.

    The series draws on original polling by KFF, court records, federal data on hospital finances, contracts obtained through public records requests, data on international health systems, and a yearlong investigation into the financial assistance and collection policies of more than 500 hospitals across the country. 

    Additional research was conducted by the Urban Institute, which analyzed credit bureau and other demographic data on poverty, race, and health status for KFF Health News to explore where medical debt is concentrated in the U.S. and what factors are associated with high debt levels.

    The JPMorgan Chase Institute analyzed records from a sampling of Chase credit card holders to look at how customers’ balances may be affected by major medical expenses. And the CED Project, a Denver nonprofit, worked with KFF Health News on a survey of its clients to explore links between medical debt and housing instability. 

    KFF Health News journalists worked with KFF public opinion researchers to design and analyze the “KFF Health Care Debt Survey.” The survey was conducted Feb. 25 through March 20, 2022, online and via telephone, in English and Spanish, among a nationally representative sample of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,292 adults with current health care debt and 382 adults who had health care debt in the past five years. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for the full sample and 3 percentage points for those with current debt. For results based on subgroups, the margin of sampling error may be higher.

    Reporters from KFF Health News and NPR also conducted hundreds of interviews with patients across the country; spoke with physicians, health industry leaders, consumer advocates, debt lawyers, and researchers; and reviewed scores of studies and surveys about medical debt.

    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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  • Who will look after us in our final years? A pay rise alone won’t solve aged-care workforce shortages

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    Aged-care workers will receive a significant pay increase after the Fair Work Commission ruled they deserved substantial wage rises of up to 28%. The federal government has committed to the increases, but is yet to announce when they will start.

    But while wage rises for aged-care workers are welcome, this measure alone will not fix all workforce problems in the sector. The number of people over 80 is expected to triple over the next 40 years, driving an increase in the number of aged care workers needed.

    How did we get here?

    The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which delivered its final report in March 2021, identified a litany of tragic failures in the regulation and delivery of aged care.

    The former Liberal government was dragged reluctantly to accept that a total revamp of the aged-care system was needed. But its weak response left the heavy lifting to the incoming Labor government.

    The current government’s response started well, with a significant injection of funding and a promising regulatory response. But it too has failed to pursue a visionary response to the problems identified by the Royal Commission.

    Action was needed on four fronts:

    • ensuring enough staff to provide care
    • building a functioning regulatory system to encourage good care and weed out bad providers
    • designing and introducing a fair payment system to distribute funds to providers and
    • implementing a financing system to pay for it all and achieve intergenerational equity.

    A government taskforce which proposed a timid response to the fourth challenge – an equitable financing system – was released at the start of last week.

    Consultation closed on a very poorly designed new regulatory regime the week before.

    But the big news came at end of the week when the Fair Work Commission handed down a further determination on what aged-care workers should be paid, confirming and going beyond a previous interim determination.

    What did the Fair Work Commission find?

    Essentially, the commission determined that work in industries with a high proportion of women workers has been traditionally undervalued in wage-setting. This had consequences for both care workers in the aged-care industry (nurses and Certificate III-qualified personal-care workers) and indirect care workers (cleaners, food services assistants).

    Aged-care staff will now get significant pay increases – 18–28% increase for personal care workers employed under the Aged Care Award, inclusive of the increase awarded in the interim decision.

    Older person holding a stabilising bar
    The commission determined aged care work was undervalued.
    Shutterstock/Toa55

    Indirect care workers were awarded a general increase of 3%. Laundry hands, cleaners and food services assistants will receive a further 3.96% on the grounds they “interact with residents significantly more regularly than other indirect care employees”.

    The final increases for registered and enrolled nurses will be determined in the next few months.

    How has the sector responded?

    There has been no push-back from employer groups or conservative politicians. This suggests the uplift is accepted as fair by all concerned.

    The interim increases of up to 15% probably facilitated this acceptance, with the recognition of the community that care workers should be paid more than fast food workers.

    There was no criticism from aged-care providers either. This is probably because they are facing difficulty in recruiting staff at current wage rates. And because government payments to providers reflect the actual cost of aged care, increased payments will automatically flow to providers.

    When the increases will flow has yet to be determined. The government is due to give its recommendations for staging implementation by mid-April.

    Is the workforce problem fixed?

    An increase in wages is necessary, but alone is not sufficient to solve workforce shortages.

    The health- and social-care workforce is predicted to grow faster than any other sector over the next decade. The “care economy” will grow from around 8% to around 15% of GDP over the next 40 years.

    This means a greater proportion of school-leavers will need to be attracted to the aged-care sector. Aged care will also need to attract and retrain workers displaced from industries in decline and attract suitably skilled migrants and refugees with appropriate language skills.

    Nursing students practise their skills
    Aged care will need to attract workers from other sectors.
    nastya_ph/Shutterstock

    The caps on university and college enrolments imposed by the previous government, coupled with weak student demand for places in key professions (such as nursing), has meant workforce shortages will continue for a few more years, despite the allure of increased wages.

    A significant increase in intakes into university and vocational education college courses preparing students for health and social care is still required. Better pay will help to increase student demand, but funding to expand place numbers will ensure there are enough qualified staff for the aged-care system of the future. The Conversation

    Stephen Duckett, Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Cacao vs Carob – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing cacao to carob, we picked the cacao.

    Why?

    It’s close, and may depend a little on your priorities!

    In terms of macros, the cacao has more protein and fat, while the carob has more carbohydrates, mostly sugar. Since people will not generally eat this by the spoonful, and will instead either make drinks or cook with it, we can’t speak for the glycemic index or general health impact of the sugars. As for the fats, on the one hand the cacao does contain saturated fat; on the other, this merely means that different saturated fat will usually be added to the carob if making something with it. Still, slight win for the carob on the fat front. Protein, of course, is entirely in cacao’s favor.

    In the category of vitamins and minerals, they’re about equal on vitamins, while cacao wins easily on the mineral front, boasting more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, and phosphorus.

    While both have a generous antioxidant content, this one’s another win for cacao, with about 3x the active polyphenols and flavonoids.

    In short: both are good, consumed in moderation and before adding unhealthy extra ingredients—but we say cacao comes out the winner.

    If you’re looking specifically for the above-depicted products, by the way, here they are:

    Cacao powder | Carob powder

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Enjoy!

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  • 10% Human – by Dr. Alanna Collen

    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.

    The title, of course, is a nod to how by cell count, we are only about 10% human, and the other 90% are assorted microbes.

    Dr. Collen starts with the premise that “all diseases begin in the gut” which is perhaps a little bold, but as a general rule of thumb, the gut is, in fairness, implicated in most things—even if not being the cause, it generally plays at least some role in the pathogenesis of disease.

    The book talks us through the various ways that our trillions of tiny friends (and some foes) interact with us, from immune-related considerations, to nutrient metabolism, to neurotransmitters, and in some cases, direct mind control, which may sound like a stretch but it has to do with the vagus nerve “gut-brain highway”, and how microbes have evolved to tug on its strings just right. Bearing in mind, most of these microbes have very short life cycles, which means evolution happens for them so much more rapidly than it does for us—something that Dr. Collen, with her PhD in evolutionary biology, has plenty to say about.

    There is a practical element too: advice on how to avoid the many illnesses that come with having our various microbiomes (it’s not just the gut!) out of balance, and how to keep everything working together as a team.

    The style is quite light pop-science and, once we get past the first chapter (which is about the history of the field), quite a pleasant read as Dr. Collen has an enjoyable and entertaining tone.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to understand more about all the things that come together to make us functionally 100% human, then this book is an excellent guide to that.

    Click here to check out 10% Human, and learn about how we interact with ourselves!

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  • Pain Doesn’t Belong on a Scale of Zero to 10

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    Over the past two years, a simple but baffling request has preceded most of my encounters with medical professionals: “Rate your pain on a scale of zero to 10.”

    I trained as a physician and have asked patients the very same question thousands of times, so I think hard about how to quantify the sum of the sore hips, the prickly thighs, and the numbing, itchy pain near my left shoulder blade. I pause and then, mostly arbitrarily, choose a number. “Three or four?” I venture, knowing the real answer is long, complicated, and not measurable in this one-dimensional way.

    Pain is a squirrely thing. It’s sometimes burning, sometimes drilling, sometimes a deep-in-the-muscles clenching ache. Mine can depend on my mood or how much attention I afford it and can recede nearly entirely if I’m engrossed in a film or a task. Pain can also be disabling enough to cancel vacations, or so overwhelming that it leads people to opioid addiction. Even 10+ pain can be bearable when it’s endured for good reason, like giving birth to a child. But what’s the purpose of the pains I have now, the lingering effects of a head injury?

    The concept of reducing these shades of pain to a single number dates to the 1970s. But the zero-to-10 scale is ubiquitous today because of what was called a “pain revolution” in the ’90s, when intense new attention to addressing pain — primarily with opioids — was framed as progress. Doctors today have a fuller understanding of treating pain, as well as the terrible consequences of prescribing opioids so readily. What they are learning only now is how to better measure pain and treat its many forms.

    About 30 years ago, physicians who championed the use of opioids gave robust new life to what had been a niche specialty: pain management. They started pushing the idea that pain should be measured at every appointment as a “fifth vital sign.” The American Pain Society went as far as copyrighting the phrase. But unlike the other vital signs — blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, and breathing rate — pain had no objective scale. How to measure the unmeasurable? The society encouraged doctors and nurses to use the zero-to-10 rating system. Around that time, the FDA approved OxyContin, a slow-release opioid painkiller made by Purdue Pharma. The drugmaker itself encouraged doctors to routinely record and treat pain, and aggressively marketed opioids as an obvious solution.

    To be fair, in an era when pain was too often ignored or undertreated, the zero-to-10 rating system could be regarded as an advance. Morphine pumps were not available for those cancer patients I saw in the ’80s, even those in agonizing pain from cancer in their bones; doctors regarded pain as an inevitable part of disease. In the emergency room where I practiced in the early ’90s, prescribing even a few opioid pills was a hassle: It required asking the head nurse to unlock a special prescription pad and making a copy for the state agency that tracked prescribing patterns. Regulators (rightly) worried that handing out narcotics would lead to addiction. As a result, some patients in need of relief likely went without.

    After pain doctors and opioid manufacturers campaigned for broader use of opioids — claiming that newer forms were not addictive, or much less so than previous incarnations — prescribing the drugs became far easier and were promoted for all kinds of pain, whether from knee arthritis or back problems. As a young doctor joining the “pain revolution,” I probably asked patients thousands of times to rate their pain on a scale of zero to 10 and wrote many scripts each week for pain medication, as monitoring “the fifth vital sign” quickly became routine in the medical system. In time, a zero-to-10 pain measurement became a necessary box to fill in electronic medical records. The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations made regularly assessing pain a prerequisite for medical centers receiving federal health care dollars. Medical groups added treatment of pain to their list of patient rights, and satisfaction with pain treatment became a component of post-visit patient surveys. (A poor showing could mean lower reimbursement from some insurers.)

    But this approach to pain management had clear drawbacks. Studies accumulated showing that measuring patients’ pain didn’t result in better pain control. Doctors showed little interest in or didn’t know how to respond to the recorded answer. And patients’ satisfaction with their doctors’ discussion of pain didn’t necessarily mean they got adequate treatment. At the same time, the drugs were fueling the growing opioid epidemic. Research showed that an estimated 3% to 19% of people who received a prescription for pain medication from a doctor developed an addiction.

    Doctors who wanted to treat pain had few other options, though. “We had a good sense that these drugs weren’t the only way to manage pain,” Linda Porter, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Pain Policy and Planning, told me. “But we didn’t have a good understanding of the complexity or alternatives.” The enthusiasm for narcotics left many varietals of pain underexplored and undertreated for years. Only in 2018, a year when nearly 50,000 Americans died of an overdose, did Congress start funding a program — the Early Phase Pain Investigation Clinical Network, or EPPIC-Net — designed to explore types of pain and find better solutions. The network connects specialists at 12 academic specialized clinical centers and is meant to jump-start new research in the field and find bespoke solutions for different kinds of pain.

    A zero-to-10 scale may make sense in certain situations, such as when a nurse uses it to adjust a medication dose for a patient hospitalized after surgery or an accident. And researchers and pain specialists have tried to create better rating tools — dozens, in fact, none of which was adequate to capture pain’s complexity, a European panel of experts concluded. The Veterans Health Administration, for instance, created one that had supplemental questions and visual prompts: A rating of 5 correlated with a frown and a pain level that “interrupts some activities.” The survey took much longer to administer and produced results that were no better than the zero-to-10 system. By the 2010s, many medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Family Physicians, were rejecting not just the zero-to-10 scale but the entire notion that pain could be meaningfully self-reported numerically by a patient.

    In the years that opioids had dominated pain remedies, a few drugs — such as gabapentin and pregabalin for neuropathy, and lidocaine patches and creams for musculoskeletal aches — had become available. “There was a growing awareness of the incredible complexity of pain — that you would have to find the right drugs for the right patients,” Rebecca Hommer, EPPIC-Net’s interim director, told me. Researchers are now looking for biomarkers associated with different kinds of pain so that drug studies can use more objective measures to assess the medications’ effect. A better understanding of the neural pathways and neurotransmitters that create different types of pain could also help researchers design drugs to interrupt and tame them.

    Any treatments that come out of this research are unlikely to be blockbusters like opioids; by design, they will be useful to fewer people. That also makes them less appealing prospects to drug companies. So EPPIC-Net is helping small drug companies, academics, and even individual doctors design and conduct early-stage trials to test the safety and efficacy of promising pain-taming molecules. That information will be handed over to drug manufacturers for late-stage trials, all with the aim of getting new drugs approved by the FDA more quickly.

    The first EPPIC-Net trials are just getting underway. Finding better treatments will be no easy task, because the nervous system is a largely unexplored universe of molecules, cells, and electronic connections that interact in countless ways. The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to scientists who discovered the mechanisms that allow us to feel the most basic sensations: cold and hot. In comparison, pain is a hydra. A simple number might feel definitive. But it’s not helping anyone make the pain go away.

    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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  • Scarcity Brain – by Michael Easter

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    After a brief overview of theevolutionary psychology underpinnings of the scarcity brain, the author grounds the rest of this book firmly in the present. He explains how the scarcity loop hooks us and why we crave more, and what factors can increase or lessen its hold over us.

    As for what things we are wired to consider “potentially scarce any time now” no matter how saturated we are in them, he looks at an array of categories, each with their nuances. From the obvious such as “food” and “stuff“, to understandable “information” and “happiness“, to abstractions like “influence“, he goes to many sources—experts of various kinds from around the world—to explore how we can know “how much is enough”, and—which can be harder—act accordingly.

    The key, he argues, is not in simply wanting less, but in understanding why we crave more in the first place, get rid of our worst habits, and use what we already have, better.

    Bottom line: if you feel a gnawing sense of needing more “to be on the safe side”, this book can help you to be a little more strategic (and at the same time, less stressed!) about that.

    Click here to check out Scarcity Brain, and manage yours more mindfully!

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