The Little-Known Truth…
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.
Myth-Buster, Myth-Buster, Bust Us A Myth (or three!)
Let’s can this myth for good
People think of “canned foods” as meaning “processed foods” and therefore bad. But the reality is it’s all dependent on what’s in the can (check the ingredients!). And as for nutrients?
Many canned fruits and vegetables contain more nutrients than fresh ones! This is because the way they’ve been stored preserves them better. For example:
- Canned tomatoes contain more bioavailable lycopene than fresh
- Canned spinach contains more bioavailable carotene than fresh
- Canned corn contains more bioavailable lutein than fresh
- The list goes on, but you get the idea!
Don’t Want To Take Our Word For It? Read The Scientific Paper Here!
Gaslight, Gymkeep, Girl-loss?
Many women and girls avoid doing weight-training as part of their exercise—or use only the smallest weights—to avoid “bulking up” and “looking like a man”.
Many men, meanwhile, wish it were that easy to bulk up!
The reality is that nobody, unless you have very rare genes, packs on a lot of muscle by accident. Even with the genes for it, it won’t happen unless you’re also eating for it!
Resistance-based strength training (such as lifting weights), is a great way for most people to look after an important part of their long-term health: bone density!
You can’t have strong muscles on weak bones, so strengthening the muscles cues the body to strengthen the bones. In short, your strength-training at age 45 or 55 (or earlier) could be what helps you avoid a broken hip at 65 or 75.
We’re Not Kidding, It Really Is That Important (Read The Study Here)!
Something doesn’t smell right about this
There’s been a big backlash against anti-perspirants and deodorants. The popular argument is that the aluminium in them causes cancer.
This led to many people buying “deodo-rocks”, crystal rocks that can be run under water and then rubbed on the armpits to deodorize “naturally”. But, those crystal rocks are actually alum crystals (guess what they contain…).
The belief that deodorants cause cancer came from studies done by applying deodorant to cells (like the canine kidney cells in this study) in petri dishes. So, assuming you don’t cut out your kidney and then spray it directly with the deodorant, the jury is still out!
A more recent systematic review sorted out quite clearly the ways in which aluminium was, or was not, harmful, and said:
❝Neither is there clear evidence to show use of Al-containing underarm antiperspirants or cosmetics increases the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease or breast cancer. Metallic Al, its oxides, and common Al salts have not been shown to be either genotoxic or carcinogenic.❞
Critical Reviews in Toxicology
…but also says that you should avoid eating aluminium while pregnant or breastfeeding. We hope you can resist the urge.
See The Summary For Yourself Here!
(actually the whole article is there, but we know you value condensed knowledge, so: the abstract at the top will probably tell you all you want to know!)
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:
Want to sleep longer? Adding mini-bursts of exercise to your evening routine can help – new study
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.
Exercising before bed has long been discouraged as the body doesn’t have time to wind down before the lights go out.
But new research has found breaking up a quiet, sedentary evening of watching television with short bursts of resistance exercise can lead to longer periods of sleep.
Adults spend almost one third of the 24-hour day sleeping. But the quality and length of sleep can affect long-term health. Sleeping too little or waking often in the night is associated with an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes.
Physical activity during the day can help improve sleep. However, current recommendations discourage intense exercise before going to bed as it can increase a person’s heart rate and core temperature, which can ultimately disrupt sleep.
Nighttime habits
For many, the longest period of uninterrupted sitting happens at home in the evening. People also usually consume their largest meal during this time (or snack throughout the evening).
Insulin (the hormone that helps to remove sugar from the blood stream) tends to be at a lower level in the evening than in the morning.
Together these factors promote elevated blood sugar levels, which over the long term can be bad for a person’s health.
Our previous research found interrupting evening sitting every 30 minutes with three minutes of resistance exercise reduces the amount of sugar in the bloodstream after eating a meal.
But because sleep guidelines currently discourage exercising in the hours before going to sleep, we wanted to know if frequently performing these short bursts of light activity in the evening would affect sleep.
Activity breaks for better sleep
In our latest research, we asked 30 adults to complete two sessions based in a laboratory.
During one session the adults sat continuously for a four-hour period while watching streaming services. During the other session, they interrupted sitting by performing three minutes of body-weight resistance exercises (squats, calf raises and hip extensions) every 30 minutes.
After these sessions, participants went home to their normal life routines. Their sleep that evening was measured using a wrist monitor.
Our research found the quality of sleep (measured by how many times they woke in the night and the length of these awakenings) was the same after the two sessions. But the night after the participants did the exercise “activity breaks” they slept for almost 30 minutes longer.
Identifying the biological reasons for the extended sleep in our study requires further research.
But regardless of the reason, if activity breaks can extend sleep duration, then getting up and moving at regular intervals in the evening is likely to have clear health benefits.
Time to revisit guidelines
These results add to earlier work suggesting current sleep guidelines, which discourage evening exercise before bed, may need to be reviewed.
As the activity breaks were performed in a highly controlled laboratory environment, future research should explore how activity breaks performed in real life affect peoples sleep.
We selected simple, body-weight exercises to use in this study as they don’t require people to interrupt the show they may be watching, and don’t require a large space or equipment.
If people wanted to incorporate activity breaks in their own evening routines, they could probably get the same benefit from other types of exercise. For example, marching on the spot, walking up and down stairs, or even dancing in the living room.
The key is to frequently interrupt evening sitting time, with a little bit of whole-body movement at regular intervals.
In the long run, performing activity breaks may improve health by improving sleep and post-meal blood sugar levels. The most important thing is to get up frequently and move the body, in a way the works best for a person’s individual household.
Jennifer Gale, PhD candidate, Department of Human Nutrition, University of Otago and Meredith Peddie, Senior Lecturer, Department of Human Nutrition, University of Otago
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Share This Post
An Elegant Defense – by Matt Richtel
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.
In a way, Richtel got the best and worst of the publication date lottery. This book, which he’d obviously been working on for however long, was published in March 2020. Yes, that March 2020. So, it obviously got a huge boost in sales that launced it to bestseller status, and/but it doesn’t actually discuss COVID at all.
What it does discuss, is—as one might expect—the immune system. Or really, the immune systems, plural, several systems working alongside each other. How we got to have such, how our immune functions work, where all the various immune cells come from and what part they play. What pathogens can do to fight and/or confuse (or even co-opt) our immune response, and what modern medicine can do to counteract the pathogens’ anti-countermeasure countermeasures. And how it can still go wrong.
The “Four Lives” promised in the subtitle are stories, and Richtel explains the immune system through specific people’s specific battles. In particular, a friend of his who had quite a remarkable battle against cancer, which was of course terrible for him, but illustrative for us.
The style of the book is very readably journalistic. The author is a Pulitzer-winning NYT journalist, and not normally a science writer. Here at 10almonds, “we like big bibliographies and we cannot lie”, and we didn’t get to enjoy that in this case. The book contained no bibliography (nor appropriate inline citations, nor equivalent footnotes). Maybe a future addition will include this.
Bottom line: there’s a lot of “science for the lay reader” here. While the lack of references is a big oversight, the book does give a very good overview of what both sides (immune response and pathogenic invasion) bring to the battle of your body.
Click here to check out Elegant Defense, and demystify immunology!
Share This Post
Tech Bliss – by Clo S., MSc.
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 popular idea of a “digital detox” is simple enough, “just unplug!”, they say.
But here in the real world, not only is that often not practical for many of us, it may not always even be entirely desirable. The Internet (and our devices with all their bells and whistles) can be a source of education, joy, and connection!
So, how to find out what’s good for us and what’s not, in our daily digital practices? Clo. S. has answers… Or rather, experiments for us to do and find out for ourselves.
These experiments range from the purely practical “try this to streamline your experience” to the more personal “how does this thing make you feel?”. A lot of the experiments will be performed via your digital devices—some, without! Others are about online interpersonal dynamics, be they one-on-one or navigating a world in which it seems everyone is out to get us, our outrage, and/or our money. Still yet others are about optimizing what you do get from the parts of your digital experience that are enriching for you.
As the title suggests, there are 30 experiments, and it’s not a stretch to do them one per day for a month. But, as the author notes, it’s by no means necessary to do them like that; it’s a workbook and reference guide, not a to-do list!
(On the topic of it being a reference guide…There’s also an extensive tools directory towards the end!)
In short: this is a great book for optimizing your online experience—whatever that might mean for you personally; you can decide for yourself along the way!
Click here to get a copy of Tech Bliss: 30 Experiments For Your Digital Wellness today!
Share This Post
Related Posts
The Pain-Free Mindset – by Dr. Deepak Ravindran
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.
First: please ignore the terrible title. This is not the medical equivalent of “think and grow rich”. A better title would have been something like “The Pain-Free Plan”.
Attentive subscribers may notice that this author was our featured expert yesterday, so you can learn about his “seven steps” described in our article there, without us repeating that in our review here.
This book’s greatest strength is also potentially its greatest weakness, depending on the reader: it contains a lot of detailed medical information.
This is good or bad depending on whether you like lots of detailed medical information. Dr. Ravindran doesn’t assume prior knowledge, so everything is explained as we go. However, this means that after his well-referenced clinical explanations, high quality medical diagrams, etc, you may come out of this book feeling like you’ve just done a semester at medical school.
Knowledge is power, though, so understanding the underlying processes of pain and pain management really does help the reader become a more informed expert on your own pain—and options for reducing that pain.
Bottom line: this, disguised by its cover as a “think healing thoughts” book, is actually a science-centric, information-dense, well-sourced, comprehensive guide to pain management from one of the leading lights in the field.
Click here to check out The Pain-Free Mindset, and manage yours more comfortably!
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:
A Therapeutic Journey – by Alain de Botton
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’ve often featured The School of Life’s videos here on 10almonds, and most of those are written by (and often voiced by) Alain de Botton.
This book lays out the case for mental health being also just health, that no person is perfectly healthy all the time, and sometimes we all need a little help. While he does suggest seeking help from reliable outside sources, he also tells a lot about how we can improve things for ourselves along the way, whether by what we can control in our environment, or just what’s between our ears.
In the category of limitations, the book is written with the assumption that you are in a position to have access to a therapist of your choice, and in a sufficiently safe and stable life situation that there is a limit to how bad things can get.
The style is… Alain de Botton’s usual style. Well-written, clear, decisive, instructive, compassionate, insightful, thought-provoking.
Bottom line: this isn’t a book for absolutely everyone, but if your problems are moderate and your resources are comfortable, then this book has a lot of insights that can make your life more easy-going and joyful, without dropping the seriousness when appropriate.
Click here to check out A Therapeutic Journey, and perhaps begin one of your own!
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:
Knee Cracking & Popping: Should You Be Worried?
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.
Dr. Tom Walters (Doctor of Physical Therapy) explains about what’s going on behind our musical knees, and whether or not this synovial symphony is cause for concern.
When to worry (and when not to)
If the clicking/cracking/popping/etc does not come with pain, then it is probably being caused by the harmless movement of fluid within the joints, in this case specifically the patellofemoral joint, just behind the kneecap.
As Dr. Walters says:
❝It is extremely important that people understand that noises from the knee are usually not associated with pathology and may actually be a sign of a healthy, well-lubricated joint. let’s be careful not to make people feel bad about their knee noise as it can negatively influence how they view their body!❞
On the other hand, there is also such a thing as patellofemoral joint pain syndrome (PFPS), which is very common, and involves pain behind the kneecap, especially upon over-stressing the knee(s).
In such cases, it is good to get that checked out by a doctor/physiotherapist.
Dr. Walters advises us to gradually build up strength, and not try for too much too quickly. He also advises us to take care to strengthen our glutes in particular, so our knees have adequate support. Gentle stretching of the quadriceps and soft tissue mobilization with a foam roller, are also recommended, to reduce tension on the kneecap.
For more on these things and especially about the exercises, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
How To Really Take Care Of Your Joints
Take care!
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:
