Cynthia’s Thoughts on Intermittent Fasting
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The Myth of Breakfast and Snacking
Here at 10almonds we love addressing misconceptions in the health world.
When it comes to eating habits and fasting, we’ve written our own pieces on how to break your fast (otherwise known as break-fast, or breakfast), alongside a general breakdown of intermittent fasting, and a much-requested piece on fasting specifically for women.
Cynthia Thurlow, though, instead of just writing a few articles, has dedicated the majority of her working years to intermittent fasting and, in her TEDx talk (below), makes a strong argument challenging the long-held belief that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Cynthia Thurlow’s Two Main Points
Thurlow argues that it’s not what you eat but when you eat that has a more profound impact on health and aging. And she argues this is crucial regardless of your age.
Complementing her views on fasting are her views on snacking; she argues that snacking all day long is outdated advice and can overtax the digestive system, leading to various health issues.
Practical Tips for Starting Intermittent Fasting
To begin intermittent fasting, Thurlow suggests starting with a 12-13 hour fasting window and gradually increasing it to 16 hours.
In terms of food choice, she recommends eating whole, unprocessed foods during eating periods as well as staying well-hydrated with water, coffee, or tea.
But you won’t see results immediately; Thurlow advises giving the strategy a solid 30 days to see results and consulting a healthcare provider if there are any existing health conditions.
You can dive deeper and join the 15 million other people who have listened to her thoughts on fasting by watching her TEDx talk below:
How was the video? If you’ve discovered any great videos yourself that you’d like to share with fellow 10almonds readers, then please do email them to us!
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Inverse Vaccines for Autoimmune Diseases
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Inverse Vaccines for Autoimmune Diseases
This is Dr. Jeffrey Hubbell. He’s a molecular engineer, with a focus on immunotherapy, immune response, autoimmune diseases, and growth factor variants.
He’s held 88 patents, and was the recipient of the Society for Biomaterials’ Founders Award for his “long-term, landmark contributions to the discipline of biomaterials”, amongst other awards and honours that would make our article too long if we included them all.
And, his latest research has been about developing…
Inverse Vaccines
You may be thinking: “you mean diseases; he’s engineering diseases?”
And no, it’s not that. Here’s how it works:
Normally in the case of vaccine, it’s something to tell the body “hey, if you see something that looks like this, you should kill it on sight” and the body goes “ok, preparing countermeasures according to these specifications; thanks for the heads-up”
In the case of an inverse vaccine, it’s the inverse. It’s something to tell the body “hey, this thing you seem to think is a threat, it’s actually not, and you should leave it alone”.
Why this matters for people with autoimmune diseases
Normally, autoimmune diseases are treated in one or more of the following ways:
- Dampen the entire immune system (bad for immunity against actual diseases, obviously, and is part of why many immunocompromised people have suffered and died disproportionately from COVID, for example)
- Give up and find a workaround (a good example of this is Type 1 Diabetes, and just giving up on the pancreas not being constantly at war with itself, and living on exogenous insulin instead)
Neither of those are great.
What inverse vaccines do is offer a way to flag the attacked-in-error items as acceptable things to have in the body. Those might be things that are in our body by default, as in the case of many autoimmune diseases, or they may even be external items that should be allowed but aren’t, as in the case of gluten, in the context of Celiac disease.
The latest research is not yet accessible for free, alas, but you can read the abstract here:
Or if you prefer a more accessible pop-science approach, here’s a great explanatory article:
“Inverse vaccine” shows potential to treat multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases
Where can we get such inverse vaccines?
❝There are no clinically approved inverse vaccines yet, but we’re incredibly excited about moving this technology forward❞
~ Dr. Jeffrey Hubbell
But! Lest you be disappointed, you can get in line already, in the case of the Celiac disease inverse vaccine, if you’d like to be part of their clinical trial:
Click here to see if you are eligible to be part of their clinical trial
If you’re not up for that, or if your autoimmune disease is something else (most of the rest of their research is presently focusing on Multiple Sclerosis and Type 1 Diabetes), then:
- The phase 1 MS trial is currently active, estimated completion in summer 2024.
- They are in the process of submitting an investigational new drug (IND) application for Type 1 Diabetes
- This is the first step to starting clinical safety and efficacy trials
…so, watch this space!
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Stop Tinnitus, & Improve Your Hearing By 130%
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Caveat: this will depend on the cause of your tinnitus, but there’s a quick diagnostic test first, and it’s for the most common kind 🙂
Step by step
To address noise in the ears (tinnitus) and improve hearing, start by identifying whether the issue is treatable. The diagnostic tests are:
- First, turn your head to the side, tilt it forward and backward, and observe changes in the noise. If the intensity changes, then the noise can be managed.
- Additionally, open and close your mouth, clenching and unclenching your teeth, and note any variations; this is about muscular tension affecting hearing.
- Finally, tilt your head downward—if the noise increases, it may mean it is a venous outflow disorder—there’s a fix for this, too.
Effective exercises focus on releasing tension and improving blood flow:
- Begin with the neck’s scalene muscles, located behind the sternocleidomastoid muscle.
- Massage these areas by moving your hands up and down and varying head positions slightly forward and backward.
- Repeat on both sides to enhance blood circulation and reduce auditory interference. Next, target the chewing muscles.
- Massage painful areas of the jaw and temporalis muscle in circular motions, working along and across the muscle fibers.
- Divide the temporalis muscle into sections and address each thoroughly to relieve tension and improve hearing.
- Mobilize the outer auditory passage by gently pulling the ear in all directions—starting with the earlobe, middle part, and upper ear.
- Focus on the cartilage above the lobe, moving it up and down to restore mobility and improve blood flow.
These exercises should fix the most common kind of tinnitus, and improve hearing—you’ll know quickly whether it works for you or not. Regular practice is required for sustained results, though.
For more on all this, plus visual demonstrations (e.g. how to find that temporalis muscle, etc), enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Tinnitus: Quieting The Unwanted Orchestra In Your Ears ← our main feature on this topic, with more things to try if this didn’t help!
Take care!
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Wakefulness, Cognitive Enhancement, AND Improved Mood?
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Old Drug, New Tricks?
Modafinil (also known by brand names including Modalert and Provigil) is a dopamine uptake inhibitor.
What does that mean? It means it won’t put any extra dopamine in your brain, but it will slow down the rate at which your brain removes naturally-occuring dopamine.
The result is that your brain will get to make more use of the dopamine it does have.
(dopamine is a neutrotransmitter that allows you to feel wakeful and happy, and perform complex cognitive tasks)
Modafinil is prescribed for treatment of excessive daytime sleepiness. Often that’s caused by shift work sleep disorder, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, or narcolepsy.
Read: Overview of the Clinical Uses, Pharmacology, and Safety of Modafinil
Many studies done on humans (rather than rats) have been military experiments to reduce the effects of sleep deprivation:
Click Here To See A Military Study On Modafinil!
They’ve found modafinil to be helpful, and more effective and more long-lasting than caffeine, without the same “crash” later. This is for two reasons:
1) while caffeine works by blocking adenosine (so you don’t feel how tired you are) and by constricting blood vessels (so you feel more ready-for-action), modafinil works by allowing your brain to accumulate more dopamine (so you’re genuinely more wakeful, and you get to keep the dopamine)
2) the biological half-life of modafinil is 12–15 hours, as opposed to 4–8 hours* for caffeine.
*Note: a lot of sources quote 5–6 hours for caffeine, but this average is misleading. In reality, we are each genetically predetermined to be either a fast caffeine metabolizer (nearer 4 hours) or a slow caffeine metabolizer (nearer 8 hours).
What’s a biological half-life (also called: elimination half-life)?
A substance’s biological half-life is the time it takes for the amount in the body to be reduced by exactly half.
For example: Let’s say you’re a fast caffeine metabolizer and you have a double-espresso (containing 100mg caffeine) at 8am.
By midday, you’ll have 50mg of caffeine left in your body. So far, so simple.
By 4pm you might expect it to be gone, but instead you have 25mg remaining (because the amount halves every four hours).
By 8pm, you have 12.5mg remaining.
When midnight comes and you’re tucking yourself into bed, you still have 6.25mg of caffeine remaining from your morning coffee!
Use as a nootropic
Many healthy people who are not sleep-deprived use modafinil “off-label” as a nootropic (i.e., a cognitive enhancer).
Read: Modafinil for cognitive neuroenhancement in healthy non-sleep-deprived subjects: A systematic review
Important Note: modafinil is prescription-controlled, and only FDA-approved for sleep disorders.
To get around this, a lot of perfectly healthy biohackers describe the symptoms of sleep pattern disorder to their doctor, to get a prescription.
We do not recommend lying to your healthcare provider, and nor do we recommend turning to the online “grey market”.
Such websites often use anonymized private doctors to prescribe on an “informed consent” basis, rather than making a full examination. Those websites then dispense the prescribed medicines directly to the patient with no further questions asked (i.e. very questionable practices).
Caveat emptor!
A new mood-brightener?
Modafinil was recently tested head-to-head against Citalapram for the treatment of depression, and scored well:
See its head-to-head scores here!
How does it work? Modafinil does for dopamine what a lot of anti-depressants do for serotonin. Both dopamine and serotonin promote happiness and wakefulness.
This is very promising, especially as modafinil (in most people, at least) has fewer unwanted side-effects than a lot of common anti-depressant medications.
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How Processed Is The Food You Buy, Really?
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Ultraprocessed foods are a) ubiquitous in industrialized nations b) generally not fabulous for the health. See for example:
- Eat To Beat Cancer ← skipping the ultraprocessed foods is one main point
- What To Leave Off Your Table (To Stay Off This Surgeon’s) ← have a guess
Abstaining from ultraprocessed food can also be difficult psychologically, because they are generally engineered specifically to trigger certain physiological responses, often with their combination of sweet and/or salty flavors with simple carbohydrates that will zip straight into one’s veins and feel immediately rewarding, even if there is a health price to pay later.
And worse, being habituated to ultraprocessed food can make unprocessed or minimally-processed food seem less appealing:
What causes food cravings? And what can we do about them?
Fortunately, we can reverse this, and once we get habituated to unprocessed or minimally-processed food, the ultraprocessed will start to seem like not-food to us. You will wonder: how did I ever eat that crap?
Now, one other thing to bear in mind:
There is a scale of “badness”
You might recall this article:
Not all ultra-processed foods are bad for your health, whatever you might have heard
For example, Reese’s confectionary and Huel nutrition powder are both ultra-processed, but one is definitely better than the other.
See also: Are plant-based burgers really bad for your heart? Here’s what’s behind the scary headlines
Some comparisons are obvious; others, not so much. So, how to tell the difference?
The “True Food” Scale
A large study analyzed ingredient lists, nutrition facts, and prices of over 50,000 food items from Target, Whole Foods, and Walmart. Using a rigorous statistical method, they assigned processing scores and compiled data into a giant database, with results published publicly.
You can find the study here:
Prevalence of processed foods in major US grocery stores
That in and of itself doesn’t tell a lot that’s useful to the consumer, because the paper itself does not have all of the data from all 50,000 food items, just the aggregate results, trends, implications for public health, and suggestions for public health policy.
However, what does tell a lot, is the public face of the database itself, which you can browse for free, and look up your regular shopping items, if you are wondering “are these textured soy pieces basically a step away from soy beans, or a frankenfood that will murder me in my sleep?”
How it works: it examines each food, its listed ingredients, and what is known about the processedness of such ingredients. It also draws a distinction between ingredients and additives, rendering the entire process of the production of the food into an “ingredient tree”, showing what was added to what along the way. Minimally-processed foods will have barely an ingredient sapling, while ultraprocessed foods will have an ingredient tree whose branches can barely be counted, they are so numerous. It’s not just about the number of ingredients though; it’s about the processes that each underwent.
How it represents this data: you can look at the food in the database, and it’ll tell you the ingredients and nutritional facts (which you probably knew already; it’s written on the packaging), and then show you how processed it is, and then ranking that against all other foods in the database of the same kind.
So for example, if you are looking at a pizza (have you ever noticed how some are marketed with bright flashy colors, and others in natural tones to suggest minimal processing? This is marketing, not reliable information! Sometimes the product that looks healthier, isn’t!), then it’ll give it a score reflecting how it ranks compared to all other pizze in the database. This number is out of a hundred, and it reflects the percentile into which it falls.
So for example, if the score your pizza gets is 47, then that means that if you looked at it next to 99 others, on average your pizza would would rank better than 46 of them and worse than 53 of them.
In other words, the lower the score, the less processed it is on the whole.
Here’s a side-by-side example of two cakes, one of which got a score of 3, and the other got a score of 61:
Mini No Sugar Added Cheesecake vs EDWARDS Desserts Original Whipped Cheesecake
And here is the main menu of the database, in which you can use the search function to look up the food you want to check, or else browse by category:
The TrueFood Database: Search or Browse (it’s free!)
Enjoy!
Want to know more?
You might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:
Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food – by Dr. Chris van Tulleken
Enjoy!
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Butternut Squash vs Pumpkin – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing butternut squash to pumpkin, we picked the butternut squash.
Why?
Both are great! But the butternut squash manages a moderate win in most categories.
In terms of macros, butternut squash has more of everything except water. Most notably, it has more protein and more fiber. Yes, more carbs too, but the fiber content means that it also has the lower glycemic index, by quite a bit.
When it comes to vitamins, pumpkin does have a little more of vitamin B1 and a lot more of vitamin E, while butternut squash has more of vitamins B3, B5, B9, C, K, and choline. They’re about equal in the other vitamins they both contain. A fair win for butternut squash.
In the category of minerals, butternut squash has more calcium, magnesium, manganese, and selenium, while pumpkin has more copper, iron, and phosphorus. They’re about equal in potassium and zinc. A marginal win for butternut squash.
Adding up the strong win, the fair win, and the marginal win, makes for an easy overall win for butternut squash!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Superfood-Stuffed Squash Recipe
Take care!
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Under Pressure: A Guide To Controlling High Blood Pressure – by Dr. Frita Fisher
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Hypertension kills a lot of people, and does so with little warning—it can be asymptomatic before it gets severe enough to cause harm, and once it causes harm, well, one heart attack or stroke is already one too many.
Aimed more squarely at people in the 35–45 danger zone (young enough to not be getting regular blood pressure checks, old enough that it may have been building up for decades), this is a very good primer on blood pressure, factors affecting it, what goes wrong, what to do about it, and how to make a good strategy for managing it for life.
The style is easy-reading, making this short (91 pages) book a very quick read, but an informative one.
Bottom line: if you are already quite knowledgeable about blood pressure and blood pressure management, this one’s probably not for you. But if you’re in the category of “what do those numbers mean again?”, then this is a very handy book to have, to get you up to speed so that you can handle things as appropriate.
Click here to check out Under Pressure, and get/keep yours under control!
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