Dancing vs Parkinson’s Depression
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This is a fun study, and the results are/were very predictable, and/but not necessarily something that people might think of in advance. First, let’s look at how some things work:
Parkinson’s disease & depression
Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative neurological disease that, amongst other things, is characterized by low dopamine levels.
For the general signs and symptoms, see: Recognize The Early Symptoms Of Parkinson’s Disease
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of reward, is involved in our language faculties and the capacity to form plans (even simple plans such as “make a cup of coffee”) as well as being critical for motor functions.
See also: Neurotransmitter Cheatsheet ← for demystifying some of “what does what” for commonly-conflated chemicals
You can see, therefore, why Parkinson’s disease will often have depression as a comorbidity—there may be influencing social factors as well (many Parkinson’s disease sufferers are quite socially isolated, which certainly does not help), but a clear neurochemical factor that we can point to is “a person with low dopamine levels will feel joyless, bored, and unmotivated”.
Let movement be thy medicine
Parkinson’s disease medications, therefore, tend to involve increasing dopamine levels and/or the brain’s ability to use dopamine.
Antidepressant medications, however, are more commonly focused on serotonin, as serotonin is another neurotransmitter associated with happiness—it’s the one we get when we look at open green spaces with occasional trees and a blue sky ← we get it in other ways too, but for evolutionary reasons, it seems our brains still yearn the most for landscapes that look like the Serengeti, even if we have never even been there personally.
There are other kinds of antidepressants too, and (because depression can have different causes) what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. See: Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!
In the case of Parkinson’s disease, because the associated depression is mostly dopamine-related, those green spaces and blue skies and SSRIs won’t help much. But you know what does?
Dance!
A recent (published last month, at time of writing) study by Dr. Karolina Bearss et al. did an interventional study that found that dance classes significantly improved both subjective experience of depression, and objective brain markers of depression, across people with (68%) and without (32%) Parkinson’s disease.
The paper is quite short and it has diagrams, and discusses the longer-term effect as well as the per-session effect:
Dance is thought to have a double-effect, improving both cognitive factors and motor control factors, for obvious reasons, and all related to dopamine response (dancing is an activity we are hardwired to find rewarding*, plus it is exercise which also triggers various chemicals to be made, plus it is social, which also improves many mental health factors).
*You may have heard the expression that “dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire”, and while that may not be true for everyone on an individual level, on a species level it is a very reasonable hypothesis for why we do it and why it is the way it is.
Want to learn more?
We wrote previously about battling depression (of any kind) here:
The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need
Take care!
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Reinventing Your Life – by Dr. Jeffrey Young & Dr. Janet Klosko
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This book is quite unlike any other broadly-CBT-focused books we’ve reviewed before. How so, you may wonder?
Rather than focusing on automatic negative thoughts and cognitive distortions with a small-lens focus on an immediate problem, this one zooms out rather and tackles the cause rather than the symptom.
The authors outline eleven “lifetraps” that we can get stuck in:
- Abandonment
- Mistrust & abuse
- Vulnerability
- Dependence
- Emptional deprivation
- Social exclusion
- Defectiveness
- Failure
- Subjugation
- Unrelenting standards
- Entitlement
They then borrow from other areas of psychology, to examine where these things came from, and how they can be addressed, such that we can escape from them.
The style of the book is very reader-friendly pop-psychology, with illustrative (and perhaps apocryphal, but no less useful for it if so) case studies.
The authors then go on to give step-by-step instructions for dealing with each of the 11 lifetraps, per 6 unmet needs we probably had that got us into them, and per 3 likely ways we tried to cope with this using maladaptive coping mechanisms that got us into the lifetrap(s) we ended up in.
Bottom line: if you feel there’s something in your life that’s difficult to escape from (we cannot outrun ourselves, after all, and bring our problems with us), this book could well contain the key that you need to get out of that cycle.
Click here to check out “Reinventing Your Life” and break free from any lifetrap(s) of your own!
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Healthy Longevity As A Lifestyle Choice
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7 Keys To Healthy Longevity
This is Dr. Luigi Fontana. He’s a research professor of Geriatrics & Nutritional Science, and co-director of the Longevity Research Program at Washington University in St. Louis.
What does he want us to know?
He has a many-fold approach to healthy longevity, most of which may not be news to you, but you might want to prioritize some things:
Consider caloric restriction with optimal nutrition (CRON)
This is about reducing the metabolic load on your body, which frees up bodily resources for keeping yourself young.
Keeping your body young and healthy is your body’s favorite thing to do, but it can’t do that if it never gets a chance because of all the urgent metabolic tasks you’re giving it.
If CRON isn’t your thing (isn’t practicable for you, causes undue suffering, etc) then intermittent fasting is a great CR mimetic, and he recommends that too. See also:
- Is Cutting Calories The Key To Healthy Long Life?
- Fasting Without Crashing? We Sort The Science From The Hype
Keep your waistline small
Whichever approach you prefer to use to look after your metabolic health, keeping your waistline down is much more important for health than BMI.
Specifically, he recommends keeping it:
- under 31.5” for women
- under 37” for men
The disparity here is because of hormonal differences that influence both metabolism and fat distribution.
Exercise as part of your lifestyle
For Dr. Fontana, he loves mountain-biking (this writer could never!) and weight-lifting (also not my thing). But what’s key is not the specifics, but what’s going on:
- Some kind of frequent movement
- Some kind of high-intensity interval training
- Some kind of resistance training
Frequent movement because our bodies are evolved to be moving more often than not:
The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, & Move More
High-Intensity Interval Training because unlike most forms of exercise (which slow metabolism afterwards to compensate), it boosts metabolism for up to 2 hours after training:
How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
Resistance training because strength (of muscles and bones) matters too:
Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)
Writer’s examples:
So while I don’t care for mountain-biking or weight-lifting, what I do is:
1) movement: walk (briskly!) everywhere and also use a standing desk
2) HIIT: 2-minute bursts of hindu squats and/or exercise bike sprints
3) resistance: pilates and other calisthenicsModeration is not key
Dr. Fontana advises that we do not smoke, and that we do not drink alcohol, for example. He also notes that just as the only healthy amount of alcohol is zero, less ultra-processed food is always better than more.
Maybe you don’t want to abstain completely, but mindful wilful consumption of something unhealthy is preferable to believing “moderate consumption is good for the health” and an unhealthy habit develops!
Greens and beans
Shocking absolutely nobody, Dr. Fontana advocates for (what has been the most evidence-based gold standard of healthy-aging diets for quite some years now) the Mediterranean diet.
See also: Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet ← this is about tweaking the Mediterranean diet per personal area of focus, e.g. anti-inflammatory bonus, best for gut, heart healthiest, and most neuroprotective.
Take it easy
Dr. Fontana advises us (again, with a wealth of evidence) Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and to get good sleep.
Not shocked?
To quote the good doctor,
❝There are no shortcuts. No magic pills or expensive procedures can replace the beneficial effects of a healthy diet, exercise, mindfulness, or a regenerating night’s sleep.❞
Always a good reminder!
Want to know more?
You might enjoy his book “The Path to Longevity: How to Reach 100 with the Health and Stamina of a 40-Year-Old”, which we reviewed previously
You might also like this video of his, about changing the conversation from “chronic disease” to “chronic health”:
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later
Take care!
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Protein: How Much Do We Need, Really?
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Mythbusting Protein!
Yesterday, we asked you for your policy on protein consumption. The distribution of responses was as follows:
- A marginal majority (about 55%) voted for “Protein is very important, but we can eat too much of it”
- A large minority (about 35%) voted for “We need lots of protein; the more, the better!”
- A handful (about 4%) voted for “We should go as light on protein as possible”
- A handful (6%) voted for “If we don’t eat protein, our body will create it from other foods”
So, what does the science say?
If we don’t eat protein, our body will create it from other foods: True or False?
Contingently True on an absurd technicality, but for all practical purposes False.
Our body requires 20 amino acids (the building blocks of protein), 9 of which it can’t synthesize and absolutely must get from food. Normally, we get those amino acids from protein in our diet, and we can also supplement them by buying amino acid supplements.
Specifically, we require (per kg of bodyweight) a daily average of:
- Histidine: 10 mg
- Isoleucine: 20 mg
- Leucine: 39 mg
- Lysine: 30 mg
- Methionine: 10.4 mg
- Phenylalanine*: 25 mg
- Threonine: 15 mg
- Tryptophan: 4 mg
- Valine: 26 mg
*combined with the non-essential amino acid tyrosine
Source: Protein and Amino Acid Requirements In Human Nutrition: WHO Technical Report
However, to get the requisite amino acid amounts, without consuming actual protein, would require gargantuan amounts of supplementation (bearing in mind bioavailability will never be 100%, so you’ll always need to take more than it seems), using supplements that will have been made by breaking down proteins anyway.
So unless you live in a laboratory and have access to endless amounts of all of the required amino acids (you can’t miss even one; you will die), and are willing to do that for the sake of proving a point, then you do really need to eat protein.
Your body cannot, for example, simply break down sugar and use it to make the protein you need.
On another technical note… Do bear in mind that many foods that we don’t necessarily think of as being sources of protein, are sources of protein.
Grains and grain products, for example, all contain protein; we just don’t think of them as that because their macronutritional profile is heavily weighted towards carbohydrates.
For that matter, even celery contains protein. How much, you may ask? Almost none! But if something has DNA, it has protein. Which means all plants and animals (at least in their unrefined forms).
So again, to even try to live without protein would very much require living in a laboratory.
We can eat too much protein: True or False?
True. First on an easy technicality; anything in excess is toxic. Even water, or oxygen. But also, in practical terms, there is such a thing as too much protein. The bar is quite high, though:
❝Based on short-term nitrogen balance studies, the Recommended Dietary Allowance of protein for a healthy adult with minimal physical activity is currently 0.8 g protein per kg bodyweight per day❞
❝To meet the functional needs such as promoting skeletal-muscle protein accretion and physical strength, dietary intake of 1.0, 1.3, and 1.6 g protein per kg bodyweight per day is recommended for individuals with minimal, moderate, and intense physical activity, respectively❞
❝Long-term consumption of protein at 2 g per kg bodyweight per day is safe for healthy adults, and the tolerable upper limit is 3.5 g per kg bodyweight per day for well-adapted subjects❞
❝Chronic high protein intake (>2 g per kg bodyweight per day for adults) may result in digestive, renal, and vascular abnormalities and should be avoided❞
Source: Dietary protein intake and human health
To put this into perspective, if you weigh about 160lbs (about 72kg), this would mean eating more than 144g protein per day, which grabbing a calculator means about 560g of lean beef, or 20oz, or 1¼lb.
If you’re eating quarter-pounder burgers though, that’s not usually so lean, so you’d need to eat more than nine quarter-pounder burgers per day to get too much protein.
High protein intake damages the kidneys: True or False?
True if you have kidney damage already; False if you are healthy. See for example:
- Effects of dietary protein restriction on the progression of advanced renal disease in the modification of diet in renal disease study
- A high protein diet has no harmful effects: a one-year crossover study in healthy male athletes
High protein intake increases cancer risk: True or False?
True or False depending on the source of the protein, so functionally false:
- Eating protein from red meat sources has been associated with higher risk for many cancers
- Eating protein from other sources has been associated with lower risk for many cancers
Source: Red Meat Consumption and Mortality Results From 2 Prospective Cohort Studies
High protein intake increase risk of heart disease: True or False?
True or False depending on the source of the protein, so, functionally false:
- Eating protein from red meat sources has been associated with higher risk of heart disease
- Eating protein from other sources has been associated with lower risk of heart disease
Source: Major Dietary Protein Sources and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Women
In summary…
Getting a good amount of good quality protein is important to health.
One can get too much, but one would have to go to extremes to do so.
The source of protein matters:
- Red meat is associated with many health risks, but that’s not necessarily the protein’s fault.
- Getting plenty of protein from (ideally: unprocessed) sources such as poultry, fish, and/or plants, is critical to good health.
- Consuming “whole proteins” (that contain all 9 amino acids that we can’t synthesize) are best.
Learn more: Complete proteins vs. incomplete proteins (explanation and examples)
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This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism – by Ashton Applewhite
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It’s easy to think of ageism as being 80% “nobody will hire me because I am three years away from standard retirement age”, but it’s a lot more pervasive than that. And some of it, perhaps the most insidious, is the ageism that we can sometimes internalize without thinking it through.
10almonds readers love to avoid/reverse aging (and this reviewer is no different!), but it’s good once in a while to consider our priorities and motivations, for example:
- There is merit in being able to live without disability or discomfort
- There is harm in feeling a need to pass for younger than we are
And yet, even things such as disabilities are, Applewhite fairly argues, not to be feared. Absolutely avoided if reasonably possible of course, yes, but if they happen they happen and it’s good that we be able to make our peace with that, because most people have at least some kind of disability before the end, and can still strive to make the most of the precious gift that is life. The goal can and should be to play the hand we’re dealt and to live as well as we can—whatever that latter means for us personally.
Many people’s life satisfaction goes up in later years, and Applewhite hypothesizes that while some of that can be put down to circumstances (often no longer overwhelmed with work etc, often more financially stable), a lot is a matter of having come to terms with “losing” youth and no longer having that fear. Thus, a new, freer age of life begins.
The book does cover many other areas too, more than we can list here (but for example: ranging from pro/con brain differences to sex and intimacy), and the idea that long life is a team sport, and that we should not fall into the all-American trap of putting independence on a pedestal. Reports of how aging works with close-knit communities in the supercentenarian Blue Zones can be considered to quash this quite nicely, for instance.
The style is casual and entertaining, and yet peppered with scholarly citations, which stack up to 30 pages of references at the back.
Bottom line: getting older is a privilege that not everyone gets to have, so who are we to squander it? This book shares a vital sense of perspective, and is a call-to-arms for us all to do better, together.
Click here to check out This Chair Rocks, and indeed rock it!
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Menopause can bring increased cholesterol levels and other heart risks. Here’s why and what to do about it
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Menopause is a natural biological process that marks the end of a woman’s reproductive years, typically between 45 and 55. As women approach or experience menopause, common “change of life” concerns include hot flushes, sweats and mood swings, brain fog and fatigue.
But many women may not be aware of the long-term effects of menopause on the heart and blood vessels that make up the cardiovascular system. Heart disease accounts for 35% of deaths in women each year – more than all cancers combined.
What should women – and their doctors – know about these risks?
Hormones protect hearts – until they don’t
As early as 1976, the Framingham Heart Study reported more than twice the rates of cardiovascular events in postmenopausal than pre-menopausal women of the same age. Early menopause (younger than age 40) also increases heart risk.
Before menopause, women tend to be protected by their circulating hormones: oestrogen, to a lesser extent progesterone and low levels of testosterone.
These sex hormones help to relax and dilate blood vessels, reduce inflammation and improve lipid (cholesterol) levels. From the mid-40s, a decline in these hormone levels can contribute to unfavourable changes in cholesterol levels, blood pressure and weight gain – all risk factors for heart disease.
Speedkingz/Shutterstock 4 ways hormone changes impact heart risk
1. Dyslipidaemia– Menopause often involves atherogenic changes – an unhealthy imbalance of lipids in the blood, with higher levels of total cholesterol, triglycerides, and low-density lipoprotein (LDL-C), dubbed the “bad” cholesterol. There are also reduced levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL-C) – the “good” cholesterol that helps remove LDL-C from blood. These changes are a major risk factor for heart attack or stroke.
2. Hypertension – Declines in oestrogen and progesterone levels during menopause contribute to narrowing of the large blood vessels on the heart’s surface, arterial stiffness and raise blood pressure.
3. Weight gain – Females are born with one to two million eggs, which develop in follicles. By the time they stop ovulating in midlife, fewer than 1,000 remain. This depletion progressively changes fat distribution and storage, from the hips to the waist and abdomen. Increased waist circumference (greater than 80–88 cm) has been reported to contribute to heart risk – though it is not the only factor to consider.
4. Comorbidities – Changes in body composition, sex hormone decline, increased food consumption, weight gain and sedentary lifestyles impair the body’s ability to effectively use insulin. This increases the risk of developing metabolic syndromes such as type 2 diabetes.
While risk factors apply to both genders, hypertension, smoking, obesity and type 2 diabetes confer a greater relative risk for heart disease in women.
So, what can women do?
Every woman has a different level of baseline cardiovascular and metabolic risk pre-menopause. This is based on their genetics and family history, diet, and lifestyle. But all women can reduce their post-menopause heart risk with:
- regular moderate intensity exercise such as brisk walking, pushing a lawn mower, riding a bike or water aerobics for 30 minutes, four or five times every week
- a healthy heart diet with smaller portion sizes (try using a smaller plate or bowl) and more low-calorie, nutrient-rich foods such as vegetables, fruit and whole grains
- plant sterols (unrefined vegetable oil spreads, nuts, seeds and grains) each day. A review of 14 clinical trials found plant sterols, at doses of at least 2 grams a day, produced an average reduction in serum LDL-C (bad cholesterol) of about 9–14%. This could reduce the risk of heart disease by 25% in two years
- less unhealthy (saturated or trans) fats and more low-fat protein sources (lean meat, poultry, fish – especially oily fish high in omega-3 fatty acids), legumes and low-fat dairy
- less high-calorie, high-sodium foods such as processed or fast foods
- a reduction or cessation of smoking (nicotine or cannabis) and alcohol
- weight-gain management or prevention.
Exercise can reduce post-menopause heart disease risk. Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock What about hormone therapy medications?
Hormone therapy remains the most effective means of managing hot flushes and night sweats and is beneficial for slowing the loss of bone mineral density.
The decision to recommend oestrogen alone or a combination of oestrogen plus progesterone hormone therapy depends on whether a woman has had a hysterectomy or not. The choice also depends on whether the hormone therapy benefit outweighs the woman’s disease risks. Where symptoms are bothersome, hormone therapy has favourable or neutral effects on coronary heart disease risk and medication risks are low for healthy women younger than 60 or within ten years of menopause.
Depending on the level of stroke or heart risk and the response to lifestyle strategies, some women may also require medication management to control high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol levels. Up until the early 2000s, women were underrepresented in most outcome trials with lipid-lowering medicines.
The Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ Collaboration analysed 27 clinical trials of statins (medications commonly prescribed to lower cholesterol) with a total of 174,000 participants, of whom 27% were women. Statins were about as effective in women and men who had similar risk of heart disease in preventing events such as stroke and heart attack.
Every woman approaching menopause should ask their GP for a 20-minute Heart Health Check to help better understand their risk of a heart attack or stroke and get tailored strategies to reduce it.
Treasure McGuire, Assistant Director of Pharmacy, Mater Health SEQ in conjoint appointment as Associate Professor of Pharmacology, Bond University and as Associate Professor (Clinical), The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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All About Olive Oil
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
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 😎
❝Skip the video & tell more about olive oil please.❞
We love requests!
We can’t really do anti-requests (e.g. “skip the video”) because for every one person who doesn’t care for one particular element of the newsletter, there will be thousands who do—and indeed, the video segment is a popular one, so it will certainly remain.
However! Let us reassure you that you personally are not obliged to watch the video if you don’t want to 🙂 In fact, our general hope with 10almonds is that there will be at least one feature that is of value to each reader, each day.
Writer’s note: I’m a very bookish person, and in honesty do not love videos personally either. You know what I do love though? Olive oil. So let’s get onto that 😎
Why olive oil?
Let’s quickly address the taste/culinary side of things first, and then spend more time on the health aspects. Olive oil’s strong punchy flavor (as oils go, anyway) makes it a big winner with those of us who love strong punchy flavors. However, it does mean that it can overwhelm some more delicate dishes if one isn’t careful, meaning that it’s not perfect for everything all the time.
Healthwise, olive oil is one of the healthiest oils around, along with avocado oil. In fact, we compared them previously:
Avocado Oil vs Olive Oil – Which is Healthier?
…and it’s worth noting that their (excellent) lipids profiles are very similar, meaning that the main factor between them is that olive oil usually retains vitamins that avocado oil doesn’t.
Meanwhile, another popular contender for “healthy oil” is coconut oil, but this doesn’t have nearly as unambiguously good a lipids profile, because of coconut oil’s high saturated fat content—though lauric acid can have a cardioprotective effect, so the jury is out on that one:
Olive Oil vs Coconut Oil – Which is Healthier?
Interestingly, this article from The Conversation considered seed oils (canola, sunflower, sesame) to be next-best options:
I can’t afford olive oil. What else can I use?
…but it’s worth noting that the way those seed oils are made varies a lot from country to country, and can affect their health impact considerably.
It’s not just about the fats
Olives, especially green olives with their stronger more pungent flavor, are rich in assorted polyphenols that have many health-giving properties:
Black Olives vs Green Olives – Which is Healthier
…and olive oil is almost always made from green olives. Note that while we picked black olives in the above comparison, that’s mainly because green olives are “cured” for longer and thus are much higher in sodium… Which, guess what, isn’t in olive oil, so with olive oil we can enjoy all of the polyphenols with almost none of the sodium!
Let’s talk virginity
When it comes to olive oil, definitely not everything labelled as olive oil in the supermarket is of the same quality. Mostly, however, it’s not whether it’s “extra virgin” (i.e. the oil from the first mechanical pressing) or not that actually makes the biggest health difference, so much as that olive oils are often adulterated with other cheaper oils, so it’s important to check labels for that, even when they say “extra virgin”, in case it’s something like:
a blend of
EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL
and other oilsWe talk about this, and the various different levels of quality of olive oil and how you can tell them apart for yourself in the supermarket (and be wise to the ways they may try to trick you), here:
What to enjoy it with?
Olive oil is the single largest source of fat in the Mediterranean diet, and by that we mean not just “food that is eaten in the Mediterranean”, but rather, the well-defined dietary approach that has for a long time now been considered “the gold standard” of what a healthy diet looks like, scientifically. You can read more about what is and isn’t included in the definition, here:
Mediterranean Diet: What Is It Good For? ← what isn’t it good for!
Enjoy!
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