Deskbound – by Kelly Starrett and Glen Cordoza
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We’ve all heard that “sitting is the new smoking”, and whether or not that’s an exaggeration (the jury’s out), one thing that is clear is that sitting is very bad.
Popular advice is “here’s how to sit with good posture and stretch your neck sometimes”… but that advice tends to come from companies that pay people to sit for a long time. They might not be the a very unbiased source.
Starrett and Cordoza offer better. After one opening chapter covering the multifarious ways sitting ruins our health, the rest of the book is all advice, covering:
- The principles of how the body is supposed to be
- The most important movements that we should be doing
- A dynamic workstation setup
- This is great, because “get a standing desk” tends to present more questions than answers, and can cause as much harm as good if done wrong
- The authors also cover how to progressively cut down on sitting, rather than try to go cold-turkey.
- They also recognize that not everyone can stand at all, and…
- Optimizing the sitting position, for when we must sit
- Exercises to maintain our general mobility and compensate about as well as we can for the body-unfriendly nature of modern life.
The book is mostly explanations, so at 682 pages, you can imagine it’s not just “get up, lazybones!”. Rather, things are explained in such detail (and with many high-quality medical diagrams) so that we can truly understand them.
Most of us have gone through life knowing we should have “better posture” and “move more”… but without the details, that can be hard to execute correctly, and worse, we can even sabotage our bodies unknowingly with incorrect form.
This book straightens all that out very comprehensively, and we highly recommend it.
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How To Avoid Age-Related Macular Degeneration
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Avoiding Age-Related Macular Degeneration
Eye problems can strike at any age, but as we get older, it becomes a lot more likely. In particular, age-related macular degeneration is, as the name suggests, an age-bound disease.
Is there no escaping it, then?
The risk factors for age-related macular degeneration are as follows:
- Being over the age of 55 (can’t do much about this one)
- Being over the age of 65 (risk climbs sharply now)
- Having a genetic predisposition (can’t do much about this one)
- Having high cholesterol (this one we can tackle)
- Having cardiovascular disease (this one we can tackle)
- Smoking (so, just don’t)
Genes predispose; they don’t predetermine. Or to put it another way: genes load the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger.
Preventative interventions against age-related macular degeneration
Prevention is better than a cure in general, and this especially goes for things like age-related macular degeneration, because the most common form of it has no known cure.
So first, look after your heart (because your heart feeds your eyes).
See also: The Mediterranean Diet
Next, eat to feed your eyes specifically. There’s a lot of research to show that lutein helps avoid age-related diseases in the eyes and the rest of the brain, too:
See also: Brain Food? The Eyes Have It
Do supplements help?
They can! There was a multiple-part landmark study by the National Eye Institute, a formula was developed that reduced the 5-year risk of intermediate disease progressing to late disease by 25–30%. It also reduced the risk of vision loss by 19%.
You can read about both parts of the study here:
Age-Related Eye Disease Studies (AREDS/AREDS2): major findings
As you can see, an improvement was made between the initial study and the second one, by replacing beta-carotene with lutein and zeaxanthin.
The AREDS2 formula contains:
- 500 mg vitamin C
- 180 mg vitamin E
- 80 mg zinc
- 10 mg lutein
- 2 mg copper
You can learn more about these supplements, and where to get them, here on the NEI’s corner of the official NIH website:
AREDS 2 Supplements for Age-Related Macular Degeneration
Take care of yourself!
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Are You Taking PIMs?
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Getting Off The Overmedication Train
The older we get, the more likely we are to be on more medications. It’s easy to assume that this is because, much like the ailments they treat, we accumulate them over time. And superficially at least, that’s what happens.
And yet, almost half of people over 65 in Canada are taking “potentially inappropriate medications”, or PIMs—in other words, medications that are not needed and perhaps harmful. This categorization includes medications where the iatrogenic harms (side effects, risks) outweigh the benefits, and/or there’s a safer more effective medication available to do the job.
You may be wondering: what does this mean for the US?
Well, we don’t have the figures for the US because we’re working from Canadian research today, but given the differences between the two country’s healthcare systems (mostly socialized in Canada and mostly private in the US), it seems a fair hypothesis that if it’s almost half in Canada, it’s probably more than half in the US. Socialized healthcare systems are generally quite thrifty and seek to spend less on healthcare, while private healthcare systems are generally keen to upsell to new products/services.
The three top categories of PIMs according to the above study:
- Gabapentinoids (anticonvulsants also used to treat neuropathic pain)
- Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs)
- Antipsychotics (especially, to people without psychosis)
…but those are just the top of the list; there are many many more.
The list continues: opioids, anticholinergics, sulfonlyurea, NSAIDs, benzodiazepines and related rugs, and cholinesterase inhibitors. That’s where the Canadian study cuts off (although it also includes “others” just before NSAIDs), but still, you guessed it, there are more (we’re willing to bet statins weigh heavily in the “others” section, for a start).
There are two likely main causes of overmedication:
The side effect train
This is where a patient has a condition and is prescribed drug A, which has some undesired side effects, so the patient is prescribed drug B to treat those. However, that drug also has some unwanted side effects of its own, so the patient is prescribed drug C to treat those. And so on.
For a real-life rundown of how this can play out, check out the case study in:
The Hidden Complexities of Statins and Cardiovascular Disease (CVD)
The convenience factor
No, not convenient for you. Convenient for others. Convenient for the doctor if it gets you out of their office (socialized healthcare) or because it was easy to sell (private healthcare). Convenient for the staff in a hospital or other care facility.
This latter is what happens when, for example, a patient is being too much trouble, so the staff give them promazine “to help them settle down”, notwithstanding that promazine is, besides being a sedative, also an antipsychotic whose common side effects include amenorrhea, arrhythmias, constipation, drowsiness and dizziness, dry mouth, impotence, tiredness, galactorrhoea, gynecomastia, hyperglycemia, insomnia, hypotension, seizures, tremor, vomiting and weight gain.
This kind of thing (and worse) happens more often towards the end of a patient’s life; indeed, sometimes precipitating that end, whether you want it or not:
Mortality, Palliative Care, & Euthanasia
How to avoid it
Good practice is to be “open-mindedly skeptical” about any medication. By this we mean, don’t reject it out of hand, but do ask questions about it.
Ask your prescriber not only what it’s for and what it’ll do, but also what the side effects and risks are, and an important question that many people don’t think to ask, and for which doctors thus don’t often have a well-prepared smooth-selling reply, “what will happen if I don’t take this?”
And look up unbiased neutral information about it, from reliable sources (Drugs.com and The BNF are good reference guides for this—and if it’s important to you, check both, in case of any disagreement, as they function under completely different regulatory bodies, the former being American and the latter being British. So if they both agree, it’s surely accurate, according to best current science).
Also: when you are on a medication, keep a journal of your symptoms, as well as a log of your vitals (heart rate, blood pressure, weight, sleep etc) so you know what the medication seems to be helping or harming, and be sure to have a regular meds review with your doctor to check everything’s still right for you. And don’t be afraid to seek a second opinion if you still have doubts.
Want to know more?
For a more in-depth exploration than we have room for here, check out this book that we reviewed not long back:
To Medicate or Not? That is the Question! – by Dr. Asha Bohannon
Take care!
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Chetna’s Healthy Indian – by Chetna Makan
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Indian food is wonderful—a subjective opinion perhaps, but a popular view, and one this reviewer certainly shares. And of course, cooking with plenty of vegetables and spices is a great way to get a lot of health benefits.
There are usually downsides though, such as that in a lot of Indian cookbooks, every second thing is deep-fried, and what’s not deep-fried contains an entire day or more’s saturated fat content in ghee, and a lot of sides have more than their fair share of sugar.
This book fixes all that, by offering 80 recipes that prioritize health without sacrificing flavor.
The recipes are, as the title suggests, vegetarian, though many are not vegan (yogurt and cheese featuring in many recipes). That said, even if you are vegan, it’s pretty easy to veganize those with the obvious plant-based substitutions. If you have soy yogurt and can whip up vegan paneer yourself (here’s our own recipe for that), you’re pretty much sorted.
The cookbook strikes a good balance of being neither complicated nor “did we really need a recipe for this?” basic, and delivers value in all of its recipes. The ingredients, often a worry for many Westerners, should be easily found if you have a well-stocked supermarket near you; there’s nothing obscure here.
Bottom line: if you’d like to cook more Indian food and want your food to be exciting without also making your blood pressure exciting, then this is an excellent book for keeping you well-nourished, body and soul.
Click here to check out Chetna’s Healthy Indian, and spice up your culinary repertoire!
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How To Avoid Slipping Into (Bad) Old Habits
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Treating Bad Habits Like Addictions
How often have you started a healthy new habit (including if it’s a “quit this previous thing” new habit), only to find that you slip back into your old ways?
We’ve written plenty on habit-forming before, so here’s a quick recap before we continue:
How To Really Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits
…and even how to give them a boost:
How To Keep On Keeping On… Long Term!
But how to avoid the relapses that are most likely to snowball?
Borrowing from the psychology of addiction recovery
It’s well known that someone recovering from substance addiction should not have even a small amount of the thing they were addicted to. Not one sip of champagne at a wedding, not one drag of a cigarette, and so forth.
This can go for other bad habits too; make one exception, and suddenly you have a whole string of “exceptions”, and before you know it, it’s not the exception anymore; it’s the new rule—again.
Three things that can help guard against this are:
- Absolutely refuse to romanticize the bad habit. Do not fall for its marketing! And yes, everything has marketing even if not advertising; for example, consider the Platonic ideal of a junk-food-eating couch-potato who is humble, unassuming, agreeable, the almost-holy idea of homely comfort, and why shouldn’t we be comfortable after all, haven’t we earned our chosen hedonism, and so on. It’s seductive, and we need to make the choice to not be seduced by it. In this case for example, yes pleasure is great, but being sick tired and destroying our bodies is not, in fact, pleasurable in the long run. Which brings us to…
- Absolutely refuse to forget why you dropped that behavior in the first place. Remember what it did to you, remember you at your worst. Remember what you feared might become of you if you continued like that. This is something where journaling helps, by the way; remembering our low points helps us to avoid finding ourselves in the same situation again.
- Absolutely refuse to let your guard down due to an overabundance of self-confidence in your future self. We all can easily feel that tomorrow is a mystical land in which all productivity is stored, and also where we are strong, energized, iron-willed, and totally able to avoid making the very mistakes that we are right now in the process of making. Instead, be that strong person now, for the benefit of tomorrow’s you. Because after all, if it’s going to be easy tomorrow, it’s easy now, right?
The above is a very simple, hopefully practical, set of rules to follow. If you like hard science more though, Yale’s Dr. Steven Melemis offers five rules (aimed more directly at addiction recovery, so this may be a big “heavy guns” for some milder habits):
- change your life
- be completely honest
- ask for help
- practice self-care
- don’t bend the rules
You can read his full paper and the studies it’s based on, here:
Relapse Prevention and the Five Rules of Recovery
“What if I already screwed up?”
Draw a line under it, now, and move forwards in the direction you actually want to go.
Here’s a good article, that saves us taking up more space here; it’s very well-written so we do recommend it:
The Abstinence Violation Effect and Overcoming It
this article gives specific, practical advices, including CBT tools to use
Take care!
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Meditations for Mortals – by Oliver Burkeman
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We previously reviewed this author’s “Four Thousand Weeks”, but for those who might have used a lot of those four thousand weeks already, and would like to consider things within a smaller timeframe for now, this work is a 28-day daily reader.
Now, daily readers are usually 366 days, but the chapters here are not the single page chapters that 366-page daily readers usually have. So, expect to invest a little more time per day (say, about 6 pages for each daily chapter).
Burkeman does not start the way we might expect, by telling us to take the time to smell the roses. Instead, he starts by examining the mistakes that most of us make most of the time, often due to unexamined assumptions about the world and how it works. Simply put, we’ve often received bad lessons in life (usually not explicitly, but rather, from our environments), and it takes some unpacking first to deal with that.
Nor is the book systems-based, as many books that get filed under “time management” may be, but rather, is simply principles-based. This is a strength, because principles are a lot easier to keep to than systems.
The writing style is direct and conversational, and neither overly familiar nor overly academic. It strikes a very comfortably readable balance.
Bottom line: if you’d like to get the most out of your days, this book can definitely help improve things a lot.
Click here to check out Meditations For Mortals, and live fulfilling days!
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Radiant Rebellion – by Karen Walrond
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In health terms, we are often about fighting aging here. But to be more specific, what we’re fighting in those cases is not truly aging itself, so much as age-related decline.
Karen Walrond makes a case that we’ve made from the very start of 10almonds (but she wrote a whole book about it), that there’s merit in looking at what we can and can’t control about aging, doing what we reasonably can, and embracing what we can’t.
And yes, embracing, not merely accepting. This is not a downer of a book; it’s a call to revolution. It asks us to be proud of our grey hairs, to see our smile-lines around our eyes as the sign of a lived-in body, and even to embrace some of the unavoidable “actual decline” things as part of the journey of life. Maybe we’re not as strong as we used to be and now need a grippety-doodah to open jars; not everyone gets to live long enough to experience that! How lucky we are.
Perhaps most importantly, she bids us be the change we want to see in the world, and inspire others with our choices and actions, and shake off ageist biases for good.
Bottom line: if you want to foster a better attitude to aging not only for yourself, but also those around you, then this is a top-tier book for that.
Click here to check out Radiant Rebellion, and reclaim aging!
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