Detox: What’s Real, What’s Not, What’s Useful, What’s Dangerous?

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Detox: What’s Real, What’s Not, What’s Useful, What’s Dangerous?

Out of the subscribers who engaged in the poll, it looks like we have a lot of confidence in at least some detox approaches being useful!

Celery juice is most people’s go-to, and indeed it was the only one to get mentioned in the comments added. So let’s take a look at that first…

Celery juice

Celery juice is enjoyed by many people, with many health benefits in mind, including to:

  • reduce inflammation
  • lower blood pressure
  • heal the liver
  • fight cancer
  • reduce bloating
  • support the digestive system
  • increase energy
  • support weight loss
  • promote good mental health

An impressive list! With such an impressive list, we would hope for an impressive weight of evidence, so regular readers might be wondering why those bullet-pointed items aren’t all shiny hyperlinks to studies backing those claims. The reason is…

There aren’t any high-quality studies that back any of those claims.

We found one case study (so, a study with a sample size of one; not amazing) that observed a blood pressure change in an elderly man after drinking celery juice.

Rather than trawl up half of PubMed to show the lacklustre results in a way more befitting of Research Review Monday, though, here’s a nice compact article detailing the litany of disappointment that is science’s observations regards celery juice:

Why Are People Juicing Their Celery? – by Allison Webster, PhD, RD

A key take-away is: juicing destroys the fiber that is celery’s biggest benefit, and its phytochemicals are largely unproven to be of use.

If you enjoy celery, great! It (when not juiced) is a great source of fiber and water. If you juice it, it’s a great source of water.

Activated Charcoal

Unlike a lot of greenery—whose “cleansing” benefits mostly come from fiber and disappear when juiced—activated charcoal has a very different way of operating.

Activated charcoal is negatively charged on a molecular level*, and that—along with its porous nature—traps toxins. It really is a superpowered detox that actually works very well indeed.

But…

It works very well indeed. It will draw out toxins so well, that it’s commonly used to treat poisonings. “Wait”, we hear you say, “why was that a but”?

It doesn’t know what a toxin is. It just draws out all of the things. You took medicine recently? Not any more you didn’t. You didn’t even take that medication orally, you took it some other way? Activated charcoal does not care:

Does this mean that activated charcoal can be used to “undo” a night of heavy drinking?

Sadly not. That’s one of the few things it just doesn’t work for. It won’t work for alcohol, salts, or metals:

The Use of Activated Charcoal to Treat Intoxications

*Fun chemistry mnemonic about ions:

Cations are pussitive

Anions (by process of elimination) are negative

Onions taste good in salad (remember also: Cole’s Law)

Bottom line on detox foods/drinks:

  • Fiber is great; juicing removes fiber. Eat your greens (don’t drink them)!
  • Activated charcoal is the heavy artillery of detoxing
  • Sometimes it will remove things you didn’t want removed, though
  • It also won’t help against alcohol, sadly

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  • Stop Tinnitus, & Improve Your Hearing By 130%

    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.

    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:

    1. 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.
    2. Additionally, open and close your mouth, clenching and unclenching your teeth, and note any variations; this is about muscular tension affecting hearing.
    3. 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:

    1. Begin with the neck’s scalene muscles, located behind the sternocleidomastoid muscle.
    2. Massage these areas by moving your hands up and down and varying head positions slightly forward and backward.
    3. Repeat on both sides to enhance blood circulation and reduce auditory interference. Next, target the chewing muscles.
    4. Massage painful areas of the jaw and temporalis muscle in circular motions, working along and across the muscle fibers.
    5. Divide the temporalis muscle into sections and address each thoroughly to relieve tension and improve hearing.
    6. Mobilize the outer auditory passage by gently pulling the ear in all directions—starting with the earlobe, middle part, and upper ear.
    7. 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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  • Improving Women’s Health Across the Lifespan – by Dr. Michelle Tollefson et al.

    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 say “et al.”, because this hefty book (504 pages) is a compilation of contributions by about 60 authors, of whom, 100% are doctors and about 90% are women.

    As one might expect from a book with many small self-contained chapters by such a lot of doctors, the content is very diverse, though the style is consistent throughout, likely due to the authors working from a style sheet, plus the work of the editorial team.

    About that content: the focus here is lifestyle medicine, and while much of the advice will go for men too (most people are unlikely to go wrong with “eat more fruits and vegetables and get better sleep” etc), anything more detailed than that (of which there’s a lot) is focussed on women. Hence, we get chapters on optimal nutrition for women, physical activity for women, sleep and women’s health, etc, as well as topics that can affect everyone but disproportionately affect women—ranging from autoimmune diseases to social burdens that affect health in measurable ways. There’s also, as you might expect, plenty about sexual health, pregnancy-related health, menopausal health, and so forth.

    The strength of this book is really in its diversity; it’s very much a case of “60 heads are better than one”, and as such, we’re pretty much getting 60 books for the price of one here, as each author brings what they are most specialized in.

    Bottom line: if you are a woman and/or love a woman, this book is packed with information that will be of interest and applicable use.

    Click here to check out Improving Women’s Health Across The Lifespan, and do just that!

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  • Do We Need Supplements, And Do They Work?

    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.

    Does our diet need a little help?

    We asked you for your take on supplements, and got the above-illustrated, below-described set of results.

    • The largest minority of respondents (a little over a third) voted for “I just take something very specific”
    • The next most respondents voted for “I take so many supplements; every little helps!”
    • Almost as many voted for “I just take a vitamin or two / a multivitamin”
    • Fewest, about 8%, voted for “I get everything I need from my diet”

    But what does the science say?

    Food is less nutritious now than it used to be: True or False?

    True or False depending on how you measure it.

    An apple today and an apple from a hundred years ago are likely to contain the same amounts of micronutrients per apple, but a lower percentage of micronutrients per 100g of apple.

    The reason for this is that apples (and many other food products; apples are just an arbitrary example) have been selectively bred (and in some cases, modified) for size, and because the soil mineral density has remained the same, the micronutrients per apple have not increased commensurate to the increase in carbohydrate weight and/or water weight. Thus, the resultant percentage will be lower, despite the quantity remaining the same.

    We’re going to share some science on this, and/but would like to forewarn readers that the language of this paper is a bit biased, as it looks to “debunk” claims of nutritional values dropping while skimming over “yes, they really have dropped percentage-wise” in favor of “but look, the discrete mass values are still the same, so that’s just a mathematical illusion”.

    The reality is, it’s no more a mathematical illusion than is the converse standpoint of saying the nutritional value is the same, despite the per-100g values dropping. After all, sometimes we eat an apple as-is; sometimes we buy a bag of frozen chopped fruit. That 500g bag of chopped fruit is going to contain less copper (for example) than one from decades past.

    Here’s the paper, and you’ll see what we mean:

    Mineral nutrient composition of vegetables, fruits and grains: The context of reports of apparent historical declines

    Supplements aren’t absorbed properly and thus are a waste of money: True or False?

    True or False depending on the supplement (and your body, and the rest of your diet)

    Many people are suffering from dietary deficiencies of vitamins and minerals, that could be easily correctable by supplementation:

    However, as this study by Dr. Fang Fang Zhang shows, a lot of vitamin and mineral supplementation does not appear to have much of an effect on actual health outcomes, vis-à-vis specific diseases. She looks at:

    • Cardiovascular disease
    • Cancer
    • Type 2 diabetes
    • Osteoporosis

    Her key take-aways from this study were:

    • Randomised trial evidence does not support use of vitamin, mineral, and fish oil supplements to reduce the risk of non-communicable diseases
    • People using supplements tend to be older, female, and have higher education, income, and healthier lifestyles than people who do not use them
    • Use of supplements appreciably reduces the prevalence of inadequate intake for most nutrients but also increases the prevalence of excess intake for some nutrients
    • Further research is needed to assess the long term effects of supplements on the health of the general population and in individuals with specific nutritional needs, including those from low and middle income countries

    Read her damning report: Health effects of vitamin and mineral supplements

    On the other hand…

    This is almost entirely about blanket vitamin-and-mineral supplementation. With regard to fish oil supplementation, many commercial fish oil supplements break down in the stomach rather than the intestines, and don’t get absorbed well. Additionally, many people take them in forms that aren’t pleasant, and thus result in low adherence (i.e., they nominally take them, but in fact they just sit on the kitchen counter for a year).

    One thing we can conclude from this is that it’s good to check the science for any given supplement before taking it, and know what it will and won’t help for. Our “Monday Research Review” editions of 10almonds do this a lot, although we tend to focus on herbal supplements rather than vitamins and minerals.

    We can get everything we need from our diet: True or False?

    Contingently True (but here be caveats)

    In principle, if we eat the recommended guideline amounts of various macro- and micro-nutrients, we will indeed get all that we are generally considered to need. Obviously.

    However, this may come with:

    • Make sure to get enough protein… Without too much meat, and also without too much carbohydrate, such as from most plant sources of protein
    • Make sure to get enough carbohydrates… But only the right kinds, and not too much, nor at the wrong time, and without eating things in the wrong order
    • Make sure to get enough healthy fats… Without too much of the unhealthy fats that often exist in the same foods
    • Make sure to get the right amount of vitamins and minerals… We hope you have your calculators out to get the delicate balance of calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, and vitamin D right.

    That last one’s a real pain, by the way. Too much or too little of one or another and the whole set start causing problems, and several of them interact with several others, and/or compete for resources, and/or are needed for the others to do their job.

    And, that’s hard enough to balance when you’re taking supplements with the mg/µg amount written on them, never mind when you’re juggling cabbages and sardines.

    On the topic of those sardines, don’t forget to carefully balance your omega-3, -6, and -9, and even within omega-3, balancing ALA, EPA, and DHA, and we hope you’re juggling those HDL and LDL levels too.

    So, when it comes to getting everything we need from our diet, for most of us (who aren’t living in food deserts and/or experiencing food poverty, or having a medical condition that restricts our diet), the biggest task is not “getting enough”, it’s “getting enough of the right things without simultaneously overdoing it on the others”.

    With supplements, it’s a lot easier to control what we’re putting in our bodies.

    And of course, unless our diet includes things that usually can’t be bought in supermarkets, we’re not going to get the benefits of taking, as a supplement, such things as:

    Etc.

    So, there definitely are supplements with strong science-backed benefits, that probably can’t be found on your plate!

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  • The End of Old Age – by Dr. Marc Agronin

    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, what this book is not: a book about ending aging. For that, you would want to check out “Ending Aging”, by Dr. Aubrey de Grey.

    What this book actually is: a book about the purpose of aging. As in: “aging: to what end?”, and then the book answers that question.

    Rather than viewing aging as solely a source of decline, this book (while not shying away from that) resolutely examines the benefits of old age—from clinically defining wisdom, to exploring the many neurological trade-offs (e.g., “we lose this thing but we get this other thing in the process”), and the assorted ways in which changes in our brain change our role in society, without relegating us to uselessness—far from it!

    The style of the book is deep and meaningful prose throughout. Notwithstanding the author’s academic credentials and professional background in geriatric psychiatry, there’s no hard science here, just comprehensible explanations of psychiatry built into discussions that are often quite philosophical in nature (indeed, the author additionally has a degree in psychology and philosophy, and it shows).

    Bottom line: if you’d like your own aging to be something you understand better and can actively work with rather than just having it happen to you, then this is an excellent book for you.

    Click here to check out The End Of Old Age, and live it!

    Don’t Forget…

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  • Bright Line Eating – by Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson

    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.

    This is a great title! It’s a great book too, but let’s talk about the title for a moment:

    The “Bright Line” referenced (often used in the plural within the book) is the line one draws between what one will and will not do. It’s a line one doesn’t cross, and it’s a bright line, because it’s not a case of “oh woe is me I cannot have the thing”, but rather “oh yay is me for I being joyously healthy”.

    And as for living happy, thin, and free? The author makes clear that “thin” is only a laudable goal if it’s bookended by “happy” and “free”. Eating things because we want to, and being happy about our choices.

    To this end, while some of the book is about nutrition (and for example the strong recommendation to make the first “bright lines” one draws cutting out sugar and flour), the majority of it is about the psychology of eating.

    This includes, hunger and satiety, willpower and lack thereof, disordered eating and addictions, body image issues and social considerations, the works. She realizes and explains, that if being healthy were just a matter of the right diet plan, everyone would be healthy. But it’s not; our eating behaviors don’t exist in a vacuum, and there’s a lot more to consider.

    Despite all the odds, however, this is a cheerful and uplifting book throughout, while dispensing very practical, well-evidenced methods for getting your brain to get your body to do what you want it to.

    Bottom line: this isn’t your average diet book, and it’s not just a motivational pep talk either. It’s an enjoyable read that’s also full of science and can make a huge difference to how you see food.

    Click here to check out Bright Line Eating, and enjoy life, healthily!

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  • Tasty Versatile Rice

    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 the nearish future, we’re going to do some incredible rice dishes, but first we need to make sure we’re all on the same page about cooking rice, so here’s a simple recipe first, to get technique down and work in some essentials. We’ll be using wholegrain basmati rice, because it has a low glycemic index, lowest likelihood of heavy metal contamination (a problem for some kinds of rice), and it’s one of the easiest rices to cook well.

    You will need

    • 1 cup wholegrain basmati rice (it may also be called “brown basmati rice“; this is the same)
    • 1 1/2 cups vegetable stock (ideally you have made this yourself from vegetable offcuts that you saved in the freezer, then it will be healthiest and lowest in sodium; failing that, low-sodium vegetable stock cubes can be purchased at most large supermarkets. and then made up at home with hot water)
    • 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
    • 1 tbsp chia seeds
    • 1 tbsp black pepper, coarse ground
    • 1 tsp turmeric powder (this small quantity will not change the flavor, but it has important health benefits, and also makes the rice a pleasant golden color)
    • 1 tsp garlic powder
    • 1 tsp yeast extract (this gently improves the savory flavor and also adds vitamin B12)
    • Optional small quantity of green herbs for garnish. Cilantro is good (unless you have the soap gene); parsley never fails.

    This is the ingredients list for a super-basic rice that will go with anything rice will go with; another day we can talk more extensive mixes of herbs and spice blends for different kinds of dishes (and different health benefits!), but for now, let’s get going!

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Wash the rice thoroughly. We recommend using a made-for-purpose rice-washing bowl (like this one, for example), but failing that, simply rinse it thoroughly with cold water using a bowl and a sieve. You will probably need to rinse it 4–5 times, but with practice, it will only take a few seconds per rinse, and the water will be coming up clear.

    2) Warm the pan. It doesn’t matter for the moment whether you’re using an electronic rice cooker, a stovetop pressure cooker, electronic pressure cooker, or just a sturdy pan with a heavy lid available, aside from that if it’s something non-stovetop, you now want it to be on low to warm up already.

    3) Separately in a saucepan, bring your stock to a simmer

    4) Put the tbsp of olive oil into the pan (even if you’re confident the rice won’t stick; this isn’t entirely about that) and turn up the heat (if it’s a very simple rice cooker, most at least have a warm/cook differentiation; if so, turn it to “cook”). You don’t want the oil to get to the point of smoking, so, to test the temperature as it heats, flick a single drop of water from your fingertip (you did wash your hands first, right? We haven’t been including that step, but please do wash your hands before doing kitchen things) into the pan. If it sizzles, the pan is hot enough now for the next step.

    5) Put the rice into the pan. That’s right, with no extra liquid yet; we’re going to toast it for a moment. Stir it a little, for no more than a minute; keep it moving; don’t let it burn! If you try this several times and fail, it could be that you need a better pan. Treat yourself to one when you get the opportunity; until then, skip the toasting part if necessary.

    6) Add the chia seeds and spices, followed by the stock, followed by the yeast extract. Why did we do the stock before the yeast extract? It’s because hot liquid will get all the yeast extract off the teaspoon 🙂

    7) Put the lid on/down (per what kind of pan or rice cooker you are using), and turn up the heat (if it is a variable heat source) until a tiny bit of steam starts making its way out. When it does, turn it down to a simmer, and let the rice cook. Don’t stir it, don’t jiggle it; trust the process. If you stir or jiggle it, the rice will cook unevenly and, paradoxically, probably stick.

    8) Do keep an eye on it, because when steam stops coming out, it is done, and needs taking off the heat immediately. If using an automatic rice cooker, you can be less attentive if you like, because it will monitor this for you.

    Note: if you are using a simple pan with a non-fastening lid (any other kind of rice cooking setup is better), more steam will escape than the other methods, and it’s possible that it might run out of steam (literally) before the rice is finished. If the steam stops and you find the rice isn’t done, add a splash of water as necessary (the rice doesn’t need to be submerged, it just needs to have liquid; the steam is part of the cooking process), and make a note of how much you had to add (so that next time you can just add it at the start), and put it back on the heat until it is done.

    9) Having taken it off the heat, let it sit for 5 minutes (with the lid still on) before doing any fluffing-up. Then you can fluff-up and serve, adding the garnish if you want one.

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    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

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