Dietary Changes for Artery Health
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
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
❝How does your diet change clean out your arteries of the bad cholesterol?❞
There’s good news and bad news here, and they can both be delivered with a one-word reply:
Slowly.
Or rather: what’s being cleaned out is mostly not the LDL (bad) cholesterol, but rather, the result of that.
When our diet is bad for cardiovascular health, our arteries get fatty deposits on their walls. Cholesterol gets stuck here too, but that’s not the main physical problem.
Our body’s natural defenses come into action and try to clean it up, but they (for example macrophages, a kind of white blood cell that consumes invaders and then dies, before being recycled by the next part of the system) often get stuck and become part of the buildup (called atheroma), which can lead to atherosclerosis and (if calcium levels are high) hardening of the arteries, which is the worst end of this.
This can then require medical attention, precisely because the body can’t remove it very well—especially if you are still maintaining a heart-unhealthy diet, thus continuing to add to the mess.
However, if it is not too bad yet, yes, a dietary change alone will reverse this process. Without new material being added to the arterial walls, the body’s continual process of rejuvenation will eventually fix it, given time (free from things making it worse) and resources.
In fact, your arteries can be one of the quickest places for your body to make something better or worse, because the blood is the means by which the body moves most things (good or bad) around the body.
All the more reason to take extra care of it, since everything else depends on it!
You might also like our previous main feature:
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Marathons in Mid- and Later-Life
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.
It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
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
We had several requests pertaining to veganism, meatless mondays, and substitutions in recipes—so we’re going to cover those on a different day!
As for questions we’re answering today…
Q: Is there any data on immediate and long term effects of running marathons in one’s forties?
An interesting and very specific question! We didn’t find an overabundance of studies specifically for the short- and long-term effects of marathon-running in one’s 40s, but we did find a couple of relevant ones:
The first looked at marathon-runners of various ages, and found that…
- there are virtually no relevant running time differences (p<0.01) per age in marathon finishers from 20 to 55 years
- the majority of middle-aged and elderly athletes have training histories of less than seven years of running
From which they concluded:
❝The present findings strengthen the concept that considers aging as a biological process that can be considerably speeded up or slowed down by multiple lifestyle related factors.❞
See the study: Performance, training and lifestyle parameters of marathon runners aged 20–80 years: results of the PACE-study
The other looked specifically at the impact of running on cartilage, controlled for age (45 and under vs 46 and older) and activity level (marathon-runners vs sedentary people).
The study had the people, of various ages and habitual activity levels, run for 30 minutes, and measured their knee cartilage thickness (using MRI) before and after running.
They found that regardless of age or habitual activity level, running compressed the cartilage tissue to a similar extent. From this, it can be concluded that neither age nor marathon-running result in long-term changes to cartilage response to running.
Or in lay terms: there’s no reason that marathon-running at 40 should ruin your knees (unless you are doing something wrong).
That may or may not have been a concern you have, but it’s what the study looked at, so hey, it’s information.
Here’s the study: Functional cartilage MRI T2 mapping: evaluating the effect of age and training on knee cartilage response to running
Q: Information on [e-word] dysfunction for those who have negative reactions to [the most common medications]?
When it comes to that particular issue, one or more of these three factors are often involved:
- Hormones
- Circulation
- Psychology
The most common drugs (that we can’t name here) work on the circulation side of things—specifically, by increasing the localized blood pressure. The exact mechanism of this drug action is interesting, albeit beyond the scope of a quick answer here today. On the other hand, the way that they work can cause adverse blood-pressure-related side effects for some people; perhaps you’re one of them.
To take matters into your own hands, so to speak, you can address each of those three things we just mentioned:
Hormones
Ask your doctor (or a reputable phlebotomy service) for a hormone test. If your free/serum testosterone levels are low (which becomes increasingly common in men over the age of 45), they may prescribe something—such as testosterone shots—specifically for that.
This way, it treats the underlying cause, rather than offering a workaround like those common pills whose names we can’t mention here.
Circulation
Look after your heart health; eat for your heart health, and exercise regularly!
Cold showers/baths also work wonders for vascular tone—which is precisely what you need in this matter. By rapidly changing temperatures (such as by turning off the hot water for the last couple of minutes of your shower, or by plunging into a cold bath), your blood vessels will get practice at constricting and maintaining that constriction as necessary.
Psychology
[E-word] dysfunction can also have a psychological basis. Unfortunately, this can also then be self-reinforcing, if recalling previous difficulties causes you to get distracted/insecure and lose the moment. One of the best things you can do to get out of this catch-22 situation is to not worry about it in the moment. Depending on what you and your partner(s) like to do in bed, there are plenty of other equally respectable options, so just switch track!
Having a conversation about this in advance will probably be helpful, so that everyone’s on the same page of the script in that eventuality, and it becomes “no big deal”. Without that conversation, misunderstandings and insecurities could arise for your partner(s) as well as yourself (“aren’t I desirable enough?” etc).
So, to recap, we recommend:
- Have your hormones checked
- Look after your circulation
- Make the decision to have fun!
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The Brain-Skin Doctor
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Of Brains And Breakouts
Today’s spotlight is on Dr. Claudia Aguirre. She’s a molecular neuroscientist, and today she’s going to be educating us about skin.
What? Why?
When we say “neuroscience”, we generally think of the brain. And indeed, that’s a very important part of it.
We might think about eyes, which are basically an extension of the brain.
We don’t usually think about skin, which (just like our eyes) is constantly feeding us a lot of information about our surroundings, via a little under three million nerve endings. Guess where the other ends of those nerves lead!
There’s a constant two-way communication going on between our brain and our skin.
What does she want us to know?
Psychodermatology
The brain and the skin talk to each other, and maladies of one can impact the other:
- Directly, e.g. stress prompting skin breakouts (actually this is a several-step process physiologically, but for the sake of brevity we’ll call this direct)
- Indirectly, e.g. nervous disorders that result in people scratching or picking at their skin, which prompts a whole vicious cycle of one thing making the other worse
Read more: Psychodermatology: The Brain-Skin Connection
To address both kinds of problems, clearly something beyond moisturizer is needed!
Mindfulness (meditation and beyond)
Mindfulness is a well-evidenced healthful practice for many reasons, and Dr. Aguirra argues the case for it being good for our skin too.
As she points out,
❝Cultural stress and anxiety can trigger or aggravate many skin conditions—from acne to eczema to herpes, psoriasis, and rosacea.
Conversely, a disfiguring skin condition can trigger stress, anxiety, depression, and even suicide.
Chronic, generalized anxiety can create chronic inflammation and exacerbate inflammatory skin conditions, such as those I mentioned previously.
Chronic stress can result in chronic anxiety, hypervigilance, poor sleep, and a whole cascade of effects resulting in a constant breakdown of tissues and organs, including the skin.❞
So, she recommends mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), for the above reasons, along with others!
Read more: Mind Matters
How to do it: No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness
And as for “and beyond?”
Do you remember in the beginning of the pandemic, when people were briefly much more consciously trying to avoid touching their faces so much? That, too, is mindfulness. It may have been a stressed and anxious mindfulness for many*, but mindfulness nonetheless.
*which is why “mindfulness-based stress reduction” is not a redundant tautology repeated more than once unnecessarily, one time after another 😉
So: do try to keep aware of what you are doing to your skin, and so far as is reasonably practicable, only do the things that are good for it!
The skin as an endocrine organ
Nerves are not the only messengers in the body; hormones do a lot of our body’s internal communication too. And not just the ones everyone remembers are hormones (e.g. estrogen, testosterone, although yes, they do both have a big impact on skin too), but also many more, including some made in the skin itself!
Dr. Aguirra gives us a rundown of common conditions, the hormones behind them, and what we can do if we don’t want them:
Read more: Rethinking The Skin As An Endocrine Organ
Take-away advice:
For healthy skin, we need to do more than just hydrate, get good sleep, have good nutrition, and get a little sun (but not too much).
- We should also practice mindfulness-based stress reduction, and seek help for more serious mental health issues.
- We should also remember the part our hormones play in our skin, and not just the obvious ones.
Did you know that vitamin D is also a hormone, by the way? It’s not the only hormone at play in your skin by a long way, but it is an important one:
Society for Endocrinology | Vitamin D
Want to know more?
You might like this interview with Dr. Aguirre:
The Brain in Our Skin: An Interview with Dr. Claudia Aguirre
Take care!
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Modern Friendship – by Anna Goldfarb
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It’s a topic we’ve covered before at 10almonds: Human Connection In An All-Too-Busy World.
Here, however, Goldfarb has an entire book to cover what we had one article to cover, so of course it’s a lot more in-depth.
Importantly, if also covers: what if you seem to be doing everything right, and it’s still not working out? What if you’re already reaching out, suggesting things, doing your part?
Piece by piece, she uncovers what the very many problems are, ranging from availability issues and priorities, to health concerns and financial difficulties, to challenges as diverse as trust issues and exhaustion, and much more.
After all the hard truths about modern friendship, she gets onto equally cheery topics such as why friendships fail, but fear not, solutions are forthcoming too—and indeed, that’s what most of the book is about.
Covering such topics as desire, diligence, and delight, we learn how to not only practise wholehearted friendship, but also, how to matter to others, too. She finishes up with a “14-day friendship cleanse”, which sounds a lot more alarming than it actually is.
The style is interesting, being personal and, well, friendly throughout—but still with scholarly citations as we go along, and actual social science rather than mere conjecture.
Bottom line: if you find that your friendships are facing challenges, this book can help you to get to the bottom of any problems and move forwards (likely doing so together).
Click here to check out Modern Friendship, and learn how to truly nurture and grow your connections!
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Three Critical Kitchen Prescriptions
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Three Critical Kitchen Prescriptions
This is Dr. Saliha Mahmood-Ahmed. She’s a medical doctor—specifically, a gastroenterologist. She’s also a chef, and winner of the BBC’s MasterChef competition. So, from her gastroenterology day-job and her culinary calling, she has some expert insights to share on eating well!
❝Food and medicine are inextricably linked to one another, and it is an honour to be a doctor who specialises in digestive health and can both cook, and teach others to cook❞
~ Dr. Saliha Mahmood-Ahmed, after winning MasterChef and being asked if she’d quit medicine to be a full-time chef
Dr. Mahmood-Ahmed’s 3 “Kitchen Prescriptions”
They are:
- Cook, cook, cook
- Feed your gut bugs
- Do not diet
Let’s take a look at each of those…
Cook, cook, cook
We’re the only species on Earth that cooks food. An easy knee-jerk response might be to think maybe we shouldn’t, then, but… We’ve been doing it for at least 30,000 years, which is about 1,500 generations, while a mere 100 generations is generally sufficient for small evolutionary changes. So, we’ve evolved this way now.
More importantly in this context: we, ourselves, should cook our own food, at least per household.
Not ready meals; we haven’t evolved for those (yet! Give it another few hundred generations maybe)
Feed your gut bugs
The friendly ones. Enjoy prebiotics, probiotics, and plenty of fiber—and then be mindful of what else you do or don’t eat. Feeding the friendly bacteria while starving the unfriendly ones may seem like a tricky task, but it actually can be quite easily understood and implemented. We did a main feature about this a few weeks ago:
Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
Do not diet
Dr. Mahmood-Ahmed is a strong critic of calorie-counting as a weight-loss strategy:
Rather than focusing on the number of calories consumed, try focusing on introducing enough variety of food into your daily diet, and on fostering good microbial diversity within your gut.
It’s a conceptual shift from restrictive weight loss, to prescriptive adding of things to one’s diet, with fostering diversity of microbiota as a top priority.
This, too, she recommends be undertaken gently, though—making small, piecemeal, but sustainable improvements. Nobody can reasonably incorporate, say, 30 new fruits and vegetables into one’s diet in a week; it’s unrealistic, and more importantly, it’s unsustainable.
Instead, consider just adding one new fruit or vegetable per shopping trip!
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The Web That Has No Weaver – by Ted Kaptchuk
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At 10almonds we have a strong “stick with the science” policy, and that means peer-reviewed studies and (where such exists) scientific consensus.
However, in the spirit of open-minded skepticism (i.e., acknowledging what we don’t necessarily know), it can be worth looking at alternatives to popular Western medicine. Indeed, many things have made their way from Traditional Chinese Medicine (or Ayurveda, or other systems) into Western medicine in any case.
“The Web That Has No Weaver” sounds like quite a mystical title, but the content is presented in the cold light of day, with constant “in Western terms, this works by…” notes.
The author walks a fine line of on the one hand, looking at where TCM and Western medicine may start and end up at the same place, by a different route; and on the other hand, noting that (in a very Daoist fashion), the route is where TCM places more of the focus, in contrast to Western medicine’s focus on the start and end.
He makes the case for TCM being more holistic, and it is, though Western medicine has been catching up in this regard since this book’s publication more than 20 years ago.
The style of the writing is very easy to follow, and is not esoteric in either mysticism or scientific jargon. There are diagrams and other illustrations, for ease of comprehension, and chapter endnotes make sure we didn’t miss important things.
Bottom line: if you’re curious about Traditional Chinese Medicine, this book is the US’s most popular introduction to such, and as such, is quite a seminal text.
Click here to check out The Web That Has No Weaver, and enjoy learning about something new!
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Crispy Tofu Pad Thai
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Easy to make, delicious to enjoy, and packed with phytonutrients, this dish is a great one to add to your repertoire:
You will need
- 10 oz ready-to-wok rice noodles, or 6 oz dry
- 5 oz silken tofu
- 5 oz firm or extra firm tofu, cut into small cubes
- 1 oz arrowroot (or cornstarch if you don’t have arrowroot)
- 4 scallions, sliced
- ¼ bulb garlic, finely chopped
- 1″ piece fresh ginger, grated
- 1 red chili, chopped (multiply per your heat preferences)
- 1 red bell pepper, deseeded and thinly sliced
- 4 oz bok choi, thinly sliced
- 4 oz mung bean sprouts
- 1 tbsp tamari (or other, but tamari is traditional) soy sauce
- 1 tbsp sweet chili sauce
- Juice of ½ lime
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Avocado oil, or your preferred oil for stir-frying
- To serve: lime wedges
- Optional garnish: crushed roasted peanuts (if allergic, substitute sesame seeds; peanuts are simply traditional, that’s all)
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Scramble the silken tofu. For guidance and also additional seasoning pointers, see our Tasty Tofu Scramble recipe, but omit the thyme.
2) Cook the noodles if necessary (i.e. if they are the dry type and need boiling, as opposed to “ready-to-wok” noodles that don’t), drain, and set aside.
4) Prepare the tofu cubes: if the tofu cubes are dry to the touch, toss them gently in a little oil to coat. If they’re wet to the touch, no need. Dust the tofu cubes with the arrowroot and MSG/salt; you can do this in a bowl, tossing gently to distribute the coating evenly.
4) Heat some oil in a wok over a high heat, and fry the tofu on each side until golden and crispy all over, and set aside.
5) Stir-fry the scallions, garlic, ginger, chili, and bell pepper for about 2 minutes.
6) Add the bean sprouts and bok choi, and keep stir-frying for another 2 minutes.
7) Add everything that’s not already in the pan except the lime wedges and peanuts (i.e., add the things you set aside, plus the remaining as-yet-untouched ingredients) and stir-fry for a further 2 minutes.
8) Serve hot, garnished with the crushed peanuts if using, and with the lime wedges on the side:
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Sprout Your Seeds, Grains, Beans, Etc
- Which Bell Peppers To Pick? A Spectrum Of Specialties
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
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:
