
Do You Know Which Supplements You Shouldn’t Take Together? (10 Pairs!)
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Dr. LeGrand Peterson wants us to get the most out of our supplements, so watch out for these…
Time to split up some pairs…
In most cases these are a matter of competing for absorption; sometimes to the detriment of both, sometimes to the detriment of one or the other, and sometimes, the problem is entirely different and they just interact in a way that could potentially cause other problems. Dr. Peterson advises as follows:
- Vitamin C and vitamin B12: taking these together can reduce the absorption of Vitamin B12, as vitamin C can overpower it.
- Vitamin C and copper: high amounts of vitamin C can decrease copper absorption, especially in those who are severely copper deficient.
- Magnesium and calcium: these two minerals compete for absorption in the intestines, potentially reducing the effectiveness of both.
- Calcium and iron: calcium can decrease iron absorption, so they should not be taken together, especially if you are iron deficient.
- Calcium and zinc: calcium also competes with zinc, reducing zinc absorption; they should be taken at different times.
- Zinc and copper: zinc and copper compete for absorption, so they should be taken at separate times.
- Iron and zinc: iron can decrease zinc absorption, and thus, they should not be taken together.
- Iron and green tea: perhaps a surprising one, but green tea can reduce iron absorption, so they should not be taken simultaneously.
- Vitamin E and vitamin K: vitamin E increases bleeding risk, while vitamin K promotes clotting, making them opposites and risky to take together.
- Fish oil and ginkgo biloba: both are anticoagulants and can increase the risk of bleeding, especially if taken with blood thinners like warfarin.
If you need to take supplements that compete (or conflict or otherwise potentially adversely interact) with each other, it’s recommended to separate them by at least 4 hours, or better yet, take one in the morning and the other at night. If in doubt, do speak with your pharmacist or doctor for personalized advice
You may be thinking: half my foods contain half of these nutrients! And yes, assuming you have a nutritionally dense diet, this is probably the case. Foods typically release nutrients more slowly than supplements, and unlike supplements, do not usually contain megadoses (although they can, such as the selenium content of Brazil nuts, or vitamin A in carrots). Basically, food is in most cases safer and gentler than supplements. If concerned, do speak with your nutritionist or doctor for personalized advice.
For more information on all of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Do We Need Supplements, And Do They Work?
Take care!
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Holding Back The Clock on Aging
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Holding Back The Clock on Aging
This is Dr. Eric Verdin, President and CEO of the Buck Institute of Research on Aging. He’s also held faculty positions at the University of Brussels, the NIH, and the Picower Institute for Medical Research. Dr. Verdin is also a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Verdin’s laboratory focuses on the role of epigenetic regulators (especially the behaviors of certain enzymes) in the aging process. He studies how metabolism, diet, and chemical factors regulate the aging process and its associated diseases, including Alzheimer’s.
He has published more than 210 scientific papers and holds more than 15 patents. He is a highly cited scientist and has been recognized for his research with a Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging.
And that’s just what we could fit here! Basically, he knows his stuff.
What we can do
Dr. Verdin’s position is bold, but rooted in evidence:
❝Lifestyle is responsible for about 93% of our longevity—only about 7% is genetics. Based on the data, if implementing health lifestyle choices, most people could live to 95 in good health. So there’s 15 to 17 extra years of healthy life that is up for grabs❞
~ Dr. Eric Verdin
See for example:
- From discoveries in aging research to therapeutics for healthy aging
- Optimism, lifestyle, and longevity in a racially diverse cohort of women
- Well-being, food habits, and lifestyle for longevity—evidence from supercentenarians
How we can do it
Well, we all know “the big five”:
- Good diet (Mediterranean Diet as usual is recommended)
- Good exercise (more on this in a moment)
- Good sleep (more on this in a moment)
- Avoid alcohol (not controversial)
- Don’t smoke (need we say more)
When it comes to exercise, generally recognized as good is at least 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity exercise (for example, a brisk walk, or doing the gardening), and at least three small sessions a week of high intensity exercise, unless contraindicated by some medical condition.
As for Dr. Verdin’s take on this…
What Dr. Verdin recommends is:
- make it personalized
- make it pre-emptive
- make it better
The perfect exercise plan is only perfect if you actually do it. And if you actually can do it, for that matter.
Prevention is so much better (and easier) than cure for a whole array of maladies. So while there may be merit in thinking “what needs fixing”, Dr. Verdin encourages us to take extra care to not neglect factors of our health that seem “good enough”. Because, give them time and neglect, and they won’t be!
Wherever we’re at in life and health, there’s always at least some little way we could make it a bit better. Dr. Verdin advises us to seek out those little improvements, even if it’s just a nudge better here, a nudge better there, all those nudges add up!
About sleep…
It’s perhaps the easiest one to neglect (writer’s note: as a writer, I certainly feel that way!), but his biggest take-away tip for this is:
Worry less about what time you set an alarm for in the morning. Instead, set an alarm for the evening—to remind you when to go to bed.
Want to hear directly from the man himself?
Here he is speaking on progress we can expect for the next decade in the field of aging research, as part of the 100 Minutes of Longevity session at The Longevity Forum, a few months ago:
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Can you drink your fruit and vegetables? How does juice compare to the whole food?
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Do you struggle to eat your fruits and vegetables? You are not alone. Less than 5% of Australians eat the recommended serves of fresh produce each day (with 44% eating enough fruit but only 6% eating the recommended vegetables).
Adults should aim to eat at least five serves of vegetables (or roughly 375 grams) and two serves of fruit (about 300 grams) each day. Fruits and vegetables help keep us healthy because they have lots of nutrients (vitamins, minerals and fibre) and health-promoting bioactive compounds (substances not technically essential but which have health benefits) without having many calories.
So, if you are having trouble eating the rainbow, you might be wondering – is it OK to drink your fruits and vegetables instead in a juice or smoothie? Like everything in nutrition, the answer is all about context.
Darina Belonogova/Pexels It might help overcome barriers
Common reasons for not eating enough fruits and vegetables are preferences, habits, perishability, cost, availability, time and poor cooking skills. Drinking your fruits and vegetables in juices or smoothies can help overcome some of these barriers.
Juicing or blending can help disguise tastes you don’t like, like bitterness in vegetables. And it can blitz imperfections such as bruises or soft spots. Preparation doesn’t take much skill or time, particularly if you just have to pour store-bought juice from the bottle. Treating for food safety and shipping time does change the make up of juices slightly, but unsweetened juices still remain significant sources of nutrients and beneficial bioactives.
Juicing can extend shelf life and reduce the cost of nutrients. In fact, when researchers looked at the density of nutrients relative to the costs of common foods, fruit juice was the top performer.
So, drinking my fruits and veggies counts as a serve, right?
How juice is positioned in healthy eating recommendations is a bit confusing. The Australian Dietary Guidelines include 100% fruit juice with fruit but vegetable juice isn’t mentioned. This is likely because vegetable juices weren’t as common in 2013 when the guidelines were last revised.
The guidelines also warn against having juice too often or in too high amounts. This appears to be based on the logic that juice is similar, but not quite as good as, whole fruit. Juice has lower levels of fibre compared to fruits, with fibre important for gut health, heart health and promoting feelings of fullness. Juice and smoothies also release the sugar from the fruit’s other structures, making them “free”. The World Health Organization recommends we limit free sugars for good health.
But fruit and vegetables are more than just the sum of their parts. When we take a “reductionist” approach to nutrition, foods and drinks are judged based on assumptions made about limited features such as sugar content or specific vitamins.
But these features might not have the impact we logically assume because of the complexity of foods and people. When humans eat varied and complex diets, we don’t necessarily need to be concerned that some foods are lower in fibre than others. Juice can retain the nutrients and bioactive compounds of fruit and vegetables and even add more because parts of the fruit we don’t normally eat, like the skin, can be included.
Juicing or blending might mean you eat different parts of the fruit or vegetable. flyingv3/Shutterstock So, it is healthy then?
A recent umbrella review of meta-analyses (a type of research that combines data from multiple studies of multiple outcomes into one paper looked at the relationship between 100% juice and a range of health outcomes.
Most of the evidence showed juice had a neutral impact on health (meaning no impact) or a positive one. Pure 100% juice was linked to improved heart health and inflammatory markers and wasn’t clearly linked to weight gain, multiple cancer types or metabolic markers (such as blood sugar levels).
Some health risks linked to drinking juice were reported: death from heart disease, prostate cancer and diabetes risk. But the risks were all reported in observational studies, where researchers look at data from groups of people collected over time. These are not controlled and do not record consumption in the moment. So other drinks people think of as 100% fruit juice (such as sugar-sweetened juices or cordials) might accidentally be counted as 100% fruit juice. These types of studies are not good at showing the direct causes of illness or death.
What about my teeth?
The common belief juice damages teeth might not stack up. Studies that show juice damages teeth often lump 100% juice in with sweetened drinks. Or they use model systems like fake mouths that don’t match how people drinks juice in real life. Some use extreme scenarios like sipping on large volumes of drink frequently over long periods of time.
Juice is acidic and does contain sugars, but it is possible proper oral hygiene, including rinsing, cleaning and using straws can mitigate these risks.
Again, reducing juice to its acid level misses the rest of the story, including the nutrients and bioactives contained in juice that are beneficial to oral health.
Juice might be more convenient and could replace less healthy drinks. PintoArt/Shutterstock So, what should I do?
Comparing whole fruit (a food) to juice (a drink) can be problematic. They serve different culinary purposes, so aren’t really interchangeable.
The Australian Guide to Healthy Eating recommends water as the preferred beverage but this assumes you are getting all your essential nutrients from eating.
Where juice fits in your diet depends on what you are eating and what other drinks it is replacing. Juice might replace water in the context of a “perfect” diet. Or juice might replace alcohol or sugary soft drinks and make the relative benefits look very different.
On balance
Whether you want to eat your fruits and vegetables or drink them comes down to what works for you, how it fits into the context of your diet and your life.
Smoothies and juices aren’t a silver bullet, and there is no evidence they work as a “cleanse” or detox. But, with society’s low levels of fruit and vegetable eating, having the option to access nutrients and bioactives in a cheap, easy and tasty way shouldn’t be discouraged either.
Emma Beckett, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Nutrition, Dietetics & Food Innovation – School of Health Sciences, UNSW Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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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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How Primary Care Is Being Disrupted: A Video Primer
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How patients are seeing their doctor is changing, and that could shape access to and quality of care for decades to come.
More than 100 million Americans don’t have regular access to primary care, a number that has nearly doubled since 2014. Yet demand for primary care is up, spurred partly by record enrollment in Affordable Care Act plans. Under pressure from increased demand, consolidation, and changing patient expectations, the model of care no longer means visiting the same doctor for decades.
KFF Health News senior correspondent Julie Appleby breaks down what is happening — and what it means for patients.
More From This Investigation
Primary Care Disrupted
Known as the “front door” to the health system, primary care is changing. Under pressure from increased demand, consolidation, and changing patient expectations, the model of care no longer means visiting the same doctor for decades. KFF Health News looks at what this means for patients.
Credits
Hannah Norman Video producer and animator Oona Tempest Illustrator and creative director KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
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Hormone Replacement
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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
❝I cant believe 10 Almonds addresses questions. Thanks. I see the word symptoms for menopause. I don’t know what word should replace it but maybe one should be used or is symptom accurate? And I recently read that there was a great disservice for women in my era as they were denied/scared of hormones replacement. Unnecessarily❞
You’d better believe it! In fact we love questions; they give us things to research and write about.
“Symptom” is indeed an entirely justified word to use, being:
- General: any phenomenon or circumstance accompanying something and serving as evidence of it.
- Medical: any phenomenon that arises from and accompanies a particular disease or disorder and serves as an indication of it.
If the question is more whether the menopause can be considered a disease/disorder, well, it’s a naturally occurring and ultimately inevitable change, yes, but then, so is cancer (it’s in the simple mathematics of DNA replication and mutation that, unless a cure for cancer is found, we will always eventually get cancer, if nothing else kills us first).
So, something being natural/inevitable isn’t a reason to not consider it a disease/disorder, nor a reason to not treat it as appropriate if it is causing us harm/discomfort that can be safely alleviated.
Moreover, and semantics aside, it is medical convention to consider menopause to be a medical condition, that has symptoms. Indeed, for example, the US’s NIH (and its constituent NIA, the National Institute of Aging) and the UK’s NHS, both list the menopause’s symptoms, using that word:
- NIA (NIH): What are the signs and symptoms of menopause?
- NHS: Common symptoms of menopause and perimenopause
With regard to fearmongering around HRT, certainly that has been rife, and there were some very flawed (and later soundly refuted) studies a while back that prompted this—and even those flawed studies were not about the same (bioidentical) hormones available today, in any case. So even if they had been correct (they weren’t), it still wouldn’t be a reason to not get treatment nowadays, if appropriate!
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Hope: A research-based explainer
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This year, more than 60 countries, representing more than 4 billion people, will hold major elections. News headlines already are reporting that voters are hanging on to hope. When things get tough or don’t go our way, we’re told to hang on to hope. HOPE was the only word printed on President Barack Obama’s iconic campaign poster in 2008.
Research on hope has flourished only in recent decades. There’s now a growing recognition that hope has a role in physical, social, and mental health outcomes, including promoting resilience. As we embark on a challenging year of news, it’s important for journalists to learn about hope.
So what is hope? And what does the research say about it?
Merriam-Webster defines hope as a “desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment.” This definition highlights the two basic dimensions of hope: a desire and a belief in the possibility of attaining that desire.
Hope is not Pollyannaish optimism, writes psychologist Everett Worthington in a 2020 article for The Conversation. “Instead, hope is a motivation to persevere toward a goal or end state, even if we’re skeptical that a positive outcome is likely.”
There are several scientific theories about hope.
One of the first, and most well-known, theories on hope was introduced in 1991 by American psychologist Charles R. Snyder.
In a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Snyder defined hope as a cognitive trait centered on the pursuit of goals and built on two components: a sense of agency in achieving a goal, and a perceived ability to create pathways to achieve that goal. He defined hope as something individualistic.
Snyder also introduced the Hope Scale, which continues to be used today, as a way to measure hope. He suggested that some people have higher levels of hope than others and there seem to be benefits to being more hopeful.
“For example, we would expect that higher as compared with lower hope people are more likely to have a healthy lifestyle, to avoid life crises, and to cope better with stressors when they are encountered,” they write.
Others have suggested broader definitions.
In 1992, Kaye Herth, a professor of nursing and a scholar on hope, defined hope as “a multidimensional dynamic life force characterized by a confident yet uncertain expectation of achieving good, which to the hoping person, is realistically possible and personally significant.” Herth also developed the Herth Hope Index, which is used in various settings, including clinical practice and research.
More recently, others have offered an even broader definition of hope.
Anthony Scioli, a clinical psychologist and author of several books on hope, defines hope “as an emotion with spiritual dimensions,” in a 2023 review published in Current Opinion in Psychology. “Hope is best viewed as an ameliorating emotion, designed to fill the liminal space between need and reality.”
Hope is also nuanced.
“Our hopes may be active or passive, patient or critical, private or collective, grounded in the evidence or resolute in spite of it, socially conservative or socially transformative,” writes Darren Webb in a 2007 study published in History of the Human Sciences. “We all hope, but we experience this most human of all mental feelings in a variety of modes.”
To be sure, a few studies have shown that hope can have negative outcomes in certain populations and situations. For example, one study highlighted in the research roundup below finds that Black college students who had higher levels of hope experienced more stress due to racial discrimination compared with Black students who had lower levels of hope.
Today, hope is one of the most well-studied constructs within the field of positive psychology, according to the journal Current Opinion in Psychology, which dedicated its August 2023 issue to the subject. (Positive psychology is a branch of psychology focused on characters and behaviors that allow people to flourish.)
We’ve gathered several studies below to help you think more deeply about hope and recognize its role in your everyday lives.
Research roundup
The Role of Hope in Subsequent Health and Well-Being For Older Adults: An Outcome-Wide Longitudinal Approach
Katelyn N.G. Long, et al. Global Epidemiology, November 2020.The study: To explore the potential public health implications of hope, researchers examine the relationship between hope and physical, behavioral and psychosocial outcomes in 12,998 older adults in the U.S. with a mean age of 66.
Researchers note that most investigations on hope have focused on psychological and social well-being outcomes and less attention has been paid to its impact on physical and behavioral health, particularly among older adults.
The findings: Results show a positive association between an increased sense of hope and a variety of behavioral and psychosocial outcomes, such as fewer sleep problems, more physical activity, optimism and satisfaction with life. However, there wasn’t a clear association between hope and all physical health outcomes. For instance, hope was associated with a reduced number of chronic conditions, but not with stroke, diabetes and hypertension.
The takeaway: “The later stages of life are often defined by loss: the loss of health, loved ones, social support networks, independence, and (eventually) loss of life itself,” the authors write. “Our results suggest that standard public health promotion activities, which often focus solely on physical health, might be expanded to include a wider range of factors that may lead to gains in hope. For example, alongside community-based health and nutrition programs aimed at reducing chronic conditions like hypertension, programs that help strengthen marital relations (e.g., closeness with a spouse), provide opportunities to volunteer, help lower anxiety, or increase connection with friends may potentially increase levels of hope, which in turn, may improve levels of health and well-being in a variety of domains.”
Associated Factors of Hope in Cancer Patients During Treatment: A Systematic Literature Review
Corine Nierop-van Baalen, Maria Grypdonck, Ann van Hecke and Sofie Verhaeghe. Journal of Advanced Nursing, March 2020.The study: The authors review 33 studies, written in English or Dutch and published in the past decade, on the relationship between hope and the quality of life and well-being of patients with cancer. Studies have shown that many cancer patients respond to their diagnosis by nurturing hope, while many health professionals feel uneasy when patients’ hopes go far beyond their prognosis, the authors write.
The findings: Quality of life, social support and spiritual well-being were positively associated with hope, as measured with various scales. Whereas symptoms, psychological distress and depression had a negative association with hope. Hope didn’t seem to be affected by the type or stage of cancer or the patient’s demographics.
The takeaway: “Hope seems to be a process that is determined by a person’s inner being rather than influenced from the outside,” the authors write. “These factors are typically given meaning by the patients themselves. Social support, for example, is not about how many patients experience support, but that this support has real meaning for them.”
Characterizing Hope: An Interdisciplinary Overview of the Characteristics of Hope
Emma Pleeging, Job van Exel and Martijn Burger. Applied Research in Quality of Life, September 2021.The study: This systematic review provides an overview of the concept of hope based on 66 academic papers in ten academic fields, including economics and business studies, environmental studies, health studies, history, humanities, philosophy, political science, psychology, social science, theology and youth studies, resulting in seven themes and 41 sub-themes.
The findings: The authors boil down their findings to seven components: internal and external sources, the individual and social experience of hope, internal and external effects, and the object of hope, which can be “just about anything we can imagine,” the authors write.
The takeaway: “An important implication of these results lies in the way hope is measured in applied and scientific research,” researchers write. “When measuring hope or developing instruments to measure it, researchers could be well-advised to take note of the broader understanding of the topic, to prevent that important characteristics might be overlooked.”
Revisiting the Paradox of Hope: The Role of Discrimination Among First-Year Black College Students
Ryon C. McDermott, et al. Journal of Counseling Psychology, March 2020.The study: Researchers examine the moderating effects of hope on the association between experiencing racial discrimination, stress and academic well-being among 203 first-year U.S. Black college students. They build on a small body of evidence that suggests high levels of hope might have a negative effect on Black college students who experience racial discrimination.
The authors use data gathered as part of an annual paper-and-pencil survey of first-year college students at a university on the Gulf Coast, which the study doesn’t identify.
The findings: Researchers find that Black students who had higher levels of hope experienced more stress due to racial discrimination compared with students who had lower levels of hope. On the other hand, Black students with low levels of hope may be less likely to experience stress when they encounter discrimination.
Meanwhile, Black students who had high levels of hope were more successful in academic integration — which researchers define as satisfaction with and integration into the academic aspects of college life — despite facing discrimination. But low levels of hope had a negative impact on students’ academic well-being.
“The present study found evidence that a core construct in positive psychology, hope, may not always protect Black students from experiencing the psychological sting of discrimination, but it was still beneficial to their academic well-being,” the authors write.
The takeaway: “Our findings also highlight an urgent need to reduce discrimination on college campuses,” the researchers write. “Reducing discrimination could help Black students (and other racial minorities) avoid additional stress, as well as help them realize the full psychological and academic benefits of having high levels of hope.”
Additional reading
Hope Across Cultural Groups Lisa M. Edwards and Kat McConnell. Current Opinion in Psychology, February 2023.
The Psychology of Hope: A Diagnostic and Prescriptive Account Anthony Scioli. “Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope,” July 2020.
Hope Theory: Rainbows in the Mind C.R. Snyder. Psychological Inquiry, 2002
This article first appeared on The Journalist’s Resource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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