Doctor Explains: 15 Signs Of Hypothyroidism
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Dr. Siobhan Deshauer explains the signs (and in some cases, symptoms) that can point to this oft-underdiagnosed condition:
Watch out for these
We’ll not keep them a secret, the signs/symptoms are…
- Goiter: enlarged thyroid gland, visible in the neck and may cause difficulty swallowing or breathing.
- Dry skin: due to reduced production of skin oils, leading to rough, cracked skin.
- Asteatotic eczema: cracked, mosaic-like dry skin often called “crazy paving.”
- Palmoplantar keratoderma: thickening and buildup of skin on hands and feet due to improper shedding.
- Hair thinning: hair becomes dull, brittle, and sheds excessively, including scalp, eyebrows, and body hair.
- Brittle or thickened nails: poor quality nail growth, vertical ridges, and nails prone to splitting or lifting.
- Queen Anne’s sign: loss of the outer third of the eyebrows.
- Myxedema: swelling, especially around the eyes, hands, and feet, caused by buildup of gelatinous material in the skin.
- Obstructive sleep apnea: enlarged tongue due to myxedema can block the airway during sleep.
- Carpal tunnel syndrome: swelling compresses the median nerve, causing numbness and tingling in the hands.
- Facial palsy: rare nerve compression causing one-sided facial droop.
- Cold intolerance: feeling unusually cold due to slowed metabolism.
- Myxedema coma: a severe, life-threatening form of hypothyroidism causing confusion, low body temperature, and organ shutdown. This may seem a strange (and rather severe) one to sandwich in between “feeling a bit cold” and “skin discoloration”, but we’re just reporting on what’s in the video!
- Carotenemia: yellow-orange discoloration of the skin, especially palms and soles, due to impaired conversion of beta-carotene.
- Depression: reduced neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, leading to mood changes and mental fog.
- Menstrual changes: heavier, longer, or irregular periods caused by hormonal imbalance.
- Chronic fatigue: constant tiredness and low energy.
- Constipation: slowed digestion due to decreased metabolism.
- Unexplained weight gain: often mild to moderate, caused by a slower metabolic rate.
For more on each of these plus visual illustrations where appropriate, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
The Three Rs To Boost Thyroid-Related Energy Levels
Take care!
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Goat Milk Greek Yogurt vs Almond Milk Greek Yogurt – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing goat milk yogurt to almond milk yogurt, we picked the almond milk yogurt.
Why?
Surprised? Honestly, we were too!
Much as we love almonds, we were fully expecting to write about how they’re very close in nutritional value, but the dairy yogurt has more probiotics, but no, as it turns out when we looked into them, they’re quite comparable in that regard.
It’s easy to assume “goat milk yogurt is more natural and therefore healthier”, but in both cases, it was a case of taking a fermentable milk, and fermenting it (an ancient process). “But almond milk is a newfangled thing”, well, new-ish…
So what was the deciding factor?
In this case, the almond milk yogurt has about twice the protein per (same size) serving, compared to the goat milk; all the other macros are about the same, and the micronutrients are similar. Like many plant-based milks and yogurts, this one is fortified with calcium and vitamin D, so that wasn’t an issue either.
In short: the only meaningful difference was the protein, and the almond came out on top.
However!
The almond came out on top only because it is strained; this can be done (or not) with any kind of yogurt, be it from an animal or a plant.
In other words: if it had been different brands, the goat milk yogurt could have come out on top!
The take-away idea here is: always read labels, because as you’ve just seen, even we can get surprised sometimes!
seriously if you only remember one thing from this today, make it the above
Other thing worth mentioning: yogurts, and dairy products in general, are often made with common allergens (e.g. dairy, nuts, soy, etc). So if you are allergic or intolerant, obviously don’t choose the one to which you are allergic or intolerant.
That said… If you are lactose-intolerant, but not allergic, goat’s milk does have less lactose than cow’s milk. But of course, you know your limits better than we can in this regard.
Want to try some?
Amazon is not coming up with the goods for this one (or anything even similar, at time of writing), so we recommend trying your local supermarket (and reading labels, because products vary widely!)
What you’re looking for (be it animal- or plant-based):
- Live culture probiotic bacteria
- No added sugar
- Minimal additives in general
- Lastly, check out the amounts for protein, calcium, vitamin D, etc.
Enjoy!
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What Length Of Walk Is Best?
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It is not shocking news that walking is good for the health.
See for example: Top 8 Habits Of The Top 1% Healthiest Over-50s ← walking is #3 on the list!
And a lot of research has been done into how many steps per day are important. Of which, the general consensus is:
- Under 5,000 steps = bad; one needs to walk more than this if possible
- 5,000 to 8,000 steps = good, with more being better than fewer
- Over 8,000 steps = also good, but with diminishing marginal returns
Some research has even been done with regard to when it is best to get these steps in!
See: The Japanese Health Initiative That Lowers Blood Sugars
But today we’ll look at the question: is it better to get many short walks, or a few long ones?
The road goes ever on and on
The above heading is a nod to a line from Tolkien, and while it’s not necessary to walk all the way to Mordor for good for health (in fact, we recommend against walking to Mordor specifically; famously risky for the health), as it turns out, one long walk may be better than many short ones.
Researchers (Dr. Borja del Pozo Cruz et al.) examined whether step accumulation patterns—not just total steps—affect long-term health in low-activity adults (defined as walking fewer than 8,000 steps per day).
How these were sorted: 33,560 adults averaging 5,165 steps daily were followed for 9.5 years, grouped by typical walking bout length from under 5 minutes to 15 minutes or longer.
What they found, in few words: people who bundled steps into longer, uninterrupted walks had substantially lower risks of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease than those whose steps came in short, scattered bursts.
There was a clear dose-dependent gradient to this; all-cause mortality risk fell steadily as walking bouts lengthened, from 4.36% in bouts under 5 minutes to about 0.8% in bouts lasting 15 minutes or longer. In other words, more than a 5x difference in mortality!
Not only that, but cardiovascular disease risk (not just mortality, but any CVD incidence) showed a steep decline too, dropping from 13.03% with under-5-minute bouts to 4.39% with walks of 15 minutes or longer.
If you’re on the low end of activity, there’s good news: the benefits were most pronounced among people taking fewer than 5,000 steps per day, suggesting longer walks matter most when overall activity is low.
Note: this isn’t an argument for “walk less to get greater benefits”; that’d be the opposite of the correct interpretation of these statistics. The take-away here is “longer walks matter even more when overall activity is low“.
There is an important cited limitation, namely:
❝Observational design with potential residual confounding and reverse causation❞
In other words, the results could also be at least partly explained by the alternative hypothesis “people who are healthier and have healthier hearts, walk for longer because of their good health, whereas people who are less health and have weaker hearts, walk for shorter durations only”.
However, even if this may be true, it is clear which group one should aim to be in.
You can find the paper itself here: Step Accumulation Patterns and Risk for Cardiovascular Events and Mortality Among Suboptimally Active Adults
Want to learn more?
You might like this very good book we reviewed a while back:
In Praise Of Walking – by Dr. Shane O’Mara
…and, for that matter:
52 Ways To Walk – by Annabel Streets
Enjoy!
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Cows’ Milk, Bird Flu, & You
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.
When it comes to dairy products, generally speaking, fermented ones (such as most cheeses and yogurts) are considered healthy in moderation, and unfermented ones have their pros and cons that can be argued and quibbled “until the cows come home”. We gave a broad overview, here:
Furthermore, you may recall that there’s some controversy/dissent about when human babies can have cows’ milk:
When can my baby drink cow’s milk? It’s sooner than you think
So, what about bird flu now?
Earlier this year, the information from the dairy industry was that it was nothing to be worried about for the time being:
Bird Flu Is Bad for Poultry and Dairy Cows. It’s Not a Dire Threat for Most of Us — Yet.
More recently, the latest science has found:
❝We found a first-order decay rate constant of −2.05 day–1 equivalent to a T99 of 2.3 days. Viral RNA remained detectable for at least 57 days with no degradation. Pasteurization (63 °C for 30 min) reduced infectious virus to undetectable levels and reduced viral RNA concentrations, but reduction was less than 1 log10.
The prolonged persistence of viral RNA in both raw and pasteurized milk has implications for food safety assessments and environmental surveillance❞
You can find the study here:
Infectivity and Persistence of Influenza A Virus in Raw Milk
In short: raw milk keeps the infectious virus; pasteurization appears to render it uninfectious, though viral RNA remains present.
This is relevant, because of the bird flu virus being found in milk:
World Health Organization | H5N1 strain of bird flu found in milk
To this end, a moratorium has been placed on the sale of raw milk, first by the California Dept of Public Health (following an outbreak in California):
California halts sales of raw milk due to bird flu virus contamination
And then, functionally, by the USDA, though rather than an outright ban, it’s requiring testing for the virus:
USDA orders testing of milk supply for presence of bird flu virus
So, is pasteurized milk safe?
The official answer to this, per the FDA, is… Honestly, a lot of hand-wringing and shrugging. What we do know is:
- the bird flu virus has been found in pasteurized milk too
- the test for this is very sensitive, and has the extra strength/weakness that viral fragments will flag it as a positive
- it is assumed that the virus was inactivated by the pasteurization process
- it could, however, have been the entire virus, the test simply does not tell us which
In the FDA’s own words:
❝The pasteurization process has served public health well for more than 100 years. Even if the virus is detected in raw milk, pasteurization is generally expected to eliminate pathogens to a level that does not pose a risk to consumer health❞
So, there we have it: the FDA does not have a reassurance exactly, but it does have a general expectation.
Source: US Officials: Bird flu viral fragments found in pasteurized milk
Want to know more?
You might like this mythbusting edition we did a little while back:
Pasteurization: What It Does And Doesn’t Do ← this is about its effect on risks and nutrients
Take care!
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Instead Of Standing On One Leg…
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Some better ways to train balance and stability:
Best foot forward… and back!
We’ve mentioned before that standing on one leg trains static balance—where you’re staying still—but most falls happen during movement, which requires dynamic balance.
For many people, it’s possible to stand on one leg for more than 20 seconds yet still feel unsteady when walking, turning, or stepping over things, because real-world balance depends on reacting to movement and the unexpected.
So here are some ways to train that real-world dynamic balance:
- Obstacle step or cross step over: roll two towels into sausages, lay them in a cross on the floor, step forwards, sideways, and backwards over them in different directions, increase your pace onto your toes as you improve, raise the towels and/or lift your gaze to make it harder, and train agility, coordination, and foot clearance.
- Tightrope walk: walk heel-to-toe in a straight line for about 10 feet as slowly as possible to narrow your base of support and challenge side-to-side control, then progress by turning your head or closing your eyes to further hone your balance systems.
- Cup taps: stand in a corner for safety, balance on one leg, tap three cups placed around you with your free foot without crushing them, vary the order and distance to build rhythm, coordination, and quick foot placement for stumble recovery.
For more on all of this plus some visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
90% Of People Over 50 Fail This Balance Test. Will You?
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5 dental TikTok trends you probably shouldn’t try at home
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TikTok is full of videos that demonstrate DIY hacks, from up-cycling tricks to cooking tips. Meanwhile, a growing number of TikTok videos offer tips to help you save money and time at the dentist. But do they deliver?
Here are five popular dental TikTok trends and why you might treat them with caution.
1. Home-made whitening solutions
Many TikTok videos provide tips to whiten teeth. These include tutorials on making your own whitening toothpaste using ingredients such as hydrogen peroxide, a common household bleaching agent, and baking soda (sodium bicarbonate).
In this video, the influencer says:
And then you’re going to pour in your hydrogen peroxide. There’s really no measurement to this.
But hydrogen peroxide in high doses is poisonous if swallowed, and can burn your gums, mouth and throat, and corrode your teeth.
High doses of hydrogen peroxide may infiltrate holes or microscopic cracks in your teeth to inflame or damage the nerves and blood vessels in the teeth, which can cause pain and even nerve death. This is why dental practitioners are bound by rules when we offer whitening treatments.
Sodium bicarbonate and hydrogen peroxide are among the components in commercially available whitening toothpastes. While these commercial products may be effective at removing surface stains, their compositions are carefully curated to keep your smile safe.
2. Oil pulling
Oil pulling involves swishing one tablespoon of sesame or coconut oil in your mouth for up to 20 minutes at a time. It has roots in Ayurvedic medicine, a traditional medicine practice that originates from the Indian subcontinent.
While oil pulling should be followed by brushing and flossing, I’ve had patients who believe oil pulling is a replacement for these practices.
There has been some research on the potential of oil pulling to treat gum disease or other diseases in the mouth. But overall, evidence that supports the effectiveness of oil pulling is of low certainty.
For example, studies that test the effectiveness of oil pulling have been conducted on school-aged children and people with no dental problems, and often measure dental plaque growth over a few days to a couple of weeks.
Chlorhexidine is an ingredient found in some commercially available mouthwashes.
In one study, people who rinsed with chlorhexidine mouthwash (30 seconds twice daily) developed less plaque on their teeth compared to those who undertook oil pulling for eight to 10 minutes.Ultimately, it’s unlikely you will experience measurable gain to your oral health by adding oil pulling to your daily routine. If you’re time-poor, you’re better off focusing on brushing your teeth and gums well alongside flossing.
3. Using rubber bands to fix gaps
This TikTok influencer shows his followers he closed the gaps between his front teeth in a week using cheap clear rubber bands.
But this person may be one of the lucky few to successfully use bands to close a gap in his teeth without any mishaps. Front teeth are slippery and taper near the gums into cone-shaped roots. This can cause bands to slide and disappear into the gums to surround the tooth roots, which can cause infections and pain.
If this happens, you may require surgery that involves cutting your gums to remove the bands. If the bands have caused an infection, you may lose the affected teeth. So it’s best to leave this sort of work to a dental professional trained in orthodontics.
4. Filing or cutting teeth to shape them
My teeth hurt just watching this video.
Cutting or filing teeth unnecessarily can expose the second, more sensitive tooth layer, called dentine, or potentially, the nerve and blood vessels inside the tooth. People undergoing this sort of procedure could experience anything from sensitive teeth through to a severe toothache that requires root canal treatment or tooth removal.
You may notice dentist drills spray water when cutting to protect your teeth from extreme heat damage. The drill in this video is dry with no water used to cool the heat produced during cutting.
It may also not be sterile. We like to have everything clean and sterile to prevent contaminated instruments used on one patient from potentially spreading an infection to another person.
Importantly, once you cut or file your teeth away, it’s gone forever. Unlike bone, hair or nails, our teeth don’t have the capacity to regrow.
5. DIY fillings
Many people on TikTok demonstrate filling cavities (holes) or replacing gaps between teeth with a material made from heated moulded plastic beads. DIY fillings can cause a lot of issues – I’ve seen this in my clinic first hand.
While we may make it look simple in dental surgeries, the science behind filling materials and how we make them stick to teeth to fill cavities is sophisticated.
Filling a cavity with the kind of material made from these beads will be as effective as using sticky tape on sand. Not to mention the cavity will continue to grow bigger underneath the untreated “filled” teeth.
I know it’s easy to say “see a dentist about that cavity” or “go to an orthodontist to fix that gap in your teeth you don’t like”, but it can be expensive to actually do these things. However if you end up requiring treatment to fix the issues caused at home, it may end up costing you much more.
So what’s the take-home message? Stick with the funny cat and dog videos on TikTok – they’re safer for your smile.
Arosha Weerakoon, Senior Lecturer and General Dentist, School of Dentistry, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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What Mattress Is Best, By Science?
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The Foundations of Good Sleep
You probably know the importance of good sleep for good health. If not, here’s a quick refresher:
- Why You Probably Need More Sleep
- How Sleep-Deprived Are You, Really?
- The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter)
You should also definitely check out this quite famous book on the topic:
Why We Sleep – by Dr Matthew Walker
What helps, to get that good sleep
We’ve covered this a little before too, for example:
- Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors
- Sleep Better With Better Air
- How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)
How to level-up from there
One of the biggest barriers to good sleep for many people is obstructive sleep apea:
Healthier, Natural Sleep Without Obstruction!
We covered (in the above article) a whole lot of ways of mitigating/managing obstructive sleep apnea. One of the things we mentioned as beneficial was avoiding sleeping on one’s back, and this is something Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Somers agreed with:
Back Sleeping, And Sleeping Differently After 50
“But side-sleeping is uncomfortable”
If this is you, then chances are you have the wrong mattress.
If your mattress is too firm, you can get around it by using this “five pillow” method:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically
If your mattress is too soft, then sorry, you really just have to throw that thing out and start again.
The Goldilocks mattress
While different people will have different subjective preferences, the science is quite clear on what is actually best for people’s spines. As this review of 39 qualified scholarly articles concluded:
❝Results of this systematic review show that a medium-firm mattress promotes comfort, sleep quality and rachis alignment❞
~ Dr. Gianfilippo Caggiari et al.
Read in full: What type of mattress should be chosen to avoid back pain and improve sleep quality? Review of the literature
Note: to achieve “medium-firm” that remains “medium firm” has generally been assumed to require a memory-foam mattress.
How memory-foam works: memory-foam is a moderately thermosoftening material, designed to slightly soften at the touch of human body temperature, and be firmer at room temperature. This will result in it molding itself to the form of a human body, providing what amounts to personalized support for your personal shape and size, meaning your spine can stay exactly as it’s supposed to when you’re sleeping on your side, instead of (for example) your hips being wider meaning that your lumbar vertebrae are raised higher than your thoracic vertebrae, giving you the equivalent of a special nocturnal scoliosis.
It will, therefore, stop working if
- the ambient temperature is comparable to human body temperature (as happens in some places sometimes, and increasingly often these days)
- you die, and thus lose your body temperature (but in that case, your spinal alignment will be the least of your concerns)
Here’s a good explanation of the mechanics of memory foam from the Sleep Foundation:
Sleep Foundation | What is Memory Foam?
An alternative to memory foam?
If you don’t like memory foam (one criticism is that it doesn’t allow good ventilation underneath the body), there is an alterative, the grid mattress.
It’s very much “the new kid on the block” and the science is young for this, but for example this recent (April 2024) study that concluded:
❝The grid mattress is a simple, noninvasive, and nonpharmacological intervention that improved adults sleep quality and health. Controlled trials are encouraged to examine the effects of this mattress in a variety of populations and environments.❞
~ Dr. Heather Hausenblas et al.
Read in full: Effectiveness of a grid mattress on adults’ sleep quality and health: A quasi-experimental intervention study
However, that was a small (n=39) uncontrolled (i.e. there was no control group) study, and the conflict of interest statement is, well, interesting:
❝Heather A. Hausenblas, Stephanie L. Hooper, Martin Barragan, and Tarah Lynch declare no conflict of interest. Michael Breus served as a former consultant for Purple, LLC.❞
~ Ibid.
…which is a fabulous way of distracting from the mention in the “Acknowledgements” section to follow, that…
❝Purple, LLC, provided financial support for the study❞
~ Ibid.
Purple is the company that invented the mattress being tested. So while this doesn’t mean the study is necessarily dishonest and/or corrupt, it does at the very least raise a red flag for a potential instance of publication bias (because Purple may have funded multiple studies and then pulled funding of the ones that weren’t going their way).
If you are interested in Purple’s mattress and how it works, you can check it out here ← this is a link for your interest and information; not an advertisement or an endorsement. We look forward to seeing more science for this though, and echo their own call for randomized controlled trials!
Summary
Sleep is important, and while it’s a popular myth that we need less as we get older, the truth is that we merely get less on average, while still needing the same amount.
A medium-firm memory-foam mattress is a very good, well-evidenced way to support that (both figuratively and literally!).
A grid mattress is an interesting innovation, and/but we’d like to see more science for it.
Take care!
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