Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen
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Give Us This Day Our Daily Dozen
This is Dr. Michael Greger. He’s a physician-turned-author-educator, and we’ve featured him and his work occasionally over the past year or so:
- Brain Food? The Eyes Have It! ← this is about dark leafy greens, lutein, & avoiding Alzheimer’s
- Twenty-One, No Wait, Twenty Tweaks For Better Health ← he says 21, but we say one of them is very skippable. Check it out and decide what you think!
- Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight ← his top well-evidenced interventions specifically for slowing aging
But what we’ve not covered, astonishingly, is one of the things for which he’s most famous, which is…
Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen
Based on the research in the very information-dense tome that his his magnum opus How Not To Die (while it doesn’t confer immortality, it does help avoid the most common causes of death), Dr. Greger recommends that we take care to enjoy each of the following things per day:
Beans
- Servings: 3 per day
- Examples: ½ cup cooked beans, ¼ cup hummus
Greens
- Servings: 2 per day
- Examples: 1 cup raw, ½ cup cooked
Cruciferous vegetables
- Servings: 1 per day
- Examples: ½ cup chopped, 1 tablespoon horseradish
Other vegetables
- Servings: 2 per day
- Examples: ½ cup non-leafy vegetables
Whole grains
- Servings: 3 per day
- Examples: ½ cup hot cereal, 1 slice of bread
Berries
- Servings: 1 per day
- Examples: ½ cup fresh or frozen, ¼ cup dried
Other fruits
- Servings: 3 per day
- Examples: 1 medium fruit, ¼ cup dried fruit
Flaxseed
- Servings: 1 per day
- Examples: 1 tablespoon ground
Nuts & (other) seeds
- Servings: 1 per day
- Examples: ¼ cup nuts, 2 tablespoons nut butter
Herbs & spices
- Servings: 1 per day
- Examples: ¼ teaspoon turmeric
Hydrating drinks
- Servings: 60 oz per day
- Examples: Water, green tea, hibiscus tea
Exercise
- Servings: Once per day
- Examples: 90 minutes moderate or 40 minutes vigorous
Superficially it seems an interesting choice to, after listing 11 foods and drinks, have the 12th item as exercise but not add a 13th one of sleep—but perhaps he quite reasonably expects that people get a dose of sleep with more consistency than people get a dose of exercise. After all, exercise is mostly optional, whereas if we try to skip sleep for too long, our body will force the matter for us.
Further 10almonds notes:
- We’d consider chia superior to flax, but you do you. Flax is a fine choice also.
- We recommend trying to get each of these top 5 most health-giving spices in daily if you can.
Enjoy!
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The Truth About Handwashing
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Washing Our Hands Of It
In Tuesdays’s newsletter, we asked you how often you wash your hands, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of self-reported answers:
- About 54% said “More times per day than [the other options]”
- About 38% said “Whenever using the bathroom or kitchen
- About 5% said “Once or twice per day”
- Two (2) said “Only when visibly dirty”
- Two (2) said “I prefer to just use sanitizer gel”
What does the science have to say about this?
People lie about their handwashing habits: True or False?
True and False (since some people lie and some don’t), but there’s science to this too. Here’s a great study from 2021 that used various levels of confidentiality in questioning (i.e., there were ways of asking that made it either obvious or impossible to know who answered how), and found…
❝We analysed data of 1434 participants. In the direct questioning group 94.5% of the participants claimed to practice proper hand hygiene; in the indirect questioning group a significantly lower estimate of only 78.1% was observed.❞
Note: the abstract alone doesn’t make it clear how the anonymization worked (it is explained later in the paper), and it was noted as a limitation of the study that the participants may not have understood how it works well enough to have confidence in it, meaning that the 78.1% is probably also inflated, just not as much as the 94.5% in the direct questioning group.
Here’s a pop-science article that cites a collection of studies, finding such things as for example…
❝With the use of wireless devices to record how many people entered the restroom and used the pumps of the soap dispensers, researchers were able to collect data on almost 200,000 restroom trips over a three-month period.
The found that only 31% of men and 65% of women washed their hands with soap.❞
Source: Study: Men Wash Their Hands Much Less Often Than Women (And People Lie About Washing Their Hands)
Sanitizer gel does the job of washing one’s hands with soap: True or False?
False, though it’s still not a bad option for when soap and water aren’t available or practical. Here’s an educational article about the science of why this is so:
UCI Health | Soap vs. Hand Sanitizer
There’s also some consideration of lab results vs real-world results, because while in principle the alcohol gel is very good at killing most bacteria / inactivating most viruses, it can take up to 4 minutes of alcohol gel contact to do so, as in this study with flu viruses:
In contrast, 20 seconds of handwashing with soap will generally do the job.
Antibacterial soap is better than other soap: True or False?
False, because the main way that soap protects us is not in its antibacterial properties (although it does also destroy the surface membrane of some bacteria and for that matter viruses too, killing/inactivating them, respectively), but rather in how it causes pathogens to simply slide off during washing.
Here’s a study that found that handwashing with soap reduced disease incidence by 50–53%, and…
❝Incidence of disease did not differ significantly between households given plain soap compared with those given antibacterial soap.❞
Read more: Effect of handwashing on child health: a randomised controlled trial
Want to wash your hands more than you do?
There have been many studies into motivating people to wash their hands more (often with education and/or disgust-based shaming), but an effective method you can use for yourself at home is to simply buy more luxurious hand soap, and generally do what you can to make handwashing a more pleasant experience (taking a moment to let the water run warm is another good thing to do if that’s more comfortable for you).
Take care!
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The Most Underrated Hip Mobility Exercise (Not Stretching)
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Cori Lefkowith, of “Redefining Strength” and “Strong At Every Age” fame, is back to help us keep our hips in good order:
These tips don’t lie
It’s less about stretching, and more about range of motion and “use it or lose it”:
- Full range of motion in lifting exercises enhances joint mobility and stability, whereas strengthening muscles through a limited range of motion (e.g., half squats) can cause tightness.
- Lifting through a larger range of motion may result in faster strength gains too, so that’s a bonus.
- Customize your range of motion based on your body type and capability, but do try for what you reasonably can—don’t give up!
- Lower weights and focus on deeper movements like split squats or single-leg squats, but work up slowly if you have any difficulties to start with.
- Using exercises like the Bulgarian split squat and deficit split squat can improve hip mobility and strength (you’ll really need to see the video for this one)
- Fully controlling the range of motion is key to progress, even if it means going lighter; prioritize mobility over brute strength. Strength is good, but mobility is even more critical.
- Adding instability, such as raising the front foot in lunges, challenges muscles and increases mobility. Obviously, please be safe while doing so, and slowly increase the range of motion while maintaining control, avoiding reliance on momentum.
- Final tip that most don’t consider: try starting exercises from the bottom position to ensure proper form and muscle engagement!
For more on each of these plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Take care!
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Digital Minimalism – by Dr. Cal Newport
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There are a lot of books that advise “Unplug once in a while, and go outside”. But it doesn’t really take a book to convey that, does it? And it just leaves all the digital catching-up once we get back. Surely there must be a better way?
Rather than relying on a “digital detox”, Dr. Newport offers principles to apply to our digital lives, that allow us to reap the benefits of modern information technology without being obeisant to it.
The book’s greatest strength lies in that; having clear guidelines that can be applied to cut out the extra weight of digital media that has simply snuck in because of The Almighty Algorithm—and even tips on how to engage more mindfully with that if we still want to, for example using social media only in a web browser rather than on our phones, so that we can ringfence the time for it rather than having it spill into every spare moment.
In the category of criticism, the book sometimes lacks a little awareness when it comes to assumptions about the reader and the reader’s social circles; that (for example) nobody has any disabilities and everyone lives in the same town. But for most people most of the time, the advices will stand, and the exceptions can be managed by the reader neatly enough.
Stylistically, the book is not very minimalist, but this is not inconsistent with the advice of the book, if you’re curling up in the armchair with a physical copy, or a single-purpose ereader device.
Bottom line: if you’d like to streamline your use of digital media, but don’t want to lose out on the value it brings you, this book provides an excellent template
Click here to check out Digital Minimalism, and choose focused life in a noisy world!
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7 Steps to Get Off Sugar and Carbohydrates – by Susan Neal
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We will not keep the steps a mystery; abbreviated, they are:
- decide to really do this thing
- get knowledge and support
- clean out that pantry/fridge/etc and put those things behind you
- buy in healthy foods while starving your candida
- plan for an official start date, so that everything is ready
- change the way you eat (prep methods, timings, etc)
- keep on finding small ways to improve, without turning back
Particularly important amongst those are starving the candida (the fungus in your gut that is responsible for a lot of carb cravings, especially sugar and alcohol—which latter can be broken down easily into sugar), and changing the “how” of eating as well as the “what”; those are both things that are often overlooked in a lot of guides, but this one delivers well.
Walking the reader by the hand through things like that is probably the book’s greatest strength.
In the category of subjective criticism, the author does go off-piste a little at the end, to take a moment while she has our attention to talk about other things.
For example, you may not need “Appendix 7: How to Become A Christian and Disciple of Jesus Christ”.
Of course if that calls to you, then by all means, follow your heart, but it certainly isn’t a necessary step of quitting sugar. Nevertheless, the diversion doesn’t detract from the good dietary change advice that she has just spent a book delivering.
Bottom line: there’s no deep science here, but there’s a lot of very good, very practical advice, that’s consistent with good science.
Click here to check out 7 Steps to Get Off Sugar, and watch your health improve!
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Unwell Women – by Dr. Elinor Cleghorn
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For a demographic that makes up a little over half of the world’s population, women are paradoxically marginalized in healthcare. And in other ways too, but this book is about health.
Dr. Cleghorn had to fight for seven (!) years to get her own lupus condition recognized as such, and continues to have to fight for it to be taken seriously on an ongoing basis. And yet, 95% of the book is not about her and her experiences, but rather, the bigger picture.
The book is divided into sections, by period in history. From Hippocrates to the modern day, Dr. Cleghorn gives us a well-researched, incredibly well-referenced overview of the marginalization of women’s health. Far from being a dry history book in the early parts though, it’s fascinating and engaging throughout.
The modern day sections are part shining a light into dark areas, part practical information-and-advice “did you know this happens, and you can do this about it”, and part emphatic call-to-action to demand better.
Bottom line: this book is in this reviewer’s “top 5 books read this year”, and we highly recommend it to you.
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The Science and Technology of Growing Young – by Sergey Young
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There are a lot of very optimistic works out there that promise the scientific breakthroughs that will occur very soon. Even amongst the hyperoptimistic transhumanism community, there is the joke of “where’s my flying car?” Sometimes prefaced with “Hey Ray, quick question…” as a nod to (or sometimes, direct address to) Ray Kurzweil, the Google computer scientist and futurist.
So, how does this one measure up?
Our author, Sergey Young, is not a scientist, but an investor with fingers in many pies. Specifically, pies relating to preventative medicine and longevity. Does that make him an unreliable narrator? Not necessarily, but it means we need to at least bear that context in mind.
But, also, he’s investing in those fields because he believes in them, and wants to benefit from them himself. In essense, he’s putting his money where his mouth is. But, enough about the author. What of the book?
It’s a whirlwind tour of the main areas of reseach and development, in the recent past, the present, and the near future. He talks about problems, and compelling solutions to problems.
If the book has a weak point, it’s that it doesn’t really talk about the problems to those solutions—that is, what can still go wrong. He’s excited about what we can do, and it’s somebody else’s job to worry about pitfalls along the way.
As to the “and what you can do now?” We’ll summarize:
- Mediterranean diet, mostly plant-based
- Get moderate exercise daily
- Get good sleep
- Don’t drink or smoke
- Get your personal health genomics data
- Get regular medical check-ups
- Look after your mental health too
Bottom line: this is a great primer on the various avenues of current anti-aging research and development, with discussion ranging from the the technological to the sociological. It has some health tips too, but the real meat of the work is the insight into the workings of the longevity industry.
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