Dried Apricots vs Dried Prunes – Which is Healthier?
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.
Our Verdict
When comparing dried apricots to dried prunes, we picked the prunes.
Why?
First, let’s talk hydration. We’ve described both of these as “dried”, but prunes are by default dried plums, usually partially rehydrated. So, for fairness, on the other side of things we’re also looking at dried apricots, partially rehydrated. Otherwise, it would look (mass for mass or volume for volume) like one is seriously outstripping the other even if some metric were actually equal, just because of water-weight in one and not the other.
Illustrative example: consider, for example, that the sugar in a bunch of grapes or a handful of raisins can be the same, not because they magically got more sugary, but because the water was dried out, so per mass and per volume, there’s more sugar, proportionally.
Back to dried apricots and dried prunes…
You’ll often see these two next to each other in the heath food store, which is why we’re comparing them here.
Of course, if it is practical, please by all means enjoy fresh apricots and fresh plums. But we know that life is not always convenient, fruits are not in season growing in abundance in our gardens all year round, and sometimes we’re stood in the aisle of a grocery store, weighing up the dried fruit options.
- Apricots are well-known for their zinc, potassium, and vitamin A.
- Prunes are well-known for their fiber.
But that’s not the whole story…
- Apricots outperform prunes for vitamin A, and also vitamins C and E.
- Prunes take first place for vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, and K, and also for minerals calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, and zinc.
- Prunes also have about 3x the fiber, which at the very least offsets the fact that they have 3x the sugar.
Once again, sugar in fruit is healthy (sugar in fruit juices is not*, though, so enjoy prunes rather than just prune juice, if you can) and can take its rightful place as providing a significant portion of our daily energy needs, if we let it.
*It’s the same sugar, just the manner of delivery changes what it does to our liver and our pancreas; see:
Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
In summary…
Dried apricots are great (fresh are even better), and yet prunes outperform them by most metrics on a like-for-like basis.
Prunes have, on balance, a lot more vitamins and minerals, as well as more fiber and energy.
Want to get some?
Your local supermarket probably has them, and if you prefer having them delivered to your door, then here’s an example product on Amazon
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Can I Eat That? – by Jenefer Roberts
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.
The answer to the question in the title is: you can eat pretty much anything, if you’re prepared for the consequences!
This book looks to give you the information to make your own decisions in that regard. There’s a large section on the science of glucose metabolism in the context of food (other aspects of glucose metabolism aren’t covered), so you will not simply be told “raw carrots are good; mashed potatoes are bad”, you’ll understand many factors that affect it, e.g:
- Macronutrient profiles of food and resultant base glycemic indices
- How the glycemic index changes if you cut something, crush it, mash it, juice it, etc
- How the glycemic index changes if you chill something, heat it, fry it, boil it, etc
- The many “this food works differently in the presence of this other food” factors
- How your relative level of insulin resistance affects things itself
…and much more.
The style is simple and explanatory, without deep science, but with good science and comprehensive advice.
There are also the promised recipes; they’re in an appendix at the back and aren’t the main meat of the book, though.
Bottom line: if you’ve ever found it confusing working out what works how in the mysterious world of diabetes nutrition, this book is a top tier demystifier.
Click here to check out Can I Eat That?, and gain confidence in your food choices!
Share This Post
-
An Addiction Expert’s Insights On Festive Drinking
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
This is Dr. Christopher Kahler. He’s Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Director of Alcohol and Addiction Studies, Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, all at Brown University.
What does he want us to know?
It’s the trickiest time of the year
Per stats, alcohol sales peak in December, with the heaviest drinking being from mid-December (getting an early start on the Christmas cheer) to New Year’s Eve. As for why, there’s a collection of reasons, as he notes:
❝The main challenge is there’s an extra layer of stress, with a lot of obligations and expectations from friends and family. We’re around people who maybe we’re not usually around, and in larger groups. It’s also a time of heightened emotion and, for some people, loneliness.
On top of that, alcohol use is built into a lot of our winter holiday traditions. It’s often marketed as part of the “good life.” We’re expected to have alcohol when we celebrate.❞
As for how much alcohol is safe to drink… According to the World Health Organization, the only safe amount of alcohol is zero:
Dr. Kahler acknowledges, however, that many people will wish to imbibe anyway, and indeed, he himself does drink a little, but endeavours to do so mindfully, and as such, he recommends that we…
HALT!
Dr. Kahler counsels us against making decisions (including the decision to drink alcohol), on occasions when we are one or more of the following:
- Hungry
- Angry
- Lonely
- Tired
He also notes that around this time of year, often our normal schedules and habits are disrupted, which introduces more microdecisions to our daily lives, which in turn means more “decision fatigue”, and the greater chance of making bad decisions.
We share some practical tips on how to reduce the chances of thusly erring, here:
Set your intentions now
He bids us figure out what our goal is, and really think it through, including not just “how many drinks to have” if we’re drinking, but also such things as “what feelings are likely to come up”. Because, if we’ve historically used alcohol as a maladaptive coping mechanism, we’re going to need a different, better, healthier coping mechanism (we talked more about that in our above-linked article about reducing or quitting alcohol, too, with some examples).
He also suggests that we memorize our social responses—exactly what we’re going to say if offered a drink, for example:
❝It’s important to know what you’re going to say about your alcohol use. If someone asks if they can get you a drink, good responses could be: “A glass of water would be great” or “Do you have any non-alcoholic cider?” You don’t have to explain yourself. Just ask for what you want, because saying no to someone can be difficult.❞
See also:
December’s Traps To Plan Around
Mix it up and slow it down
No, that doesn’t mean mix yourself a sloe gin cocktail. But rather, it’s about alternating alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, to give your body half a chance to process the alcohol, and also to rehydrate a little along the way.
We talk about this and other damage-limitation methods, here:
How To Reduce The Harm Of Festive Drinking (Without Abstaining)
Take care!
Share This Post
-
The Good, The Bad, & The Vigorously Debated
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
This week in health news sees some pretty varied topics:
One more reason to care about the gut-brain axis
Stroke is a top killer in much of the industrialized world, usually making it into the top-few list on a per-country basis. And, it’s rising in prevalence, too. This is partly because our longevity is increasing so age-related things kill us more often, statistically, than age-unrelated things. But that’s only part of the reason; another is that our lifestyle (on the national level) is becoming more conducive to stroke. Diet is a large contributor to that, and gut health has now been identified as a key factor.
What recent research has shown is that minutes after a stroke occurs, normal gut anatomy is disrupted, and cells responsible for gut barrier integrity are eroded, and bugs from the gut get into the blood, and arrive at the (newly damaged) brain vasculature, where the blood-brain barrier is often also compromised on account of the stroke.
Because of this, critical to reducing post-stroke neuroinflammation (something that makes stroke damage more severe and recovery a lot harder) is improving the gut’s ability to heal itself quickly.
This can be helped with a dose of Insulin-like Growth Factor (IGF-1), but there are other things that can help or hinder, and those other things are modifiable by us as individuals in our lifestyle choices (e.g. a gut-healthy diet with plenty of fiber, and avoiding gut-unhealthy things like sugar and alcohol that feed C. albicans growths that will put roots through your intestines and make holes as they do), because the better/worse your gut barrier integrity is to start with, the easier/harder it will be for your gut to repair itself quickly:
Read in full: Healing the gut can reduce long-term impact of stroke
Related: Stop Sabotaging Your Gut
How about that seasonal lead-spiced hot drink?
Lead contamination in ground spices has become a bit of an issue, ground turmeric has had quite some flak in this regard, and now the spotlight is on cinnamon.
These reports, by the way, do not specify what kind of cinnamon (i.e. cassia vs Ceylon), however, clicking through to assorted sources and then doing our own digging finds that all cinnamon products we found listed as contaminated, were cassia cinnamon. This is unsurprising, as a) it’s cheaper b) it’s the kind most readily found on shelves in the US. That said, when it comes to Ceylon (sweet) cinnamon, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so that doesn’t mean they got the all-clear on lead contamination, but rather, that they haven’t received the same scrutiny as yet.
It’s worth noting that cinnamon sticks have been found to have less contamination than ground cinnamon, though.
It’s also worth noting that since some adulterated products have had lead added deliberately in increase the weight and darken the color, this is more likely to happen to cassia cinnamon than sweet cinnamon because cassia cinnamon is visibly darker, so adding a darkening agent to sweet cinnamon would just make it look like cassia (which no seller would want to do since cassia is the cheaper of the two).
Read in full: Why lead-tainted cinnamon products have turned up on shelves, and what questions consumers should ask
Related: Sweet Cinnamon vs Regular Cinnamon – Which is Healthier? ← this also covers toxicity issues, by the way
A matter of life and death
Assisted dying is currently legal in 10/40 US states, and Canada. Over in the UK, it’s being debated (and voted on) in Parliament today, at time of writing.
While bodily autonomy discussions are usually quite straightforward arguments between the very separate camps of
- “my body, my choice” vs
- “they shouldn’t be allowed to do that”,
…this one comes with a considerable middleground, because
- “people should have to right to end things without extra suffering and on their own terms”, and
- “many disabled people fear being placed in a position of having justify why they are not exercising their right to die when it might be cheaper and easier for others if they did”
…are positions with a lot of potential overlap.
In any case, we know most of our readers are in the US, but with a 10/40 split in US states (and some recent controversies in Canada), it’s likely a topic that’ll come up for most people at some point, so it’s good to understand it, and this is as good an opportunity as any:
Read in full: How would the assisted dying bill work and what issues might it create?
Related: Managing Your Mortality ← this talks about psychological/social considerations, as well as end-of-life care, palliative care (which is not quite the same thing!) and euthanasia in various forms, including the unofficial kind that you might want to be aware of if you want to avoid that happening.
Take care!
Share This Post
Related Posts
-
Eat Well With Arthritis – by Emily Johnson, with Dr. Deepak Ravindran
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.
Author Emily Johnson was diagnosed with arthritis in her early 20s, but it had been affecting her life since the age of 4. Suffice it to say, managing the condition has been integral to her life.
She’s written this book with not only her own accumulated knowledge, but also the input of professional experts; the book contains insights from chronic pain specialist Dr. Deepak Ravindran, and gets an additional medical thumbs-up in a foreword by rheumatologist Dr. Lauren Freid.
The recipes themselves are clear and easy, and the ingredients are not obscure. There’s information on what makes each dish anti-inflammatory, per ingredient, so if you have cause to make any substitutions, that’s useful to know.
Speaking of ingredients, the recipes are mostly plant-based (though there are some chicken/fish ones) and free from common allergens—but not all of them are, so each of those is marked appropriately.
Beyond the recipes, there are also sections on managing arthritis more generally, and information on things to get for your kitchen that can make your life with arthritis a lot easier!
Bottom line: if you have arthritis, cook for somebody with arthritis, or would just like a low-inflammation diet, then this is an excellent book for you.
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:
-
Stimulant Users Are Caught in Fatal ‘Fourth Wave’ of Opioid Epidemic
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, near a storefront advertising “free” cellphones, J.R. sat in an empty back stairwell and showed a reporter how he tries to avoid overdosing when he smokes crack cocaine. KFF Health News is identifying him by his initials because he fears being arrested for using illegal drugs.
It had been several hours since his last hit, and the chatty, middle-aged man’s hands moved quickly. In one hand, he held a glass pipe. In the other, a lentil-size crumb of cocaine.
Or at least J.R. hoped it was cocaine, pure cocaine — uncontaminated by fentanyl, a potent opioid that was linked to about 75% of all overdose deaths in Rhode Island in 2022. He flicked his lighter to “test” his supply. He believed that if it had a “cigar-like sweet smell,” he said, it would mean that the cocaine was laced with fentanyl. He put the pipe to his lips and took a tentative puff. “No sweet,” he said, reassured.
But this method offers only false and dangerous reassurance. A mistake can be fatal.
It is impossible to tell whether a drug contains fentanyl by the taste or smell. “Somebody can believe that they can smell it or taste it, or see it … but that’s not a scientific test,” said Josiah “Jody” Rich, an addiction specialist and researcher who teaches at Brown University. “People are going to die today because they buy some cocaine that they don’t know has fentanyl in it.”
The first wave of the long-running and devastating opioid epidemic began in the United States with the abuse of prescription painkillers in the early 2000s. The second wave involved an increase in heroin use, starting around 2010. The third wave began when powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl started appearing in the supply around 2015. Now experts are observing a fourth phase of the deadly epidemic.
The mix of stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamines with fentanyl — a synthetic opioid 50 times as powerful as heroin — is driving what experts call the opioid epidemic’s “fourth wave.” The mixture of stimulants and fentanyl presents powerful challenges to efforts to reduce overdoses because many users of stimulants don’t know they are at risk of ingesting opioids, so they don’t take overdose precautions.
The only way to know whether cocaine or other stimulants contain fentanyl is to use drug-checking tools such as fentanyl test strips — a best practice for what’s known as “harm reduction,” now embraced by federal health officials in combating drug overdose deaths. Fentanyl test strips cost as little as $2 for a two-pack online, but many front-line organizations also give them out free.
Nationwide, illicit stimulants mixed with fentanyl were the most common drugs found in fentanyl-related overdoses, according to a study published in 2023 in the scientific journal Addiction. The stimulant in the fatal mixture tends to be cocaine in the Northeast, and methamphetamine in the West and much of the Midwest and South.
“The No. 1 thing that people in the U.S. are dying from in terms of drug overdoses is the combination of fentanyl and a stimulant,’’ said Joseph Friedman, a researcher at UCLA and the study’s lead author. “Black and African Americans are disproportionately affected by this crisis to a large magnitude, especially in the Northeast.”
Friedman was also the lead author of another new study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, that shows the fourth wave of the opioid epidemic is driving up the mortality rate among older Black Americans (ages 55-64) and, more recently, Hispanic people. Friedman said part of the reason street fentanyl is so deadly is that there’s no way to tell how potent it is. Hospitals have safely used medical-grade fentanyl for surgical pain because the potency is strictly regulated, but “the potency fluctuates wildly in the illicit market” Friedman said.
Studies of street drugs, he said, show that in illicit drugs the potency can vary from 1% to 70% fentanyl.
“Imagine ordering a mixed drink in a bar and it contains one to 70 shots,” Friedman said, “and the only way you know is to start drinking it. … There would be a huge number of alcohol overdose deaths.”
Drug-checking technology can provide a rough estimate of fentanyl concentration, he said, but to get a precise measure requires sending drugs to a laboratory.
It’s not clear how much of the latest trend in polydrug use — in which users mix substances, such as cocaine and fentanyl, for example — is accidental versus intentional. It can vary for individual users: a recent study from Millennium Health found that most people who use fentanyl do so at times intentionally and other times unintentionally.
People often use stimulants to power through the rapid withdrawal from fentanyl, Friedman said. And the high-risk practice of using cocaine or meth with heroin, known as “speedballing,” has been around for decades. Other factors include manufacturers’ adding the cheap synthetic opioid to a stimulant to stretch their supply, or dealers mixing up bags.
Researchers say many people still think they are using unadulterated cocaine or crack — a misconception that can be deadly. “Folks who are using stimulants, and not intentionally using opioids, are unprepared to respond to an opioid overdose,” said Brown University epidemiologist Jaclyn White Hughto, “because they don’t perceive themselves to be at risk.” Hughto is a principal investigator in a new, unpublished study called “Preventing Overdoses Involving Stimulants.”
Hughto and the team surveyed more than 260 people in Rhode Island and Massachusetts who use drugs, including some who manufacture and distribute stimulants such as cocaine. More than 60% of the people they interviewed in Rhode Island had bought or used stimulants that they later found out had fentanyl in them. And many of the people interviewed in the study also use drugs alone. That means that if they do overdose, they may not be found until it’s too late.
In 2022, Rhode Island had the fourth-highest rate of overdose deaths involving cocaine in 2022, after Washington, D.C., Delaware, and Vermont, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The fourth wave is also hitting stimulant users who choose pills over what they perceive as more dangerous drugs such as cocaine in an effort to avoid fentanyl. That’s what happened to Jennifer Dubois’ son Cliffton.
Dubois was a single mother raising two Black sons. The older son, Cliffton, had been struggling with addiction since he was 14, she said. Cliffton also had been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and a mood disorder.
In March 2020, Cliffton had checked into a rehab program as the pandemic ramped up, Dubois said. Because of the lockdown at rehab, Cliffton was upset about not being able to visit with his mother. “He said, ‘If I can’t see my mom, I can’t do treatment,’” Dubois recalled. “And I begged him” to stay in treatment.
But soon after, Cliffton left the rehab program. He showed up at her door. “And I just cried,” she said.
Dubois’ younger son was living at home. She didn’t want Cliffton doing drugs around his younger brother. So she gave Cliffton an ultimatum: “If you want to stay home, you have to stay drug-free.”
Cliffton went to stay with family friends, first in Atlanta and later in Woonsocket, an old mill city that has Rhode Island’s highest rate of drug overdose deaths.
In August 2020, Cliffton overdosed but was revived. Cliffton later confided that he’d been snorting cocaine in a car with a friend, Dubois said. Hospital records show he tested positive for fentanyl.
“He was really scared,” Dubois said. After the overdose, he tried to “leave the cocaine and the hard drugs alone,” she said. “But he was taking pills.” Eight months later, on April 17, 2021, Cliffton was found unresponsive in the bedroom of a family member’s home.
The night before, Cliffton had bought counterfeit Adderall, according to the police report. What he didn’t know was that the Adderall pill was laced with fentanyl. “He thought by staying away from the street drugs and just taking pills, he was doing better,” Dubois said.
A fentanyl test strip could have saved his life.
This article is from a partnership that includes The Public’s Radio, NPR, and KFF Health News.
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.
USE OUR CONTENT
This story can be republished for free (details).
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.
This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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:
-
Blind Spots – by Dr. Marty Makary
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.
From the time the US recommended not giving peanuts to infants for the first three years of life “in order to avoid peanut allergies” (whereupon non-exposure to peanuts early in life led to, instead, an increase in peanut allergies and anaphylactic incidents), to the time the US recommended not taking HRT on the strength of the claim that “HRT causes breast cancer” (whereupon the reduced popularity of HRT led to, instead, an increase in breast cancer incidence and mortality), to many other such incidents of very bad public advice being given on the strength of a single badly-misrepresented study (for each respective thing), Dr. Makary puts the spotlight on what went wrong.
This is important, because this is not just a book of outrage, exclaiming “how could this happen?!”, but rather instead, is a book of inquisition, asking “how did this happen?”, in such a way that we the reader can spot similar patterns going forwards.
Oftentimes, this is a simple matter of having a basic understanding of statistics, and checking sources to see if the dataset really supports what the headlines are claiming—and indeed, whether sometimes it suggests rather the opposite.
The style is a little on the sensationalist side, but it’s well-supported with sound arguments, good science, and clear mathematics.
Bottom line: if you’d like to improve your scientific literacy, this book is an excellent illustrative guide.
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: