Easily Digestible Vegetarian Protein Sources
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
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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
❝What could be easily digestible plant sources of protein for a vegetarian. My son is a gym holic and always looking for ways to get his protein from lentils other than eggs. He says to reach his protein requirement for the day, the amount of lentils he has to eat is sometimes heavy on the gut. Would really appreciate if you throw some light on this ❞
Unless one has IBS or similar (or is otherwise unaccustomed to consuming healthy amounts of fiber), lentils shouldn’t be at all problematic for the digestion.
However, the digestive process can still be eased by (speaking specifically for lentils here) blending them (in the water they were cooked in). This thick tasty liquid can then be used as the base of a soup, for example.
Soy is an excellent source of complete protein too. Your son probably knows this because it’s in a lot of body-building supplements as soy protein isolate, but can also be enjoyed as textured soy protein (as in many plant-based meats), or even just soy beans (edamame). Tofu (also made from soy) is very versatile, and again can be blended to form the basis of a creamy sauce.
Mycoproteins (as found in “Quorn” brand products and other meat substitutes) also perform comparably to meat from animals:
Meatless Muscle Growth: Building Muscle Size and Strength on a Mycoprotein-Rich Vegan Diet
See also, for interest:
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Watermelon vs Grapes – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing watermelon to grapes, we picked the watermelon.
Why?
It was close! And certainly both are very healthy.
Both fruits are (like most fruits) good sources of water, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Any sugar content (of which grapes are slightly higher) is offset by their fiber content and polyphenols.
See: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
While both are good sources of vitamins A and C, watermelon has about 10x as much vitamin A, and about 6x as much vitamin C (give or take individual plants, how they were grown, etc, but the overall balance is clearly in watermelon’s favor).
When it comes to antioxidants, both fruits are good, but again watermelon is the more potent source. Grapes famously contain resveratrol, and they also contain quercetin, albeit you’d have to eat quite a lot of grapes to get a large portion.
Now, having to eat a lot of grapes might not sound like a terrible fate (who else finds that the grapes are gone by the time the groceries are put away?), but we are comparing the fruits here, and on a list of “100 best foods for quercetin”, for example, grapes took 99th place.
Watermelon’s main antioxidant meanwhile is lycopene, and watermelon is one of the best sources of lycopene in existence (better even than tomatoes).
We’ll have to do a main feature about lycopene sometime soon, so watch this space
Take care!
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Does intermittent fasting increase or decrease our risk of cancer?
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Research over the years has suggested intermittent fasting has the potential to improve our health and reduce the likelihood of developing cancer.
So what should we make of a new study in mice suggesting fasting increases the risk of cancer?
Stock-Asso/Shutterstock What is intermittent fasting?
Intermittent fasting means switching between times of eating and not eating. Unlike traditional diets that focus on what to eat, this approach focuses on when to eat.
There are lots of commonly used intermittent fasting schedules. The 16/8 plan means you only eat within an eight-hour window, then fast for the remaining 16 hours. Another popular option is the 5:2 diet, where you eat normally for five days then restrict calories for two days.
In Australia, poor diet contributes to 7% of all cases of disease, including coronary heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and cancers of the bowel and lung. Globally, poor diet is linked to 22% of deaths in adults over the age of 25.
Intermittent fasting has gained a lot of attention in recent years for its potential health benefits. Fasting influences metabolism, which is how your body processes food and energy. It can affect how the body absorbs nutrients from food and burns energy from sugar and fat.
What did the new study find?
The new study, published in Nature, found when mice ate again after fasting, their gut stem cells, which help repair the intestine, became more active. The stem cells were better at regenerating compared with those of mice who were either totally fasting or eating normally.
This suggests the body might be better at healing itself when eating after fasting.
However, this could also have a downside. If there are genetic mutations present, the burst of stem cell-driven regeneration after eating again might make it easier for cancer to develop.
Polyamines – small molecules important for cell growth – drive this regeneration after refeeding. These polyamines can be produced by the body, influenced by diet, or come from gut bacteria.
The findings suggest that while fasting and refeeding can improve stem cell function and regeneration, there might be a tradeoff with an increased risk of cancer, especially if fasting and refeeding cycles are repeated over time.
While this has been shown in mice, the link between intermittent fasting and cancer risk in humans is more complicated and not yet fully understood.
What has other research found?
Studies in animals have found intermittent fasting can help with weight loss, improve blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and subsequently reduce the risks of diabetes and heart disease.
Research in humans suggests intermittent fasting can reduce body weight, improve metabolic health, reduce inflammation, and enhance cellular repair processes, which remove damaged cells that could potentially turn cancerous.
However, other studies warn that the benefits of intermittent fasting are the same as what can be achieved through calorie restriction, and that there isn’t enough evidence to confirm it reduces cancer risk in humans.
What about in people with cancer?
In studies of people who have cancer, fasting has been reported to protect against the side effects of chemotherapy and improve the effectiveness of cancer treatments, while decreasing damage to healthy cells.
Prolonged fasting in some patients who have cancer has been shown to be safe and may potentially be able to decrease tumour growth.
On the other hand, some experts advise caution. Studies in mice show intermittent fasting could weaken the immune system and make the body less able to fight infection, potentially leading to worse health outcomes in people who are unwell. However, there is currently no evidence that fasting increases the risk of bacterial infections in humans.
So is it OK to try intermittent fasting?
The current view on intermittent fasting is that it can be beneficial, but experts agree more research is needed. Short-term benefits such as weight loss and better overall health are well supported. But we don’t fully understand the long-term effects, especially when it comes to cancer risk and other immune-related issues.
Since there are many different methods of intermittent fasting and people react to them differently, it’s hard to give advice that works for everyone. And because most people who participated in the studies were overweight, or had diabetes or other health problems, we don’t know how the results apply to the broader population.
For healthy people, intermittent fasting is generally considered safe. But it’s not suitable for everyone, particularly those with certain medical conditions, pregnant or breastfeeding women, and people with a history of eating disorders. So consult your health-care provider before starting any fasting program.
Amali Cooray, PhD Candidate in Genetic Engineering and Cancer, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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How To Grow New Brain Cells (At Any Age)
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How To Grow New Brain Cells (At Any Age)
It was long believed that brain growth could not occur later in life, due to expending our innate stock of pluripotent stem cells. However, this was mostly based on rodent studies.
Rodent studies are often used for brain research, because it’s difficult to find human volunteers willing to have their brains sliced thinly (so that the cells can be viewed under a microscope) at the end of the study.
However, neurobiologist Dr. Maura Boldrini led a team that did a lot of research by means of autopsies on the hippocampi of (previously) healthy individuals ranging in age from 14 to 79.
What she found is that while indeed the younger subjects did predictably have more young brain cells (neural progenitors and immature neurons), even the oldest subject, at the age of 79, had been producing new brain cells up until death.
Read her landmark study: Human Hippocampal Neurogenesis Persists throughout Aging
There was briefly a flurry of news articles about a study by Dr. Shawn Sorrels that refuted this, however, it later came to light that Dr. Sorrels had accidentally destroyed his own evidence during the cell-fixing process—these things happen; it’s just unfortunate the mistake was not picked up until after publication.
A later study by a Dr. Elena Moreno-Jiménez fixed this flaw by using a shorter fixation time for the cell samples they wanted to look at, and found that there were tens of thousands of newly-made brain cells in samples from adults ranging from 43 to 87.
Now, there was still a difference: the samples from the youngest adult had 30% more newly-made braincells than the 87-year-old, but given that previous science thought brain cell generation stopped in childhood, the fact that an 87-year-old was generating new brain cells 30% less quickly than a 43-year-old is hardly much of a criticism!
As an aside: samples from patients with Alzheimer’s also had a 30% reduction in new braincell generation, compared to samples from patients of the same age without Alzheimer’s. But again… Even patients with Alzheimer’s were still growing some new brain cells.
Read it for yourself: Adult hippocampal neurogenesis is abundant in neurologically healthy subjects and drops sharply in patients with Alzheimer’s disease
Practical advice based on this information
Since we can do neurogenesis at any age, but the rate does drop with age (and drops sharply in the case of Alzheimer’s disease), we need to:
Feed your brain. The brain is the most calorie-consuming organ we have, by far, and it’s also made mostly of fat* and water. So, get plenty of healthy fats, and get plenty of water.
*Fun fact: while depictions in fiction (and/or chemically preserved brains) may lead many to believe the brain has a rubbery consistency, the untreated brain being made of mostly fat and water gives it more of a blancmange-like consistency in reality. That thing is delicate and spatters easily. There’s a reason it’s kept cushioned inside the strongest structure of our body, far more protected than anything in our torso.
Exercise. Specifically, exercise that gets your blood pumping. This (as our earlier-featured video today referenced) is one of the biggest things we can do to boost Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor, or BDNF.
Here be science: Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor, Depression, and Physical Activity: Making the Neuroplastic Connection
However, that’s not the only way to increase BDNF; another is to enjoy a diet rich in polyphenols. These can be found in, for example, berries, tea, coffee, and chocolate. Technically those last two are also botanically berries, but given how we usually consume them, and given how rich they are in polyphenols, they merit a special mention.
See for example: Effects of nutritional interventions on BDNF concentrations in humans: a systematic review
Some supplements can help neuron (re)growth too, so if you haven’t already, you might want to check out our previous main feature on lion’s mane mushroom, a supplement which does exactly that.
For those who like videos, you may also enjoy this TED talk by neuroscientist Dr. Sandrine Thuret:
Prefer text? Click here to read the transcript
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To Nap Or Not To Nap; That Is The Question
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
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
❝Is it good to nap in the afternoon, or better to get the famous 7 to 9 hours at night and leave it at that? I’m worried that daytime napping to make up for a shorter night’s sleep will just perpetuate and worsen it in the long run, is there a categorical answer here?❞
Generally considered best is indeed the 7–9 hours at night (yes, including at older ages):
Why You Probably Need More Sleep
…and sleep efficiency does matter too:
Why 7 Hours Sleep Is Not Enough
…which in turn, is influenced by factors other than just length and depth:
The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter)
However! Knowing what is best in theory does not help at all if it’s unattainable in practice. So, if you’re not getting a good night’s sleep (and we’ll assume you’re already practising good sleep hygiene; fresh bedding, lights-off by a certain time, no alcohol or caffeine before bed, that kind of thing), then a first port-of-call may be sleep remedies:
Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors
If even those don’t work, then napping is now likely your best back-up option. But, napping done incorrectly can indeed cause as many problems as it solves. There’s a difference between:
- “I napped and now I have energy again” and you continue with your day
- “Darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time. Stars wheeled overhead, and every day was as long as the life age of the earth—but it was not the end.” and now you’re not sure whether it’s day or night, whose house you’re in, or whether you’ve been drugged.
These two very common napping experiences are influenced by factors that we can control:
How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)
If you still prefer to not risk napping but do need at least some kind of refreshment that’s actually a refreshment and not just taking stimulants, then you might consider this practice (from yoga nidra) that gives some of the same benefits of sleep, without actually sleeping:
Non-Sleep Deep Rest: A Neurobiologist’s Insights
Take care!
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Eat To Beat Cancer
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Controlling What We Can, To Avoid Cancer
Every time a cell in our body is replaced, there’s a chance it will be cancerous. Exactly what that chance is depends on very many factors. Some of them we can’t control; others, we can.
Diet is a critical, modifiable factor
We can’t choose, for example, our genes. We can, for the most part, choose our diet. Why “for the most part”?
- Some people live in a food desert (the Arctic Circle is a good example where food choices are limited by supply)
- Some people have dietary restrictions (whether by health condition e.g. allergy, intolerance, etc or by personal-but-unwavering choice, e.g. vegetarian, vegan, kosher, halal, etc)
But for most of us, most of the time, we have a good control over our diet, and so that’s an area we can and should focus on.
Choose your animal protein wisely
If you are vegan, you can skip this section. If you are not, then the short version is:
- Fish: almost certainly fine
- Poultry: the jury is out; data is leaning towards fine, though
- Red meat: significantly increased cancer risk
- Processed meat: significantly increased cancer risk
For more details (and a run-down on the science behind the above super-summarized version):
- Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy? ← A mythbuster article that outlines many health properties (good and bad) of animal products
- The Whys and Hows of Cutting Meats Out Of Your Diet ← A life-hack article about acting on that information
Skip The Ultra-Processed Foods
Ok, so this one’s probably not a shocker in its simplest form:
❝Studies are showing us is that not only do the ultraprocessed foods increase the risk of cancer, but that after a cancer diagnosis such foods increase the risk of dying❞
Source: Is there a connection between ultraprocessed food and cancer?
There’s an unfortunate implication here! If you took the previous advice to heart and cut out [at least some] meat, and/but then replaced that with ultra-processed synthetic meat, then this was not a great improvement in cancer risk terms.
Ultra-processed meat is worse than unprocessed, regardless of whether it was from an animal or was synthetic.
In other words: if you buy textured soy pieces (a common synthetic meat), it pays to look at the ingredients, because there’s a difference between:
- INGREDIENTS: SOY
- INGREDIENTS: Rehydrated Textured SOY Protein (52%), Water, Rapeseed Oil, SOY Protein Concentrate, Seasoning (SULPHITES) (Dextrose, Flavourings, Salt, Onion Powder, Food Starch Modified, Yeast Extract, Colour: Red Iron Oxide), SOY Leghemoglobin, Fortified WHEAT Flour (WHEAT Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Bamboo Fibre, Methylcellulose, Tomato Purée, Salt, Raising Agent: Ammonium Carbonates
Now, most of those original base ingredients are/were harmless per se (as are/were the grapes in wine—before processing into alcohol), but it has clearly been processed to Hell and back to do all that.
Choose the one that just says “soy”. Or eat soybeans. Or other beans. Or lentils. Really there are a lot of options.
About soy, by the way…
There is (mostly in the US, mostly funded by the animal agriculture industry) a lot of fearmongering about soy. Which is ironic, given the amount of soy that is fed to livestock to be fed to humans, but it does bear addressing:
❝Soy foods are safe for all cancer patients and are an excellent source of plant protein. Studies show soy may improve survival after breast cancer❞
Source: Food risks and cancer: What to avoid
(obviously, if you have a soy allergy then you should not consume soy—for most people, the above advice stands, though)
Advanced Glycation End-Products
These (which are Very Bad™ for very many things, including cancer) occur specifically as a result of processing animal proteins and fats.
Note: not even necessarily ultra-processing, just processing can do it. But ultra-processing is worse. What’s the difference, you wonder?
The difference between “ultra-processed” and just “processed”:
- Your average hotdog has been ultra-processed. It’s not only usually been changed with many artificial additives, it’s also been through a series of processes (physical and chemical) and ends up bearing little relation to the creature it came from.
- Your bacon (that you bought fresh from your local butcher, not a supermarket brand of unknown provenance, and definitely not the kind that might come on the top of frozen supermarket pizza) has been processed. It’s undergone a couple of simple processes on its journey “from farm to table”. Remember also that when you cook it, that too is one more process (and one that results in a lot of AGEs).
Read more: What’s so bad about AGEs?
Note if you really don’t want to cut out certain foods, changing the way you cook them (i.e., the last process your food undergoes before you eat it) can also reduce AGES:
Advanced Glycation End Products in Foods and a Practical Guide to Their Reduction in the Diet
Get More Fiber
❝The American Institute for Cancer Research shows that for every 10-gram increase in fiber in the diet, you improve survival after cancer diagnosis by 13%❞
Source: Plant-based diet is encouraged for patients with cancer
Yes, that’s post-diagnosis, but as a general rule of thumb, what is good/bad for cancer when you have it is good/bad for cancer beforehand, too.
If you’re thinking that increasing your fiber intake means having to add bran to everything, happily there are better ways:
Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)
Enjoy!
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Hearing loss is twice as common in Australia’s lowest income groups, our research shows
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Around one in six Australians has some form of hearing loss, ranging from mild to complete hearing loss. That figure is expected to grow to one in four by 2050, due in a large part to the country’s ageing population.
Hearing loss affects communication and social engagement and limits educational and employment opportunities. Effective treatment for hearing loss is available in the form of communication training (for example, lipreading and auditory training), hearing aids and other devices.
But the uptake of treatment is low. In Australia, publicly subsidised hearing care is available predominantly only to children, young people and retirement-age people on a pension. Adults of working age are mostly not eligible for hearing health care under the government’s Hearing Services Program.
Our recent study published in the journal Ear and Hearing showed, for the first time, that working-age Australians from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are at much greater risk of hearing loss than those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.
We believe the lack of socially subsidised hearing care for adults of working age results in poor detection and care for hearing loss among people from disadvantaged backgrounds. This in turn exacerbates social inequalities.
Population data shows hearing inequality
We analysed a large data set called the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey that collects information on various aspects of people’s lives, including health and hearing loss.
Using a HILDA sub-sample of 10,719 working-age Australians, we evaluated whether self-reported hearing loss was more common among people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than for those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds between 2008 and 2018.
Relying on self-reported hearing data instead of information from hearing tests is one limitation of our paper. However, self-reported hearing tends to underestimate actual rates of hearing impairment, so the hearing loss rates we reported are likely an underestimate.
We also wanted to find out whether people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were more likely to develop hearing loss in the long run.
Hearing care is publicly subsidised for children.
mady70/ShutterstockWe found people in the lowest income groups were more than twice as likely to have hearing loss than those in the highest income groups. Further, hearing loss was 1.5 times as common among people living in the most deprived neighbourhoods than in the most affluent areas.
For people reporting no hearing loss at the beginning of the study, after 11 years of follow up, those from a more deprived socioeconomic background were much more likely to develop hearing loss. For example, a lack of post secondary education was associated with a more than 1.5 times increased risk of developing hearing loss compared to those who achieved a bachelor’s degree or above.
Overall, men were more likely to have hearing loss than women. As seen in the figure below, this gap is largest for people of low socioeconomic status.
Why are disadvantaged groups more likely to experience hearing loss?
There are several possible reasons hearing loss is more common among people from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Noise exposure is one of the biggest risks for hearing loss and people from low socioeconomic backgrounds may be more likely to be exposed to damaging levels of noise in jobs in mining, construction, manufacturing, and agriculture.
Lifestyle factors which may be more prevalent in lower socioeconomic communities such as smoking, unhealthy diet, and a lack of regular exercise are also related to the risk of hearing loss.
Finally, people with lower incomes may face challenges in accessing timely hearing care, alongside competing health needs, which could lead to missed identification of treatable ear disease.
Why does this disparity in hearing loss matter?
We like to think of Australia as an egalitarian society – the land of the fair go. But nearly half of people in Australia with hearing loss are of working age and mostly ineligible for publicly funded hearing services.
Hearing aids with a private hearing care provider cost from around A$1,000 up to more than $4,000 for higher-end devices. Most people need two hearing aids.
Hearing loss might be more common in low income groups because they’re exposed to more noise at work.
Dmitry Kalinovsky/ShutterstockLack of access to affordable hearing care for working-age adults on low incomes comes with an economic as well as a social cost.
Previous economic analysis estimated hearing loss was responsible for financial costs of around $20 billion in 2019–20 in Australia. The largest component of these costs was productivity losses (unemployment, under-employment and Jobseeker social security payment costs) among working-age adults.
Providing affordable hearing care for all Australians
Lack of affordable hearing care for working-age adults from lower socioeconomic backgrounds may significantly exacerbate the impact of hearing loss among deprived communities and worsen social inequalities.
Recently, the federal government has been considering extending publicly subsidised hearing services to lower income working age Australians. We believe reforming the current government Hearing Services Program and expanding eligibility to this group could not only promote a more inclusive, fairer and healthier society but may also yield overall cost savings by reducing lost productivity.
All Australians should have access to affordable hearing care to have sufficient functional hearing to achieve their potential in life. That’s the land of the fair go.
Mohammad Nure Alam, PhD Candidate in Economics, Macquarie University; Kompal Sinha, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Macquarie University, and Piers Dawes, Professor, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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