Eat Better, Feel Better – by Giada de Laurentis

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In yesterday’s edition of 10almonds, we reviewed Dr. Aujla’s “The Doctor’s Kitchen“; today we’re reviewing a different book about healing through food—in this case, with a special focus on maintaining energy and good health as we get older.

De Laurentis may not be a medical doctor, but she is a TV chef, and not only holds a lot of influence, but also has access to a lot of celebrity doctors and such; that’s reflected a lot in her style and approach here.

The recipes are clear and easy to follow; well-illustrated and nicely laid-out.

This cookbook’s style is less “enjoy this hearty dish of rice and beans with these herbs and spices” and more “you can serve your steak salad with white beans and sweet shallot dressing on a bed of organic quinoa if you haven’t already had your day’s serving of grains, of course”.

It’s a little fancier, in short, and more focused on what to cut out, than what to include. On account of that, this could make it a good contrast to yesterday’s book, which had the opposite focus.

She also recommends assorted adjuvant practices; some that are evidence-based, like intermittent fasting and meditation, and some that are not, like extreme detox-dieting, and acupuncture (which has no bearing on gut health).

Bottom line: if you like the idea of eating for good health, and prefer a touch of celebrity lifestyle to your meals, this one’s a good book for you.

Click here to check out “Eat Better, Feel Better”, and enjoy her unique blend of quality and minimalism!

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Recommended

  • The Menopause Brain – by Dr. Lisa Mosconi
  • Is it OK to lie to someone with dementia?
    Debate heats up over ethical care in dementia as “fake-away” burgers serve both nourishment and comfort, while critics cry foul on deceit.

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  • Foam Rolling – by Karina Inkster

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    If you’ve ever bought a foam roller only to place it under your lower back once and then put it somewhere for safekeeping and never use it again, this book will help fix that.

    Karina Inkster (what a cool name) is a personal trainer, and the book also features tips and advice from physiotherapists and sports medicine specialist doctors too, so all bases are well and truly covered.

    This is not, in case you’re wondering, a book that could have been a pamphlet, with photos of the exercises and one-liner explanation and that’s it. Rather, Inkster takes us through the anatomy and physiology of what’s going on, so that we can actually use this thing correctly and get actual noticeable improvements to our health from it—as promised in the subtitle’s mention of “for massage, injury prevention, and core strength”. To be clear, a lot of it is also about soft tissue mobilization, and keeping our fascia healthy (an oft-underestimated aspect of general mobility).

    We would mention that since the photos are pleasantly colorful (like those on the cover) and this adds to the clarity, we’d recommend springing for the (quite inexpensive) physical copy, rather than a Kindle edition (if your e-reader is a monochrome e-ink device like this reviewer’s, anyway).

    Bottom line: this book will enable your foam roller to make a difference to your life.

    Click here to check out Foam Rolling, and get rolling (correctly)!

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  • The Oh She Glows Cookbook – by Angela Liddon

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    Let’s get the criticism out of the way first: notwithstanding the subtitle promising over 100 recipes, there are about 80-odd here, if we discount recipes that are no-brainer things like smoothies, sides such as for example “roasted garlic”, or meta-ingredients such as oat flour (instructions: blend the oats and you get oat flour).

    The other criticism is more subjective: if you are like this reviewer, you will want to add more seasonings than recommended to most of the recipes. But that’s easy enough to do.

    As for the rest: this is a very healthy cookbook, and quite wide-ranging and versatile, with recipes that are homely, with a lot of emphasis on comfort foods (but still, healthy), though certainly some are perfectly worthy of entertaining too.

    A nice bonus of this book is that it offers a lot of available substitutions (much like we do at 10almonds), and also ways of turning the recipe into something else entirely with just a small change. This trait more than makes up for the slight swindle in terms of number of recipes, since some of the recipes have bonus recipes snuck in.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to broaden your plant-based cooking range, this book is a fine option for expanding your repertoire.

    Click here to check out The Oh She Glows Cookbook, and indeed glow!

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  • Lemon vs Lime – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing lemons to limes, we picked the lemons.

    Why?

    This one’s simple today. They’re both comparable fruits in most ways, and their macro profiles are almost identical. When it comes to vitamins, however, they stand apart a little.

    Both are most well-known for their vitamin C content, but lemons contain about 2x the vitamin C of limes.

    In other vitamins, they’re not too far apart. Technically limes have 2x the vitamin A, but this doesn’t count for much because it’s a case of “two times almost nothing is still almost nothing”.

    In the category of minerals, neither fruit is a very good source of most minerals, and the minerals they do have, are mostly more or less the same.

    Both are acidic, and this can have blood sugar benefits in both cases (and, if not careful, damage tooth enamel in both cases). Nothing to set either apart from the other here.

    So, it comes down to the vitamin C! In which category, lemons take the prize with their higher content.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars ← where it talks about the use of vinegar here, it’s about the acidity, so lemon juice or lime juice is an option too!

    Take care!

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Related Posts

  • The Menopause Brain – by Dr. Lisa Mosconi
  • Mediterranean Diet… In A Pill?

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    Does It Come In A Pill?

    For any as yet unfamiliar with the Mediterranean diet, you may be wondering what it involves, beyond a general expectation that it’s a diet popularly enjoyed in the Mediterranean. What image comes to mind?

    We’re willing to bet that tomatoes feature (great source of lycopene, by the way, and if you’re not getting lycopene, you’re missing out), but what else?

    • Salads, perhaps? Vegetables, olives? Olive oil, yea or nay?
    • Bread? Pasta? Prosciutto, salami? Cheese?
    • Pizza but only if it’s Romana style, not Chicago?
    • Pan-seared liver, with some fava beans and a nice Chianti?

    In fact, the Mediterranean diet is quite clear on all these questions, so to read about these and more (including a “this yes, that no” list), see:

    What Is The Mediterranean Diet, And What Is It Good For?

    So, how do we get that in a pill?

    A plucky band of researchers, Dr. Chiara de Lucia et al. (quite a lot of “et al.”; nine listed authors on the study), wondered to what extent the benefits of the Mediterranean diet come from the fact that the Mediterranean diet is very rich in polyphenols, and set about testing that, by putting the same polyphenols in capsule form, and running a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover clinical intervention trial.

    Now, polyphenols are not the only reason the Mediterranean diet is great; there are also other considerations, such as:

    • a great macronutrient balance with lots of fiber, healthy fats, moderate carbs, and protein from select sources
    • the absence or at least very low presence of a lot of harmful substances such as refined seed oils, added sugars, refined carbohydrates, and the like (“but pasta” yes pasta; in moderation and wholegrain and served with extra sources of fiber and healthy fats, all of which slow down the absorption of the carbs)

    …but polyphenols are admittedly very important too; we wrote about some common aspects of them here:

    Tasty Polyphenols: Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain

    As for what Dr. de Lucia et al. put into the capsule, behold…

    The ingredients:

    1. Apple Extract 10.0%
    2. Pomegranate Extract 10.0%
    3. Tomato Powder 2.5%
    4. Beet, Spray Dried 2.5%
    5. Olive Extract 7.5%
    6. Rosemary Extract 7.5%
    7. Green Coffee Bean Extract (CA) 7.5%
    8. Kale, Freeze Dried 2.5%
    9. Onion Extract 10.0%
    10. Ginger Extract 10.0%
    11. Grapefruit Extract 2.5%
    12. Carrot, Air Dried 2.5%
    13. Grape Skin Extract 17.5%
    14. Blueberry Extract 2.5%
    15. Currant, Freeze Dried 2.5%
    16. Elderberry, Freeze Dried 2.5%

    And the relevant phytochemicals they contain:

    • Quercetin
    • Luteolin
    • Catechins
    • Punicalagins
    • Phloretin
    • Ellagic Acid
    • Naringin
    • Apigenin
    • Isorhamnetin
    • Chlorogenic Acids
    • Rosmarinic Acid
    • Anthocyanins
    • Kaempferol
    • Proanthocyanidins
    • Myricetin
    • Betanin

    And what, you may wonder, did they find? Well, first let’s briefly summarise the setup of the study:

    They took volunteers (n=30), average age 67, BMI >25, without serious health complaints, not taking other supplements, not vegetarian or vegan, not consuming >5 cups of coffee per day, and various other stipulations like that, to create a fairly homogenous study group who were expected to respond well to the intervention. In contrast, someone who takes antioxidant supplements, already eats many different color plants per day, and drinks 10 cups of coffee, probably already has a lot of antioxidant activity going on, and someone with a lower BMI will generally have lower resting levels of inflammatory markers, so it’s harder to see a change, proportionally.

    About those inflammatory markers: that’s what they were testing, to see whether the intervention “worked”; essentially, did the levels of inflammatory markers go up or down (up is bad; down is good).

    For more on inflammation, by the way, see:

    How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation

    …which also explains what it actually is, and some important nuances about it.

    Back to the study…

    They gave half the participants the supplement for a week and the other half placebo; had a week’s gap as a “washout”, then repeated it, switching the groups, taking blood samples before and after each stage.

    What they found:

    The group taking the supplement had lower inflammatory markers after a week of taking it, while the group taking the placebo had relatively higher inflammatory markers after a week of taking it; this trend was preserved across both groups (i.e., when they switched roles for the second half).

    The results were very significant (p=0.01 or thereabouts), and yet at the same time, quite modest (i.e. the supplement made a very reliable, very small difference), probably because of the small dose (150mg) and small intervention period (1 week).

    What the researchers concluded from this

    The researchers concluded that this was a success; the study had been primarily to provide proof of principle, not to rock the world. Now they want the experiment to be repeated with larger sample sizes, greater heterogeneity, larger doses, and longer intervention periods.

    This is all very reasonable and good science.

    Read in full: A Randomised, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Cross-Over Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Biological Effects and Safety of a Polyphenol Supplement on Healthy Ageing

    What we conclude from this

    That ingredients list makes for a good shopping list!

    Well, not the extracts they listed, necessarily, but rather those actual fruits, vegetables, etc.

    If nine top scientists (anti-aging specialists, neurobiologists, pharmacologists, and at least one professor of applied statistics) came to the conclusion that to get the absolute most bang-for-buck possible, those are the plants to get the phytochemicals from, then we’re not going to ignore that.

    So, take another list above and ask yourself: how many of those 16 foods do you eat regularly, and could you work the others in?

    Want to make your Mediterranean diet even better?

    While the Mediterranean diet is a top-tier catch-all, it can be tweaked for specific areas of health, for example giving it an extra focus on heart health, or brain health, or being anti-inflammatory, or being especially gut healthy:

    Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean

    Enjoy!

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  • How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk

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    Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk

    Alzheimer’s is just one cause of dementia, but it’s a very notable one, not least of all because it’s

    • a) the most common cause of dementia, and
    • b) a measurably terminal disease.

    For that reason we’re focusing on Alzheimer’s today, although most of the advice will go for avoiding dementia in general.

    First, some things not everyone knows about Alzheimer’s:

    • Alzheimer’s is a terminal disease.
    • People who get a diagnosis at age 60 are typically given 4–8 years to live.
      • Some soldier on for as many as 20, but those are rare outliers.
    • Alzheimer’s begins 20 years or more before other symptoms start to develop.
      • This makes this information very relevant for younger people approaching 40, for example.
    • Alzheimer’s accounts for 60–80% of dementia, and affects around 6% of people over 60.
      • By the age of 65, that figure is 10%. By the age of 70, however, the percentage is still about the same—this is because of the mortality rate preventing the accumulation of Alzheimer’s patients over time.

    Want to know more? Read: 2023 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts And Figures Special Report ← this is a very comprehensive downloadablereference, by the way, including a lot of information about diagnosis, treatmentpathways, and earlyinterventions.

    Speaking of diagnosis…

    Know what the symptoms are… and aren’t!

    Forgetting your car keys can be frustrating. Forgetting them frequently can be worrying.

    But: there’s a difference between forgetting your car keys, and forgetting what car keys are used for. The latter is the kind of memory loss that’s more of a red flag for Alzheimer’s.

    Similarly: forgetting someone’s name can be embarrassing. Forgetting someone’s name, asking them, forgetting asking them, asking them again, forgetting again (lather rinse repeat) is more of a red flag for Alzheimer’s.

    There are other symptoms too, some of them less commonly known:

    ❝Difficulty remembering recent conversations, names or events; apathy; and depression are often early symptoms. Communication problems, confusion, poor judgment and behavioral changes may occur next. Difficulty walking, speaking, and swallowing are common in the late stages of the disease❞

    ~ Alzheimer’s Association

    If you or a loved one are experiencing worrying symptoms: when it comes to diagnosis and intervention, sooner is a lot better than later, so do talk to your doctor.

    As for reducing your risk? First, the obvious stuff:

    The usual 5 things that go for almost everything:

    How much do lifestyle changes alone make a difference?

    They make a big difference. This 2022 population-based cohort study (so: huge sample size) looked at people who had 4–5 of the healthy lifestyle factors being studied, vs people who had 0–1 of them. They found:

    ❝A healthy lifestyle was associated with a longer life expectancy among men and women, and they lived a larger proportion of their remaining years without Alzheimer’s dementia.❞

    The numbers of years involved by the way ranged between 3 and 20 years, in terms of life expectancy and years without or with Alzheimer’s, with the average increase of healthy life years being approximately the same as the average increase in years. This is important, because:

    A lot of people think “well if I’m going to go senile, I might as well [unhealthy choice that shortens lifespan]”, but they misunderstand a critical factor:

    The unhealthy choices will reduce their healthy life years, and simply bring the unhealthy ones (and subsequent death) sooner. If you’re going to spend your last few years in ill-health, it’s better to do so at 90 than 50.

    The other thing you may already know… And a thing about it that not everyone considers:

    Keeping cognitively active is important. This much is broadly known by the general public, and to clinicians, this was the fourth “healthy factor” in the list of five (instead of the sleep that we put there, because we were listing the 5 things that go for most preventable health issues).

    Everyone leaps to mention sudoku at this point, so if that’s your thing, great, enjoy it! (This writer personally enjoys chess, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; if it yours though, you can come join her on Chess.com and we’ll keep sharp together)

    But the more parts of your mental faculties you keep active, the better. Remember, brainpower (as with many things in health and life) is a matter of “use it or lose it” and this is on a “per skill” basis!

    What this means: doing sudoku (a number-based puzzle game) or chess (great as it may be) won’t help as much for keeping your language skills intact, for example. Given that language skills are one of the most impactful and key faculties to get lost to Alzheimer’s disease, neglecting such would be quite an oversight!

    Some good ways to keep your language skills tip-top:

    • Read—but read something challenging, if possible. It doesn’t have to be Thomas Scanlon’s What We Owe To Each Other, but it should be more challenging than a tabloid, for example. In fact, on the topic of examples:
      • This newsletter is written to be easy to read, while not shying away from complex ideas or hard science. Our mission is literally to “make [well-sourced, science-based] health and productivity crazy simple”.
      • But the academic papers that we link? Those aren’t written to be easy to read. Go read them, or at least the abstracts (in academia, an abstract is essentially an up-front summary, and is usually the first thing you’ll see when you click a link to a study or such). Challenge yourself!
    • Write—compared to reading/listening, producing language is a (related, but) somewhat separate skill. Just ask any foreign language learner which is more challenging: reading or writing!
      • Journaling is great, but writing for others is better (as then you’ll be forced to think more about it)
    • Learn a foreign language—in this case, what matters it that you’re practicing and learning, so in the scale of easy to hard, or doesn’t matter if it’s Esperanto or Arabic. Duolingo is a great free resource that we recommend for this, and they have a wide range of extensive courses these days.

    Now for the least obvious things…

    Social contact is important.

    Especially in older age, it’s easy to find oneself with fewer remaining friends and family, and getting out and about can be harder for everyone. Whatever our personal inclinations (some people being more introverted or less social than others), we are fundamentally a social species, and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have built us around the idea that we will live our lives alongside others of our kind. And when we don’t, we don’t do as well.

    See for example: Associations of Social Isolation and Loneliness With Later Dementia

    If you can’t get out and about easily:

    • Online socialising is still socializing.
    • Online community is still community.
    • Online conversations between friends are still conversations between friends.

    If you don’t have much (or anyone) in the category of friends and family, join Facebook groups related to your interests, for example.

    Berries are surprisingly good

    ^This may read like a headline from 200,000 BCE, but it’s relevant here!

    Particularly recommended are:

    • blueberries
    • blackberries
    • raspberries
    • strawberries
    • cranberries

    We know that many of these berries seem to have a shelf-life of something like 30 minutes from time of purchase, but… Frozen and dried are perfectly good nutritionally, and in many cases, even better nutritionally than fresh.

    Read: Effect of berry-based supplements and foods on cognitive function: a systematic review

    Turmeric’s health benefits appear to include protecting against Alzheimer’s

    Again, this is about risk reduction, and turmeric (also called curcumin, which is not the same as cumin) significantly reduces the build-up of amyloid plaques in the brain. Amyloid plaques are part of the progression of Alzheimer’s.

    See for yourself: Protective Effects of Indian Spice Curcumin Against Amyloid Beta in Alzheimer’s Disease

    If you don’t like it as a spice (and even if you do, you probably don’t want to put it in your food every day), you can easily get it as a supplement in capsule form.

    Lower your homocysteine levels

    Lower our what now? Homocysteine is an amino acid used for making certain proteins, and it’s a risk factor for Alzheimer’s.

    Foods high in folate (and possible other B-vitamins) seem to lower homocysteine levels. Top choices include:

    • Leafy greens
    • Cruciferous vegetables
    • Tomatoes

    Get plenty of lutein

    We did a main feature about specifically this a little while ago, so we’ll not repeat our work here, but lutein is found in, well, the same things we just listed above, and lower levels of lutein are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not a proven causative factor—we don’t know entirely what causes Alzheimer’s, just a lot of factors that have a high enough correlation that it’d be remiss to ignore them.

    Catch up on our previous article: Brain Food? The Eyes Have It

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  • Heal Your Stressed Brain

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    Rochelle Walsh, therapist, explains the problem and how to fix it:

    Not all brain damage is from the outside

    Long-term stress and burnout cause brain damage; it’s not just a mindset issue—it impacts the brain physiologically. To compound matters, it also increases the risk of neurodegenerative diseases. While the brain can indeed grow new neurons and regenerate itself, chronic stress damages specific regions, and inhibits that.

    There are some effects of chronic stress that can seem positive—the amygdalae and hypothalamus are seen to grow larger and stronger, for instance—but this is, unfortunately, “all the better to stress you with”. In compensation for this, chronic stress deprioritizes the pre-frontal cortex and hippocampi, so there goes your reasoning and memory.

    This often results in people not managing chronic stress well. Just like a weak heart and lungs might impede the exercise that could make them stronger, the stressed brain is not good at permitting you to do the things that would heal it—preferring to keep you on edge all day, worrying and twitchy, mind racing and body tense. It also tends to lead to autoimmune diseases, due to the increased inflammation (because the body’s threat-detection system as at “jumping at own shadow” levels so it’s deploying every defense it has, including completely inappropriate ones).

    Notwithstanding the “Heal Your Stressed Brain” thumbnail, she doesn’t actually go into this in detail and bids us sign up for her masterclass. We at 10almonds however like to deliver, so you can find useful advice and free resources in our links-drop at the bottom of this article.

    Meanwhile, if you’d like to hear more about the neurological woes described above, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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