Eat to Beat Your Diet – by Dr. William Li
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We previously reviewed Dr. Li’s excellent “Eat To Beat Disease”, so you may be wondering how much overlap there is. While he does still cover such topics as angiogenesis, organ regeneration, microbiome health, DNA protection, and immunological considerations, and much of the dietary advice is similar, most of the explanation is different.
Because, this time, rather than looking at beating disease in general, there’s a much stronger focus on metabolic disease in particular, and yes, for those who want to do so, losing fat.
The scientific explanations are in-depth, such that you come way with not merely “I should eat an avocado once in a while”, but a comprehensive understanding of the body’s metabolic processes, from the chemistry to the organs involved, from the cellular to the systemic.
The style is on the hard end of pop-science. It’s approachably readable, while having a lot of densely-packed information with minimal fluff. You will be more than getting your money’s worth out of its 496 pages.
Bottom line: if you’d like to perk up your metabolism with a dietary approach that’s enjoyable and very restrictive, then this book will arm you with the knowledge to do that.
Click here to check out Eat To Beat Your Diet, and eat to beat your diet!
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The Secret To Better Squats: Foot, Knee, & Ankle Mobility
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We’ve talked before about how Slav squats, Asian squats, deep squats, sitting squats, or various other things they might by called (these are all different names for the same thing), are one of the most anti-aging exercises, if not outright the most anti-aging exercise. Yet, how to get good at them?
“Just squat more” is fine advice and will get you there eventually, but there are ways to shorten the time it takes, by unlocking whatever part(s) might be holding you back:
Piece by piece
The key to improving the whole is to not neglect any of the parts—so here they are:
- Foot rolls: roll your foot onto its outer and inner edges to stretch; repeat for both legs.
- Toe lifts: lift your toes up and down while keeping your legs straight.
- Toe curls: curl your toes to engage foot muscles.
- Foot circles: rotate your feet in circles; repeat for both legs.
- Heel raises: stand tall, raise your heels off the ground, and engage your core.
- Tibialis anterior exercise: lean against a wall or similar, and lift your toes off ground to strengthen your tibialis anterior (important and oft-forgotten muscle, responsible for more than people think!)
- Heel drops: perform dynamic heel drops with your feet back, to stretch your ankles.
- Hamstring curls & leg extension: curl your leg back toward your glutes, and then extend it forwards; alternate legs.
- Dynamic calf stretch: bend and straighten your knees alternately in a forward lunge position.
- Squat to heel raise: perform squats with your heels lifting off the floor and your arms raised.
- Banded ankle dorsiflexion: use a yoga strap or towel to stretch your feet, calves, and hamstrings.
- Seated feet circles: extend your legs and rotate your feet in outward and inward circles.
- Dorsiflexion/plantar flexion: alternate one foot up and the other down dynamically.
- Seated knee flexion & extension: alternate lifting your knees and extending your legs, while seated.
Note: “seated” in all cases means on the floor, not a chair!
For more on all 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:
What Nobody Teaches You About Strengthening Your Knees ← about that tibialis anterior muscle and what it means for your knees
Take care!
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Can you drink your fruit and vegetables? How does juice compare to the whole food?
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.
Do you struggle to eat your fruits and vegetables? You are not alone. Less than 5% of Australians eat the recommended serves of fresh produce each day (with 44% eating enough fruit but only 6% eating the recommended vegetables).
Adults should aim to eat at least five serves of vegetables (or roughly 375 grams) and two serves of fruit (about 300 grams) each day. Fruits and vegetables help keep us healthy because they have lots of nutrients (vitamins, minerals and fibre) and health-promoting bioactive compounds (substances not technically essential but which have health benefits) without having many calories.
So, if you are having trouble eating the rainbow, you might be wondering – is it OK to drink your fruits and vegetables instead in a juice or smoothie? Like everything in nutrition, the answer is all about context.
Darina Belonogova/Pexels It might help overcome barriers
Common reasons for not eating enough fruits and vegetables are preferences, habits, perishability, cost, availability, time and poor cooking skills. Drinking your fruits and vegetables in juices or smoothies can help overcome some of these barriers.
Juicing or blending can help disguise tastes you don’t like, like bitterness in vegetables. And it can blitz imperfections such as bruises or soft spots. Preparation doesn’t take much skill or time, particularly if you just have to pour store-bought juice from the bottle. Treating for food safety and shipping time does change the make up of juices slightly, but unsweetened juices still remain significant sources of nutrients and beneficial bioactives.
Juicing can extend shelf life and reduce the cost of nutrients. In fact, when researchers looked at the density of nutrients relative to the costs of common foods, fruit juice was the top performer.
So, drinking my fruits and veggies counts as a serve, right?
How juice is positioned in healthy eating recommendations is a bit confusing. The Australian Dietary Guidelines include 100% fruit juice with fruit but vegetable juice isn’t mentioned. This is likely because vegetable juices weren’t as common in 2013 when the guidelines were last revised.
The guidelines also warn against having juice too often or in too high amounts. This appears to be based on the logic that juice is similar, but not quite as good as, whole fruit. Juice has lower levels of fibre compared to fruits, with fibre important for gut health, heart health and promoting feelings of fullness. Juice and smoothies also release the sugar from the fruit’s other structures, making them “free”. The World Health Organization recommends we limit free sugars for good health.
But fruit and vegetables are more than just the sum of their parts. When we take a “reductionist” approach to nutrition, foods and drinks are judged based on assumptions made about limited features such as sugar content or specific vitamins.
But these features might not have the impact we logically assume because of the complexity of foods and people. When humans eat varied and complex diets, we don’t necessarily need to be concerned that some foods are lower in fibre than others. Juice can retain the nutrients and bioactive compounds of fruit and vegetables and even add more because parts of the fruit we don’t normally eat, like the skin, can be included.
Juicing or blending might mean you eat different parts of the fruit or vegetable. flyingv3/Shutterstock So, it is healthy then?
A recent umbrella review of meta-analyses (a type of research that combines data from multiple studies of multiple outcomes into one paper looked at the relationship between 100% juice and a range of health outcomes.
Most of the evidence showed juice had a neutral impact on health (meaning no impact) or a positive one. Pure 100% juice was linked to improved heart health and inflammatory markers and wasn’t clearly linked to weight gain, multiple cancer types or metabolic markers (such as blood sugar levels).
Some health risks linked to drinking juice were reported: death from heart disease, prostate cancer and diabetes risk. But the risks were all reported in observational studies, where researchers look at data from groups of people collected over time. These are not controlled and do not record consumption in the moment. So other drinks people think of as 100% fruit juice (such as sugar-sweetened juices or cordials) might accidentally be counted as 100% fruit juice. These types of studies are not good at showing the direct causes of illness or death.
What about my teeth?
The common belief juice damages teeth might not stack up. Studies that show juice damages teeth often lump 100% juice in with sweetened drinks. Or they use model systems like fake mouths that don’t match how people drinks juice in real life. Some use extreme scenarios like sipping on large volumes of drink frequently over long periods of time.
Juice is acidic and does contain sugars, but it is possible proper oral hygiene, including rinsing, cleaning and using straws can mitigate these risks.
Again, reducing juice to its acid level misses the rest of the story, including the nutrients and bioactives contained in juice that are beneficial to oral health.
Juice might be more convenient and could replace less healthy drinks. PintoArt/Shutterstock So, what should I do?
Comparing whole fruit (a food) to juice (a drink) can be problematic. They serve different culinary purposes, so aren’t really interchangeable.
The Australian Guide to Healthy Eating recommends water as the preferred beverage but this assumes you are getting all your essential nutrients from eating.
Where juice fits in your diet depends on what you are eating and what other drinks it is replacing. Juice might replace water in the context of a “perfect” diet. Or juice might replace alcohol or sugary soft drinks and make the relative benefits look very different.
On balance
Whether you want to eat your fruits and vegetables or drink them comes down to what works for you, how it fits into the context of your diet and your life.
Smoothies and juices aren’t a silver bullet, and there is no evidence they work as a “cleanse” or detox. But, with society’s low levels of fruit and vegetable eating, having the option to access nutrients and bioactives in a cheap, easy and tasty way shouldn’t be discouraged either.
Emma Beckett, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Nutrition, Dietetics & Food Innovation – School of Health Sciences, UNSW Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Apples vs Dates – 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 apples to dates, we picked the dates.
Why?
Both have their strengths, but ultimatley, it wasn’t close:
In terms of macros, dates have more fiber and carbs, for an approximately equal glycemic index. Thus, we say dates win this category as the more nutritionally dense option.
In the category of vitamins, apples have more of vitamins A, C, and E, while dates have more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, and K. A clear win for dates here!
When it comes to minerals, it’s even more one-sided: apples are not richer in any minerals, while dates have a lot more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. An overwhelming third win in a row for dates.
Adding up the sections makes for a resoundingly clear overall win for dates, but as ever, do by all means enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose Cs: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Enjoy!
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The Diet Myth – by Dr. Tim Spector
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Why are we supposed to go low-carb, but get plenty of whole grains? Avoid saturated fat, but olive oil is one of the healthiest fats around? Will cheese kill us or save us? Even amongst the well-informed, there’s a lot of confusion. This book addresses these and many such topics.
A main theme of the book is howa lot of it relates to the state of our gut microbiome, and what is good or bad for that. He also discusses, for example, how microbes predict obesity better than genes, and the good news is: we can change our microbes a lot more easily than we can change our genes!
In the category of criticism, he repeats some decades-old bad science in some areas outside of his field (i.e. unrelated to nutrition), so that’s unfortunate, and/but doesn’t detract from the value of the book if we keep to the main topic.
Bottom line: if you’d like to understand better the physiology and microbiology behind why dieting does work for most people (and how to do it better), then this is a great book for that.
Click here to check out The Diet Myth, and learn the science behind the confusion!
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AuDHD means being autistic and having ADHD – and it can look very different to a single diagnosis
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When you finally receive a neurodevelopmental diagnosis that reflects your strengths and the challenges you face, it can be life-changing.
But for people with both autism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) – known colloquially as AuDHD – getting the right diagnosis can be difficult.
People with AuDHD (pronounced awe-D-H-D) often find their traits and experiences don’t always neatly fit into either category. Sometimes the two conditions contradict each other and appear to act in opposite ways. Other times they exacerbate or increase a trait or difficulty.
This can delay diagnosis and support.
Halfpoint Images/Getty Images What are these conditions and how common are they?
Autism is a condition that affects social communication. Autistic people often have significant sensory sensitivities and need certainty and repetition. Around 1-2% of children and adults are autistic.
ADHD impacts either the ability to flexibly focus and sustain attention, or results in hyperactivity and impulsivity – or both. Around 5–8% of children and 3% of adults have ADHD.
Around 30% to 50% of autistic people also have ADHD. But despite them commonly occurring together, autism and ADHD have only been able to be diagnosed together since 2013, when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders received its fifth update in the the DSM-5.
What’s usually diagnosed first?
Autism is usually diagnosed at an earlier age than AuDHD and ADHD in childhood.
This may related to autistic traits – social difficulties – often being apparent in preschool, whereas ADHD traits may not become apparent or problematic until school age, when concentration abilities are needed to learn.
But some people can mask their autistic differences through strategies, such as learning explicitly how to socialise, following scripts, copying and mirroring others and hiding autistic traits.
Sometimes, accessing ADHD medication treatment can reveal autistic traits that may not have been obvious and were overshadowed by ADHD. After taking ADHD medications, some people can achieve their preference for being highly structured and organised, when ADHD traits of disorganisation and inconsistency in attention are reduced.
For others, ADHD medication will treat impulsivity that manifests as talkativeness or extroversion, to reveal a deeper introversion and preference for solitary activities.
In recent years, some people who have one existing diagnosis have learned about the other condition on social media and realised they might have AuDHD.
Some difficulties are exacerbated
Maintaining friendships and socialising
For autistic people, maintaining friendships is a core difficulty and can make social interaction draining and overwhelming. Autism makes it difficult to pick up social cues, know what to do or say in social situations, and identify non-verbal signals from others.
ADHD can make it hard to organise social events, stay in touch with friends and respond to texts and calls. When socialising, attention difficulties can make it harder to focus on conversations and remember what was said. Hyperactivity and impulsivity can mean interrupting and talking over others or being overly talkative.
Together, AuDHD can mean a person experiences all these differences in social interactions, resulting in more unintended “social mistakes”.
Stims
Repetitive behaviours in autism (stims) are often ways to regulate or express emotions through repeated movements or vocalisations. They could be repetitive noises such as squeaks or humming, or movements such as rocking back and forth or finger flicking.
ADHD hyperactivity often involves fidgeting and not being able to be still or relax.
Together, movement from stims and fidgets can be more obvious and frequent.
Other traits pull people in different directions
Organisation
Autistic traits include the need for order, systems, categorisation and organisation around the house, at work and with hobbies.
ADHD traits of inattention include significant difficulties with organisation.
The result for people with AuDHD is often internal frustration and discomfort: wanting to be organised but not being able to maintain it.
Special interests
Autistic special interests are usually long-standing (over years) and limited to a few subjects.
ADHD involves seeking novelty and quickly becoming bored and moving on to the next interest once something is no longer stimulating. This might mean buying new things for a hobby but never actually using them.
AuDHD tends to follow the pattern of ADHD. So someone may have intense interests but be exhausted by them sooner than they would with autism alone.
Routine
Autism wants certainty, plans and routine. ADHD wants spontaneity and novelty. Together, autism often seems to win.
People with AuDHD may follow routines due to the anxiety uncertainty causes them, but they may feel bored or dissatisfied as their ADHD needs aren’t met.
Unique strengths
Many late-diagnosed people with AuDHD are highly intelligent and have developed elaborate compensation strategies for their difficulties. Many have found ways to leverage and maximise their strengths.
Strengths in AuDHD can be related to either condition. This can include common autistic strengths such as being highly focused, having meticulous attention to detail and subject matter expertise.
ADHD strengths can include creativity and the ability to develop novel solutions, strategise, quickly research to a deep level, have a high level of focus, and take quick action in highly stressful situations.
Knowing you have AuDHD can result in self-acceptance and understanding, and replace a lifetime of self-criticism. This can lead to developing a life that is right for each individual person with AuDHD rather than trying to fit in with what might be socially and culturally expected.
It also means you can access treatments and supports to support both autism and ADHD needs. This might include ADHD medication, neuro-affirming education and therapy adjusted for autism and ADHD, occupational therapy, ADHD coaching, as well as workplace and academic accommodations.
Tamara May, Psychologist and Research Associate in the Department of Paediatrics, Monash University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Asparagus vs Zucchini – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing asparagus to zucchini, we picked the asparagus.
Why?
It wasn’t close:
In terms of macros, asparagus has more fiber, carbs, and protein, making it the more nutritionally-dense option in this category.
In the category of vitamins, asparagus has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B7, B9, E, K, and choline, while zucchini has more of vitamins B6 and C. An easy win for asparagus.
When it comes to minerals, asparagus has more calcium, copper, iron, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc, while zucchini has more magnesium and potassium. Another clear win for asparagus.
Looking at polyphenols, asparagus has 23.2mg/100g quercetin, while zucchini has 1.32mg/100g quercetin—one more easy win for asparagus.
Adding up the sections makes for an overwhelming win for asparagus, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Fight Inflammation & Protect Your Brain, With Quercetin
Enjoy!
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