Elderly loss of energy
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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
❝Please please give some information on elderly loss of energy and how it can be corrected. Please!❞
A lot of that is the metabolic slump described above! While we certainly wouldn’t describe 60 as elderly, and the health impacts from those changes at 45–55 get a gentler curve from 60 onwards… that curve is only going in one direction if we don’t take exceptionally good care of ourselves.
And of course, there’s also a degree of genetic lottery, and external factors we can’t entirely control (e.g. injuries etc).
One factor that gets overlooked a lot, though, is really easy to fix: B-vitamins.
In particular, vitamins B1, B5, B6, and B12. Of those, especially vitamins B1 and B12.
(Vitamins B5 and B6 are critical to health too, but relatively few people are deficient in those, while many are deficient in B1 and/or B12, especially as we get older)
Without going so detailed as to make this a main feature: these vitamins are essential for energy conversion from food, and they will make a big big difference.
You might especially want to consider taking sulbutiamine, which is a synthetic version of thiamin (vitamin B1), and instead of being water-soluble, it’s fat-soluble, and it easily crosses the blood-brain barrier, which is a big deal.
As ever, always check with your doctor because your needs/risks may be different. Also, there can be a lot of reasons for fatigue and you wouldn’t want to overlook something important.
You might also want to check out yesterday’s sponsor, as they offer personalized at-home health testing to check exactly this sort of thing.
❝What are natural ways to lose weight after 60? Taking into account bad knees or ankles, walking may be out as an exercise, running certainly is.❞
Losing weight is generally something that comes more from the kitchen than the gym, as most forms of exercise (except HIIT; see below) cause the metabolism to slow afterwards to compensate.
However, exercise is still very important, and swimming is a fine option if that’s available to you.
A word to the wise: people will often say “gentle activities, like tai chi or yoga”, and… These things are not the same.
Tai chi and yoga both focus on stability and suppleness, which are great, but:
- Yoga is based around mostly static self-support, often on the floor
- Tai chi will have you very often putting most of your weight on one slowly-increasingly bent knee at a time, and if you have bad knees, we’ll bet you winced while reading that.
So, maybe skip tai chi, or at least keep it to standing meditations and the like, not dynamic routines. Qigong, the same breathing exercises used in tai chi, is also an excellent way to improve your metabolism, by the way.
Ok, back onto HIIT:
You might like our previous article: How To Do HIIT* (Without Wrecking Your Body)
*High-Intensity Interval Training (the article also explains what this is and why you want to do it)
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Spoon-Fed – by Dr. Tim Spector
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Dr. Spector looks at widespread beliefs about food, and where those often scientifically disproven beliefs come from. Hint, there’s usually some manner of “follow the money”.
From calorie-counting to cholesterol content, from fish to bottled water, to why of all the people who self-report having an allergy, only around half turn out to actually have one when tested, Dr. Spector sets the record straight.
The style is as very down-to-earth and not at all self-aggrandizing; the author acknowledges his own mistakes and limitations along the way. In terms of pushing any particular agenda, his only agenda is clear: inform the public about bad science, so that we demand better science going forwards. Along the way, he gives us lots of information that can inform our personal health choices based on better science than indiscriminate headlines wildly (and sometimes intentionally) misinterpreting results.
Read this book, and you may find yourself clicking through to read the studies for yourself, next time you see a bold headline.
Bottom line: this book looks at a lot of what’s wrong with what a lot of people believe about healthy eating. Regular 10almonds readers might not find a lot that’s new here, but it could be a great gift for a would-be health-conscious friend or relative
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7 Invisible Eating Disorders
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It’s easy to assume that anyone with an eating disorder can be easily recognized by the resultantly atypical body composition, but it’s often not so.
Beyond the obvious
We’ll not keep them a mystery; the 7 invisible eating disorders discussed by therapist Kati Morton in this video are:
- OSFED (Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder): a catch-all diagnosis for those who don’t meet the criteria for more specific eating disorders but still have significant eating disorder behaviors.
- Atypical Anorexia: characterized by all the symptoms of anorexia nervosa (especially: intense fear of gaining weight, and body image distortion) except that the individual’s weight remains in a normal range.
- Atypical Bulimia: similar to bulimia nervosa, but the frequency or duration of binge-purge behaviors does not meet the usual diagnostic criteria and thus can fly under the radar.
- Atypical Binge-Eating Disorder: has episodes of consuming large amounts of food without compensatory behaviors (e.g. purging), but the episodes are less frequent and/or intense than typical binge-eating disorder.
- Purging Disorder: purging behaviors such as self-induced vomiting or laxative abuse without having binge-eating episodes (thus, this not being binging, and nothing obvious is happening outside of the bathroom).
- Night Eating Syndrome: consuming excessive amounts of food during the night while being fully aware of the nature of the eating episodes, which disrupts sleep and leads to guilt.
- Rumination Disorder: repeatedly regurgitating food, which may be rechewed, reswallowed, or spat out, without nausea or involuntary retching, often as a self-soothing mechanism.
For more on each of these, along with a case study-style example of each, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Eating Disorders: More Varied (And Prevalent) Than People Think
Take care!
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Kiwi Fruit vs Pineapple – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing kiwi fruit to pineapple, we picked the kiwi.
Why?
In terms of macros, they’re mostly quite comparable, being fruits made of mostly water, and a similar carb count (slightly different proportions of sugar types, but nothing that throws out the end result, and the GI is low for both). Technically kiwi has twice the protein, but they are fruits and “twice the protein” means “0.5g difference per 100g”. Aside from that, and more meaningfully, kiwi also has twice the fiber.
When it comes to vitamins, kiwi has more of vitamins A, B9, C, E, K, and choline, while pineapple has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, and B6. This would be a marginal (6:5) win for kiwi, but kiwi’s margins of difference are greater per vitamin, including 72x more vitamin E (with a cupful giving 29% of the RDA, vs a cupful of pineapple giving 0.4% of the RDA) and 57x more vitamin K (with a cupful giving a day’s RDA, vs a cupful of pineapple giving a little under 2% of the RDA). So, this is a fair win for kiwi.
In the category of minerals, things are clear: kiwi has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while pineapple has more manganese. An overwhelming win for kiwi.
Looking at their respective anti-inflammatory powers, pineapple has its special bromelain enzymes, which is a point in its favour, but when it comes to actual polyphenols, the two fruits are quite balanced, with kiwi’s flavonoids vs pineapple’s lignans.
Adding up the sections, it’s a clear win for kiwi—but pineapple is a very respectable fruit too (especially because of its bromelain content), so do enjoy both!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Bromelain vs Inflammation & Much More
Take care!
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Do Essential Oils Really Have Medicinal Properties?
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.
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 😎
❝Do essential oils really have scientific merit?❞
Great question! Assuming you mean “…for medicinal purposes” then it really depends on the oil in question.
For example, one can probably buy a big book of essential oils from a New Age store, and a lot of claims for different oils will not have any scientific backing whatsoever.
However! Some definitely do. For example, we wrote a little while back about ginger:
Ginger Does A Lot More Than You Think
Now, the active compound that gives ginger those properties and more is gingerol. Which is usually found as pure ginger oil, in other words, ginger essential oil.
Another essential oil that definitely does have benefits is that of Boswellia serrata, commonly known as frankincense. It can be used in various forms, and the essential oil is one of them; see:
- Five Supplements That Actually Work Vs Arthritis
- When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might: Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief
Meanwhile, menthol, the essential oil of peppermint, has its pros and cons:
Peppermint For Digestion & Against Nausea: How Useful Is Peppermint, Really?
And lavender essential oil does really have a sedative effect:
Herbs for Evidence-Based Health & Healing
If you have a different, particular essential oil in mind, let us know, and we can do a deep-dive on it for one of our “Research Review” editions!
A note on safety
Essential oils are pure and undiluted extracts of what’s usually a particularly potent chemical from a plant. Two things to bear in mind about this:
- Just because a chemical is potent, does not mean it will necessarily help you in a specific way, or indeed at all. On the contrary, many potent chemicals are simply harmful. So, be careful.
- Essential oils being so strong means that usually only a drop or two is required for effects; consult available literature (or ask us to do that for you!), and employ good safety practices such as:
- Do not use undiluted essential oils on your skin or internally
- If you are going to use it internally (diluted, following instructions from a reputable source, and with your doctor’s blessing, please) then test it on your skin first at the same dilution, in case of any adverse reaction.
- However you are using it, if you have any kind of adverse reaction, stop, and seek medical attention if it’s severe and/or it persists.
Take care!
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An Underrated Tool Against Alzheimer’s
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Dementia in general, and Alzheimer’s in particular, affects a lot of people, and probably even more than the stats show, because some (estimated to be: about half) will go undiagnosed and thus unreported:
Alzheimer’s: The Bad News And The Good
At 10almonds, we often talk about brain health, whether from a nutrition standpoint or other lifestyle factors. For nutrition, by the way, check out:
Today we’ll be looking at some new science for an underrated tool:
Bilingualism as protective factor
It’s well-known that bilingualism offers brain benefits, but most people would be hard-pressed to name what, specifically, those brain benefits are.
As doctors Kristina Coulter and Natalie Phillips found in a recent study, one of the measurable benefits may be a defense against generalized (i.e. not necessarily language-related) memory loss Alzheimer’s disease.
Specifically,
❝We used surface-based morphometry methods to measure cortical thickness and volume of language-related and AD-related brain regions. We did not observe evidence of brain reserve in language-related regions.
However, reduced hippocampal volume was observed for monolingual, but not bilingual, older adults with AD. Thus, bilingualism is hypothesized to contribute to reserve in the form of brain maintenance in the context of AD.❞
Read in full: Bilinguals show evidence of brain maintenance in Alzheimer’s disease
This is important, because while language is processed in various parts of the brain beyond the scope of this article, the hippocampi* are where memory is stored.
*usually mentioned in the singular as “hippocampus”, but you have one on each side, unless some terrible accident or incident befell you.
What this means in practical terms: these results suggest that being bilingual means we will retain more of our capacity for memory, even if we get Alzheimer’s disease, than people who are monolingual.
Furthermore, while we’re talking practicality:
❝…our subsample may be characterized as mostly late bilinguals (i.e., learning an L2 after age 5), having moderate self-reported L2 ability, and relatively few participants reporting daily L2 use (33 out of 119)❞
(L2 = second language)
This is important, because it means you don’t have to have grown up speaking multiple languages, you don’t even have to speak it well, and you don’t have to be using your second language(s) on a daily basis, to enjoy benefits. Merely having them in your head appears to be sufficient to trigger the brain to go “oh, we need to boost and maintain the hippocampal volume”.
We would hypothesize that using second language(s) regularly and/or speaking second language(s) well offers additional protection, and the data would support this if it weren’t for the fact that the sample sizes for daily and high-level speakers are a bit small to draw conclusions.
But the important part is: simply knowing another language, including if you literally just learned it later in life, is already protective of hippocampal volume in the context of Alzheimer’s disease.
Here’s a pop-science article about the study, that goes into it in more detail than we have room to here:
Bilingualism linked to greater brain resilience in older adults
Want to learn a new language?
Here are some options where you can get going right away:
If you are thinking “sounds good, but learning a language is too much work”, then that is why we included that third option there. It’s specifically for one language, and that language is Esperanto, arguably the world’s easiest language and specifically designed to be super quick and easy to get good at. Also, it’s free!
Do, kial ne lerni novan lingvon rapide kaj facile? 😉
Want to know more?
For ways to reduce your overall Alzheimer’s risk according to science, check out:
Take care!
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The Wim Hof Method – by Wim Hof
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In Wednesday’s main feature, we wrote about the Wim Hof Method, and/but only scratched the surface. Such is the downside of being a super-condensed newsletter! However, it does give us the opportunity to feature the book:
The Wim Hof Method is definitely loudly trumpeted as “up there” with Atomic Habits or How Not To Die in the category of “life-changing” books. Why?
Firstly, it’s a very motivational book. Hof is a big proponent of the notion “if you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right” idea, practises what he preaches, and makes clear he’s not special.
Secondly, it’s backed up with science. While it’s not a science-heavy book and that’s not the main focus, there are references to studies. Where physiological explanations are given for how certain things work, those explanations are sound. There’s no pseudoscience here, which is especially important for a book of this genre!
What does the book have that our article didn’t? A good few things:
- More about Hof’s own background and where it’s taken him. This is generally not a reason people buy books (unless they are biographies), but it’s interesting nonetheless.
- A lot more advice, data, and information about Cold Therapy and how it can (and, he argues convincingly, should) be built into your life.
- A lot about breathing exercises that we just didn’t cover at all in our article, but is actually an important part of the Wim Hof Method.
- More about stepping through the psychological barriers that can hold us back.
Bottom line: this book offers benefits that stretch into many areas of life, from some simple habits that can be built.
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