Entertaining Harissa Traybake
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No, it’s not entertaining in the sense that it will tell you jokes or perhaps dance for you, but rather: it can be easily prepared in advance, kept in the fridge for up to 3 days, and reheated when needed as part of a spread when entertaining, leaving you more time to spend with your houseguests.
Aside from its convenience, it is of course nutritious and delicious:
You will need
- 14 oz cherry tomatoes
- 2 cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed (or 2 cups cooked chickpeas, drained and rinsed)
- 2 eggplants, cut into ¾” cubes
- 1 red onion, roughly chopped
- 1 bulb garlic
- 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 1 tbsp harissa paste
- 1 tbsp ras el-hanout
- 1 tsp MSG or 2 tsp low-sodium salt
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Preheat the oven to 400℉ / 200℃
2) Mix the onion, eggplant, and garlic (whole cloves; just peel them and put them in) with the olive oil in a mixing bowl, ensuring everything is coated evenly.
3) Add in 1 tbsp of the harissa paste, 1 tbsp of the ras-el hanout, and half of the MSG/salt, and again mix thoroughly to coat evenly.
4) Bake in the oven, in a walled tray, for about 30 minutes, giving things a stir/jiggle halfway through to ensure they cook evenly.
5) Add the cherry tomatoes to the tray, and return to the oven for another 10 minutes.
6) Mix the chickpeas with the other 1 tbsp of the harissa paste, the other 1 tbsp of the ras-el hanout, and the other half of the MSG/salt, and add to the tray, returning it to the oven for a final 10 minutes.
7) Serve hot, or set aside for later, refrigerating once cool enough to do so. When you do serve, we recommend serving with a yogurt, cucumber, and mint dip, and perhaps flatbreads (you can use our Healthy Homemade Flatbreads recipe):
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Eat More (Of This) For Lower Blood Pressure
- Lycopene’s Benefits For The Gut, Heart, Brain, & More
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
Take care!
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Shrimp vs Caviar – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing shrimp to caviar, we picked the caviar.
Why?
Both of these seafoods share a common history (also shared with lobster, by the way) of “nutrient-dense peasant-food that got gentrified and now it’s more expensive despite being easier to source”. But, cost and social quirks aside, what are their strengths and weaknesses?
In terms of macros, both are high in protein, but caviar is much higher in fat. You may be wondering: are the fats healthy? And the answer is that it’s a fairly even mix between monounsaturated (healthy), polyunsaturated (healthy), and saturated (unhealthy). The fact that caviar is generally enjoyed in very small portions is its saving grace here, but quantity for quantity, shrimp is the natural winner on macros.
…unless we take into account the omega-3 and omega-6 balance, in which case, it’s worthy of note that caviar has more omega-3 (which most people could do with consuming more of) while shrimp has more omega-6 (which most people could do with consuming less of).
When it comes to vitamins, caviar has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B5, B6, B9, B12, D, K, and choline; nor are the margins small in most cases, being multiples (or sometimes, tens of multiples) higher. Shrimp, meanwhile, boasts only more vitamin B3.
In the category of minerals, caviar leads with more calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and selenium, while shrimp has more copper and zinc.
All in all, while shrimp has its benefits for being lower in fat (and thus also, for those whom that may interest, lower in calories), caviar wins the day by virtue of its overwhelming nutritional density.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
What Omega-3 Fatty Acids Really Do For Us
Take care!
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You’re Not Forgetful: How To Remember Everything
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Elizabeth Filips, medical student busy learning a lot of information, explains how in today’s video:
Active processing
An important thing to keep in mind is that forgetting is an active process, not passive as once believed. It has its own neurotransmitters and pathways, and as such, to improve memory, it’s essential to understand and manage forgetting.
So, how does forgetting occur? Memories are stored with cues or tags, which help retrieve information. However, overloading cues with too much information can cause “transient forgetting”—that is to say, the information is still in there somewhere; you just don’t have the filing system required to retrieve the data. This is the kind of thing that you will try hard to remember at some point in the day when you need it, fail, and then wake up at 3am with an “Aha!” because your brain finally found what you were looking for. So, to avoid that, use unique and strong cues to help improve recall (mnemonics are good for this, as are conceptual anchors).
While memory does not appear to actually be finite, there is some practical truth in the “finite storage” model insofar as learning new information can overwrite previous knowledge, iff your brain mistakes it for an update rather than addition. So for that reason, it’s good to periodically go over old information—in psychology this is called rehearsal, which may conjure theatrical images, but it can be as simple as mentally repeating a phone number, a mnemonic, or visually remembering a route one used to take to go somewhere.
Self-perception affects memory performance. Negative beliefs about one’s memory can worsen performance (so don’t say “I have a bad memory”, even to yourself, and in contrast, find more positive affirmations to make about your memory), and mental health in general plays a significant role in memory. For example, if you have ever had an extended period of depression, then chances are good you have some huge gaps in your memory for that time in your life.
A lot of what we learned in school was wrong—especially what we learned about learning. Traditional (vertical) learning is harder to retain, whereas horizontal learning (connecting topics through shared characteristics) creates stronger, interconnected memories. In short, your memories should tell contextual stories, not be isolated points of data.
Embarking on a new course of study? Yes? (If not, then why not? Pick something!)
It may be difficult at first, but experts memorize things more quickly due to built-up intuition in their field. For example a chess master can glance at a chess board for about 5 seconds and memorize the position—but only if the position is one that could reasonably arise in a game; if the pieces are just placed at random, then their memorization ability plummets to that of the average person, because their expertise has been nullified.
What this means in practical terms: building a “skeleton” framework before learning can enhance memorization through logical connections. For this reason, if embarking on a serious course of study, getting a good initial overview when you start is critical, so that you have a context for the rest of what you learn to go into. For example, let’s say you want to learn a language; if you first quickly do a very basic bare-bones course, such as from Duolingo or similar, then even though you’ll have a very small vocabulary and a modest grasp of grammar and make many mistakes and have a lot of holes in your knowledge, you now have somewhere to “fit” every new word or idea you learn. Same goes for other fields of study; for example, a doctor can be told about a new drug and remember everything about it immediately, because they understand the systems it interacts with, understand how it does what it does, and can compare it mentally to similar drugs, and they thus have a “place” in that overall system for the drug information to reside. But for someone who knows nothing about medicine, it’s just a lot of big words with no meaning. So: framework first, details later.
For more on all this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
How To Boost Your Memory Immediately (Without Supplements)
Take care!
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Dopamine Nation – by Dr. Anna Lembke
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We live in an age of abundance, though it often doesn’t feel like it. Some of that is due to artificial scarcity, but a lot of it is due to effectively whiting out our dopamine circuitry through chronic overuse.
Psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke explores the neurophysiology of pleasure and pain, and how each can (and does) lead to the other. Is the answer to lead a life of extreme neutrality? Not quite.
Rather, simply by being more mindful of how we seek each (yes, both pleasure and pain), we can leverage our neurophysiology to live a better, healthier life—and break/avoid compulsive habits, while we’re at it.
That said, the book itself is quite compelling reading, but as Dr. Lembke shows us, that certainly doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
Bottom line: if you sometimes find yourself restlessly cycling through the same few apps (or TV channels) looking for dopamine that you’re not going to find there, this is the book for you.
Click here to check out Dopamine Nation, and get a handle on yours!
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Immunity – by Dr. William Paul
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 book gives a very person-centric (i.e., focuses on the contributions of named individuals) overview of advances in the field of immunology—up to its publication date in 2015. So, it’s not cutting edge, but it is very good at laying the groundwork for understanding more recent advances that occur as time goes by. After all, immunology is a field that never stands still.
We get a good grounding in how our immune system works (and how it doesn’t), the constant arms race between pathogens and immune responses, and the complexities of autoimmune disorders and—which is functionally in an overlapping category of disease—cancer. And, what advances we can expect soon to address those things.
Given the book was published 8 years ago, how did it measure up? Did we get those advances? Well, for the mostpart yes, we have! Some are still works in progress. But, we’ve also had obvious extra immunological threats in years since, which have also resulted in other advances along the way!
If the book has a downside, it’s that sometimes the author can be a little too person-centric. It’s engaging to focus on human characters, and helps us bring information to life; name-dropping to excess, along with awards won, can sometimes feel a little like the book was co-authored by Tahani Al-Jamil.
Nevertheless, it certainly does keep the book from getting too dry!
Bottom line: this book is a great overview of immunology and immunological research, for anyone who wants to understand these things better.
Click here to check out Immunity, and boost your knowledge of yours!
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Beetroot vs Red Cabbage – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing beetroot to red cabbage, we picked the red cabbage.
Why?
Both are great, and both have their strengths!
In terms of macros, beetroot has very slightly more protein, carbs, and fiber, but the margins of difference are very small in each case. However, in terms of glycemic index, red cabbage has the considerably lower glycemic index, of 32 (low) as opposed to beetroot’s GI of 64 (medium). On the strength of this GI difference, we call this category a win for red cabbage.
In the category of vitamins, beetroot has more of vitamin B9, while red cabbage has a lot more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, C, E, K, and choline. By strength of numbers and also by having very large margins of difference on most of those, red cabbage is the clear winner here.
When it comes to minerals, beetroot has more copper, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and potassium, while red cabbage has more calcium (and about ⅓ of the sodium). By the numbers, this is a win for beetroot, though it’s worth noting that the margins of difference were small, i.e. red cabbage was right behind beetroot on each of those.
Adding up the sections makes for an overall red cabbage win, but as we say, beetroot is great too, especially when it comes to minerals!
As ever, enjoy either or both; diversity is good.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
No, beetroot isn’t vegetable Viagra. But here’s what it can do!
Enjoy!
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Eat All You Want (But Wisely)
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Some Surprising Truths About Hunger And Satiety
This is Dr. Barbara Rolls. She’s Professor and Guthrie Chair in Nutritional Sciences, and Director of the Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestive Behavior at Pennsylvania State University, after graduating herself from Oxford and Cambridge (yes, both). Her “awards and honors” take up four A4 pages, so we won’t list them all here.
Most importantly, she’s an expert on hunger, satiety, and eating behavior in general.
What does she want us to know?
First and foremost: you cannot starve yourself thin, unless you literally starve yourself to death.
What this is about: any weight lost due to malnutrition (“not eating enough” is malnutrition) will always go back on once food becomes available. So unless you die first (not a great health plan), merely restricting good will always result in “yo-yo dieting”.
So, to avoid putting the weight back on and feeling miserable every day along the way… You need to eat as much as you feel you need.
But, there’s a trick here (it’s about making you genuinely feel you need less)!
Your body is an instrument—so play it
Your body is the tool you use to accomplish pretty much anything you do. It is, in large part, at your command. Then there are other parts you can’t control directly.
Dr. Rolls advises taking advantage of the fact that much of your body is a mindless machine that will simply follow instructions given.
That includes instructions like “feel hungry” or “feel full”. But how to choose those?
Volume matters
An important part of our satiety signalling is based on a physical sensation of fullness. This, by the way, is why bariatric surgery (making a stomach a small fraction of the size it was before) works. It’s not that people can’t eat more (the stomach is stretchy and can also be filled repeatedly), it’s that they don’t want to eat more because the pressure sensors around the stomach feel full, and signal the hormone leptin to tell the brain we’re full now.
Now consider:
- On the one hand, 20 grapes, fresh and bursting with flavor
- On the other hand, 20 raisins (so, dried grapes), containing the same calories
Which do you think will get the leptin flowing sooner? Of course, the fresh grapes, because of the volume.
So if you’ve ever seen those photos that show two foods side by side with the same number of calories but one is much larger (say, a small slice of pizza or a big salad), it’s not quite the cheap trick that it might have appeared.
Or rather… It is a cheap trick; it’s just a cheap trick that works because your stomach is quite a simple organ.
So, Dr. Rolls’ advice: generally speaking, go for voluminous food. Fruit is great from this, because there’s so much water. Air-popped popcorn also works great. Vegetables, too.
Water matters, but differently than you might think
A well-known trick is to drink water before and with a meal. That’s good, it’s good to be hydrated. However, it can be better. Dr. Rolls did an experiment:
The design:
❝Subjects received 1 of 3 isoenergetic (1128 kJ) preloads 17 min before lunch on 3 d and no preload on 1 d.
The preloads consisted of 1) chicken rice casserole, 2) chicken rice casserole served with a glass of water (356 g), and 3) chicken rice soup.
The soup contained the same ingredients (type and amount) as the casserole that was served with water.❞
The results:
❝Decreasing the energy density of and increasing the volume of the preload by adding water to it significantly increased fullness and reduced hunger and subsequent energy intake at lunch.
The equivalent amount of water served as a beverage with a food did not affect satiety.❞
The conclusion:
❝Consuming foods with a high water content more effectively reduced subsequent energy intake than did drinking water with food.❞
You can read the study in full (it’s a worthwhile read!) here:
Water incorporated into a food but not served with a food decreases energy intake in lean women
Protein matters
With all those fruits and vegetables and water, you may be wondering Dr. Rolls’ stance on proteins. It’s simple: protein is an appetite suppressant.
However, it takes about 20 minutes to signal the brain about that, so having some protein in a starter (if like this writer, you’re the cook of the household, a great option is to enjoy a small portion of nuts while cooking!) gets that clock ticking, to signal satiety sooner.
It may also help in other ways:
Clinical Evidence and Mechanisms of High-Protein Diet-Induced Weight Loss
As for other foods that can suppress appetite, by the way, you might like;
25 Foods That Act As Natural Appetite Suppressants
Variety matters, and in ways other than you might think
A wide variety of foods (especially: a wide variety of plants) in one’s diet is well recognized as a key to a good balanced diet.
However…
A wide variety of dishes at the table, meanwhile, promotes greater consumption of food.
Dr. Rolls did a study on this too, a while ago now (you’ll see how old it is) but the science seems robust:
Variety in a Meal Enhances Food Intake in Man
Notwithstanding the title, it wasnot about a man (that was just how scientists wrote in ye ancient times of 1981). The test subjects were, in order: rats, cats, a mixed group of men and women, the same group again, and then a different group of all women.
So, Dr. Rolls’ advice is: it’s better to have one 20-ingredient dish, than 10 dishes with 20 ingredients between them.
Sorry! We love tapas and buffets too, but that’s the science!
So, “one-pot” meals are king in this regard; even if you serve it with one side (reasonable), that’s still only two dishes, which is pretty good going.
Note that the most delicious many-ingredient stir-fries and similar dishes from around the world also fall into this category!
Want to know more?
If you have the time (it’s an hour), you can enjoy a class of hers for free:
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later
Enjoy!
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