Exercises for Aging-Ankles

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Can Ankles Deterioration be Stopped?

As we all know (or have experienced!), Ankle mobility deteriorates with age.

We’re here to argue that it’s not all doom and gloom!

(In fact, we’ve written about keeping our feet, and associated body parts, healthy here).

This video by “Livinleggings” (below) provides a great argument that yes, ankle deterioration can be stopped, or even reversed. It’s a must-watch for anyone from yoga enthusiasts to gym warriors who might be unknowingly crippling their ankle-health.

How We Can Prioritise Our Ankles

Poor ankle flexibility isn’t just an inconvenience – it’s a direct route to knee issues, hip hiccups, and back pain. More importantly, ankle strength is a core component of building overall mobility.

With 12 muscles in the ankle, it can be overwhelming to work out which to strengthen – and how. But fear not, we can prioritise three of the twelve: the calf duo (gastrocnemius and soleus) and the shin’s main muscle, the tibialis anterior.

The first step is to test yourself! A simple wall test reveals any hidden truths about your ankle flexibility. Go to the 1:55 point in the video to see how it’s done.

If you can’t do it, you’ve got work to be done.

If you read the book we recommended on great functional exercises for seniors, then you may already be familiar with some super ankle exercises.

Otherwise, these four ankle exercises are a great starting point:

How did you find that video? If you’ve discovered any great videos yourself that you’d like to share with fellow 10almonds readers, then please do email them to us!

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  • Long-Covid Patients Are Frustrated That Federal Research Hasn’t Found New Treatments

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    Erica Hayes, 40, has not felt healthy since November 2020 when she first fell ill with covid.

    Hayes is too sick to work, so she has spent much of the last four years sitting on her beige couch, often curled up under an electric blanket.

    “My blood flow now sucks, so my hands and my feet are freezing. Even if I’m sweating, my toes are cold,” said Hayes, who lives in Western Pennsylvania. She misses feeling well enough to play with her 9-year-old son or attend her 17-year-old son’s baseball games.

    Along with claiming the lives of 1.2 million Americans, the covid-19 pandemic has been described as a mass disabling event. Hayes is one of millions of Americans who suffer from long covid. Depending on the patient, the condition can rob someone of energy, scramble the autonomic nervous system, or fog their memory, among many other http://symptoms.in/ addition to the brain fog and chronic fatigue, Hayes’ constellation of symptoms includes frequent hives and migraines. Also, her tongue is constantly swollen and dry.

    “I’ve had multiple doctors look at it and tell me they don’t know what’s going on,” Hayes said about her tongue. 

    Estimates of prevalence range considerably, depending on how researchers define long covid in a given study, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts it at 17 million adults.

    Despite long covid’s vast reach, the federal government’s investment in researching the disease — to the tune of $1.15 billion as of December — has so far failed to bring any new treatments to market. 

    This disappoints and angers the patient community, who say the National Institutes of Health should focus on ways to stop their suffering instead of simply trying to understand why they’re suffering.

    “It’s unconscionable that more than four years since this began, we still don’t have one FDA-approved drug,” said Meighan Stone, executive director of the Long COVID Campaign, a patient-led advocacy organization. Stone was among several people with long covid who spoke at a workshop hosted by the NIH in September where patients, clinicians, and researchers discussed their priorities and frustrations around the agency’s approach to long-covid research.

    Some doctors and researchers are also critical of the agency’s research initiative, called RECOVER, or Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery. Without clinical trials, physicians specializing in treating long covid must rely on hunches to guide their clinical decisions, said Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development with the VA St Louis Healthcare System.

    “What [RECOVER] lacks, really, is clarity of vision and clarity of purpose,” said Al-Aly, saying he agrees that the NIH has had enough time and money to produce more meaningful progress.

    Now the NIH is starting to determine how to allocate an additional $662 million of funding for long-covid research, $300 million of which is earmarked for clinical trials. These funds will be allocated over the next four http://years.at/ the end of October, RECOVER issued a request for clinical trial ideas that look at potential therapies, including medications, saying its goal is “to work rapidly, collaboratively, and transparently to advance treatments for Long COVID.”

    This turn suggests the NIH has begun to respond to patients. This has stirred cautious optimism among those who say that the agency’s approach to long covid has lacked urgency in the search for effective treatments.Stone calls this $300 million a down payment. She warns it’s going to take a lot more money to help people like Hayes regain some degree of health.“There really is a burden to make up this lost time now,” Stone said.

    The NIH told KFF Health News and NPR via email that it recognizes the urgency in finding treatments. But to do that, there needs to be an understanding of the biological mechanisms that are making people sick, which is difficult to do with post-infectious conditions.

    That’s why it has funded research into how long covid affects lung function, or trying to understand why only some people are afflicted with the condition.

    Good Science Takes Time

    In December 2020, Congress appropriated $1.15 billion for the NIH to launch RECOVER, raising hopes in the long-covid patient community.

    Then-NIH Director Francis Collins explained that RECOVER’s goal was to better understand long covid as a disease and that clinical trials of potential treatments would come later.

    According to RECOVER’s website, it has funded eight clinical trials to test the safety and effectiveness of an experimental treatment or intervention. Just one of those trials has published results.

    On the other hand, RECOVER has supported more than 200 observational studies, such as research on how long covid affects pulmonary function and on which symptoms are most common. And the initiative has funded more than 40 pathobiology studies, which focus on the basic cellular and molecular mechanisms of long covid.

    RECOVER’s website says this research has led to crucial insights on the risk factors for developing long covid and on understanding how the disease interacts with preexisting conditions.

    It notes that observational studies are important in helping scientists to design and launch evidence-based clinical trials.

    Good science takes time, said Leora Horwitz, the co-principal investigator for the RECOVER-Adult Observational Cohort at New York University. And long covid is an “exceedingly complicated” illness that appears to affect nearly every organ system, she said. 

    This makes it more difficult to study than many other diseases. Because long covid harms the body in so many ways, with widely variable symptoms, it’s harder to identify precise targets for treatment.

    “I also will remind you that we’re only three, four years into this pandemic for most people,” Horwitz said. “We’ve been spending much more money than this, yearly, for 30, 40 years on other conditions.”

    NYU received nearly $470 million of RECOVER funds in 2021, which the institution is using to spearhead the collection of data and biospecimens from up to 40,000 patients. Horwitz said nearly 30,000 are enrolled so far.

    This vast repository, Horwitz said, supports ongoing observational research, allowing scientists to understand what is happening biologically to people who don’t recover after an initial infection — and that will help determine which clinical trials for treatments are worth undertaking.

    “Simply trying treatments because they are available without any evidence about whether or why they may be effective reduces the likelihood of successful trials and may put patients at risk of harm,” she said.

    Delayed Hopes or Incremental Progress?

    The NIH told KFF Health News and NPR that patients and caregivers have been central to RECOVER from the beginning, “playing critical roles in designing studies and clinical trials, responding to surveys, serving on governance and publication groups, and guiding the initiative.”But the consensus from patient advocacy groups is that RECOVER should have done more to prioritize clinical trials from the outset. Patients also say RECOVER leadership ignored their priorities and experiences when determining which studies to fund.

    RECOVER has scored some gains, said JD Davids, co-director of Long COVID Justice. This includes findings on differences in long covid between adults and kids.But Davids said the NIH shouldn’t have named the initiative “RECOVER,” since it wasn’t designed as a streamlined effort to develop treatments.

    “The name’s a little cruel and misleading,” he said.

    RECOVER’s initial allocation of $1.15 billion probably wasn’t enough to develop a new medication to treat long covid, said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Healthcare Transformation Institute.

    But, he said,  the results of preliminary clinical trials could have spurred pharmaceutical companies to fund more studies on drug development and test how existing drugs influence a patient’s immune response.

    Emanuel is one of the authors of a March 2022 covid roadmap report. He notes that RECOVER’s lack of focus on new treatments was a problem. “Only 15% of the budget is for clinical studies. That is a failure in itself — a failure of having the right priorities,” he told KFF Health News and NPR via email.

    And though the NYU biobank has been impactful, Emanuel said there needs to be more focus on how existing drugs influence immune response.

    He said some clinical trials that RECOVER has funded are “ridiculous,” because they’ve focused on symptom amelioration, for example to study the benefits of over-the-counter medication to improve sleep. Other studies looked at non-pharmacological interventions, such as exercise and “brain training” to help with cognitive fog.

    People with long covid say this type of clinical research contributes to what many describe as the “gaslighting” they experience from doctors, who sometimes blame a patient’s symptoms on anxiety or depression, rather than acknowledging long covid as a real illness with a physiological basis.

    “I’m just disgusted,” said long-covid patient Hayes. “You wouldn’t tell somebody with diabetes to breathe through it.”

    Chimére L. Sweeney, director and founder of the Black Long Covid Experience, said she’s even taken breaks from seeking treatment after getting fed up with being told that her symptoms were due to her diet or mental health.

    “You’re at the whim of somebody who may not even understand the spectrum of long covid,” Sweeney said.

    Insurance Battles Over Experimental Treatments

    Since there are still no long-covid treatments approved by the Food and Drug Administration, anything a physician prescribes is classified as either experimental — for unproven treatments — or an off-label use of a drug approved for other conditions. This means patients can struggle to get insurance to cover prescriptions.

    Michael Brode, medical director for UT Health Austin’s Post-COVID-19 Program — said he writes many appeal letters. And some people pay for their own treatment.

    For example, intravenous immunoglobulin therapy, low-dose naltrexone, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy are all promising treatments, he said.

    For hyperbaric oxygen, two small, randomized controlled studies show improvements for the chronic fatigue and brain fog that often plague long-covid patients. The theory is that higher oxygen concentration and increased air pressure can help heal tissues that were damaged during a covid infection.

    However, the out-of-pocket cost for a series of sessions in a hyperbaric chamber can run as much as $8,000, Brode said.

    “Am I going to look a patient in the eye and say, ‘You need to spend that money for an unproven treatment’?” he said. “I don’t want to hype up a treatment that is still experimental. But I also don’t want to hide it.”

    There’s a host of pharmaceuticals that have promising off-label uses for long covid, said microbiologist Amy Proal, president and chief scientific officer at the Massachusetts-based PolyBio Research Foundation. For instance, she’s collaborating on a clinical study that repurposes two HIV drugs to treat long covid.

    Proal said research on treatments can move forward based on what’s already understood about the disease. For instance, she said that scientists have evidence — partly due to RECOVER research — that some patients continue to harbor small amounts of viral material after a covid infection. She has not received RECOVER funds but is researching antivirals.

    But to vet a range of possible treatments for the millions suffering now — and to develop new drugs specifically targeting long covid — clinical trials are needed. And that requires money.

    Hayes said she would definitely volunteer for an experimental drug trial. For now, though, “in order to not be absolutely miserable,” she said she focuses on what she can do, like having dinner with her http://family.at/ the same time, Hayes doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life on a beige couch. 

    RECOVER’s deadline to submit research proposals for potential long-covid treatments is Feb. 1.

    This article is from a partnership that includes NPR and KFF Health News.

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

    This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • Even small diet tweaks can lead to sustainable weight loss

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    It’s a well-known fact that to lose weight, you either need to eat less or move more. But how many calories do you really need to cut out of your diet each day to lose weight? It may be less than you think.

    To determine how much energy (calories) your body requires, you need to calculate your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE). This is comprised of your basal metabolic rate (BMR) – the energy needed to sustain your body’s metabolic processes at rest – and your physical activity level. Many online calculators can help determine your daily calorie needs.

    If you reduce your energy intake (or increase the amount you burn through exercise) by 500-1,000 calories per day, you’ll see a weekly weight loss of around one pound (0.45kg).

    But studies show that even small calorie deficits (of 100-200 calories daily) can lead to long-term, sustainable weight-loss success. And although you might not lose as much weight in the short-term by only decreasing calories slightly each day, these gradual reductions are more effective than drastic cuts as they tend to be easier to stick with.

    Small diet changes can still lead to weight loss in the long run. Monkey Business Images/ Shutterstock

    Hormonal changes

    When you decrease your calorie intake, the body’s BMR often decreases. This phenomenon is known as adaptive thermogenesis. This adaptation slows down weight loss so the body can conserve energy in response to what it perceives as starvation. This can lead to a weight-loss plateau – even when calorie intake remains reduced.

    Caloric restriction can also lead to hormonal changes that influence metabolism and appetite. For instance, thyroid hormones, which regulate metabolism, can decrease – leading to a slower metabolic rate. Additionally, leptin levels drop, reducing satiety, increasing hunger and decreasing metabolic rate.

    Ghrelin, known as the “hunger hormone”, also increases when caloric intake is reduced, signalling the brain to stimulate appetite and increase food intake. Higher ghrelin levels make it challenging to maintain a reduced calorie diet, as the body constantly feels hungrier.

    Insulin, which helps regulate blood sugar levels and fat storage, can improve in sensitivity when we reduce calorie intake. But sometimes, insulin levels decrease instead, affecting metabolism and leading to a reduction in daily energy expenditure. Cortisol, the stress hormone, can also spike – especially when we’re in a significant caloric deficit. This may break down muscles and lead to fat retention, particularly in the stomach.

    Lastly, hormones such as peptide YY and cholecystokinin, which make us feel full when we’ve eaten, can decrease when we lower calorie intake. This may make us feel hungrier.

    Fortunately, there are many things we can do to address these metabolic adaptations so we can continue losing weight.

    Weight loss strategies

    Maintaining muscle mass (either through resistance training or eating plenty of protein) is essential to counteract the physiological adaptations that slow weight loss down. This is because muscle burns more calories at rest compared to fat tissue – which may help mitigate decreased metabolic rate.

    Plastic containers filled with pre-portioned meals.
    Portion control is one way of decreasing your daily calorie intake. Fevziie/ Shutterstock

    Gradual caloric restriction (reducing daily calories by only around 200-300 a day), focusing on nutrient-dense foods (particularly those high in protein and fibre), and eating regular meals can all also help to mitigate these hormonal challenges.

    But if you aren’t someone who wants to track calories each day, here are some easy strategies that can help you decrease daily calorie intake without thinking too much about it:

    1. Portion control: reducing portion sizes is a straightforward way of reducing calorie intake. Use smaller plates or measure serving sizes to help reduce daily calorie intake.

    2. Healthy swaps: substituting high-calorie foods with lower-calorie alternatives can help reduce overall caloric intake without feeling deprived. For example, replacing sugary snacks with fruits or swapping soda with water can make a substantial difference to your calorie intake. Fibre-rich foods can also reduce the calorie density of your meal.

    3. Mindful eating: practising mindful eating involves paying attention to hunger and fullness cues, eating slowly, and avoiding distractions during meals. This approach helps prevent overeating and promotes better control over food intake.

    4. Have some water: having a drink with your meal can increase satiety and reduce total food intake at a given meal. In addition, replacing sugary beverages with water has been shown to reduce calorie intake from sugars.

    4. Intermittent fasting: restricting eating to specific windows can reduce your caloric intake and have positive effects on your metabolism. There are different types of intermittent fasting you can do, but one of the easiest types is restricting your mealtimes to a specific window of time (such as only eating between 12 noon and 8pm). This reduces night-time snacking, so is particularly helpful if you tend to get the snacks out late in the evening.

    Long-term behavioural changes are crucial for maintaining weight loss. Successful strategies include regular physical activity, continued mindful eating, and periodically being diligent about your weight and food intake. Having a support system to help you stay on track can also play a big role in helping you maintain weight loss.

    Modest weight loss of 5-10% body weight in people who are overweight or obese offers significant health benefits, including improved metabolic health and reduced risk of chronic diseases. But it can be hard to lose weight – especially given all the adaptations our body has to prevent it from happening.

    Thankfully, small, sustainable changes that lead to gradual weight loss appear to be more effective in the long run, compared with more drastic lifestyle changes.

    Alexandra Cremona, Lecturer, Human Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Limerick

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Twenty-One, No Wait, Twenty Tweaks For Better Health

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    Dr. Greger’s 21 Tweaks… We say 20, though!

    We’ve talked before about Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen (12 things he advises that we make sure to eat each day, to enjoy healthy longevity), but much less-talked-about are his “21 Tweaks”…

    They are, in short, a collection of little adjustments one can make for better health. Some of them are also nutritional, but many are more like lifestyle tweaks. Let’s do a rundown:

    At each meal:

    • Preload with water
    • Preload with “negative calorie” foods (especially: greens)
    • Incorporate vinegar (1-2 tbsp in a glass of water will slow your blood sugar increase)
    • Enjoy undistracted meals
    • Follow the 20-minute rule (enjoy your meal over the course of at least 20 minutes)

    Get your daily doses:

    • Black cumin ¼ tsp
    • Garlic powder ¼ tsp
    • Ground ginger (1 tsp) or cayenne pepper (½ tsp)
    • Nutritional yeast (2 tsp)
    • Cumin (½ tsp)
    • Green tea (3 cups)

    Every day:

    • Stay hydrated
    • Deflour your diet
    • Front-load your calories (this means implementing the “king, prince, pauper” rule—try to make your breakfast the largest meal of your day, followed my a medium lunch, and a small evening meal)
    • Time-restrict your eating (eat your meals within, for example, an 8-hour window, and fast the rest of the time)
    • Optimize exercise timing (before breakfast is best for most people, unless you are diabetic)
    • Weigh yourself twice a day (doing this when you get up and when you go to bed results in much better long-term weight management than weighing only once per day)
    • Complete your implementation intentions (this sounds a little wishy-washy, but it’s about building a set of “if this, then that” principles, and then living by them. An example could be directly physical health-related such as “if there is a choice of stairs or elevator, I will take the stairs”, or could be more about holistic good-living, such as “if someone asks me for help, I will try to oblige them so far as I reasonably can”)

    Every night:

    • Fast after 7pm
    • Get sufficient sleep (7–9 hours is best. As we get older, we tend more towards the lower end of that, but try get at least those 7 hours!)
    • Experiment with Mild Trendelenburg (better yet, skip this one)*

    *This involves a 6º elevation of the bed, at the foot end. Dr. Greger advises that this should only be undertaken after consulting your doctor, though, as a lot of health conditions can contraindicate it. We at 10almonds couldn’t find any evidence to support this practice, and numerous warnings against it, so we’re going to go ahead and say we think this one’s skippable.

    Again, we do try to bring you the best evidence-based stuff here at 10almonds, and we’re not going to recommend something just because of who suggested it

    As for the rest, you don’t have to do them all! And you may have noticed there was a little overlap in some of them. But, we consider them a fine menu of healthy life hacks from which to pick and choose!

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Related Posts

  • Understanding Cellulitis: Skin And Soft Tissue Infections
  • Feeding your baby butter won’t help them sleep through the night, whatever TikTok says

    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.

    Sleep is the holy grail for new parents. So no wonder many tired parents are looking for something to help their babies sleep.

    A TikTok trend claims giving your baby a tablespoon or two of butter in the evening will help them sleep more at night.

    As we’ll see, butter is just the latest food that promises to help babies sleep at night. But no single food can do this.

    So if you’re a new parent and desperate for a good night’s sleep, here’s what to try instead.

    BaLL LunLa/Shutterstock

    Is my baby’s sleep normal?

    Babies need help to fall asleep, through feeding, movement (like rocking) or touch (like a cuddle or massage).

    Newborn babies also do not know night from day. Melatonin in breastmilk helps babies sleep more at night until they start to make this sleep-inducing hormone themselves. Bottlefed newborn babies do not have access to this melatonin. Regardless of how you feed your baby, it can take several months for them to develop a sleep pattern with longer stretches at night.

    Babies also sleep lighter than older children and adults. Light sleep helps ensure they continue breathing, protecting them from SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). It also means they wake easily and often.

    The idea that babies should sleep deeply, alone and for long stretches, goes against their physiology. So “sleeping like a baby” usually means waking quite a lot at night.

    Yet, many parents have been asked whether their baby is sleeping through the night and is a “good baby”. The perception is that if a baby doesn’t sleep for long stretches at night, it must be “bad”.

    This may lead parents to say their babies sleep longer than they really do, setting unrealistic expectations for other new parents.

    Could feeding butter do any harm?

    The social pressure around baby sleep can add stress and anxiety for new parents. So the Tiktok trend about feeding babies butter may seem tempting.

    But giving babies any solid food before they are around six months old is not recommended. Babies’ digestive systems are not ready for solid food until they are around six months and feeding them before this can cause constipation or make them more likely to catch an illness. For this reason alone, you should not give your young baby butter.

    From about six months old, babies should be offered nutritious, iron-rich solid foods. Butter doesn’t fit this bill because it is almost all saturated fat. If butter replaces more nutritious foods, babies may not get the vitamins and minerals they need.

    Cubes of butter against blue background
    Butter is just the latest food claimed to help babies sleep better at night. Pixel-Shot/Shutterstock

    Butter is the latest in a long line of beliefs about certain foods making babies sleep longer at night. It was once thought that adding cereal or crushed arrowroot biscuits in bottle of milk before bedtime would make them sleep longer. Research found this did not increase sleep at all.

    Similarly, there is no evidence that giving babies butter before bed makes them sleep longer.

    In fact, research shows the foods babies eat make no difference to night waking.

    What else can I try?

    Waking overnight doesn’t necessarily mean a baby is hungry. And stopping breastfeeds or bottle feeds overnight doesn’t necessarily reduce night waking.

    Your baby could be too hot or cold, or need a nappy change. But some babies continue to wake at night even without an obvious problem.

    The good news is, sleeping is a skill babies develop naturally as they grow.

    Behavioural sleep interventions, known as “sleep training”, are not very effective in increasing overnight sleep. In one study, sleep training did not reduce the number of night wakes and only increased the length of the longest sleep by about 16 minutes. Sleep training is especially not recommended for babies under six months.

    Mother caring for baby at night, baby asleep on changing mat
    The good news is that babies do eventually get the hang of sleeping at night. Miljan Zivkovic/Shutterstock

    Look after yourself

    If you’re missing out on sleep at night, try to have small naps during the day while your baby sleeps. Ask friends and family to do some chores to allow you to nap.

    If your baby is crying and you find yourself getting overwhelmed it is OK to put your baby down somewhere safe (like a cot or baby mat) and take some time to settle yourself.

    If your baby’s sleep pattern changes significantly or they haven’t slept at all for more than a day, or if your baby seems to have pain or a fever see your doctor, or family and child health nurse, as soon as possible.

    Some helpful resources

    If you think your baby is not sleeping well because of a breastfeeding problem, the Australian Breastfeeding Association has a national helpline. The association can also advise on co-sleeping.

    The charity Little Sparklers provides peer support for parents, including someone to chat to, about baby sleep. It also has helpful resources.

    UNICEF has resources about caring for your baby at night. And the UK-based Baby Sleep Info Source (Basis) provides evidence-based information about babies and sleep.

    Karleen Gribble, Adjunct Professor, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Western Sydney University; Naomi Hull, PhD candidate, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney, and Nina Jane Chad, Research Fellow, University of Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Is alcohol good or bad for you? Yes.

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    This article originally appeared in Harvard Public Health magazine.

    It’s hard to escape the message these days that every sip of wine, every swig of beer is bad for your health. The truth, however, is far more nuanced.

    We have been researching the health effects of alcohol for a combined 60 years. Our work, and that of others, has shown that even modest alcohol consumption likely raises the risk for certain diseases, such as breast and esophageal cancer. And heavy drinking is unequivocally harmful to health. But after countless studies, the data do not justify sweeping statements about the effects of moderate alcohol consumption on human health.

    Yet we continue to see reductive narratives, in the media and even in science journals, that alcohol in any amount is dangerous. Earlier this month, for instance, the media reported on a new study that found even small amounts of alcohol might be harmful. But the stories failed to give enough context or probe deeply enough to understand the study’s limitations—including that it cherry-picked subgroups of a larger study previously used by researchers, including one of us, who concluded that limited drinking in a recommended pattern correlated with lower mortality risk.

    “We need more high-quality evidence to assess the health impacts of moderate alcohol consumption. And we need the media to treat the subject with the nuance it requires. Newer studies are not necessarily better than older research.”

    Those who try to correct this simplistic view are disparaged as pawns of the industry, even when no financial conflicts of interest exist. Meanwhile, some authors of studies suggesting alcohol is unhealthy have received money from anti-alcohol organizations.

    We believe it’s worth trying, again, to set the record straight. We need more high-quality evidence to assess the health impacts of moderate alcohol consumption. And we need the media to treat the subject with the nuance it requires. Newer studies are not necessarily better than older research.

    It’s important to keep in mind that alcohol affects many body systems—not just the liver and the brain, as many people imagine. That means how alcohol affects health is not a single question but the sum of many individual questions: How does it affect the heart? The immune system? The gut? The bones?

    As an example, a highly cited study of one million women in the United Kingdom found that moderate alcohol consumption—calculated as no more than one drink a day for a woman—increased overall cancer rates. That was an important finding. But the increase was driven nearly entirely by breast cancer. The same study showed that greater alcohol consumption was associated with lower rates of thyroid cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and renal cell carcinoma. That doesn’t mean drinking a lot of alcohol is good for you—but it does suggest that the science around alcohol and health is complex.

    One major challenge in this field is the lack of large, long-term, high-quality studies. Moderate alcohol consumption has been studied in dozens of randomized controlled trials, but those trials have never tracked more than about 200 people for more than two years. Longer and larger experimental trials have been used to test full diets, like the Mediterranean diet, and are routinely conducted to test new pharmaceuticals (or new uses for existing medications), but they’ve never been done to analyze alcohol consumption. 

    Instead, much alcohol research is observational, meaning it follows large groups of drinkers and abstainers over time. But observational studies cannot prove cause-and-effect because moderate drinkers differ in many ways from non-drinkers and heavy drinkers—in diet, exercise, and smoking habits, for instance. Observational studies can still yield useful information, but they also require researchers to gather data about when and how the alcohol is consumed, since alcohol’s effect on health depends heavily on drinking patterns.  

    For example, in an analysis of over 300,000 drinkers in the U.K., one of us found that the same total amount of alcohol appeared to increase the chances of dying prematurely if consumed on fewer occasions during the week and outside of meals, but to decrease mortality if spaced out across the week and consumed with meals. Such nuance is rarely captured in broader conversations about alcohol research—or even in observational studies, as researchers don’t always ask about drinking patterns, focusing instead on total consumption. To get a clearer picture of the health effects of alcohol, researchers and journalists must be far more attuned to the nuances of this highly complex issue. 

    One way to improve our collective understanding of the issue is to look at both observational and experimental data together whenever possible. When the data from both types of studies point in the same direction, we can have more confidence in the conclusion. For example, randomized controlled trials show that alcohol consumption raises levels of sex steroid hormones in the blood. Observational trials suggest that alcohol consumption also raises the risk of specific subtypes of breast cancer that respond to these hormones. Together, that evidence is highly persuasive that alcohol increases the chances of breast cancer.    

    Similarly, in randomized trials, alcohol consumption lowers average blood sugar levels. In observational trials, it also appears to lower the risk of diabetes. Again, that evidence is persuasive in combination. 

    As these examples illustrate, drinking alcohol may raise the risk of some conditions but not others. What does that mean for individuals? Patients should work with their clinicians to understand their personal risks and make informed decisions about drinking. 

    Medicine and public health would benefit greatly if better data were available to offer more conclusive guidance about alcohol. But that would require a major investment. Large, long-term, gold-standard studies are expensive. To date, federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health have shown no interest in exclusively funding these studies on alcohol.

    Alcohol manufacturers have previously expressed some willingness to finance the studies—similar to the way pharmaceutical companies finance most drug testing—but that has often led to criticism. This happened to us, even though external experts found our proposal scientifically sound. In 2018, the National Institutes of Health ended our trial to study the health effects of alcohol. The NIH found that officials at one of its institutes had solicited funding from alcohol manufacturers, violating federal policy.

    It’s tempting to assume that because heavy alcohol consumption is very bad, lesser amounts must be at least a little bad. But the science isn’t there, in part because critics of the alcohol industry have deliberately engineered a state of ignorance. They have preemptively discredited any research, even indirectly, by the alcohol industry—even though medicine relies on industry financing to support the large, gold-standard studies that provide conclusive data about drugs and devices that hundreds of millions of Americans take or use daily.

    Scientific evidence about drinking alcohol goes back nearly 100 years—and includes plenty of variability in alcohol’s health effects. In the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, alcohol in moderation, and especially red wine, was touted as healthful. Now the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that contemporary narratives suggest every ounce of alcohol is dangerous. Until gold-standard experiments are performed, we won’t truly know. In the meantime, we must acknowledge the complexity of existing evidence—and take care not to reduce it to a single, misleading conclusion.

    This article first appeared on The Journalist’s Resource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • Pomegranate vs Apricot – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing pomegranate to apricot, we picked the pomegranate.

    Why?

    Both are great! Top tier fruits. But ultimately, pomegranate does have more to offer:

    In terms of macros, pomegranate has more protein, carbs, and fiber (and even a little healthy fat—it’s the seeds); the main deciding factor on macros for fruits is almost always the fiber, and that’s the case here, which is why we hand the win to pomegranates in this category.

    In the category of vitamins, pomegranates have more of vitamins B1, B2, b5, B6, B7, B9, K, and choline, while apricots have more of vitamins A, B3, and E. A clear win for pomegranates here.

    When it comes to minerals, pomegranate has more copper, calcium, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc, while apricots boast just a little more calcium and iron. Another easy win for pomegranates.

    Looking at polyphenols, apricots finally win a category, with greater overall polyphenol coverage.

    Which is good, but not enough to overcome the other three categories all being in pomegranates’ favor—hence the overall win for pomegranates here!

    Of course, the solution is to enjoy both! Diversity is good, for exactly such reasons as this.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Pomegranate’s Health Gifts Are Mostly In Its Peel ← in other words, the one part of the fruit you don’t normally eat. However! It can be dried and ground into a powder supplement, or else made in pomegranate tea.

    Enjoy!

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