Fast. Feast. Repeat – by Dr. Gin Stephens
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.
We’ve reviewed intermittent fasting books before, so what makes this one different?
The title “Fast. Feast. Repeat.” doesn’t give much away; after all, we already know that that’s what intermittent fasting is.
After taking the reader though the basics of how intermittent fasting works and what it does for the body, much of the rest of the book is given over to improvements.
That’s what the real strength of this book is: ways to make intermittent fasting more efficient, including how to avoid plateaus. After all, sometimes it can seem like the only way to push further with intermittent fasting is to restrict the eating window further. Not so!
Instead, Dr. Stephens gives us ways to keep confusing our metabolism (in a good way) if, for example, we had a weight loss goal we haven’t met yet.
Best of all, this comes without actually having to eat less.
Bottom line: if you want to be in good physical health, and/but also believe that life is for living and you enjoy eating food, then this book can resolve that age-old dilemma!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Garden Cress vs Watercress – 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 garden cress to watercress, we picked the garden cress.
Why?
While watercress is (rightly!) popularly viewed as a superfood for its nutritional density, the garden variety actually outperforms it.
In terms of macros first, garden cress has more protein, carbs, and fiber, while also having the lower glycemic index. Not that anyone’s getting blood sugar spikes from eating any kind of cress, but still, by the numbers, this is a clear win on the whole for garden cress in the category of macros.
When it comes to vitamins, garden cress has a lot (tens of times) more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B6, B7, B9, C, K, and choline, while watercress has (slightly) more of vitamins B1, B5, and E. An easy win for garden cress.
In the category of minerals, garden cress has more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and potassium, while watercress has more calcium. Another clear win for garden cress.
Taking a quick peep at polyphenols in case there’s anything to offset the above, garden cress has 13x more kaempferol (13mg/100g to watercress’s 1mg/100g), and/but watercress, in its favor, has quercetin (at 4mg/100g), which garden cress doesn’t. So, we say this category is also a win for garden cress, but watercress has its merits too.
👆 Let’s clarify: those numbers are all very good, and garden cress’s 13mg/100g kaempferol is absurdly high; most such quotients of most edible plants are orders of magnitude smaller; not to shoehorn in another vegetable, but just to give an example, savoy cabbage, which won on nutritional density vs bok choi recently, has 0.26mg/100g kaempferol and 0.12mg/100g quercetin (which were already very respectable numbers), so you see the difference in cress’s exceptionally generous delivery of these polyphenols!
Adding up the sections makes for an overwhelming win for garden cress!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Sprout Your Seeds, Grains, Beans, Etc ← cress is a great example of this!
Take care!
Share This Post
-
Do Seed Oils Have A Place In A Healthy Lifestyle?
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 a popular topic in the US at the moment, as the current Secretary of Health condemns them strongly.
So, what does the science say?
Seed oils are not great.
Let’s consider two most popular seed oils in N. America, canola and sunflower, either of which also get described simply as “vegetable oil”, which is an umbrella term that also covers oils from many other plants, including soybeans and even olives, but it’s rare someone will call olive oil “vegetable oil”, because you get to charge more if you mention it’s olive oil.
Canola oil and sunflower oil are less healthy than almost any other vegetable or nut oil (unless you have an allergy, of course).
But then, as regular participants in our “This or That” feature might remember, grapes are less healthy than almost any other fruit. Are they bad? No! They’re just not as good as most other fruits, that’s all; they simply deliver fewer micronutrients, and their structure allows them to exist with minimal fiber compared to most fruits.
So the question now is: ok, so they don’t score as well as olive oil or avocado oil or such, but are they dangerous?
And the answer is: water is dangerous if consumed much in excess of about 1 liter per hour (that’s how much an average healthy pair of kidneys can process) for some hours. More than that, and toxicity ensues quickly, along with swelling of the brain.
And yet… A lot of people, especially in places whose regional cuisine is “deep-fried everything”, do consume a lot of vegetable oil, and that becomes a health problem.
We may hypothesize that it’s for this reason that they (seed oils as a general umbrella term, but usually mostly meaning canola and sunflower) are often associated with cardiovascular disease in epidemiological studies, while olive oil and avocado oil, for example, are certainly not. The thing is, nobody is deep-frying ice-cream sandwiches in olive oil.
Here’s an example, which ties it to industrially-processed seed oils’ higher omega-6 content:
Omega-6 vegetable oils as a driver of coronary heart disease: the oxidized linoleic acid hypothesis
Now, we do need omega-6! In fact, we typically need more omega-6 than omega-3.
However, while we need 1–4x more omega-6 than omega-3, problems arise when the average American is getting nearer to 16x more omega-6 than omega-3. Hence the common advice to get more omega-3 and less omega-6. It’s not that omega-6 is bad per se; it’s good! Rather, it’s that we need the ratio to be a lot closer, that’s all.
See: The importance of the ratio of omega-6/omega-3 essential fatty acids
Canola oil, by the way, has a 2:1 ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, so if that were your only source of omega-6 and omega-3, then well, you’re probably going to have to consume a lot of calories to get your daily dose in and that’s going to cause different problems, but the ratio itself is fine. Not
In a similar vein, canola oil and sunflower oil are marketed as being a source of vitamin E, which they are, but you’d need to drink a cup of oil to get your daily dose, so please just eat some sunflower seeds instead, or perhaps some almonds.
The other side of cardiovascular disease risk
We mentioned above, and cited a study, for how seed oils are linked to coronary heart disease.
But, remember when we said that this is often in epidemiological studies (as that research review mostly reviewed), which don’t necessarily record how people are using them, so much as how often they use them?
Things get interesting if we look at randomized controlled trials (RCTs) instead. That’s because RCTs typically have small, standardized daily doses, suitable for such studies and consistent with “reasonable health guidelines” that allow that study to pass an ethics board.
And when we do that, we get things like…
❝Canola oil (CO) is a plant-based oil with the potential to improve several cardiometabolic risk factors❞
What about vs butter?
This one we covered in detail before, so we’ll share that here:
Butter vs Plant Oils: What The Latest Evidence Shows
…which, after much number-crunching, ultimately concludes that substituting even 10g/intake of total butter with an equivalent amount of plant-based oils yielded 17% lower total mortality.
In summary
Do we recommend seed oils? In honesty, not really, no. There are better oils in general.
Consider, for example: All About Olive Oil
…and for more choices, check out that “Butter vs Plant Oils” link just above, because we back-link to so many articles about different options!
But they’re also (per current scientific consensus, since research is ongoing) absolutely fine in moderation—even potentially healthy in moderation, as those RCTs show.
Take care!
Share This Post
-
The 9-Day Liver Detox Diet – by Patrick Holford
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.
While the author is not “Dr. Patrick Holford”, it’s worth mentioning that he is a career nutritionist with half the alphabet after his name, and decades of experience in the field.
Now, about the detox diet: being well-informed 10almonds readers, you probably know that most detox diets do little to nothing, and your liver detoxes itself; that is literally one of its main jobs.
However! Depending on diet and lifestyle, sometimes it can get a backlog of work, and then it starts struggling. We wrote about that in our article: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver.
The premise of this book is in the largest part very similar to what we wrote there, and it’s about giving your liver a metabolic break, for which it will be grateful and use the slack to do its own internal clean-up and regeneration.
The way Holford recommends doing this is consistent with what we’ve written before, just, in a lot more detail because it’s a whole book. It’s also more extreme, because it’s a 9-day thing rather than our usual focus on sustainability, so for example he’ll often say “cut out” many things where we have often said “reduce” or “avoid”.
In few words:
- Cut out foods with a high glycemic load (e.g. most starches and sugars)
- Cut out foods that are known to be inflammatory (e.g. meat and dairy)
- Enjoy foods that have anti-inflammatory properties (e.g. foods high in antioxidants)
He offers a dietary approach (and of course, a 9-day meal plan, with recipes), and also recommends a lot of supplements. However, if you don’t love taking supplements, then the diet plan is already just fine.
Oddly, he does include a chapter on reintroducing all the “bad” things, which seems like a strange thing to choose to do especially in the cases of things like alcohol if you literally just quit it, but of course it’s an option.
The style is quite old-school pop-science, but still very readable, easy to navigate if looking for specific things, and there’s a bibliography as well as a resource list at the back.
Bottom line: if you’d like to take radical short-term action to improve your liver health quickly, this book will indeed help you to do that!
Click here to check out The 9-Day Liver Detox Diet, and give your liver a chance to get better!
Share This Post
-
Artichoke vs Olives – 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 artichoke to olives, we picked the artichoke.
Why?
Both are great! And the battle of the antipasti…
In terms of macros, artichoke has 4x the protein and nearly 2x the fiber as well as slightly more carbs, while olives have more (famously healthy) fats. This one really comes down to whether we want to prioritize the fiber or the fats more, so in the interests of fairness, we’re calling this round a tie.
In the category of vitamins, artichoke has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, and K, while olives have more of vitamins A & E, yielding a 9:2 win to artichokes here.
Looking at minerals, artichokes have more magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc, while olives have more calcium, iron, and selenium, for a more modest 5:3 win for olives in this round.
In other considerations, they’re both abundant sources of polyphenols, and we’re calling this final round a tie on that basis.
Adding up the sections makes for an overall win for artichoke, but by all means do enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Black Olives vs Green Olives – Which is Healthier? ← for some nuance, which doesn’t affect the outcome of today’s choice, but is good to know
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Body Scrubs: Benefits, Risks, and Guidance
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
❝I was wondering whether I should be using a body scrub in the shower, rather than just soap. What should guide me in the choice of a body scrub, and are there any risks to be aware of?❞
Body scrubs are great for giving skin a healthy glow, but are best used sparingly—over-exfoliation leads to the opposite effect (unhappy skin, premature skin aging, etc).
As for contents:
- microplastics are now banned in most places, but you might want to check any products (and their containers!) are BPA-free, pthalate free, etc.
- fragrances in body scrubs are usually a bad idea, and many essential oils have been shown to be endocrine-disruptors, which you do not want:
About the microplastics, harmful artificial chemicals in general, and what constitutes “etc”:
About the fragrances’ (including “natural” essential oils’) endocrine-disrupting shenanigans:
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals: an Endocrine Society scientific statement
So, what might you want to use instead?
If you’re feeling adventurous, you might like to try treating yourself to a pineapple-based mask instead (a muslin cloth soaked in pineapple juice will work just fine; please don’t waterboard yourself though), as the bromelain enzymes (found very generously in pineapple juice) break down dead cells without the need for scrubbing.
Another option is a homemade salt- or sugar-scrub. Put your salt or sugar into a jar, add enough warm water to cover it, leave it for about a day, adding more water if it seems in danger of drying out, until it recrystallizes with a high water content keeping it malleable to the touch; congratulations, you now have a very simple scrub. This should still not be used more than, say, once per week, though.
Last but not least, you might consider investing in a konjac sponge; they gently remove dead skin without damaging living skin. Here’s an example product on Amazon, for your convenience
For more on gentle-yet-effective skincare, you might like to read:
Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Why Going Gluten-Free Could Be A Bad Idea
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.
Is A Gluten-Free Diet Right For You?
This is Rachel Begun, MS, RD. She’s a nutritionist who, since her own diagnosis with Celiac disease, has shifted her career into a position of educating the public (and correcting misconceptions) about gluten sensitivity, wheat allergy, and Celiac disease. In short, the whole “gluten-free” field.
First, a quick recap
We’ve written on this topic ourselves before; here’s what we had to say:
On “Everyone should go gluten-free”
Some people who have gone gluten-free are very evangelical about the lifestyle change, and will advise everyone that it will make them lose weight, have clearer skin, more energy, and sing well, too. Ok, maybe not the last one, but you get the idea—a dietary change gets seen as a cure-all.
And for some people, it can indeed make a huge difference!
Begun urges us to have a dose of level-headedness in our approach, though.
Specifically, she advises:
- Don’t ignore symptoms, and/but…
- Don’t self-diagnose
- Don’t just quit gluten
One problem with self-diagnosis is that we can easily be wrong:
But why is that a problem? Surely there’s not a health risk in skipping the gluten just to be on the safe side? As it turns out, there actually is:
If we self-diagnose incorrectly, Begun points out, we can miss the actual cause of the symptoms, and by cheerfully proclaiming “I’m allergic to gluten” or such, a case of endometriosis, or Hashimoto’s, or something else entirely, might go undiagnosed and thus untreated.
“Oh, I feel terrible today, there must have been some cross-contamination in my food” when in fact, it’s an undiagnosed lupus flare-up, that kind of thing.
Similarly, just quitting gluten “to be on the safe side” can mask a different problem, if wheat consumption (for example) contributed to, but did not cause, some ailment.
In other words: it could reduce your undesired symptoms, but in so doing, leave a more serious problem unknown.
Instead…
If you suspect you might have a gluten sensitivity, a wheat allergy, or even Celiac disease, get yourself tested, and take professional advice on proceeding from there.
How? Your physician should be able to order the tests for you.
You can also check out resources available here:
Celiac Disease Foundation | How do I get tested?
Or for at-home gluten intolerance tests, here are some options weighed against each other:
MNT | 5 gluten intolerance tests and considerations
Want to learn more?
Begun has a blog:
Rachel Begun | More than just recipes
(it is, in fact, just recipes—but they are very simple ones!)
You also might enjoy this interview, in which she talks about gluten sensitivity, celiac disease, and bio-individuality:
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
