Beat The Heat, With Fat
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Surviving Summer
Summer is upon us, for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere anyway, and given that nowadays each year tends to be hotter than the one before, on average, it pays to be prepared.
We’ve talked about dealing with the heat before:
Sun, Sea, And Sudden Killers To Avoid
All the above advice stands this summer too, but today we’re going to speak a little extra on not having a “default body”.
For much of medical literature and common health advice, the default body is that of a slim and/or athletic white cis man aged 25–35 with no disabilities.
When it comes to “women’s health”, this is often confined to “the bikini zone” and everything else is commonly treated based on research conducted with men.
Today we’ll be looking at a particular challenge for a wide variety of people, when it comes to heat…
Beating the heat, with fat
If you are fat, and/or have a bit of a tummy, and/or have breasts, this one’s for you.
Fat acts as an insulator, which naturally does no favors in hot weather. Carrying the weight around is also extra exercise, which also becomes a problem in hot weather. Fat people usually sweat more than thin people do, as a result.
Sweat is great for cooling down the body, because it takes heat with it when it evaporates off. However, that only works if it can evaporate off, and it can’t evaporate off if it’s trapped in a skin fold / fat roll.
If you’re fat, you may have plenty of those; if you have a bit of a tummy (if you’re not fat generally, this might be a leftover from pregnancy, or weight loss, or something else; how it got there doesn’t matter for our purposes today), you’ll have at least one under it, and if you have breasts, unless they’re quite small, you’ll have one under each breast, and potentially your cleavage may become an issue too.
Note: if you are perhaps a man who has fat in the place where breasts go, then medically this goes for you too, except that there’s not a societal expectation that you wear bra. Use today’s information as you see fit.
Sweat-wicking hacks
We don’t want sweat to stay in those folds—both because then it’s not doing its cooling-down job, and also, because it can cause a rash, and even yeast infections and/or bacterial infections.
So, we want there to be some barrier there. You could use something like vaseline or baby powder, as to prevent chafing, but fat better (more effective, and less messy) is to have some kind of cloth there that can wick the sweat away.
There are made-for-purpose curved cotton bands that exist, called “tummy liners”; here’s an example product on Amazon, or you could make your own if you’re so inclined. They’re breathable, absorbent, and reduce friction too, making everything a lot more comfortable.
And for breasts? Same deal, there are made-for-purpose cotton bra-liners that exist; here’s an example product on Amazon, or again, you could make your own if you feel so inclined. The important part is that it makes things so much comfortable, because let’s face it: wearing a bra in the summer is not comfortable.
So with these, it can become more comfortable (and the cotton liners are flat, so they’re not visible if one’s wearing a t-shirt or similar-coverage garment). You could go braless, of course, but then you’re back to having sweaty folds, so if you’re doing something other than swimming or lying on your back, you might want something there.
Different hydration rules
“People should drink this much per day” and guess what, those guidelines were based on, drumroll please, not fat people.
Sweating more means needing to hydrate more, and even without breaking a sweat, having a larger body than average (be it muscle, fat, or both) means having more body to hydrate. That’s simple math.
So instead, a good general guideline is half an ounce of water per your weight in pounds, per day:
How much water do I need each day?
Another good general guideline is to simply drink “little and often”, that is to say, always have a (hydrating!) drink on the go.
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Fisetin: The Anti-Aging Assassin
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Out With The Old…
Fisetin is a flavonoid (specifically, a flavonol), but it’s a little different than most. While it has the usual antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-cancer properties you might reasonably expect from flavonoids, it has an extra anti-aging trick up its sleeve that most don’t.
❝Fisetin is a flavonol that shares distinct antioxidant properties with a plethora of other plant polyphenols. Additionally, it exhibits a specific biological activity of considerable interest as regards the protection of functional macromolecules against stress which results in the sustenance of normal cells cytoprotection. Moreover, it shows potential as an anti-inflammatory, chemopreventive, chemotherapeutic and recently also senotherapeutic agent❞
~ Dr. Grynkiewicz & Dr. Demchuk
Let’s briefly do some due diligence on its expected properties, and then we’ll take a look at its bonus anti-aging effects.
The flavonol that does-it-ol
Because of the similar mechanisms involved, there are three things that often come together, which are:
- Antioxidant
- Anti-inflammatory
- Anticancer
This list often gets expanded to also include:
- Anti-aging
…although that is usually the last thing to get tested out of that list.
In today’s case, let’s kick it off with…
❝Fisetin (3,3′,4′,7-tetrahydroxyflavone) is a dietary flavonoid found in various fruits (strawberries, apples, mangoes, persimmons, kiwis, and grapes), vegetables (tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers), nuts, and wine that has shown strong anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, anti-tumorigenic, anti-invasive, anti-angiogenic, anti-diabetic, neuroprotective, and cardioprotective effects❞
Read more: Fisetin and Its Role in Chronic Diseases
Understanding its anticancer mechanisms
The way that fisetin fights cancer is basically “all the ways”, and this will be important when we get to its special abilities shortly:
❝Being a potent anticancer agent, fisetin has been used to inhibit stages in the cancer cells (proliferation, invasion),prevent cell cycle progression, inhibit cell growth, induce apoptosis, cause polymerase (PARP) cleavage, and modulate the expressions of Bcl‐2 family proteins in different cancer cell lines (HT‐29, U266, MDA‐MB‐231, BT549, and PC‐3M‐luc‐6), respectively. Further, fisetin also suppresses the activation of the PKCα/ROS/ERK1/2 and p38 MAPK signaling pathways, reduces the NF‐κB activation, and down‐regulates the level of the oncoprotein securin. Fisetin also inhibited cell division and proliferation and invasion as well as lowered the TET1 expression levels. ❞
Read more: Fisetin: An anticancer perspective
There’s also more about it than we even have room to quote, here:
Now For What’s New And Exciting: Senolysis
All that selectivity that fisetin exhibits when it comes to “this cell gets to live, and this one doesn’t” actions?
It makes a difference when it comes to aging, too. Because aging and cancer happen by quite similar mechanisms; they’re both DNA-copying errors that get copied forward, to our detriment.
- In the case of cancer, it’s a cell line that accidentally became immortal and so we end up with too many of them multiplying in one place (a tumor)
- In the case of aging, it’s the cellular equivalent of “a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy” gradually losing information as it goes
In both cases…
The cell must die if we want to live
Critically, and which quality differentiates it from a lot of other flavonoids, fisetin has the ability to selectively kill senescent cells.
To labor the photocopying metaphor, this means there’s an office worker whose job it is to say “this photocopy is barely legible, I’m going to toss this, and then copy directly from the clearest copy we have instead”, thus keeping the documents (your DNA) in pristine condition.
In fisetin’s case, this was first tested in mouse (in vivo) studies, and in human tissue (in vitro) studies, before moving to human clinical studies:
❝Of the 10 flavonoids tested, fisetin was the most potent senolytic.
The natural product fisetin has senotherapeutic activity in mice and in human tissues. Late life intervention was sufficient to yield a potent health benefit.❞
~ Dr. Matthew Yousefzadeh et al.
Read in full: Fisetin is a senotherapeutic that extends health and lifespan
There’s lots more science that’s been done to it since that first groundbreaking study though; here’s a more recent example:
Want some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon
Enjoy!
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Healing After Loss – by Martha Hickman
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Mental health is also just health, and this book’s about an underexamined area of mental health. We say “underexamined”, because for something that affects almost everyone sooner or later, there’s not nearly so much science being done about it as other areas of mental health.
This is not a book of science per se, but it is a very useful one. The format is:
Each calendar day of the year, there’s a daily reflection, consisting of:
- A one-liner insight about grief, quoted from somebody
- A page of thoughts about this
- A one-liner summary, often formulated as a piece of advice
The book is not religious in content, though the author does occasionally make reference to God, only in the most abstract way that shouldn’t be offputting to any but the most stridently anti-religious readers.
Bottom line: if this is a subject near to your heart, then you will almost certainly benefit from this daily reader.
Click here to check out Healing After Loss, and indeed heal after loss
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Burn! How To Boost Your Metabolism
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Let’s burn! Metabolic tweaks and hacks
Our metabolism is, for as long as we live, a constantly moving thing. And it’s not a monolith either; there are parts of our metabolism that can speed up or slow down independently of others.
If we talk about metabolism without clarifying context, though, this is usually about one’s “basal metabolic rate”, that is, how many calories we burn just by being alive.
Why do we want to speed it up? Might we ever want to slow it down?
We might want to slow our metabolism down in survival circumstances, but generally speaking, a faster metabolism is a better one.
Yes, even when it comes to aging. Because although metabolism comes with metabolizing oxygen (which, ironically, tends to kill us eventually, since this is a key part of cellular aging), it is still beneficial to replace cells sooner rather than later. The later we replace a given cell (ie, the longer the cell lives), the more damaged it gets, and then the copy is damaged from the start, because the damage was copied along with it. So, best to have a fast metabolism to replace cells quickly when they are young and healthy.
A quick metabolism helps the body to do this.
Most people, of course, are interested in a fast metabolism to burn off fat, but beware: if you increase your metabolism without consideration to how and when you consume calories, you will simply end up eating more to compensate.
One final quick note before we begin:
Limitations
There’s a lot we can do to change our metabolism, but there are some things that may be outside of our control. They include:
- Age—we can influence our biological age, but we cannot (yet!) halt aging, so this will happen
- Body size—and yes we can change this a bit, but we all have our own “basic frame” to work with. Someone who is 6’6” is never going to be able to have the same lower-end-of-scale body mass of someone who is 5’0”, say.
- Sex—this is about hormones, and HRT is a thing, but for example, broadly speaking, men will have faster metabolisms than women, because of hormonal differences.
- Medical conditions—often also related to other hormones, but for example someone with Type 1 Diabetes is going to have a very different relationship with their metabolism than someone without, and someone with a hypo- or hyperactive thyroid will again have a very different metabolism in a way that that lifestyle factors can’t completely compensate for.
The tips and tricks
Intermittent fasting
Intermittent fasting has been found to, amongst other things, promote healthy apoptosis and autophagy (in other words: early programmed cell death and recycling—these are good things).
It also has anti-inflammatory benefits and decreases the risk of insulin resistance. In other words, intermittent fasting boosts the metabolism while simultaneously guarding against some of the dangers of a faster metabolism (harms you’d get if you instead increased your metabolism by doing intense exercise and then eating a mountain of convenience food to compensate)
Read the science: Intermittent Fasting: Is the Wait Worth the Weight?
Read our prior article: Fasting Without Crashing? We Sort The Science From The Hype
Enjoy plenty of protein
This one won’t speed your metabolism up, so much as help it avoid slowing down as a result of fat loss.
Because of our body’s marvelous homeostatic system trying to keep our body from changing status at any given time, often when we lose fat, our body drops our metabolism to compensate, thinking we are in an ongoing survival situation and food is scarce so we’d better conserve energy (as fat). That’s a pain for would-be weight-loss dieters!
Eating protein can let our body know that we’re perfectly safe and not starving, so it will keep the metabolism ticking over nicely, without putting on fat.
Read the science: The role of protein in weight loss and maintenance
Stay hydrated
People think of drinking water as part of a weight loss program being just about filling oneself up, and that is a thing, but it also has a role to play in our metabolism. Specifically, lipolysis (the process of removing fat).
Because, we are mostly water. Not only is it the main content of our various body tissue cells, but also, of particular note, our blood (the means by which everything is transported around our body) is mostly water, too.
It’s hard for the body to keep everything ticking over like a well-oiled machine if its means of transportation is sluggish!
Check it out: Increased Hydration Can Be Associated with Weight Loss
Take a stand
That basal metabolic rate we talked about?
- If you’re lying down at rest, that’s what your metabolism will be like.
- If you’re sitting up, it’ll be a little quicker, but not much.
- If you’re standing, suddenly half your body is doing things, and you don’t even notice them because they’re just stabilizing muscles and the like, but on a cellular level, your body gets very busy.
Read all about it: Cardiometabolic impact of changing sitting, standing, and stepping in the workplace
Time to invest in a standing desk? Or a treadmill in front of the TV?
The spice of life
Capsaicin, the compound in many kinds of pepper that give them their spicy flavor, boosts the metabolism. In the words of Tremblay et al for the International Journal of Obesity:
❝[Capsaicin] stimulates the sympathoadrenal system that mediates the thermogenic and anorexigenic effects of capsaicinoids.
Capsaicinoids have been found to accentuate the impact of caloric restriction on body weight loss.
Some studies have also shown that capsinoids increase energy expenditure.
Capsaicin supplementation attenuates or even prevents the increase in hunger and decrease in fullness as well as the decrease in energy expenditure and fat oxidation, which normally result from energy restriction❞
Read for yourself: Capsaicinoids: a spicy solution to the management of obesity?
You snooze, you lose (fat)
While exercising is generally touted as the road to weight loss, and certainly regular exercise does have a part to play, doing so without good rest will have bad results.
In fact, even if you’re not exercising, if you don’t get enough sleep your metabolism will get sluggish to try to slow you down and encourage you to sleep.
So, be proactive, and make getting enough good quality sleep a priority.
Eat for metabolic health
Aside from the chilli peppers we mentioned, there are other foods associated with good metabolic health. We don’t have room to go into the science of each of them here, but here’s a well-researched, well-sourced standalone article listing some top choices:
The 12 Best Foods to Boost Your Metabolism
Enjoy!
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Three Daily Servings of Beans?
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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
❝Not crazy about the Dr.s food advice. Beans 3X a day?❞
For reference, this is in response to our recent article on the topic of 12 things to aim to get a certain amount of each day:
So, there are a couple of things to look at here:
Firstly, don’t worry, it’s a guideline and an aim. If you don’t hit it on a given day, there is always tomorrow. It’s just good to know what one is aiming for, because without knowing that, achieving it will be a lot less likely!
Secondly, the beans/legumes/pulses category says three servings, but the example serving sizes are quite small, e.g. ½ cup cooked beans, or ¼ cup hummus. And also as you notice, dips/pastes/sauces made from beans count too. So given the portion sizes, you could easily get two servings in by breakfast (and two servings of whole grains, too) if you enjoy frijoles refritos, for example. Many of the recipes we share on this site have “stealth” beans/legumes/pulses in this fashion
Take care!
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Almonds vs Cashews – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing almonds to cashews, we picked the almonds.
Why?
Both are great! But here’s why we picked the almonds:
In terms of macros, almonds have a little more protein and more than 4x the fiber. Given how critical fiber is to good health, and how most people in industrialized countries in general (and N. America in particular) aren’t getting enough, we consider this a major win for almonds.
Things are closer to even for vitamins, but almonds have a slight edge. Almonds are higher in vitamins A, B2, B3, B9, and especially 27x higher in vitamin E, while cashews are higher in vitamins B1, B5, B6, C & K. So, a moderate win for almonds.
In the category of minerals, cashews do a bit better on average. Cashews have moderately more copper, iron, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc, while almonds boast 6x more calcium, and slightly more manganese and potassium. We say this one’s a slight win for cashews.
Adding the categories up, however, makes it clear that almonds win the day.
However, of course, enjoy both! Diversity is healthy. Just, if you’re going to choose between them, we recommend almonds.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
- Almonds vs Walnuts – Which is Healthier?
- Pistachios vs Cashews – Which is Healthier?
- Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!
- What Matters Most For Your Heart?
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Why Going Gluten-Free Could Be A Bad Idea
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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…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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