Fennel vs Artichoke – Which is Healthier?

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Our Verdict

When comparing fennel to artichoke, we picked the artichoke.

Why?

Both are great! But artichoke wins on nutritional density.

In terms of macros, artichoke has more protein and more fiber, for only slightly more carbs.

Vitamins are another win for artichoke, boasting more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B9, and choline. Meanwhile, fennel has more of vitamins A, E, and K, which is also very respectable but does allow artichoke a 6:3 lead.

In the category of minerals, artichoke has a lot more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, and phosphorus, while fennel has a little more calcium, potassium, and selenium.

One other relevant factor is that fennel is a moderate appetite suppressant, which may be good or bad depending on your food-related goals.

All in all though, we say the artichoke wins by virtue of its greater abundance of nutrients!

Want to learn more?

You might like to read:

What Matters Most For Your Heart? ← appropriately enough, with fennel hearts and artichoke hearts!

Take care!

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Learn to Age Gracefully

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  • Aging Backwards – by Miranda Esmonde-White

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    In this book, there’s an upside and a downside to the author’s professional background:

    • Upside: Miranda Esmonde-White is a ballet-dancer-turned-physical-trainer, and it shows
    • Downside: Miranda Esmonde-White is not a scientist, and it shows

    She cites a lot of science, but she either does not understand it or else intentionally misrepresents it. We will assume the former. But as one example, she claims:

    “for every minute you exercise, you lengthen your life by 7 minutes”

    …which cheat code to immortality is absolutely not backed-up by the paper she cites for it. The paper, like most papers, was much more measured in its proclamations; “there was an association” and “with these conditions”, etc.

    Nevertheless, while she misunderstands lots of science along the way, her actual advice is good and sound. Her workout programs really will help people to become younger by various (important, life-changing!) metrics of biological age, mostly pertaining to mobility.

    And yes, this is a workout-based approach; we won’t read much about diet and other lifestyle factors here.

    Bottom line: it has its flaws, but nevertheless delivers on its premise of helping the reader to become biologically younger through exercises, mostly mobility drills.

    Click here to check out Aging Backwards, and age backwards!

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  • Stop Checking Your Likes – by Susie Moore

    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.

    You might think this one’s advice is summed up sufficiently by the title, that there’s no need for a book! But…

    There’s a lot more to this than “stop comparing the worst out-takes of your life to someone else’s highlight reel”, and there’s a lot more to this than “just unplug”.

    Instead, Susie Moore discusses the serious underlying real emotional considerations of the need for approval (and even just acceptance) by our community, as well the fear of missing out.

    It’s not just about how social media is designed to hijack various parts of our brain, or how The Alogorithm™ is out to personally drag your soul through Hell for a few more clicks; it’s also about the human element that would exist even without that. Who remembers MySpace? No algorithm in those days, but oh the drama potential for those “top 8 friends” places. And if you think that kind of problem is just for young people 20 years ago, you have mercifully missed the drama that older generations can get into on Facebook.

    Along with the litany of evil, though, Moore also gives practical advice on how to overcome those things, how to “see the world through comedy-colored glasses”, how to ask “what’s missing, really?”, and how to make your social media experience work for you, rather than it merely using you as fuel. ← link is to our own related article!

    Bottom line: if social media sucks a lot of your time, there may be more to it than just “social media sucks in general”, and there are ways to meet your emotional needs without playing by corporations’ rules to do so.

    Click here to check out Stop Checking Your Likes, and breathe easy!

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  • Green Coffee Bean Extract: Coffee Benefits Without The Coffee?

    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.

    Coffee is, on balance, very good for the health in moderation. We wrote about it here:

    The Bitter Truth About Coffee (or is it?)

    Some quick facts before moving on:

    Those are some compelling statistics!

    But what about the caffeine content?

    Assuming one doesn’t have a caffeine sensitivity, caffeine is also healthy in moderation—but it is easy to accidentally become dependent on it, so it can be good to take a “tolerance break” once in a while, and then reintroduce it with more modest moderation:

    Caffeine: Cognitive Enhancer Or Brain-Wrecker?

    We also, for that matter, have discussed its impact on the gut:

    Coffee & Your Gut ← surprise, it’s a positive impact

    What if I don’t like coffee?

    We suspect that, having seen the title of this article, you know what the answer’s going to be here:

    Green coffee bean extract is the extract from green (i.e. unroasted) coffee beans. It has one or two advantages over drinking coffee:

    1. For those who do not like drinking coffee, this supplement sidesteps that neatly
    2. Roasting coffee beans destroys a lot (sometimes almost all; it depends on the temperature and duration) of their chlorogenic acid, a highly beneficial polyphenol; using unroasted (i.e. green) coffee beans avoids that

    See: Role of roasting conditions in the level of chlorogenic acid content in coffee beans

    All about GCE and CGA

    That’s “green coffee extract” and “chlorogenic acid”, respectively, bearing in mind that the latter is found generously in the former.

    As to what it does:

    ❝CGA is an important and biologically active dietary polyphenol, playing several important and therapeutic roles such as antioxidant activity, antibacterial, hepatoprotective, cardioprotective, anti-inflammatory, antipyretic, neuroprotective, anti-obesity, antiviral, anti-microbial, anti-hypertension, free radicals scavenger and a central nervous system (CNS) stimulator. Furthermore, CGA causes hepatoprotective effects.❞

    👆 Those are the things we know for sure that it does. And it may do even more things:

    ❝In addition, it has been found that CGA could modulate lipid metabolism and glucose in both genetically and healthy metabolic related disorders. It is speculated that CGA can perform crucial roles in lipid and glucose metabolism regulation and thus help to treat many disorders such as hepatic steatosis, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity as well.❞

    Read in full: Chlorogenic acid (CGA): A pharmacological review and call for further research

    About lipid metabolism

    • Green coffee extract supplementation significantly reduces serum total cholesterol levels.
    • Green coffee extract supplementation significantly reduces serum LDL (“bad” cholesterol) levels.
    • Increases in HDL (“good” cholesterol) after green coffee bean extract consumption are significant in green coffee bean extract dosages ≥400mg/day.

    Source: The effects of green coffee bean extract supplementation on lipid profile in humans: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

    About blood glucose and insulin

    • Green coffee extract supplementation significantly improved fasting blood sugar levels
    • Green coffee extract supplementation at ≥400 mg/day significantly lowered postprandial insulin levels (that’s good)

    Source: The influence of green coffee bean extract supplementation on blood glucose levels: A systematic review and dose–response meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

    Want to try some?

    We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎

    Enjoy!

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    Questions and Answers at 10almonds

    Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!

    This newsletter has been growing a lot lately, and so have the questions/requests, and we love that! 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

    Q: How to be your best self after 60: Self motivation / Avoiding or limiting salt, sugar & alcohol: Alternatives / Ways to sneak in more movements/exercise

    …and, from a different subscriber…

    Q: Inflammation & over 60 weight loss. Thanks!

    Here are some of our greatest hits on those topics:

    Also, while we’ve recommended a couple of books on stopping (or reducing) drinking, we’ve not done a main feature on that, so we definitely will one of these days!

    Don’t Forget…

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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  • Natural Remedies and Foods for Osteoarthritis

    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? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!

    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

    ❝Natural solutions for osteoarthritis. Eg. Rosehip tea, dandelion root tea. Any others??? What foods should I absolutely leave alone?❞

    We’ll do a main feature on arthritis (in both its main forms) someday soon, but meanwhile, we recommend eating for good bone/joint health and against inflammation. To that end, you might like these main features we did on those topics:

    Of these, probably the last one is the most critical, and also will have the speediest effects if implemented.

    Don’t Forget…

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  • Lacking Motivation? Science Has The Answer

    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.

    The Science Of Motivation (And How To Use It To Your Advantage)

    When we do something rewarding, our brain gets a little (or big!) spike of dopamine. Dopamine is popularly associated with pleasure—which is fair— but there’s more to it than this.

    Dopamine is also responsible for motivation itself, as a prime mover before we do the thing that we find rewarding. If we eat a banana, and enjoy it, perhaps because our body needed the nutrients from it, our brain gets a hit of dopamine.

    (and not because bananas contain dopamine; that dopamine is useful for the body, but can’t pass the blood-brain barrier to have an effect on the brain)

    So where does the dopamine in our brain come from? That dopamine is made in the brain itself.

    Key Important Fact: the brain produces dopamine when it expects an activity to be rewarding.

    If you take nothing else away from today’s newsletter, let it be this!

    It makes no difference if the activity is then not rewarding. And, it will keep on motivating you to do something it anticipated being rewarding, no matter how many times the activity disappoints, because it’ll remember the very dopamine that it created, as having been the reward.

    To put this into an example:

    • How often have you spent time aimlessly scrolling social media, flitting between the same three apps, or sifting through TV channels when “there’s nothing good on to watch”?
    • And how often did you think afterwards “that was a good and rewarding use of my time; I’m glad I did that”?

    In reality, whatever you felt like you were in search of, you were really in search of dopamine. And you didn’t find it, but your brain did make some, just enough to keep you going.

    Don’t try to “dopamine detox”, though.

    While taking a break from social media / doomscrolling the news / mindless TV-watching can be a great and healthful idea, you can’t actually “detox” from a substance your body makes inside itself.

    Which is fortunate, because if you could, you’d die, horribly and miserably.

    If you could “detox” completely from dopamine, you’d lose all motivation, and also other things that dopamine is responsible for, including motor control, language faculties, and critical task analysis (i.e. planning).

    This doesn’t just mean that you’d not be able to plan a wedding; it also means:

    • you wouldn’t be able to plan how to get a drink of water
    • you wouldn’t have any motivation to get water even if you were literally dying of thirst
    • you wouldn’t have the motor control to be able to physically drink it anyway

    Read: Dopamine and Reward: The Anhedonia Hypothesis 30 years on

    (this article is deep and covers a lot of ground, but is a fascinating read if you have time)

    Note: if you’re wondering why that article mentions schizophrenia so much, it’s because schizophrenia is in large part a disease of having too much dopamine.

    Consequently, antipsychotic drugs (and similar) used in the treatment of schizophrenia are generally dopamine antagonists, and scientists have been working on how to treat schizophrenia without also crippling the patient’s ability to function.

    Do be clever about how you get your dopamine fix

    Since we are hardwired to crave dopamine, and the only way to outright quash that craving is by inducing anhedonic depression, we have to leverage what we can’t change.

    The trick is: question how much your motivation aligns with your goals (or doesn’t).

    So if you feel like checking Facebook for the eleventieth time today, ask yourself: “am I really looking for new exciting events that surely happened in the past 60 seconds since I last checked, or am I just looking for dopamine?”

    You might then realize: “Hmm, I’m actually just looking for dopamine, and I’m not going to find it there”

    Then, pick something else to do that will actually be more rewarding. It helps if you make a sort of dopa-menu in advance, of things to pick from. You can keep this as a list on your phone, or printed and pinned up near your computer.

    Examples might be: Working on that passion project of yours, or engaging in your preferred hobby. Or spending quality time with a loved one. Or doing housework (surprisingly not something we’re commonly motivated-by-default to do, but actually is rewarding when done). Or exercising (same deal). Or learning that language on Duolingo (all those bells and whistles the app has are very much intentional dopamine-triggers to make it addictive, but it’s not a terrible outcome to be addicted to learning!).

    Basically… Let your brain’s tendency to get led astray work in your favor, by putting things in front of it that will lead you in good directions.

    Things for your health and/or education are almost always great things to allow yourself the “ooh, shiny” reaction and pick them up, try something new, etc.

    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

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