What Matters Most For Your Heart?
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Eat More (Of This) For Lower Blood Pressure
Heart disease remains the world’s #1 killer. We’d say “and in the US, it’s no different”, but in fact, the US is #1 country for heart disease. So, it’s worse and perhaps some extra care is in order.
But how?
What matters the most
Is it salt? Salt plays a part, but it’s not even close to the top problem:
Hypertension: Factors Far More Relevant Than Salt
Is it saturated fat? Saturated fat from certain sources plays more of a role than salt, but other sources may not be so much of an issue:
Can Saturated Fats Be Heart-Healthy?
Is it red meat? Red meat is not great for the heart (or for almost anything else, except perhaps anemia):
The Whys and Hows of Cutting Meats Out Of Your Diet
…but it’s still not the top dietary factor.
The thing many don’t eat
All the above are foodstuffs that a person wanting a healthier heart and cardiovascular system in general might (reasonably and usually correctly) want to cut down, but there’s one thing that most people need more of:
Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
And this is especially true for heart health:
❝Dietary fiber has emerged as a crucial yet underappreciated part of hypertension management.
Our comprehensive analysis emphasizes the evidence supporting the effectiveness of dietary fiber in lowering blood pressure and reducing the risk of cardiovascular events.❞
Specifically, she and her team found:
- Each additional 5g of fiber per day reduces blood pressure by 2.8/2.1 (systolic/diastolic, in mmHG)
- Dietary fiber works in several ways to improve cardiovascular health, including via gut bacteria, improved lipids profiles, and anti-inflammatory effects
- Most people are still only getting a small fraction (¼ to ⅓) of the recommended daily amount of fiber. To realize how bad that is, imagine if you consumed only ¼ of the recommended daily amount of calories every day!
You can read more about it here:
Dietary fiber critical in managing hypertension, international study finds
That’s a pop-science article, but it’s still very informative. If you prefer to read the scientific paper itself (or perhaps as well), you can find it below
Recommendations for the Use of Dietary Fiber to Improve Blood Pressure Control
Want more from your fiber?
Here’s yet another way fiber improves cardiometabolic health, hot off the academic press (the study was published just a couple of weeks ago):
How might fiber lower diabetes risk? Your gut could hold the clues
this pop-science article was based on this scientific paper
Gut Microbiota and Blood Metabolites Related to Fiber Intake and Type 2 Diabetes
Take care!
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5 Exercises That Fix 95% Of Your Problems
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Well, your musculoskeletal problems, anyway! The exercises won’t, for example, do your taxes or deal with your loud neighbor for you. But, they will help your body be strong, supple, and pain-free:
20 minutes total
The exercises & what they do:
- Dead hang: improves shoulder health, decompresses the spine, and strengthens grip. Hang from a bar for 20–30 seconds, progressing to 1–2 minutes.
- Glute bridge: builds glute strength, improves core stability, and reduces lower back tension. Perform 2 sets of 10–15 reps, with variations like single-leg bridges or added weight.
- Farmer’s walk: a full-body workout that strengthens the shoulders, core, and grip while improving posture. Walk with weights for 30–60 seconds, 3 rounds, increasing weight or duration over time.
- Resting squat: enhances ankle, hip, and knee mobility, restoring natural functionality. Hold a deep squat for 20–30 seconds, progressing to 1–2 minutes. Use support for balance if necessary.
- Thread the needle: improves flexibility, reduces tension, and enhances rotational mobility. Perform slow, controlled rotations from an all-fours position, 2 sets of 10 reps per side.
Suggested 20-minute workout plan:
- Dead hang: 3 sets of 30 seconds
- Glute bridge: 2 sets of 10–15 reps
- Farmer’s walk: 30–60 seconds, 3 rounds
- Resting squat: hold for 20–30 seconds, 2–3 rounds
- Thread the needle: 2 sets of 10 reps per side
It is recommended to perform this routine 3 times per week with 1-minute rests between sets.
For more on all of these, plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Take care!
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Colloidal Gold’s Impressive Claims
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All That Glitters…
Today we’ll be examining colloidal gold supplementation.
This issue of 10almonds brought to you by the writer suddenly getting lots of advertisements for this supplement. It’s not a new thing though, and has been around in one form or another since pretty much forever.
Colloidal gold is…
- Gold, as in the yellow metal
- Colloidal, as in “very tiny insoluble particles dispersed though another substance (such as water)”
What are the claims made for it?
Honestly, just about everything is claimed for it. But to go with some popular claims:
- Reduces inflammation
- Supports skin health
- Boosts immune function
- Combats aging
- Improves cognitive function
So, what does the science say?
Does it do those things?
The short and oversimplified answer is: no
However, there is a little bit of tangential merit, so we’re going to talk about the science of it, and how the leap gets made between what the science says and what the advertisements say.
First… What makes gold so special, in general? Historically, three things:
- It’s quite rare
- It’s quite shiny
- It’s quite unreactive
- The first is about supply and demand, so that’s not very important to us in this article.
- The second is an aesthetic quality, which actually will have a little bit of relevance, but not much.
- The third has been important historically (because it meant that shiny gold stayed shiny, because it didn’t tarnish), and now also important industrially too, as gold can be used in many processes where we basically need for nothing to happen (i.e., a very inert component is needed)
That third quality—its unreactivity—has become important in medicine.
When scientists need a way to deliver something (without the delivering object getting eaten by the body’s “eat everything” tendencies), or otherwise not interact chemically with anything around, gold is an excellent choice.
Hence gold teeth, and gold fillings, by the way. They’re not just for the bling factor; they were developed because of their unreactivity and thus safety.
So, what about those health claims we mentioned above?
Here be science (creative interpretations not included)
The most-backed-by-science claim from that list is “reduces inflammation”.
Websites selling colloidal gold cite studies such as:
Gold nanoparticles reduce inflammation in cerebral microvessels of mice with sepsis
A promising title!The results of the study showed:
❝20 nm cit-AuNP treatment reduced leukocyte and platelet adhesion to cerebral blood vessels, prevented BBB failure, reduced TNF- concentration in brain, and ICAM-1 expression both in circulating polymorphonuclear (PMN) leukocytes and cerebral blood vessels of mice with sepsis. Furthermore, 20 nm cit-AuNP did not interfere with the antibiotic effect on the survival rate of mice with sepsis.❞
That “20 nm cit-AuNP” means “20 nm citrate-covered gold nanoparticles”
So it is not so much the antioxidant powers of gold being tested here, as the antioxidant powers of citrate, a known antioxidant. The gold was the carrying agent, whose mass and unreactivity allowed it to get where it needed to be.
The paper does say the words “Gold nanoparticles have been demonstrated to own important anti-inflammatory properties“ in the abstract, but does not elaborate on that, reference it, or indicate how.
Websites selling colloidal gold also cite papers such as:
Anti-inflammatory effect of gold nanoparticles supported on metal oxides
Another promising title! However the abstract mentions:
❝The effect was dependent on the MOx NPs chemical nature
[…]
The effect of Au/TiO2 NPs was not related to Au NPs size❞
MOx NPs = mineral oxide nanoparticles. In this case, the gold was a little more than a carrying agent, though, because the gold is described and explained as being a catalytic agent (i.e., its presence helps the attached mineral oxides react more quickly).
We said that was the most-backed claim, and as you can see, it has some basis but is rather tenuous since the gold by itself won’t do anything; it just helps the mineral oxides.
Next best-backed claim builds from that, which is “supports skin health”.
Sometimes colloidal gold is sold as a facial tonic. By itself it’ll distribute (inert) gold nanoparticles across your skin, and may “give you a healthy glow”, because that’s what happens when you put shiny wet stuff on your face.
Healthwise, if the facial tonic also contains some of the minerals we mentioned above, then it may have an antioxidant effect. But again, no minerals, no effect.
The claim that it “combats aging” is really a tag-on to the “antioxidant” claim.
As for the “supports immune health” claim… Websites selling colloid gold cite studies such as:
To keep things brief: gold can fight infectious diseases in much the same way that forks can fight hunger. It’s an inert carrying agent.
As for “improves cognitive function”? The only paper we could find cited was that mouse sepsis study again, this time with the website saying “researchers found that rats treated with colloidal gold showed improved spatial memory and learning ability“ whereas the paper cited absolutely did not claim that, not remotely, not even anything close to that. It wasn’t even rats, it was mice, and they did not test their memory or learning.
Is it safe?
Colloidal gold supplementation is considered very safe, precisely because gold is one of the least chemically reactive substances you could possibly consume. It is special precisely because it so rarely does anything.
However, impurities could be introduced in the production process, and the production process often involves incredibly harsh reagents to get the gold ions, and if any of those reagents are left in the solution, well, gold is safe but sodium borohydride and chloroauric acid aren’t!
Where can I get some?
In the unlikely event that our research review has given you an urge to try it, here’s an example product on Amazon
Take care!
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It Didn’t Start with You – by Mark Wolynn
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There is a trend in psychology to “blame the parents” for “childhood trauma” that can result in problems later in life. Sometimes fairly, sometimes not. This book’s mostly not about that.
It does touch on our own childhood trauma, if applicable. But mostly, it’s about epigenetic trauma inheritance. In other words, not just trauma that’s passed on in terms of “the cycle of abuse”, but trauma that’s passed on in terms of “this generation experienced trauma x, developed trauma response y, encoded it epigenetically, and passed it on to their offspring”.
So, how does one heal from a trauma one never directly experienced, and just inherited the response to it? That’s what most of this book is about, after establishing how epigenetic trauma inheritance works.
The author, a therapist, provides practical advice for how to do the things that can be done to rewrite the epigenetic code we inherited. Better late than never!
Bottom line: it is well-established that trauma is inheritable. But unlike one’s eye color or the ability to smell asparagus metabolites in urine, we can rewrite epigenetic things, to a degree. This book explains how.
Click here to check out It Didn’t Start With You, and put things to rest!
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Escape Self-Sabotage
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Stop Making The Same Mistakes
It’s easy to think that a self-destructive cycle is easy to avoid if you have no special will to self-destruction. However, the cycle is sneaky.
It’s sneaky because it can be passive, and/or omissions rather than actions, procrastinations rather than obvious acts of impulse, and so forth.
So, they’re often things that specifically aren’t there to see.
How to catch them
How often do you think “I wish I had [done xyz]” or “I wish I had [done yxz] sooner”?
Now, how often have you thought that about the same thing more than once? For example, “I should have kept up my exercise”.
For things like this, habit-trackers are a great way to, well, keep track of habits. If for example you planned to do a 10-minute exercise session daily but you’ve been postponing it since you got distracted on January the 2nd, then it’ll highlight that. See also:
How To Really Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits
Speaking of habits, this goes for other forms of procrastination, too. For example, if you are always slow to get medical check-ups, or renew your prescriptions, or get ready for some regularly-occurring thing in your schedule, then set a reminder in your preferred way (phone app, calendar on the wall, whatever) and when the appointed time arrives (to book the check-up, renew the prescription, do your taxes, whatever), do it on the day you set your reminder for, as a personal rule for you that you keep to, barring extreme calamity.
By “extreme calamity” we mean less “running late today” and more “house burned down”.
Digital traps
Bad habits can be insidious in other ways too, like getting sucked into social media scrolling (it is literally designed to do that to you; you are not immune modern programming hijacking evolutionary dopamine responses).
Setting a screentime limit (you can specify “just these apps” if you like) will help with this. On most devices, this feature includes a sticky notification in the notification bar, that’ll remind you “27 out of 30 minutes remaining” or whatever you set it for. That’ll remind you to do what you went there to do, instead of getting caught in the endless scroll (and if you went there to just browse, to do so briefly).
Here’s how to set that:
Instructions for iOS devices | Instructions for Android devices
Oh, and on the topic of social media? If you find yourself getting caught up in unproductive arguments on the Internet, try the three-response rule:
- You reply; they reply (no progress made)
- You reply; they reply (still no progress made)
- You reply; they reply (still yet no progress made)
You reply just one more time: “I have a personal rule that if I’m arguing on the Internet and no progress has been made after three replies, I don’t reply further—I find this is helpful to avoid a lot of time lost to pointless arguing that isn’t going anywhere. Best wishes.”
(and then stick to it, no matter how they try to provoke you; best is to just not look until at least the next day)
When “swept up in love” gets to one of those little whirlpools…
The same works in personal relationships, by the way. If for example you are arguing with a loved one and not making progress, it can be good if you both have a pre-arranged agreement that either of you can, up to once on any given day, invoke a “time-out” (e.g. 30 minutes, but you agree the time between you when you first make this standing policy) during which you will both keep out of the other’s way, and come back with a more productive head on (remembering that things go best when it’s you both vs the problem, rather than vs each other).
See also:
Seriously Useful Communication Skills: Conflict Resolution
What if the self-sabotaging cycle is active and apparent?
Well, that is less sneaky, but certainly no less serious, and sometimes moreso. An obvious example is drinking too much; this is often cyclical in nature. We wrote about this one previously:
That article’s alcohol-specific, but the same advices go for other harmful activities, including other substance abuse (which in turn includes binge-eating), as well psychological addictions (such as gambling, for example).
Finally…
If your destructive cycle is more of a rut you’ve got stuck in, a common advice is to change something, anything, to get out of the rut.
That can be very bad advice! Because sometimes the change you go for is absolutely not the change that was needed, and is rather just cracking under pressure and doing something impulsive.
Here’s one way to actively get out of a slump:
Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety
Note: you do not have to be depressed or anxious to do this. But the point is, it’s a tool you can use even if you are depressed and/or anxious, so it’s a good thing to try for getting out of most kinds of slumps.
And really finally, here’s a resource for, well, the title speaks for itself:
When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
Take care!
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Millet vs Rye – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing millet to rye, we picked the rye.
Why?
In terms of macros, they’re about equal on protein, and rye has more carbs and fiber, the ratio of which give it the lower glycemic index, so we say rye wins this category.
In the category of vitamins, millet has more of vitamins B1, B2, B6, and B9, while rye has more of vitamins A, B5, E, and K. Notionally, that’s a 4:4 tie, though rye’s margins of difference are an order of magnitude greater, so we say rye takes a marginal victory on this one.
When it comes to minerals, there’s nothing to debate here: millet has more copper, while rye has more calcium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. An easy win for rye on this one.
Adding up the sections gives the overall win to rye, but there is one other thing worth mentioning: millet is naturally gluten-free, but rye is not, so if you are avoiding gluten for any reason, you’ll want to pick the millet in this case.
See also: Gluten: What’s The Truth?
Aside from that, by all means enjoy either or both, in moderation! Diversity is good.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Grains: Bread Of Life, Or Cereal Killer?
Enjoy!
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Take This Two-Minute Executive Dysfunction Test
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Roll For Initiative
Some of us struggle with executive dysfunction a lot; others, a little.
What Is Executive Dysfunction?
• Executive function is a broad group of mental skills that enable people to complete tasks and interact with others.
• Executive dysfunction can impair a person’s ability to organize and manage behavior
• Executive dysfunction is not a specific stand-alone diagnosis or condition.
• Instead, conditions such as depression and ADHD (amongst others) can affect a person’s executive function.
Take This Two-Minute Executive Dysfunction Test
How did you score? (8/16 here!)
Did you do it? (it honestly is really two minutes and is quite informative)
If not, here’s your cue to go back up and do it
For almost all of us, we sometimes find ourselves torn between several competing tasks, and end up doing… none of them.
For such times, compile yourself a “productivity buffet”, print it, and pin it above your desk or similar space.
What’s a productivity buffet?
It’s a numbered list of 6, 8, 10, 12 or 20 common tasks that pretty much always need doing (to at least some extent!). Doesn’t matter how important they are, just that they are frequently recurring tasks. For example:
- Tidy desk (including that drawer!)
- Reply to emails/messages
- Drink water
- Collect stray one-off to-dos into a list
- Stretch (or at least correct your posture!)
- Extend that Duolingo streak
- Read one chapter of a book
- Etc
Why 6, 8, 10, 12, or 20?
Because those are common denominations of polyhedral dice that are very cheap to buy!
Keep the relevant die to hand (perhaps in your pocket or on your desk), and when you know you should be doing something but can’t decide what exactly, roll the die and do the item corresponding to the number you roll.
And if you find yourself thinking “damn, I got 12, I wanted 7!” then go ahead and do item 7—the dice aren’t the boss of you, they’re just there to break the ice between you and your to-do list!
The Housekeeper In Your Pocket?
If you found the tidying tips (up top) helpful, but don’t like cleaning schedules because you just can’t stick to them, this one’s for you.
It’s easy to slip into just doing the same few easy tasks while neglecting others for far too long.
The answer? Outsource!
Not “get a cleaner” (though if you want to and can, great, go for it, this one won’t be for you after all), but rather, try this nifty little app that helps you keep on top of daily cleaning—which we all know is better than binge-cleaning every few months.
Sweepy keeps track of:
- What jobs there are that might need doing in each room (or type of room) in the house
- How often those jobs generally need doing
- How much of your energy (a finite resource, which it also takes into account!) those jobs will take
- How much energy you are prepared to spend per day (you can “lighter/heavier” days, or even “off-days”, too)
…and then it populates a small daily task list according to what needs cleaning and how much energy it’ll take.
For example, today Sweepy gives me (your trusty writer, hi! ) the tasks:
- Bathroom: clean sink (every 3 days, 1pt of energy)
- Dining room: clean and tidy table (every day, 1pt of energy)
- Bedroom: vacuum floor (every 7 days, 2pts of energy)
- Kitchen: clean coffee machine (every 30 days, 2pts of energy)
And that’s my 6pts of energy I’ve told Sweepy I’m happy to spend per day cleaning. There are “3 pts” tasks too—cleaning the oven, for example—but none came up today.
Importantly: it does not bother me about any other tasks today (even if something’s overdue), and I don’t have to worry my pretty head about it.
I don’t have to feel guilty for not doing other cleaning tasks; if they need doing, Sweepy will tell me tomorrow, and it will make sure I don’t get behind or leave anything neglected for too long.
Check it out (available for both iOS and Android)
PS: to premium or not to premium? We think the premium is worth it (unlocks some extra customization features) but the free version is sufficient to get your house in order, so don’t be afraid to give it a try first.
Don’t Forget…
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