Five Advance Warnings of Multiple Sclerosis

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Five Advance Warnings of Multiple Sclerosis

First things first, a quick check-in with regard to how much you know about multiple sclerosis (MS):

  • Do you know what causes it?
  • Do you know how it happens?
  • Do you know how it can be fixed?

If your answer to the above questions is “no”, then take solace in the fact that modern science doesn’t know either.

What we do know is that it’s an autoimmune condition, and that it results in the degradation of myelin, the “insulator” of nerves, in the central nervous system.

  • How exactly this is brought about remains unclear, though there are several leading hypotheses including autoimmune attack of myelin itself, or disruption to the production of myelin.
  • Treatments look to reduce/mitigate inflammation, and/or treat other symptoms (which are many and various) on an as-needed basis.

If you’re wondering about the prognosis after diagnosis, the scientific consensus on that is also “we don’t know”:

Read: Personalized medicine in multiple sclerosis: hope or reality?

this paper, like every other one we considered putting in that spot, concludes with basically begging for research to be done to identify biomarkers in a useful fashion that could help classify many distinct forms of MS, rather than the current “you have MS, but who knows what that will mean for you personally because it’s so varied” approach.

The Five Advance Warning Signs

Something we do know! First, we’ll quote directly the researchers’ conclusion:

❝We identified 5 health conditions associated with subsequent MS diagnosis, which may be considered not only prodromal but also early-stage symptoms.

However, these health conditions overlap with prodrome of two other autoimmune diseases, hence they lack specificity to MS.❞

So, these things are a warning, five alarm bells, but not necessarily diagnostic criteria.

Without further ado, the five things are:

  1. depression
  2. sexual disorders
  3. constipation
  4. cystitis
  5. urinary tract infections

❝This association was sufficiently robust at the statistical level for us to state that these are early clinical warning signs, probably related to damage to the nervous system, in patients who will later be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

The overrepresentation of these symptoms persisted and even increased over the five years after diagnosis.❞

~ Dr. Céline Louapre

Read the paper for yourself:

Association Between Diseases and Symptoms Diagnosed in Primary Care and the Subsequent Specific Risk of Multiple Sclerosis

Hot off the press! Published only yesterday!

Want to know more about MS?

Here’s a very comprehensive guide:

National clinical guideline for diagnosis and management of multiple sclerosis

Take care!

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  • Plant-Based Alternatives for Meat Recipes

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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

    ❝How about providing a plant-based alternative when you post meat-based recipes? I appreciate how much you advocate for veggie diets and think offering an alternative with your recipes would support that❞

    Glad you’re enjoying! And yes, we do usually do that. But: pardon, we missed one (the Tuna Steak with Protein Salad) because it’d be more than a simple this-for-that substitution, we didn’t already have an alternative recipe up (as with the salmon recipes such as the Chili Hot-Bedded Salmon and Thai Green Curry Salmon Burgers).

    Our recipes, by the way, will tend towards being vegan, vegetarian, or at least pescatarian. This is for several reasons:

    • Good science suggests the best diet for general purpose good health is one that is mostly plants, with optional moderate amounts of fermented dairy products, fish, and/or eggs.
    • Your writer here (it’s me, hi) has been vegan for many years, transitioning to such via pescatarianism and ovo-lacto vegetarianism, and so the skill of cooking meat is least fresh in my memory, meaning I’d not be confident writing about that, especially as cooking meat has the gravest health consequences for messing it up.

    Note on biases: notwithstanding this writer being vegan, we at 10almonds are committed to reporting the science as it stands with no agenda besides good health. Hence, there will continue to be unbiased information about animal products’ health considerations, positive as well as negative.

    See also: Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy?

    …as well as, of course, some animal-based classics from our archives including:

    We Are Such Stuff As Fish Are Made Of & Eggs: All Things In Moderation?

    Finishing with one for the vegans though, you might enjoy:

    Which Plant Milk? We Compare 6 Of The Most Popular

    Some previous articles you might enjoy meanwhile:

    Take care!

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  • Invigorating Sabzi Khordan

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    Have you ever looked at the nutritional values and phytochemical properties of herbs, and thought “well that’s all well and good, but we only use a tiny amount”? Sabzi khordan is a herb-centric traditional Levantine sharing platter served most commonly as an appetizer, and it is indeed appetizing! Never again will “start your meal with a green salad to ensure a gentle blood sugar curve” seem like a chore:

    You will need

    • Large bunch of parsley
    • Small bunch of tarragon leaves
    • Small bunch of basil leaves
    • Small bunch of mint
    • Small bunch of sorrel leaves
    • 7 oz block of feta cheese (if vegan, a plant-based substitution is fine in culinary terms, but won’t have the same gut-healthy benefits, as plant-based cheeses are not fermented)
    • 9 oz labneh-stuffed vine leaves in olive oil (if vegan, same deal as the above, except it’s harder to find plant-based substitutes for labneh (strained yogurt cheese), so you might want to use our Plant-Based Healthy Cream Cheese recipe instead and make your own)
    • 2 tbsp za’atar (you can make your own by blending dried hyssop, dried sumac berries, sesame seeds, dried thyme, and salt—but if you haven’t had za’atar before, we recommend first buying some like the one that we linked, so that next time you know what you’re aiming for)
    • 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
    • 10 radishes
    • 6 scallions
    • 9 oz walnuts, soaked in water overnight and drained
    • 1 cucumber, cut into batons
    • Warm flatbreads (you can use our Healthy Homemade Flatbreads recipe)

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Arrange the feta, labneh, za’atar, and olive oil in separate little serving dishes.

    2) Arrange everything else around them on a platter.

    3) Serve! You may be thinking: did we really need a recipe to tell us “put the things on a plate”? The answer here is that this one today was shared mostly as a matter of inspiration, because when was the last time you thought to serve herbs as the star of the dish? Plus, it’s an excuse to try za’atar, not something so commonly seen outside of the Levant.

    An alternative presentation

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    Take care!

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  • Rose Hips vs Blueberries – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing rose hips to blueberries, we picked the rose hips.

    Why?

    Both of these fruits are abundant sources of antioxidants and other polyphenols, but one of them stands out for overall nutritional density:

    In terms of macros, rose hips have about 2x the carbohydrates, and/but about 10x the fiber. That’s an easy calculation and a clear win for rose hips.

    When it comes to vitamins, rose hips have a lot more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B5, B6, C, E, K, and choline. On the other hand, blueberries boast more of vitamins B1 and B9. That’s a 9:2 lead for rose hips, even before we consider rose hips’ much greater margins of difference (kicking off with 80x the vitamin A, for instance, and many multiples of many of the others).

    In the category of minerals, rose hips have a lot more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc. Meanwhile, blueberries are not higher in any minerals.

    In short: as ever, enjoy both, but if you’re looking for nutritional density, there’s a clear winner here and it’s rose hips.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    It’s In The Hips: Rosehip’s Benefits, Inside & Out

    Take care!

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  • What Flexible Dieting Really Means

    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.

    When Flexibility Is The Dish Of The Day

    This is Alan Aragon. Notwithstanding not being a “Dr. Alan Aragon”, he’s a research scientist with dozens of peer-reviewed nutrition science papers to his name, as well as being a personal trainer and fitness educator. Most importantly, he’s an ardent champion of making people’s pursuit of health and fitness more evidence-based.

    We’ll be sharing some insights from a book of his that we haven’t reviewed yet, but we will link it at the bottom of today’s article in any case.

    What does he want us to know?

    First, get out of the 80s and into the 90s

    In the world of popular dieting, the 80s were all about calorie-counting and low-fat diets. They did not particularly help.

    In the 90s, it was discovered that not only was low-fat not the way to go, but also, regardless of the diet in question, rigid dieting leads to “disinhibition”, that is to say, there comes a point (usually not far into a diet) whereby one breaks the diet, at which point, the floodgates open and the dieter binges unhealthily.

    Aragon would like to bring our attention to a number of studies that found this in various ways over the course of the 90s measuring various different metrics including rigid vs flexible dieting’s impacts on BMI, weight gain, weight loss, lean muscle mass changes, binge-eating, anxiety, depression, and so forth), but we only have so much room here, so here’s a 1999 study that’s pretty much the culmination of those:

    Flexible vs. Rigid Dieting Strategies: Relationship with Adverse Behavioral Outcomes

    So in short: trying to be very puritan about any aspect of dieting will not only not work, it will backfire.

    Next, get out of the 90s into the 00s

    …which is not only fun if you read “00s” out loud as “naughties”, but also actually appropriate in this case, because it is indeed important to be comfortable being a little bit naughty:

    In 2000, Dr. Marika Tiggemann found that dichotomous perceptions of food (e.g. good/bad, clean/dirty, etc) were implicated as a dysfunctional cognitive style, and predicted not only eating disorders and mood disorders, but also adverse physical health outcomes:

    Dieting and Cognitive Style: The Role of Current and Past Dieting Behaviour and Cognitions

    This was rendered clearer, in terms of physical health outcomes, by Dr. Susan Byrne & Dr. Emma Dove, in 2009:

    ❝Weight loss was negatively associated with pre-treatment depression and frequency of treatment attendance, but not with dichotomous thinking. Females who regard their weight as unacceptably high and who think dichotomously may experience high levels of depression irrespective of their actual weight, while depression may be proportionate to the degree of obesity among those who do not think dichotomously❞

    Read more: Effect of dichotomous thinking on the association of depression with BMI and weight change among obese females

    Aragon’s advice based on all this: while yes, some foods are better than others, it’s more useful to see foods as being part of a spectrum, rather than being absolutist or “black and white” about it.

    Next: hit those perfect 10s… Imperfectly

    The next decade expanded on this research, as science is wont to do, and for this one, Aragon shines a spotlight on Dr. Alice Berg’s 2018 study with obese women averaging 69 years of age, in which…

    Flexible Eating Behavior Predicts Greater Weight Loss Following a Diet and Exercise Intervention in Older Women

    In other words (and in fact, to borrow Dr. Berg’s words from that paper),

    ❝encouraging a flexible approach to eating behavior and discouraging rigid adherence to a diet may lead to better intentional weight loss for overweight and obese older women❞

    You may be wondering: what did this add to the studies from the 90s?

    And the key here is: rather than being observational, this was interventional. In other words, rather than simply observing what happened to people who thought one way or another, this study took people who had a rigid, dichotomous approach to food, and gave them a 6-month behavioral intervention (in other words, support encouraging them to be more flexible and open in their approach to food), and found that this indeed improved matters for them.

    Which means, it’s not a matter of fate or predisposition, as it could have been back in the 90s, per “some people are just like that; who’s to say which factor causes which”. Instead, now we know that this is an approach that can be adopted, and it can be expected to work.

    Beyond weight loss

    Now, so far we’ve talked mostly about weight loss, and only touched on other health outcomes. This is because:

    • weight loss a very common goal for many
    • it’s easy to measure so there’s a lot of science for it

    Incidentally, if it’s a goal of yours, here’s what 10almonds had to say about that, along with two follow-up articles for other related goals:

    Spoiler: we agree with Aragon, and recommend a relaxed and flexible approach to all three of these things

    Aragon’s evidence-based approach to nutrition has found that this holds true for other aspects of healthy eating, too. For example…

    To count or not to count?

    It’s hard to do evidence-based anything without counting, and so Aragon talks a lot about this. Indeed, he does a lot of counting in scientific papers of his own, such as:

    How much protein can the body use in a single meal for muscle-building? Implications for daily protein distribution

    and

    The effect of protein timing on muscle strength and hypertrophy: a meta-analysis

    …as well as non-protein-related but diet-related topics such as:

    Does Timing Matter? A Narrative Review of Intermittent Fasting Variants and Their Effects on Bodyweight and Body Composition

    But! For the at-home health enthusiast, Aragon recommends that the answer to the question “to count or not to count?” is “both”:

    • Start off by indeed counting and tracking everything that is important to you (per whatever your current personal health intervention is, so it might be about calories, or grams of protein, or grams of carbs, or a certain fat balance, or something else entirely)
    • Switch to a more relaxed counting approach once you get used to the above. By now you probably know the macros for a lot of your common meals, snacks, etc, and can tally them in your head without worrying about weighing portions and knowing the exact figures.
    • Alternatively, count moderately standardized portions of relevant foods, such as “three servings of beans or legumes per day” or “no more than one portion of refined carbohydrates per day”
    • Eventually, let habit take the wheel. Assuming you have established good dietary habits, this will now do you just fine.

    This latter is the point whereby the advice (that Aragon also champions) of “allow yourself an unhealthy indulgence of 10–20% of your daily food”, as a budget of “discretionary calories”, eventually becomes redundant—because chances are, you’re no longer craving that donut, and at a certain point, eating foods far outside the range of healthiness you usually eat is not even something that you would feel inclined to do if offered.

    But until that kicks in, allow yourself that budget of whatever unhealthy thing you enjoy, and (this next part is important…) do enjoy it.

    Because it is no good whatsoever eating that cream-filled chocolate croissant and then feeling guilty about it; that’s the dichotomous thinking we had back in the 80s. Decide in advance you’re going to eat and enjoy it, then eat and enjoy it, then look back on it with a sense of “that was enjoyable” and move on.

    The flipside of this is that the importance of allowing oneself a “little treat” is that doing so actively helps ensure that the “little treat” remains “little”. Without giving oneself permission, then suddenly, “well, since I broke my diet, I might as well throw the whole thing out the window and try again on Monday”.

    On enjoying food fully, by the way:

    Mindful Eating: How To Get More Nutrition Out Of The Same Food

    Want to know more from Alan Aragon?

    Today we’ve been working heavily from this book of his; we haven’t reviewed it yet, but we do recommend checking it out:

    Flexible Dieting: A Science-Based, Reality-Tested Method for Achieving and Maintaining Your Optimal Physique, Performance & Health – by Alan Aragon

    Enjoy!

    Don’t Forget…

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  • Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook – by Sarah Raven

    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.

    Note: the US Amazon site currently (incorrectly) lists the author as “Jonathan Buckley”. The Canadian, British, and Australian sites all list the author correctly as Sarah Raven, and some (correctly) credit Jonathan Buckley as the photographer she used.

    First, what it’s not: a gardening book. Beyond a few helpful tips, pointers, and “plant here, harvest here” instructions, this book assumes you are already capable of growing your own vegetables.

    She does assume you are in a temperate climate, so if you are not, this might not be the book for you. Although! The recipes are still great; it’s just you’d have to shop for the ingredients and they probably won’t be fresh local produce for the exact same reason that you didn’t grow them.

    If you are in a temperate climate though, this will take you through the year of seasonal produce (if you’re in a temperate climate but it’s in for example Australia, you’ll need to make a six-month adjustment for being in the S. Hemisphere), with many recipes to use not just one ingredient from your garden at a time, but a whole assortment, consistent with the season.

    About the recipes: they (which are 450 in number) are (as you might imagine) very plant-forward, but they’re generally not vegan and often not vegetarian. So, don’t expect that you’ll produce everything yourself—just most of the ingredients!

    Bottom line: if you like cooking, and are excited by the idea of growing your own food but are unsure how regularly you can integrate that, this book will keep you happily busy for a very long time.

    Click here to check out Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook, and level-up your home cooking!

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  • Dates vs Grapes – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing dates to grapes, we picked the dates.

    Why?

    It’s not close:

    In terms of macros, dates have 4x the carbs and/but 8x the fiber, making for the lower glycemic index. Also, for what it’s worth, they have nearly 4x the protein, but probably nobody is eating either of these fruits for the protein. In any case, it’s an easy and clear win for dates in the category of macros.

    In the category of vitamins, dates have more of vitamins B2, B3, B5, B6, B9, and choline, while grapes have more of vitamins B1, C, E, and K, making for a 6:4 win for dates.

    When it comes to minerals, it’s more one-sided: dates have more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while grapes have more manganese. An easy win for dates here.

    Of course, enjoy either or both (diversity is good), but if you’re looking for nutrient density, dates are where it’s at.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like:

    Can We Drink To Good Health? ← while there are polyphenols such as resveratrol in red wine that per se would boost heart health, there’s so little per glass that you may need 100–1000 glasses per day to get the dosage that provides benefits in mouse studies.

    If you’re not a mouse, you might even need more than that!

    To this end, many people prefer resveratrol supplementation ← link is to an example product on Amazon, but there are plenty more so feel free to shop around 😎

    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

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