From Strength to Strength – by Dr. Arthur Brooks
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For most professions, there are ways in which performance can be measured, and the average professional peak varies by profession, but averages are usually somewhere in the 30–45 range, with a pressure to peak between 25–35.
With a peak by age 45 or perhaps 50 at the latest (aside from some statistical outliers, of course), what then to expect at age 50+? Not long after that, there’s a reason for mandatory retirement ages in some professions.
Dr. Brooks examines the case for accepting that rather than fighting it, and/but making our weaknesses into our strengths as we go. If our fluid intelligence slows, our accumulated crystal intelligence (some might call it “wisdom“) can make up for it, for example.
But he also champions the idea of looking outside of ourselves; of the importance of growing and fostering connections; giving to those around us and receiving support in turn; not transactionally, but just as a matter of mutualism of the kind found in many other species besides our own. Indeed, Dr. Brooks gives the example of a grove of aspen trees (hence the cover art of this book) that do exactly that.
The style is very accessible in terms of language but with frequent scientific references, so very much a “best of both worlds” in terms of readability and information-density.
Bottom line: if ever you’ve wondered at what age you might outlive your usefulness, this book will do as the subtitle suggests, and help you carve out your new place.
Click here to check out From Strength To Strength, and find yours!
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Undoing Creatine’s Puffiness Side Effect
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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 😎
❝Creatine is known to increase “puffiness”, especially in my face. Are there any supplements that do the opposite?!❞
So first, let’s examine why this happens: creatine is most often taken to boost muscle size and performance. Your muscles are, of course, mostly water by mass, and so building your muscles requires extra water, which triggers systemic water retention.
In other words: you take creatine, exercise, and as the muscles start growing, the body goes “oh heck, we are running out of water, better save as much as possible in order to keep hydrating the muscles without running out” and starts putting it anywhere it can that’s not your bladder, so this will largely be the soft tissues of your body.
So, this results in classic water retentions symptoms including bloating and, yes, facial puffiness.
How much this happens, and how long the effects last, depend on three main things:
- What daily dose of creatine you are taking
- What kind of exercise you are doing
- What your hydration is like
The dose is relevant as it’s most common to get this puffiness during the “loading” phase, i.e. if you’re taking an increased dose to start with.
The exercise is relevant as it affects how much your body is actually using the water to build muscles.
The hydration is relevant because the less water you are taking, the more the body will try to retain whatever you do have.
This means, of course, that the supplement you are looking for to undo the facial puffiness is, in fact, water (even, nay, especially, if you feel bloated too):
Water For Everything? Water’s Counterintuitive Properties
Additionally, you could scale back the dose of creatine you’re taking, if you’re not currently doing heavy muscle-building exercise.
That said, the recommended dose for cognitive benefits is 5g/day, which is a very standard main-phase (i.e., post-loading) bodybuilding dose, so do with that information what you will.
See also: Creatine’s Brain Benefits Increase With Age
On which note: whether or not you want to take creatine for brain benefits, however, may depend on your age:
Creatine: Very Different For Young & Old People
Most research on creatine’s effects on humans has usually been either collegiate athletes or seniors, which leaves quite a research gap in the middle—so it’s unclear at what age the muscle-building effects begin to taper off, and at what age the cognitive benefits begin to take off.
Want a quicker fix?
If you want to reduce your facial puffiness acutely (e.g., you have a date in an hour and would like to not have a puffy face), then there are two things you can do that will help immediately, and/but only have short-term effects, meaning you’d have to do them daily to enjoy the results every day:
The first is an ice bath; simply fill a large bowl with water and ice cubes, give it a couple of minutes to get down to temperature, hold your breath and plunge your face in for as long as you can comfortably hold your breath. Repeat a few times, and towel off.
This helps by waking up the vasculature in your face, helping it to reduce puffiness naturally.
The second is facial yoga or guā shā, which is the practice of physically manipulating the soft tissues of your face to put them where you want them, rather than where you don’t want them. This will work against water retention puffiness, as well as cortisol puffiness, lymphatic puffiness, and more:
7-Minute Face Fitness For Lymphatic Drainage & Youthful Jawline
Enjoy!
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Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain – by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
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We’ve reviewed books about neurology before, and we always try to review books that bring something new/different. So, what makes this one stand out?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists, starts with an overview of how our unusual brain (definitely our species’ defining characteristic) came to be, and then devotes the rest of the book to mostly practical information.
She explains, in clear terms and without undue jargon, how the brain goes about such things as making constant predictions and useful assumptions about our environment, and reports these things to us as facts—which process is usually useful, and sometimes counterproductive.
We learn about how the apparently mystical trait of empathy works, in real flesh-and-blood terms, and why some kinds of empathy are more metabolically costly than others, and what that means for us all.
Unlike many such books, this one also looks at what is going on in the case of “different minds” that operate very dissimilarly to our own, and how this neurodiversity is important for our species.
Critically, she also looks at what else makes our brains stand out, the symphony of “5 Cs” that aren’t often found to the same extent all in the same species: creativity, communication, copying, cooperation, and compression. This latter being less obvious, but perhaps the most important; Dr. Feldman Barrett explains how we use this ability to layer summaries of our memories, perceptions, and assumptions, to allow us to think in abstractions—something that powers much of what we do that separates us from other animals.
Bottom line: if you’d like to learn more about that big wet organ between your ears, what it does for you, and how it goes about doing it, then this book gives a very practical foundation from which to build.
Click here to check out Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, and learn more about yours!
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The Exercises That Can Fix Sinus Problems (And More)
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Who nose what benefits you will gain today?
This is James Nestor, a science journalist and author. He’s written for many publications, including Scientific American, and written a number of books, most notably Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art.
Today we’ll be looking at what he has to share about what has gone wrong with our breathing, what problems this causes, and how to fix it.
What has gone wrong?
When it comes to breathing, we humans are the pugs of the primate world. In a way, we have the opposite problem to the squashed-faced dogs, though. But, how and why?
When our ancestors learned first tenderize food, and later to cook it, this had two big effects:
- We could now get much more nutrition for much less hunting/gathering
- We now did not need to chew our food nearly so much
Getting much more nutrition for much less hunting/gathering is what allowed us to grow our brains so large—as a species, we have a singularly large brain-to-body size ratio.
Not needing to chew our food nearly so much, meanwhile, had even more effects… And these effects have become only more pronounced in recent decades with the rise of processed food making our food softer and softer.
It changed the shape of our jaw and cheekbones, just as the size of our brains taking up more space in our skull moved our breathing apparatus around. As a result, our nasal cavities are anatomically ridiculous, our sinuses are a crime against nature (not least of all because they drain backwards and get easily clogged), and our windpipes are very easily blocked and damaged due to the unique placement of our larynx; we’re the only species that has it there. It allowed us to develop speech, but at the cost of choking much more easily.
What problems does this cause?
Our (normal, to us) species-wide breathing problems have resulted in behavioral adaptations such as partial (or in some people’s cases, total or near-total) mouth-breathing. This in turn exacerbates the problems with our jaws and cheekbones, which in turn exacerbates the problems with our sinuses and nasal cavities in general.
Results include such very human-centric conditions as sleep apnea, as well as a tendency towards asthma, allergies, and autoimmune diseases. Improper breathing also brings about a rather sluggish metabolism for how many calories we consume.
How are we supposed to fix all that?!
First, close your mouth if you haven’t already, and breathe through your nose.
In and out.
Both are important, and unless you are engaging in peak exercise, both should be through your nose. If you’re not used to this, it may feel odd at first, but practice, and build up your breathing ability.
Six seconds in and six seconds out is a very good pace.
If you’re sitting doing a breathing exercise, also good is four seconds in, four seconds hold, four seconds out, four seconds hold, repeat.
But those frequent holds aren’t practical in general life, so: six seconds in, six seconds out.
Through your nose only.
This has benefits immediately, but there are other more long-term benefits from doing not just that, but also what has been called (by Nestor, amongst many others), “Mewing”, per the orthodontist, Dr. John Mew, who pioneered it.
How (and why) to “mew”:
Place your tongue against the roof of your mouth. It should be flat against the palate; you’re not touching it with the tip here; you’re creating a flat seal.
Note: if you were mouth-breathing, you will now be unable to breathe. So, important to make sure you can breathe adequately through your nose first.
This does two things:
- It obliges nose-breathing rather than mouth-breathing
- It creates a change in how the muscles of your face interact with the bones of your face
In a battle between muscle and bone, muscle will always win.
Aim to keep your tongue there as much as possible; make it your new best habit. If you’re not eating, talking, or otherwise using your tongue to do something, it should be flat against the roof of your mouth.
You don’t have to exert pressure; this isn’t an exercise regime. Think of it more as a postural exercise, just, inside your mouth.
Quick note: read the above line again, because it’s important. Doing it too hard could cause the opposite problems, and you don’t want that. You cannot rush this by doing it harder; it takes time and gentleness.
Why would we want to do that?
The result, over time, will tend to be much healthier breathing, better sinus health, freer airways, reduced or eliminated sleep apnea, and, as a bonus, what is generally considered a more attractive face in terms of bone structure. We’re talking more defined cheekbones, straighter teeth, and a better mouth position.
Want to learn more?
This is the “Mewing” technique that Nestor encourages us to try:
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Screaming at Screens?
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I Screen, You Screen, We All Screen For…?
Dr. Kathryn Birkenbach is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University, and Manager of Research at Early Medical in New York.
Kathryn has things to tell us about kids’ neurological development, and screen time spent with electronic devices including phones, tablets, computers, and TVs.
From the 1960s criticism of “the gogglebox” to the modern-day critiques of “iPad babies” as a watchword of parental neglect, there’s plenty people can say against screen time, but Dr. Birkenbach tells us the that the reality is more nuanced:
Context Is Key
On a positive note”: consistent exposure to age-appropriate educational material results in quicker language acquisition than media that’s purely for entertainment purposes, or not age-appropriate.
Contrary to popular belief, children do not in fact learn by osmosis!
Interaction Is Far More Valuable Than Inaction
Kathryn advises that while adults tend to quite easily grasp things from instructional videos, the same does not go for small children.
This means that a lot of educational programming can be beneficial to small children if and only if there is an adult with them to help translate the visual into the practical!
There’s a story that does the rounds on the Internet: a young boy wanted to train his puppy, but didn’t know how. He asked, and was told “search for puppy training on YouTube”. His parents came back later and found him with his iPad, earnestly showing the training videos to the puppy.
We can laugh at the child’s naïvety, knowing that’s not how it works and the puppy will not learn that way, so why make the same mistake in turn?
❝The phenomenon known as the “video deficit effect” can be overcome, when an on-screen guide interacts with the child or a parent is physically present and draws the child’s attention to relevant information.
In other words, interaction with others appears to enhance the perceived salience of on-screen information, unlocking a child’s ability to learn from a medium which would otherwise offer no real-world benefit.❞
Screens Can Supplement, But Can’t Replace, Live Learning & Play
Sci-fi may show us “education pods” in which children learn all they need to from their screen… but according to our most up-to-date science, Dr. Birkenbach says, that simply would not work at all.
Screen time without adult interactions will typically fail to provide small children any benefit.
There is one thing it’s good at, though… attracting and keeping attention.
Thus, even a mere background presence of a TV show in the room will tend to actively reduce the time a small child spends on other activities, including live learning and exploratory play.
The attention-grabbing abilities of TV shows don’t stop at children, though! Adult caregivers will also tend to engage in fewer interactions with their children… and the interactions will be shorter and of lower quality.
In Summary:
- Young children will tend not to learn from non-interactive screen time
- Interactive screen time, ideally with a caregiver, can be educational
- Interactive screen time, not with a carer, can be beneficial (but a weak substitute)
- Interactive screen time refers to shows such as Dora The Explorer, where Dora directly addresses the viewer and asks questions…But it’s reliant on the child caring to answer!
- It can also mean interactive educational apps, provided the child does consciously interact!
- Randomly pressing things is not conscious interaction! The key here is engaging with it intelligently and thoughtfully
- A screen will take a child’s time and attention away from non-screen things: that’s a genuine measurable loss to their development!
Absolute Bottom Line:
Screens can be of benefit to small children, if and only if the material is:
- Age-Appropriate
- Educational
- Interactive
If it’s missing one of those three, it’ll be of little to no benefit, and can even harm, as it reduces the time spent on more beneficial activities.
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What are ‘collarium’ sunbeds? Here’s why you should stay away
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Reports have recently emerged that solariums, or sunbeds – largely banned in Australia because they increase the risk of skin cancer – are being rebranded as “collarium” sunbeds (“coll” being short for collagen).
Commercial tanning and beauty salons in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria are marketing collariums, with manufacturers and operators claiming they provide a longer lasting tan and stimulate collagen production, among other purported benefits.
A collarium sunbed emits both UV radiation and a mix of visible wavelength colours to produce a pink or red light. Like an old-school sunbed, the user lies in it for ten to 20 minute sessions to quickly develop a tan.
But as several experts have argued, the providers’ claims about safety and effectiveness don’t stack up.
Why were sunbeds banned?
Commercial sunbeds have been illegal across Australia since 2016 (except for in the Northern Territory) under state-based radiation safety laws. It’s still legal to sell and own a sunbed for private use.
Their dangers were highlighted by young Australians including Clare Oliver who developed melanoma after using sunbeds. Oliver featured in the No Tan Is Worth Dying For campaign and died from her melanoma at age 26 in 2007.
Sunbeds lead to tanning by emitting UV radiation – as much as six times the amount of UV we’re exposed to from the summer sun. When the skin detects enough DNA damage, it boosts the production of melanin, the brown pigment that gives you the tanned look, to try to filter some UV out before it hits the DNA. This is only partially successful, providing the equivalent of two to four SPF.
Essentially, if your body is producing a tan, it has detected a significant amount of DNA damage in your skin.
Research shows people who have used sunbeds at least once have a 41% increased risk of developing melanoma, while ten or more sunbed sessions led to a 100% increased risk.
In 2008, Australian researchers estimated that each year, sunbeds caused 281 cases of melanoma, 2,572 cases of squamous cell carcinoma (another common type of skin cancer), and $3 million in heath-care costs, mostly to Medicare.
How are collarium sunbeds supposed to be different?
Australian sellers of collarium sunbeds imply they are safe, but their machine descriptions note the use of UV radiation, particularly UVA.
UVA is one part of the spectrum of UV radiation. It penetrates deeper into the skin than UVB. While UVB promotes cancer-causing mutations by discharging energy straight into the DNA strand, UVA sets off damage by creating reactive oxygen species, which are unstable compounds that react easily with many types of cell structures and molecules. These damage cell membranes, protein structures and DNA.
Evidence shows all types of sunbeds increase the risk of melanoma, including those that use only UVA.
Some manufacturers and clinics suggest the machine’s light spectrum increases UV compatibility, but it’s not clear what this means. Adding red or pink light to the mix won’t negate the harm from the UV. If you’re getting a tan, you have a significant amount of DNA damage.
Collagen claims
One particularly odd claim about collarium sunbeds is that they stimulate collagen.
Collagen is the main supportive tissue in our skin. It provides elasticity and strength, and a youthful appearance. Collagen is constantly synthesised and broken down, and when the balance between production and recycling is lost, the skin loses strength and develops wrinkles. The collagen bundles become thin and fragmented. This is a natural part of ageing, but is accelerated by UV exposure.
Sun-protected skin (top) has thick bands of pink collagen (arrows) in the dermis, as seen on microscopic examination. Chronically sun-damaged skin (bottom) has much thinner collagen bands.
Katie Lee/UQThe reactive oxygen species generated by UVA light damage existing collagen structures and kick off a molecular chain of events that downgrades collagen-producing enzymes and increases collagen-destroying enzymes. Over time, a build-up of degraded collagen fragments in the skin promotes even more destruction.
While there is growing evidence red light therapy alone could be useful in wound healing and skin rejuvenation, the UV radiation in collarium sunbeds is likely to undo any benefit from the red light.
What about phototherapy?
There are medical treatments that use controlled UV radiation doses to treat chronic inflammatory skin diseases like psoriasis.
The anti-collagen effects of UVA can also be used to treat thickened scars and keloids. Side-effects of UV phototherapy include tanning, itchiness, dryness, cold sore virus reactivation and, notably, premature skin ageing.
These treatments use the minimum exposure necessary to treat the condition, and are usually restricted to the affected body part to minimise risks of future cancer. They are administered under medical supervision and are not recommended for people already at high risk of skin cancer, such as people with atypical moles.
So what happens now?
It looks like many collariums are just sunbeds rebranded with red light. Queensland Health is currently investigating whether these salons are breaching the state’s Radiation Safety Act, and operators could face large fines.
As the 2024 Australians of the Year – melanoma treatment pioneers Georgina Long and Richard Scolyer – highlighted in their acceptance speech, “there is nothing healthy about a tan”, and we need to stop glamorising tanning.
However, if you’re desperate for the tanned look, there is a safer and easy way to get one – out of a bottle or by visiting a salon for a spray tan.
Katie Lee, PhD Candidate, Dermatology Research Centre, The University of Queensland and Anne Cust, Professor of Cancer Epidemiology, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Brain Maker – by Dr. David Perlmutter
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Regular 10almonds readers probably know about the gut-brain connection already, so what’s new here?
Dr. David Perlmutter takes us on a tour of gut and brain health, specifically, the neuroprotective effect of healthy gut microbiota.
This seems unlikely! After all, vagus nerve or no, the gut microbiota are confined to the gut, and the brain is kept behind the blood-brain barrier. So how does one thing protect the other?
Dr. Perlmutter presents the relevant science, and the honest answer is, we’re not 100% sure how this happens! We do know part of it: that bad gut microbiota can result in a “leaky gut”, and that may in turn lead to such a thing as a “leaky brain”, where the blood-brain barrier has been compromised and some bad things can get in with the blood.
When it comes to gut-brain health…
Not only is the correlation very strong, but also, in tests where someone’s gut microbiota underwent a radical change, e.g. due to…
- antibiotics (bad)
- fasting (good)
- or a change in diet (either way)
…their brain health changed accordingly—something we can’t easily check outside of a lab, but was pretty clear in those tests.
We’re also treated to an exposé on the links between gut health, brain health, inflammation, and dementia… Which links are extensive.
In closing, we’ll mention that throughout this book we’re also given many tips and advices to improve our gut/brain health, reverse damage done already, and set ourselves up well for the future.
Click here to check out “Brain Maker” on Amazon and take care of this important part of your health!
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