Functional Exercise For Seniors – by James Atkinson

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A lot of exercises books are tailored to 20-year-old athletes training for their first Tough Mudder. Others, that the only thing standing between us and a perfect Retroflex Countersupine Divine Pretzel position is a professionally-lit Instagrammable photo.

This one’s not like that.

But! Nor does it think being over a certain age is a reason to not have genuinely robust health, of the kind that may make some younger people envious. So, it lays out, in progressive format, guidelines for exercises targeted at everything we need to build and maintain as we get older.

The writing style is clear, and the illustrations too (the cover art is the same style as the illustrations inside).

Bottom line: if you’re looking for a workout guide that understands you are nearer 80 than 18, and/but also doesn’t assume your age limits your exercise potential to “wrist exercises in chair”, then this book is a fine pick.

Click here to check out Functional Exercises For Seniors, and build your stability, balance, strength and mobility!

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Recommended

  • Eat to Beat Disease – by Dr. William Li
  • 100 Hikes of a Lifetime – by Kate Siber
    National Geographic’s photo-rich guide to “100 Hikes of a Lifetime” balances dreamy inspiration with practical tips for every continent’s top trails—your ultimate hiking menu and how-to in one book.

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  • Blue Light At Night? Save More Than Just Your Sleep!

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    Beating The Insomnia Blues

    You previously asked us about recipes for insomnia (or rather, recipes/foods to help with easing insomnia). We delivered!

    But we also semi-promised we’d cover a bit more of the general management of insomnia, because while diet’s important, it’s not everything.

    Sleep Hygiene

    Alright, you probably know this first bit, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t cover it before moving on:

    • No caffeine or alcohol before bed
      • Ideally: none earlier either, but if you enjoy one or the other or both, we realize an article about sleep hygiene isn’t going to be what changes your mind
    • Fresh bedding
      • At the very least, fresh pillowcase(s). While washing and drying an entire bedding set constantly may be arduous and wasteful of resources, it never hurts to throw your latest pillowcase(s) in with each load of laundry you happen to do.
    • Warm bed, cool room = maximum coziness
    • Dark room. Speaking of which…

    About That Darkness…

    When we say the room should be dark, we really mean it:

    • Not dark like “evening mood lighting”, but actually dark.
    • Not dark like “in the pale moonlight”, but actually dark.
    • Not dark like “apart from the light peeking under the doorway”, but actually dark.
    • Not dark like “apart from a few LEDs on electronic devices that are on standby or are charging”, but actually dark.

    There are many studies about the impact of blue light on sleep, but here’s one as an example.

    If blue light with wavelength between 415 nm and 455 nm (in the visible spectrum) hits the retina, melatonin (the sleep hormone) will be suppressed.

    The extent of the suppression is proportional to the amount of blue light. This means that there is a difference between starting at an “artificial daylight” lamp, and having the blue LED of your phone charger showing… but the effect is cumulative.

    And it gets worse:

    ❝This high energy blue light passes through the cornea and lens to the retina causing diseases such as dry eye, cataract, age-related macular degeneration, even stimulating the brain, inhibiting melatonin secretion, and enhancing adrenocortical hormone production, which will destroy the hormonal balance and directly affect sleep quality.❞

    Read it in full: Research progress about the effect and prevention of blue light on eyes

    See also: Age-related maculopathy and the impact of blue light hazard

    So, what this means, if we value our health, is:

    • Switch off, or if that’s impractical, cover the lights of electronic devices. This might be as simple as placing your phone face-down rather than face-up, for instance.
    • Invest in blackout blinds/curtains (per your preference). Serious ones, like these ← see how they don’t have to be black to be blackout! You don’t have to sacrifice style for function
    • If you can’t reasonably do the above, consider a sleep mask. Again, a good one. Not the kind you were given on a flight, or got free with some fluffy handcuffs. We mean a full-blackout sleep mask that’s designed to be comfortable enough to sleep in, like this one.
    • If you need to get up to pee or whatever, do like a pirate and keep one eye covered/closed. That way, it’ll remain unaffected by the light. Pirates did it to retain their night vision when switching between being on-deck or below, but you can do it to halve the loss of melatonin.

    Lights-Out For Your Brain Too

    You can have all the darkness in the world and still not sleep if your mind is racing thinking about:

    • your recent day
    • your next day
    • that conversation you wish had gone differently
    • what you really should have done when you were 18
    • how you would go about fixing your country’s socio-political and economic woes if you were in charge
    • Etc.

    We wrote about how to hit pause on all that, in a previous edition of 10almonds.

    Check it out: The Off-Button For Your Brain—How to “just say no” to your racing mind (this trick really works)

    Sweet dreams!

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  • Languishing – by Prof. Corey Keyes

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    We’ve written before about depression and “flourishing” but what about when one isn’t exactly flourishing, but is not necessarily in the depths of depression either? That’s what this book is about.

    Prof. Keyes offers, from his extensive research, hope for those who do not check enough of the boxes to be considered depressed, but who are also definitely more in the lane of “surviving” than “thriving”.

    Specifically, he outlines five key ways to make the step from languishing to flourishing, based not on motivational rhetoric, but actual data-based science:

    1. Learn (creating your personal story of self-growth)
    2. Connect (building relationships, on the individual level and especially on the community level)
    3. Transcend (developing psychological resilience to the unexpected)
    4. Help (others! This is about finding your purpose, and then actively living it)
    5. Play (this is a necessary “recharge” element that many people miss, especially as we get older)

    With regard to finding one’s purpose being given the one-word summary of “help”, this is a callback to our tribal origins, and how we thrive and flourish best and feel happiest when we have a role to fulfil and provide value to those around us)

    Bottom line: if you’re not at the point of struggling to get out of bed each day, but you’re also not exactly leaping out of bed with a smile, this book can help get you from one place to the other.

    Click here to check out Languishing, and flourish instead!

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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:

    Take care!

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Related Posts

  • Eat to Beat Disease – by Dr. William Li
  • Lost Connections – by Johann Hari

    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.

    Johann Hari had a long journey through (and out of!) depression, and shares his personal findings, including his disappointment with medical options, and a focus on the external factors that lead to depression.

    And that’s key to this book—while he acknowledges later in the book that there are physiological factors involved in depression, he wants to look past things we can’t change (like genes accounting for 37% of depression) or things that there may be unwanted side-effects to changing (as in the case of antidepressants, for many people), to things we genuinely can choose.

    And no, it’s not a “think yourself happy” book either; rather, it looks at nine key external factorsthat a) influence depression b) can mostly be changed.

    If the book has a downside, it’s that the author does tend to extrapolate his own experience a lot more than might be ideal. If SSRIs didn’t help him, they are useless, and also the only kind of antidepressant. If getting into a green space helped him, a Londoner, someone who lives in the countryside will not be depressed in the first place. And so forth. It can also be argued that he cherry-picked data to arrive at some of his pre-decided conclusions. He also misinterprets data sometimes; which is understandable; he is after all a journalist, not a scientist.

    Nevertheless, he offers a fresh perspective with a lot of ideas, and whether or not we agree with them all, new ideas tend to be worth reading. And if even one of his nine ideas helps you, that’s a win.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to explore the treatment of depression from a direction other than medicalization or psychotherapy, then this is will be a good book for you.

    Click here to check out Lost Connections, and reforge yours!

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  • Long-Covid Patients Are Frustrated That Federal Research Hasn’t Found New Treatments

    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.

    Erica Hayes, 40, has not felt healthy since November 2020 when she first fell ill with covid.

    Hayes is too sick to work, so she has spent much of the last four years sitting on her beige couch, often curled up under an electric blanket.

    “My blood flow now sucks, so my hands and my feet are freezing. Even if I’m sweating, my toes are cold,” said Hayes, who lives in Western Pennsylvania. She misses feeling well enough to play with her 9-year-old son or attend her 17-year-old son’s baseball games.

    Along with claiming the lives of 1.2 million Americans, the covid-19 pandemic has been described as a mass disabling event. Hayes is one of millions of Americans who suffer from long covid. Depending on the patient, the condition can rob someone of energy, scramble the autonomic nervous system, or fog their memory, among many other http://symptoms.in/ addition to the brain fog and chronic fatigue, Hayes’ constellation of symptoms includes frequent hives and migraines. Also, her tongue is constantly swollen and dry.

    “I’ve had multiple doctors look at it and tell me they don’t know what’s going on,” Hayes said about her tongue. 

    Estimates of prevalence range considerably, depending on how researchers define long covid in a given study, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts it at 17 million adults.

    Despite long covid’s vast reach, the federal government’s investment in researching the disease — to the tune of $1.15 billion as of December — has so far failed to bring any new treatments to market. 

    This disappoints and angers the patient community, who say the National Institutes of Health should focus on ways to stop their suffering instead of simply trying to understand why they’re suffering.

    “It’s unconscionable that more than four years since this began, we still don’t have one FDA-approved drug,” said Meighan Stone, executive director of the Long COVID Campaign, a patient-led advocacy organization. Stone was among several people with long covid who spoke at a workshop hosted by the NIH in September where patients, clinicians, and researchers discussed their priorities and frustrations around the agency’s approach to long-covid research.

    Some doctors and researchers are also critical of the agency’s research initiative, called RECOVER, or Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery. Without clinical trials, physicians specializing in treating long covid must rely on hunches to guide their clinical decisions, said Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development with the VA St Louis Healthcare System.

    “What [RECOVER] lacks, really, is clarity of vision and clarity of purpose,” said Al-Aly, saying he agrees that the NIH has had enough time and money to produce more meaningful progress.

    Now the NIH is starting to determine how to allocate an additional $662 million of funding for long-covid research, $300 million of which is earmarked for clinical trials. These funds will be allocated over the next four http://years.at/ the end of October, RECOVER issued a request for clinical trial ideas that look at potential therapies, including medications, saying its goal is “to work rapidly, collaboratively, and transparently to advance treatments for Long COVID.”

    This turn suggests the NIH has begun to respond to patients. This has stirred cautious optimism among those who say that the agency’s approach to long covid has lacked urgency in the search for effective treatments.Stone calls this $300 million a down payment. She warns it’s going to take a lot more money to help people like Hayes regain some degree of health.“There really is a burden to make up this lost time now,” Stone said.

    The NIH told KFF Health News and NPR via email that it recognizes the urgency in finding treatments. But to do that, there needs to be an understanding of the biological mechanisms that are making people sick, which is difficult to do with post-infectious conditions.

    That’s why it has funded research into how long covid affects lung function, or trying to understand why only some people are afflicted with the condition.

    Good Science Takes Time

    In December 2020, Congress appropriated $1.15 billion for the NIH to launch RECOVER, raising hopes in the long-covid patient community.

    Then-NIH Director Francis Collins explained that RECOVER’s goal was to better understand long covid as a disease and that clinical trials of potential treatments would come later.

    According to RECOVER’s website, it has funded eight clinical trials to test the safety and effectiveness of an experimental treatment or intervention. Just one of those trials has published results.

    On the other hand, RECOVER has supported more than 200 observational studies, such as research on how long covid affects pulmonary function and on which symptoms are most common. And the initiative has funded more than 40 pathobiology studies, which focus on the basic cellular and molecular mechanisms of long covid.

    RECOVER’s website says this research has led to crucial insights on the risk factors for developing long covid and on understanding how the disease interacts with preexisting conditions.

    It notes that observational studies are important in helping scientists to design and launch evidence-based clinical trials.

    Good science takes time, said Leora Horwitz, the co-principal investigator for the RECOVER-Adult Observational Cohort at New York University. And long covid is an “exceedingly complicated” illness that appears to affect nearly every organ system, she said. 

    This makes it more difficult to study than many other diseases. Because long covid harms the body in so many ways, with widely variable symptoms, it’s harder to identify precise targets for treatment.

    “I also will remind you that we’re only three, four years into this pandemic for most people,” Horwitz said. “We’ve been spending much more money than this, yearly, for 30, 40 years on other conditions.”

    NYU received nearly $470 million of RECOVER funds in 2021, which the institution is using to spearhead the collection of data and biospecimens from up to 40,000 patients. Horwitz said nearly 30,000 are enrolled so far.

    This vast repository, Horwitz said, supports ongoing observational research, allowing scientists to understand what is happening biologically to people who don’t recover after an initial infection — and that will help determine which clinical trials for treatments are worth undertaking.

    “Simply trying treatments because they are available without any evidence about whether or why they may be effective reduces the likelihood of successful trials and may put patients at risk of harm,” she said.

    Delayed Hopes or Incremental Progress?

    The NIH told KFF Health News and NPR that patients and caregivers have been central to RECOVER from the beginning, “playing critical roles in designing studies and clinical trials, responding to surveys, serving on governance and publication groups, and guiding the initiative.”But the consensus from patient advocacy groups is that RECOVER should have done more to prioritize clinical trials from the outset. Patients also say RECOVER leadership ignored their priorities and experiences when determining which studies to fund.

    RECOVER has scored some gains, said JD Davids, co-director of Long COVID Justice. This includes findings on differences in long covid between adults and kids.But Davids said the NIH shouldn’t have named the initiative “RECOVER,” since it wasn’t designed as a streamlined effort to develop treatments.

    “The name’s a little cruel and misleading,” he said.

    RECOVER’s initial allocation of $1.15 billion probably wasn’t enough to develop a new medication to treat long covid, said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Healthcare Transformation Institute.

    But, he said,  the results of preliminary clinical trials could have spurred pharmaceutical companies to fund more studies on drug development and test how existing drugs influence a patient’s immune response.

    Emanuel is one of the authors of a March 2022 covid roadmap report. He notes that RECOVER’s lack of focus on new treatments was a problem. “Only 15% of the budget is for clinical studies. That is a failure in itself — a failure of having the right priorities,” he told KFF Health News and NPR via email.

    And though the NYU biobank has been impactful, Emanuel said there needs to be more focus on how existing drugs influence immune response.

    He said some clinical trials that RECOVER has funded are “ridiculous,” because they’ve focused on symptom amelioration, for example to study the benefits of over-the-counter medication to improve sleep. Other studies looked at non-pharmacological interventions, such as exercise and “brain training” to help with cognitive fog.

    People with long covid say this type of clinical research contributes to what many describe as the “gaslighting” they experience from doctors, who sometimes blame a patient’s symptoms on anxiety or depression, rather than acknowledging long covid as a real illness with a physiological basis.

    “I’m just disgusted,” said long-covid patient Hayes. “You wouldn’t tell somebody with diabetes to breathe through it.”

    Chimére L. Sweeney, director and founder of the Black Long Covid Experience, said she’s even taken breaks from seeking treatment after getting fed up with being told that her symptoms were due to her diet or mental health.

    “You’re at the whim of somebody who may not even understand the spectrum of long covid,” Sweeney said.

    Insurance Battles Over Experimental Treatments

    Since there are still no long-covid treatments approved by the Food and Drug Administration, anything a physician prescribes is classified as either experimental — for unproven treatments — or an off-label use of a drug approved for other conditions. This means patients can struggle to get insurance to cover prescriptions.

    Michael Brode, medical director for UT Health Austin’s Post-COVID-19 Program — said he writes many appeal letters. And some people pay for their own treatment.

    For example, intravenous immunoglobulin therapy, low-dose naltrexone, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy are all promising treatments, he said.

    For hyperbaric oxygen, two small, randomized controlled studies show improvements for the chronic fatigue and brain fog that often plague long-covid patients. The theory is that higher oxygen concentration and increased air pressure can help heal tissues that were damaged during a covid infection.

    However, the out-of-pocket cost for a series of sessions in a hyperbaric chamber can run as much as $8,000, Brode said.

    “Am I going to look a patient in the eye and say, ‘You need to spend that money for an unproven treatment’?” he said. “I don’t want to hype up a treatment that is still experimental. But I also don’t want to hide it.”

    There’s a host of pharmaceuticals that have promising off-label uses for long covid, said microbiologist Amy Proal, president and chief scientific officer at the Massachusetts-based PolyBio Research Foundation. For instance, she’s collaborating on a clinical study that repurposes two HIV drugs to treat long covid.

    Proal said research on treatments can move forward based on what’s already understood about the disease. For instance, she said that scientists have evidence — partly due to RECOVER research — that some patients continue to harbor small amounts of viral material after a covid infection. She has not received RECOVER funds but is researching antivirals.

    But to vet a range of possible treatments for the millions suffering now — and to develop new drugs specifically targeting long covid — clinical trials are needed. And that requires money.

    Hayes said she would definitely volunteer for an experimental drug trial. For now, though, “in order to not be absolutely miserable,” she said she focuses on what she can do, like having dinner with her http://family.at/ the same time, Hayes doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life on a beige couch. 

    RECOVER’s deadline to submit research proposals for potential long-covid treatments is Feb. 1.

    This article is from a partnership that includes NPR and KFF Health News.

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

    This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • 5 Ways To Naturally Boost The “Ozempic Effect”

    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.

    Dr. Jason Fung is perhaps most well-known for his work in functional medicine for reversing diabetes, and he’s once again giving us sound advice about metabolic hormone-hacking with dietary tweaks:

    All about incretin

    As you may gather from the thumbnail, this video is about incretin, a hormone group (the most well-known of which is GLP-1, as in GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, etc) that slows down stomach emptying, which means a gentler blood sugar curve and feeling fuller for longer. It also acts on the hypothalmus, controlling appetite via the brain too (signalling fullness and reducing hunger).

    Dr. Fung recommends 5 ways to increase incretin levels:

    • Enjoy dietary fat: healthy kinds, please (e.g. nuts, seeds, eggs, etc—not fried foods), but this increases incretin levels more than carbs
    • Enjoy protein: again, prompts higher incretin levels of promotes satiety
    • Enjoy fiber: this is more about slowing digestion, but when it’s fermented in the gut into short-chain fatty acids, those too increase incretin secretion
    • Enjoy bitter foods: these don’t actually affect incretin levels, but they can bind to incretin receptors, making the body “believe” that you got more incretin (think of it like a skeleton key that fits the lock that was designed to be opened by a different key)
    • Enjoy turmeric: for its curcumin content, which increases GLP-1 levels specifically

    For more information on each of these, here’s Dr. Fung himself:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Take care!

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