Garden Cress vs Watercress – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing garden cress to watercress, we picked the garden cress.
Why?
While watercress is (rightly!) popularly viewed as a superfood for its nutritional density, the garden variety actually outperforms it.
In terms of macros first, garden cress has more protein, carbs, and fiber, while also having the lower glycemic index. Not that anyone’s getting blood sugar spikes from eating any kind of cress, but still, by the numbers, this is a clear win on the whole for garden cress in the category of macros.
When it comes to vitamins, garden cress has a lot (tens of times) more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B6, B7, B9, C, K, and choline, while watercress has (slightly) more of vitamins B1, B5, and E. An easy win for garden cress.
In the category of minerals, garden cress has more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and potassium, while watercress has more calcium. Another clear win for garden cress.
Taking a quick peep at polyphenols in case there’s anything to offset the above, garden cress has 13x more kaempferol (13mg/100g to watercress’s 1mg/100g), and/but watercress, in its favor, has quercetin (at 4mg/100g), which garden cress doesn’t. So, we say this category is also a win for garden cress, but watercress has its merits too.
👆 Let’s clarify: those numbers are all very good, and garden cress’s 13mg/100g kaempferol is absurdly high; most such quotients of most edible plants are orders of magnitude smaller; not to shoehorn in another vegetable, but just to give an example, savoy cabbage, which won on nutritional density vs bok choi recently, has 0.26mg/100g kaempferol and 0.12mg/100g quercetin (which were already very respectable numbers), so you see the difference in cress’s exceptionally generous delivery of these polyphenols!
Adding up the sections makes for an overwhelming win for garden cress!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Sprout Your Seeds, Grains, Beans, Etc ← cress is a great example of this!
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Elderberries vs Cranberries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing elderberries to cranberries, we picked the elderberries.
Why?
In terms of macros, elderberry has slightly more carbs and 2x the fiber, the ratio of which gives elderberries the lower glycemic index also. A win for elderberries, then.
Looking at the vitamins, elderberries have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, B9, and C, while cranberries have more vitamin B5. An easy win for elderberries in this category.
In the category of minerals, we see a similar story: elderberries have more calcium, copper, iron, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while cranberries have (barely) more magnesium. Another clear win for elderberries.
Both of these fruits have additional “special” properties, and it’s worth noting that:
- elderberries’ bonus properties include that they significantly hasten recovery from upper respiratory tract viral infections.
- cranberries’ bonus properties (including: famously very good at reducing UTI risk) come with some warnings, including that they may increase the risk of kidney stones if you are prone to such, and also that cranberries have anti-clotting effects, which are great for heart health but can be a risk of you’re on blood thinners or have a bleeding disorder.
You can read about both of these fruits’ special properties in more detail below:
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Herbs for Evidence-Based Health & Healing ← elderberry is in the list. We haven’t, at time of writing, done a main feature just on elderberry. Maybe soon!
- Health Benefits Of Cranberries (But: You’d Better Watch Out)
Enjoy!
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How To Improve Your Heart Rate Variability
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How’s your heart rate variability?
The hallmarks of a good, strong cardiovascular system include a medium-to-low resting heart rate (for adults: under 60 beats per minute is good; under 50 is typical of athletes), and healthy blood pressure (for adults: under 120/80, while still above 90/60, is generally considered good).
Less talked-about is heart rate variability, but it’s important too…
What is heart rate variability?
Heart rate variability is a measure of how quickly and easily your heart responds to changes in demands placed upon it. For example:
- If you’re at rest and then start running your fastest (be it for leisure or survival or anything in between), your heart rate should be able to jump from its resting rate to about 180% of that as quickly as possible
- When you stop, your heart rate should be able to shift gears back to your resting rate as quickly as possible
The same goes, to a commensurately lesser extent, to changes in activity between low and moderate, or between moderate and high.
- When your heart can change gears quickly, that’s called a high heart rate variability
- When your heart is sluggish to get going and then takes a while to return to normal after exertion, that’s called a low heart rate variability.
The rate of change (i.e., the variability) is measured in microseconds per beat, and the actual numbers will vary depending on a lot of factors, but for everyone, higher is better than lower.
Aside from quick response to crises, why does it matter?
If heart rate variability is low, it means the sympathetic nervous system is dominating the parasympathetic nervous system, which means, in lay terms, your fight-or-flight response is overriding your ability to relax.
See for example: Stress and Heart Rate Variability: A Meta-Analysis and Review of the Literature
This has a lot of knock-on effects for both physical and mental health! Your heart and brain will take the worst of this damage, so it’s good to improve things for them impossible.
This Saturday’s Life Hacks: how to improve your HRV!
Firstly, the Usual Five Things™:
- A good diet (that avoids processed foods)
- Good exercise (that includes daily physical activity—more often is more important than more intense!)
- Good sleep (7–9 hours of good quality sleep per night)
- Reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption (this is dose-dependent; any reduction is an improvement)
- Don’t smoke (just don’t)
Additional regular habits that help a lot:
- Breathing exercises, mindfulness, meditation
- Therapy, especially CBT and DBT
- Stress-avoidance strategies, for example:
- Get (and maintain) your finances in good order
- Get (and maintain) your relationship(s) in good order
- Get (and maintain) your working* life in good order
*Whatever this means to you. If you’re perhaps retired, or otherwise a home-maker, or even a student, the things you “need to do” on a daily basis are your working life, for these purposes.
In terms of simple, quick-fix, physical tweaks to focus on if you’re already broadly leading a good life, two great ones are:
- Exercise: get moving! Walk to the store even if you buy nothing but a snack or drink to enjoy while walking back. If you drove, make more trips with the shopping bags rather than fewer. If you like to watch TV, consider an exercise bike or treadmill to use while watching. If you have a partner, double-up and make it a thing you do together! Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Take the scenic route when walking someplace. Go to the bathroom that’s further away. Every little helps!
- Breathe: even just a couple of times a day, practice mindful breathing. Start with even just a minute a day, to get the habit going. What breathing exercise you do isn’t so important as that you do it. Notice your breathing; count how long each breath takes. Don’t worry about “doing it right”—you’re doing great, just observe, just notice, just slowly count. We promise that regular practice of this will have you feeling amazing
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The Lupus Solution – by Dr. Tiffany Caplan & Dr. Brent Caplan
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Lupus is not fun, and this book sets out to make it easier.
Starting off by explaining the basics of autoimmunity and how lupus works, the authors go on the address the triggers of lupus and how to avoid them—which if you’ve been suffering from lupus for a while, you probably know this part already, but it’s as well to give them a look over just in case you missed something.
The real value of the book though comes in the 8 chapters of the section “Tools & Therapies” which are mostly lifestyle adjustments though there are additionally some pharmaceutical approaches that can also help, and they are explained too. And no, it’s not just “reduce inflammation” (but yes, also that); rather, a whole array of things are examined that often aren’t thought of as related to lupus, but in fact can have a big impact.
The style is to-the-point and informational, and formatted for ease of reading. It doesn’t convey more hard science than necessary, but it does have a fair bibliography at the back.
It’s a short book, weighing in at 182 pages. If you want something more comprehensive, check out our review of The Lupus Encyclopedia, which is 848 pages of information-dense text and diagrams.
Bottom line: if you have lupus and would like fewer symptoms, this book can help you with that quite a bit without getting so technical as the aforementioned encyclopedia.
Click here to check out The Lupus Solution, and live more comfortably!
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Future-Proof Your Brain
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This is Kimberly Wilson. She’s a psychologist, not a doctor, and/but her speciality is neurophysiology and brain health.
Here’s what she wants us to know…
Avoid this very common killer
As you’re probably aware, the #1 killer in the US is heart disease, followed by COVID, which effectively pushed everything down a place. Thereafter, we see cancer, followed by accidental injuries, stroke, and dementia (including Alzheimer’s).
Over in the UK, where Wilson is from, dementia (including Alzheimer’s disease) is the #1 killer, followed by heart disease and then respiratory diseases (including COVID), and then stroke, then cancer.
As ever, what’s good for the heart is good for the brain, so many of the same interventions will help avoid both. With regard to some of the other differences in order, the reasons are mostly due to differences in the two countries’ healthcare systems and firearms laws.
It’s worth noting, though, that the leading cause of death in young people (aged 15–19) is suicide in the UK; in the US it’s nominally accidental injuries first (e.g. accidental shootings) with intentional suicide in the second spot.
In other words… Young or old, mental health is a serious health category that kills literally the most people in the UK, and also makes the top spots in the US.
Avoid the early killer
Given the demographics of most of our readership, chances are you’ve already lived past your teens and twenties. That’s not to say that suicide is no longer a risk, though, and it’s also worth noting that while mental health issues are invisible, they’re still physical illnesses (the brain is also an organ, after all!), so this isn’t something where you can simply “decide not to” and that’s you set, safe for life. So, please do continue to take good care in that regard.
We wrote about this previously, here:
How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)
Avoid the later killer
Wilson talks about how a recent survey found that…
- while nearly half of adults say dementia is the disease they fear most,
- only a third of those thought you could do anything to avoid it, and
- just 1% could name the 7 known risk factors.
Quick test: can you name the 7 known risk factors?
Please take a moment to actually try (this kind of mental stimulation is good in any case), and count them out on your fingers (or write them down), and then…
When you’re ready: click here to see the answer!
How many did you get? If you got them all, well done. If not, then well, now you know, so that’s good.
So, with those 7 things in mind, the first obvious advice is to take care of those things.
Taking an evidence-based medicine approach, Wilson recommends some specific interventions that will each improve one or more of those things, directly or indirectly:
Eating right
Wilson is a big fan of “nutritional psychiatry” and feeding one’s brain properly. We wrote about this, here:
The 6 Pillars Of Nutritional Psychiatry
As well as agreeing with the obvious “eat plenty of fiber, different-colored plants, and plenty of greens and beans”, Wilson specifically also champions getting enough of vitamins B9, B12, and D, as well as getting a healthy dose of omega-3 fatty acids.
She also recommends intermittent fasting, if that’s a reasonable option for you—but advocates for not worrying about it, if it’s not easy for you. For example, if you are diabetic, or have (or have a history with) some kind of eating disorder(s), then it’s probably not usefully practicable. But for most people, it can reduce systemic inflammation, which means also reducing neuroinflammation.
Managing stress right
Here she advocates for three main things:
- Mindful meditation (see: Evidence-Based, No-Frills Mindfulness)
- Psychological resilience (see: Building Psychological Resilience)
- Mindful social media use (see: Making Social Media Work For Your Mental Health)
Managing money right
Not often we talk about this in a health science publication as opposed to a financial planning publication, but the fact is that a lot of mental distress, which goes on to have a huge impact on the brain, is rooted in financial stresses.
And, of course, it’s good to be able to draw on financial resources to directly fund one’s good health, but that is the secondary consideration here—the financial stress is the biggest issue, and you can’t CBT your way out of debt, for example.
Therapists often face this, and what has been referred to informally by professionals in the field as “Shit Life Syndrome”—and there’s only so much that therapy can do about that.
We’re not a financial publication, but one recommendation we’ll drop is that if you don’t currently have budgeting software that you use, this writer personally uses and swears by YNAB (You Need A Budget), so maybe check that out if you don’t already have everything covered in that regard. It’s not free, but there is a 34-day free trial.
Therapy can be very worthwhile nonetheless
Wilson notes that therapy is like non-invasive brain surgery (because of neuroplasticity, it’s literally changing physical things in your brain).
It’s not a magic bullet and it’s not the right choice for everyone, but it’s worth considering, and even self-therapy can yield benefits for many:
The Gym For Your Mental Health: Getting The Most Out Of Therapy
Sleeping right
Sleep is not only critical for health in general and brain health in particular, it’s also most of when our glymphatic system does clean-up in the brain (essential for avoiding Alzheimer’s & Parkinson’s, amongst other diseases):
How To Clean Your Brain (Glymphatic Health Primer)
Want to know more from Kimberley Wilson?
We reviewed a book of hers recently, here:
Unprocessed: What your Diet Is Doing To Your Brain – by Kimberley Wilson
However, much of what we shared today was sourced from another book of hers that we haven’t reviewed yet but probably will do one of these days:
Enjoy!
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Can You Be Fat AND Fit?
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The short answer is “yes“.
And as for what that means for your heart and/or all-cause mortality risk: it’s just as good as being fit at a smaller size, and furthermore, it’s better than being less fit at a smaller size.
Here’s the longer answer:
The science
A research team did a systematic review looking at multiple large cohort studies examining the associations between:
- Cardiorespiratory fitness and cardiovascular disease risk
- Cardiorespiratory fitness and all-cause mortality
- BMI and cardiovascular disease risk
- BMI and all-cause mortality
However, they also took this further, and tabulated the data such that they could also establish the cardiovascular disease mortality risk and all-cause mortality risk of:
- Unfit people with “normal” BMI
- Unfit people with “overweight” BMI
- Unfit people with “obese” BMI
- Fit people with “normal” BMI
- Fit people with “overweight” BMI
- Fit people with “obese” BMI
Before we move on, let’s note for the record that BMI is a woeful system in any case, for enough reasons to fill a whole article:
Now, with that in mind, let’s get to the results:
What they found
For cardiovascular disease mortality risk of unfit people specifically, compared to fit people of “normal” BMI:
- Unfit people with “normal” BMI: 2.04x higher risk.
- Unfit people with “overweight” BMI: 2.58x higher risk.
- Unfit people with “obese” BMI: 3.35x higher risk
So here we can see that if you are unfit, then being heavier will indeed increase your CVD mortality risk.
For all-cause mortality risk of unfit people specifically, compared to fit people of “normal” BMI:
- Unfit people with “normal” BMI: 1.92x higher risk.
- Unfit people with “overweight” BMI: 1.82x higher risk.
- Unfit people with “obese” BMI: 2.04x higher risk
This time we see that if you are unfit, then being heavier or lighter than “overweight” will increase your all-cause mortality risk.
So, what about if you are fit? Then being heavier or lighter made no significant difference to either CVD mortality risk or all-cause mortality risk.
Fit individuals, regardless of weight category (normal, overweight, or obese), had significantly lower mortality risks compared to unfit individuals in any weight category.
Note: not just “compared to unfit individuals in their weight category”, but compared to unfit individuals in any weight category.
In other words, if you are obese and have good cardiorespiratory fitness, you will (on average) live longer than an unfit person with “normal” BMI.
You can find the paper itself here, if you want to examine the data and/or method:
Cardiorespiratory fitness, body mass index and mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Ok, so how do I improve the kind of fitness that they measured?
They based their cardiorespiratory fitness on VO2 Max, which scientific consensus holds to be a good measure of how efficiently your body can use oxygen—thus depending on your heart and lungs being healthy.
If you use a fitness tracker that tracks your exercise and your heart rate, it will estimate your VO2 Max for you—to truly measure the VO2 Max itself directly, you’ll need a lot more equipment; basically, access to a lab that tests this. But the estimates are fairly accurate, and so good enough for most personal purposes that aren’t hard-science research.
Next, you’ll want to do this:
53 Studies Later: The Best Way to Improve VO2 Max
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You can train your nose – and 4 other surprising facts about your sense of smell
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Would you give up your sense of smell to keep your hair? What about your phone?
A 2022 US study compared smell to other senses (sight and hearing) and personally prized commodities (including money, a pet or hair) to see what people valued more.
The researchers found smell was viewed as much less important than sight and hearing, and valued less than many commodities. For example, half the women surveyed said they’d choose to keep their hair over sense of smell.
Smell often goes under the radar as one of the least valued senses. But it is one of the first sensory systems vertebrates developed and is linked to your mental health, memory and more.
Here are five fascinating facts about your olfactory system.
DimaBerlin/Shutterstock 1. Smell is linked to memory and emotion
Why can the waft of fresh baking trigger joyful childhood memories? And why might a certain perfume jolt you back to a painful breakup?
Smell is directly linked to both your memory and emotions. This connection was first established by American psychologist Donald Laird in 1935 (although French novelist Marcel Proust had already made it famous in his reverie about the scent of madeleines baking.)
Odours are first captured by special olfactory nerve cells inside your nose. These cells extend upwards from the roof of your nose towards the smell-processing centre of your brain, called the olfactory bulb.
Smells are first detected by nerve cells in the nose. Axel_Kock/Shutterstock From the olfactory bulb they form direct connection with the brain’s limbic system. This includes the amygdala, where emotions are generated, and the hippocampus, where memories are created.
Other senses – such as sight and hearing – aren’t directly connected to the lymbic system.
One 2004 study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to demonstrate odours trigger a much stronger emotional and memory response in the brain than a visual cue.
2. Your sense of smell constantly regenerates
You can lose your ability to smell due to injury or infection – for example during and after a COVID infection. This is known as olfactory dysfunction. In most cases it’s temporary, returning to normal within a few weeks.
This is because every few months your olfactory nerve cells die and are replaced by new cells.
We’re not entirely sure how this occurs, but it likely involves your nose’s stem cells, the olfactory bulb and other cells in the olfactory nerves.
Other areas of your nervous system – including your brain and spinal cord – cannot regenerate and repair after an injury.
Constant regeneration may be a protective mechanism, as the olfactory nerves are vulnerable to damage caused by the external environment, including toxins (such as cigarette smoke), chemicals and pathogens (such as the flu virus).
But following a COVID infection some people might continue to experience a loss of smell. Studies suggest the virus and a long-term immune response damages the cells that allow the olfactory system to regenerate.
3. Smell is linked to mental health
Around 5% of the global population suffer from anosmia – total loss of smell. An estimated 15-20% suffer partial loss, known as hyposmia.
Given smell loss is often a primary and long-term symptom of COVID, these numbers are likely to be higher since the pandemic.
Yet in Australia, the prevalence of olfactory dysfunction remains surprisingly understudied.
Losing your sense of smell is shown to impact your personal and social relationships. For example, it can mean you miss out on shared eating experiences, or cause changes in sexual desire and behaviour.
In older people, declining ability to smell is associated with a higher risk of depression and even death, although we still don’t know why.
Losing your sense of smell can have a major impact on mental health. Halfpoint/Shutterstock 4. Loss of smell can help identify neurodegenerative diseases
Partial or full loss of smell is often an early indicator for a range of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
Patients frequently report losing their sense of smell years before any symptoms show in body or brain function. However many people are not aware they are losing their sense of smell.
There are ways you can determine if you have smell loss and to what extent. You may be able to visit a formal smell testing centre or do a self-test at home, which assesses your ability to identify household items like coffee, wine or soap.
5. You can train your nose back into smelling
“Smell training” is emerging as a promising experimental treatment option for olfactory dysfunction. For people experiencing smell loss after COVID, it’s been show to improve the ability to detect and differentiate odours.
Smell training (or “olfactory training”) was first tested in 2009 in a German psychology study. It involves sniffing robust odours — such as floral, citrus, aromatic or fruity scents — at least twice a day for 10—20 seconds at a time, usually over a 3—6 month period.
Participants are asked to focus on the memory of the smell while sniffing and recall information about the odour and its intensity. This is believed to help reorganise the nerve connections in the brain, although the exact mechanism behind it is unclear.
Some studies recommend using a single set of scents, while others recommend switching to a new set of odours after a certain amount of time. However both methods show significant improvement in smelling.
This training has also been shown to alleviate depressive symptoms and improve cognitive decline both in older adults and those suffering from dementia.
Just like physiotherapy after a physical injury, olfactory training is thought to act like rehabilitation for your sense of smell. It retrains the nerves in your nose and the connections it forms within the brain, allowing you to correctly detect, process and interpret odours.
Lynn Nazareth, Research Scientist in Olfactory Biology, CSIRO
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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