10almonds Subcribers Take The Wheel!
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❓ Q&A With 10almonds Subscribers!
Q: What kind of salt is best for neti pots?
A: Non-iodised salt is usually recommended, but really, any human-safe salt is fine. By this we mean for example:
- Sodium chloride (like most kitchen salts),
- Potassium chloride (as found in “reduced sodium” kitchen salts), or
- Magnesium sulfate (also known as epsom salts).
Q: You talked about spearmint as reducing testosterone levels, what about ginseng for increasing them?
A: Hormones are complicated and often it’s not a simple matter of higher or lower levels! It can also be a matter of…
- how your body converts one thing into another
- how your body responds (or not) to something according to how the relevant hormone’s receptors are doing
- …and whether there’s anything else blocking those receptors.
All this to say: spearmint categorically is an anti-androgen, but the mechanism of action remains uncertain.
Panax ginseng, meanwhile, is one of the most well-established mysteries in herbal medicine.
Paradoxically, it seems to improve both male and female hormonal regulation, despite being more commonly associated with the former.
- It doesn’t necessarily increase or decrease testosterone or estrogen levels (but it can, even if indirectly)
- It does improve sexual function
- …and alleviates symptoms associated with conditions as varied as:
- Late-onset hypogonadism (common for men during the andropause)
- Benign prostate hyperplasia (again common for men during the andropause)
- …and also counteracts unwanted side-effects of finasteride. Finasteride is often taken by men as a hair loss remedy or, less often but critically, in the case of an enlarged prostate.
But it also…
- Alleviates symptoms of PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome, which effects around 20% of women)
- May even be an effective treatment for PCOS (rat model only so far)
- It also may improve female reproductive fertility more generally (the studies are down to fruit flies now though)
Bottom line: Panax ginseng is popularly taken to improve natural hormone function, a task at which it appears to excel.
Scientists are still working out exactly how it does the many things it appears to do.
Progress has been made, and it clearly is science rather than witchcraft, but there are still far more unanswered questions than resolved ones!
Q: I like that the quizzes (I’ve done two so far) give immediate results , with no “give us your email to get your results”. Thanks!
A: You’re welcome! That’s one of the factors that influences what things we include here! Our mission statement is “to make health and productivity crazy simple”, and the unwritten part of that is making sure to save your time and energy wherever we reasonably can!
Q: Do you know if adrafanil is as good as modafinil? It seems to be a lot cheaper for the same result?
A: Adrafinil is the pro-drug of modafinil. What this means is that if you take it, your own liver will use it to make modafinil inside you. So the end result is chemically the same drug.
As to whether it’s as good, it depends what you need. It’s worth noting that anything that taxes liver function can be harmful if you take too much, and/or your liver is already strained for some reason.
If in doubt, consult a doctor! And if it’s something that’s accessible to you, a recent lipids test (a kind of blood test that checks your liver health) is always a good thing to have.
Q: Would love to see your take on polyphasic sleep!
A: Watch this space
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Blood-Brain Barrier Breach Blamed For Brain-Fog
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Move Over, Leaky Gut. Now It’s A Leaky Brain.
…which is not a headline that promises good news, and indeed, the only good news about this currently is “now we know another thing that’s happening, and thus can work towards a treatment for it”.
Back in February (most popular media outlets did not rush to publish this, as it rather goes against the narrative of “remember when COVID was a thing?” as though the numbers haven’t risen since the state of emergency was declared over), a team of Irish researchers made a discovery:
❝For the first time, we have been able to show that leaky blood vessels in the human brain, in tandem with a hyperactive immune system may be the key drivers of brain fog associated with long covid❞
~ Dr. Matthew Campbell (one of the researchers)
Let’s break that down a little, borrowing some context from the paper itself:
- the leaky blood vessels are breaching the blood-brain-barrier
- that’s a big deal, because that barrier is our only filter between our brain and Things That Definitely Should Not Go In The Brain™
- a hyperactive immune system can also be described as chronic inflammation
- in this case, that includes chronic neuroinflammation which, yes, is also a major driver of dementia
You may be wondering what COVID has to do with this, and well:
- these blood-brain-barrier breaches were very significantly associated (in lay terms: correlated, but correlated is only really used as an absolute in write-ups) with either acute COVID infection, or Long Covid.
- checking this in vitro, exposure of brain endothelial cells to serum from patients with Long Covid induced the same expression of inflammatory markers.
How important is this?
As another researcher (not to mention: professor of neurology and head of the school of medicine at Trinity) put it:
❝The findings will now likely change the landscape of how we understand and treat post-viral neurological conditions.
It also confirms that the neurological symptoms of long covid are measurable with real and demonstrable metabolic and vascular changes in the brain.❞
~ Dr. Colin Doherty (see mini-bio above)
You can read a pop-science article about this here:
Irish researchers discover underlying cause of “brain fog” linked with long covid
…and you can read the paper in full here:
Want to stay safe?
Beyond the obvious “get protected when offered boosters/updates” (see also: The Truth About Vaccines), other good practices include the same things most people were doing when the pandemic was big news, especially avoiding enclosed densely-populated places, washing hands frequently, and looking after your immune system. For that latter, see also:
Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!
Take care!
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- the leaky blood vessels are breaching the blood-brain-barrier
The Humor Habit – by Paul Osincup
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Ask not for whom the bell tolls… It could be tolling for anyone. Don’t worry about it.It’s probably fine.
More seriously (heh), laughter is good for healthy lifespan, also called healthspan. It eases stress and anxiety, gives our brains neurochemicals they need to function well, and is very pro-social too, which in turn has knock-on positive effects for our own mental health as well as those around us.
This book is a guide to cultivating that humor, finding the funny side in difficult times, and bringing a light-hearted silliness to moments where it helps.
The title suggests it’s about habit-building (and it is!) but it’s also about knowing where to look in your daily life for humorous potential and how to find it, and how to bring that into being in the moment.
The style is that of an instruction manual with a healthy dose of pop-science; first and foremost this is a practical guide, not a several-hundred page exhortation on “find things funny!”, but rather a “hey, psst, here are many sneaky insider tricks for finding the funny“.
Bottom line: this book is not only a very enjoyable read, but also very much the gift that keeps on giving, so treat yourself!
Click here to check out The Humor Habit, and strength your funny-bones!
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How long does back pain last? And how can learning about pain increase the chance of recovery?
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Back pain is common. One in thirteen people have it right now and worldwide a staggering 619 million people will have it this year.
Chronic pain, of which back pain is the most common, is the world’s most disabling health problem. Its economic impact dwarfs other health conditions.
If you get back pain, how long will it take to go away? We scoured the scientific literature to find out. We found data on almost 20,000 people, from 95 different studies and split them into three groups:
- acute – those with back pain that started less than six weeks ago
- subacute – where it started between six and 12 weeks ago
- chronic – where it started between three months and one year ago.
We found 70%–95% of people with acute back pain were likely to recover within six months. This dropped to 40%–70% for subacute back pain and to 12%–16% for chronic back pain.
Clinical guidelines point to graded return to activity and pain education under the guidance of a health professional as the best ways to promote recovery. Yet these effective interventions are underfunded and hard to access.
More pain doesn’t mean a more serious injury
Most acute back pain episodes are not caused by serious injury or disease.
There are rare exceptions, which is why it’s wise to see your doctor or physio, who can check for signs and symptoms that warrant further investigation. But unless you have been in a significant accident or sustained a large blow, you are unlikely to have caused much damage to your spine.
Your doctor or physio can rule out serious damage.
DG fotostock/ShutterstockEven very minor back injuries can be brutally painful. This is, in part, because of how we are made. If you think of your spinal cord as a very precious asset (which it is), worthy of great protection (which it is), a bit like the crown jewels, then what would be the best way to keep it safe? Lots of protection and a highly sensitive alarm system.
The spinal cord is protected by strong bones, thick ligaments, powerful muscles and a highly effective alarm system (your nervous system). This alarm system can trigger pain that is so unpleasant that you cannot possibly think of, let alone do, anything other than seek care or avoid movement.
The messy truth is that when pain persists, the pain system becomes more sensitive, so a widening array of things contribute to pain. This pain system hypersensitivity is a result of neuroplasticity – your nervous system is becoming better at making pain.
Reduce your chance of lasting pain
Whether or not your pain resolves is not determined by the extent of injury to your back. We don’t know all the factors involved, but we do know there are things that you can do to reduce chronic back pain:
- understand how pain really works. This will involve intentionally learning about modern pain science and care. It will be difficult but rewarding. It will help you work out what you can do to change your pain
- reduce your pain system sensitivity. With guidance, patience and persistence, you can learn how to gradually retrain your pain system back towards normal.
How to reduce your pain sensitivity and learn about pain
Learning about “how pain works” provides the most sustainable improvements in chronic back pain. Programs that combine pain education with graded brain and body exercises (gradual increases in movement) can reduce pain system sensitivity and help you return to the life you want.
Some programs combine education with gradual increases in movement.
Halfpoint/ShutterstockThese programs have been in development for years, but high-quality clinical trials are now emerging and it’s good news: they show most people with chronic back pain improve and many completely recover.
But most clinicians aren’t equipped to deliver these effective programs – good pain education is not taught in most medical and health training degrees. Many patients still receive ineffective and often risky and expensive treatments, or keep seeking temporary pain relief, hoping for a cure.
When health professionals don’t have adequate pain education training, they can deliver bad pain education, which leaves patients feeling like they’ve just been told it’s all in their head.
Community-driven not-for-profit organisations such as Pain Revolution are training health professionals to be good pain educators and raising awareness among the general public about the modern science of pain and the best treatments. Pain Revolution has partnered with dozens of health services and community agencies to train more than 80 local pain educators and supported them to bring greater understanding and improved care to their colleagues and community.
But a broader system-wide approach, with government, industry and philanthropic support, is needed to expand these programs and fund good pain education. To solve the massive problem of chronic back pain, effective interventions need to be part of standard care, not as a last resort after years of increasing pain, suffering and disability.
Sarah Wallwork, Post-doctoral Researcher, University of South Australia and Lorimer Moseley, Professor of Clinical Neurosciences and Foundation Chair in Physiotherapy, University of South Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Get Fitter As You Go
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Dr. Jaime Seeman: Hard To Kill?
This is Dr. Jaime Seeman. She’s a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist with a background in nutrition, exercise, and health science. She’s also a Fellow in Integrative Medicine, and a board-certified nutrition specialist.
However, her biggest focus is preventative medicine.
What does she want us to know?
The Five Pillars of being “Hard to Kill”!
As an athlete when she was younger, she got away with poor nutrition habits with good exercise, but pregnancy (thrice) brought her poor thyroid function, other hormonal imbalances, and pre-diabetes.
So, she set about getting better—not something the general medical establishment focuses on a lot! Doctors are pressured to manage symptoms, but are under no expectation to actually help people get better.
So, what are her five pillars?
Nutrition
Dr. Seeman unsurprisingly recommends a whole-foods diet with lots of plants, but unlike many plant-enjoyers, she is also an enjoyer of the ketogenic diet.
While keto-enthusiasts say “carbs are bad” and vegans say “meat is bad”, the reality is: both of those things can be bad, and in both cases, avoiding the most harmful varieties is a very good first step:
Movement
This is in two parts:
- get your 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week
- keep your body mobile!
See also:
Sleep
This one’s quite straightforward, and Dr. Seeman uncontroversially recommends getting 7–9 hours per night; yes, even you:
Mindset
This is key to Dr. Seeman’s approach, and it is about not settling for average, because the average is undernourished, overmedicated, sedentary, and suffering.
She encourages us all to keep working for better health, wherever we’re at. To not “go gentle into that good night”, to get stronger whatever our age, to showcase increasingly robust vitality as we go.
To believe we can, and then to do it.
Environment
That previous item usually won’t last beyond a 10-day health-kick without the correct environment.
As for how to make sure we have that? Check out:
Want more?
She does offer coaching:
Hard To Kill Academy: Master The Mindset To Maximize Your Years
Take care!
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How the stress of playing chess can be fatal
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The death of a chess player in the middle of a match at the world’s most prestigious competition may have shocked those who view the game as a relaxing pastime. Kurt Meier, 67, collapsed during his final match in the tournament and died in hospital later that day. But chess, like any other game or sport, can lead to an immense amount of stress, which can be bad for a competitor’s physical health too.
We tend to associate playing sport or games with good health and well-being. And there are a countless number of studies showing playing games has an association with feeling happier. While this argument is true for recreational players, the story can be different for the elite, where success and failure are won and lost by the finest margins and where winning can mean funding and a future, and losing can mean poverty and unemployment. If this is the case, can being successful at a sport or game actually be bad for you?
Competitive anxiety
Elite competition can be stressful because the outcome is so important to the competitors. We can measure stress using a whole range of physiological indicators such as heart rate and temperature, and responses such as changes in the intensity of our emotions.
Emotions provide a warning of threat. So if you feel that achieving your goal is going to be difficult, then expect to feel intense emotions. The leading candidate that signals we are experiencing stress is anxiety, characterised by thoughts of worry, fears of dread about performance, along with accompanying physiological responses such as increased heart rate and sweaty palms. If these symptoms are experienced regularly or chronically, then this is clearly detrimental to health.
This stress response is probably not restricted to elite athletes. Intense emotions are linked to trying to achieve important goals and while it isn’t the only situation where it occurs, it is just very noticeable in sport.
The causes of stress
It makes more sense to focus on what the causes of stress are rather than where we experience it. The principle is that the more important the goal is to achieve, then the greater the propensity for the situation to intensify emotions.
Emotions intensify also by the degree of uncertainty and competing, at whatever level of a sport, is uncertain when the opposition is trying its hardest to win the contest and also has a motivation to succeed. The key point is that almost all athletes at any level can suffer bouts of stress, partly due to high levels of motivation.
A stress response is also linked to how performance is judged and reported. Potentially stressful tasks tend to be ones where performance is public and feedback is immediate. In chess – as with most sporting contests – we see who the winner is and can start celebrating success or commiserating failure as soon as the game is over.
There are many tasks which have similar features. Giving a speech in public, taking an academic examination, or taking your driving test are all examples of tasks that can illicit stress. Stress is not restricted to formal tasks but can also include social tasks. Asking a potential partner for a date, hand in marriage, and meeting the in-laws for the first time can be equally stressful.
Winning a contest or going on a date relate to higher-order goals about how we see ourselves. If we define ourselves as “being a good player” or “being attractive or likeable” then contrasting information is likely to associate with unpleasant emotions. You will feel devastated if you are turned down when asking someone out on a date, for instance, and if this was repeated, it could lead to reduced self-esteem and depression.
The key message here is to recognise what your goals are and think about how important they are. If you want to achieve them with a passion and if the act of achieving them leads to intense and sometimes unwanted emotions, then it’s worth thinking about doing some work to manage these emotions.
Andrew Lane, Professor in Sport and Learning, University of Wolverhampton
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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HIIT, But Make It HIRT
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This May HIRT A Bit
This is Ingrid Clay. She’s a professional athlete, personal trainer, chef*, and science writer.
*A vegan bodybuilding chef, no less:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
For those who prefer reading…
This writer does too
We’ve previously reviewed her book, “Science of HIIT”, and we’re going to be talking a bit about High Intensity Interval Training today.
If you’d like to know a little more about the woman herself first, then…
Centr | Meet Ingrid: Your HIIT HIRT trainer
Yes, that is Centr, as in Chris Hemsworth’s personal training app, where Clay is the resident HIIT & HIRT expert & trainer.
What’s this HIIT & HIRT?
“HIIT” is High Intensity Interval Training, which we’ve written about before:
How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
Basically, it’s a super-efficient way of working out, that gets better results than working out for longer with other methods, especially because of how it raises the metabolism for a couple of hours after training (this effect is called EPOC, by the way—Excessive Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption), and is a good thing.
You can read more about the science of it, in the above-linked main feature.
And HIRT?
“HIRT” is High Intensity Resistance Training, and is resistance training performed with HIIT principles.
See also: Chris Hemsworth’s Trainer Ingrid Clay Explains HIRT
An example is doing 10 reps of a resistance exercise (e.g., a dumbbell press) every minute on odd-numbered minutes, and 10 reps of a different resistance exercise (e.g. dumbbell squats) on even-numbered minutes.
If dumbbells aren’t your thing, it could be resistance bands, or even the floor (press-ups are a resistance exercise!)
For HIRT that’s not also a cardio exercise, gaps between different exercises can be quite minimal, as we only need to confuse the muscles, not the heart. So, effectively, it becomes a specially focused kind of circuit training!
If doing planks though, you might want to check out Clay’s troubleshooting guide:
Want more from Clay?
Here she gives a full 20-minute full-body HIIT HIRT workout:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Enjoy!
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