Glucose Revolution – by Jessie Inchauspé
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While we all know that keeping balanced blood sugars is important for all us (be we diabetic, pre-diabetic, or not at all), it can be a mystifying topic!
Beyond a generic “sugar is bad”…
- What does it all mean and how does it all work?
- Should we go low-carb?
- What’s the deal with fruit?
- Carbs or protein for breakfast?
- Is “quick energy” ever a good thing?
- How do starches weigh in again?
It’s all so confusing!
Happily, Jessie Inchauspé has the incredible trifecta of qualifications to help us: she’s a biochemist, a keen cook, and a great educator. What we mean by this latter is:
Instead of dry textbook explanations, or “trust me” hand-waives, she explains biochemistry in a clear, simple, digestible (if you’ll pardon the pun) way with very helpful diagrams what things cause (or flatten) blood sugar spikes and how and why. If you read this book, you will understand, without guesswork or gaps, exactly what is happening on a physical level, and why and how her “10 hacks” work.
Her “10 hacks” are explained so thoroughly that each gets a chapter of its own, but we’ll not keep them a mystery from you meanwhile, they are:
- Eat foods in the right order
- Add a green starter to your meals
- Stop counting calories
- Flatten your breakfast curve
- Have any type of sugar you like—they’re all the same
- Pick dessert over a sweet snack
- Reach for the vinegar before you eat
- After you eat, move
- If you have to snack, go savoury
- Put some clothes on your carbs
She then finishes up with a collection of handy cheat-sheets and some of her own recipes.
Bottom line: this isn’t just a “how-to” book. It gives the how-to, yes, but it also gives such good explanations that you’ll never be confused again by what’s going on in your glucose-related health.
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The Doctor’s Kitchen – by Dr. Rupy Aujla
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We’ve featured Dr. Aujla before as an expert-of-the-week, and now it’s time to review a book by him. What’s his deal, and what should you expect?
Dr. Aujla first outlines the case for food as medicine. Not just “eat nutritionally balanced meals”, but literally, “here are the medicinal properties of these plants”. Think of some of the herbs and spices we’ve featured in our Monday Research Reviews, and add in medicinal properties of cancer-fighting cruciferous vegetables, bananas with dopamine and dopamine precursors, berries full of polyphenols, hemp seeds that fight cognitive decline, and so forth.
Most of the book is given over to recipes. They’re plant-centric, but mostly not vegan. They’re consistent with the Mediterranean diet, but mostly Indian. They’re economically mindful (favoring cheap ingredients where reasonable) while giving a nod to where an extra dollar will elevate the meal. They don’t give calorie values etc—this is a feature not a bug, as Dr. Aujla is of the “positive dieting” camp that advocates for us to “count colors, not calories”. Which, we have to admit, makes for very stress-free cooking, too.
Dr. Aujla is himself an Indian Brit, by the way, which gives him two intersecting factors for having a taste for spices. If you don’t share that taste, just go easier on the pepper etc.
As for the medicinal properties we mentioned up top? Four pages of references at the back, for any who are curious to look up the science of them. We at 10almonds do love references!
Bottom line: if you like tasty food and you’re looking for a one-stop, well-rounded, food-as-medicine cookbook, this one is a top-tier choice.
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When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
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When knowing what to do isn’t the problem
Often, we know what we need to do. Sometimes, knowing isn’t the problem!
The topic today is going to be a technique used by therapeutic service providers to help people to enact positive changes in their lives.
While this is a necessarily dialectic practice (i.e., it involves a back-and-forth dialogue), it’s still perfectly possible to do it alone, and that’s what we’ll be focussing on in this main feature.
What is Motivational Interviewing?
❝Motivational interviewing (MI) is a technique that has been specifically developed to help motivate ambivalent patients to change their behavior.❞
Read in full: Motivational Interviewing: An Evidence-Based Approach for Use in Medical Practice
It’s mostly used for such things as helping people reduce or eliminate substance abuse, or manage their weight, or exercise more, things like that.
However, it can be employed for any endeavour that requires motivation and sustained willpower to carry it through.
Three Phases
Motivational Interviewing traditionally has three phases:
- Exploring and understanding the issue at hand
- Guiding and deciding importance and goals
- Choosing and setting an action plan
In self-practice, maybe you can already know and understand what it is that you want/need to change.
If not, consider asking yourself such questions as:
- What does a good day look like? What does a bad day look like?
- If things are not good now, when were they good? What changed?
- If everything were perfect now, what would that look like? How would you know?
Once you have a clear idea of where you want to be, the next thing to know is: how much do you want it? And how confident are you in attaining it?
This is a critical process:
- Give your answers numerically on a scale from 0 to 10
- Whatever your score, ask yourself why it’s not lower. For example, if you scored your motivation 4 and your confidence 2, what factors made your motivation not a lower number? What factors made your confidence not a lower number?
- In the unlikely event that you gave yourself a 0, ask whether you can really afford to scrap the goal. If you can’t, find something, anything, to bring it to at least a 1.
- After you’ve done that, then you can ask yourself the more obvious question of why your numbers aren’t higher. This will help you identify barriers to overcome.
Now you’re ready to choose what to focus on and how to do it. Don’t bite off more than you can chew; it’s fine to start low and work up. You should revisit this regularly, just like you would if you had a counsellor helping you.
Some things to ask yourself at this stage of the motivational self-interviewing:
- What’s a good SMART goal to get you started?
- What could stop you from achieving your goal?
- How could you overcome that challenge?
- What is your backup plan, if you have to scale back your goal for some reason?
A conceptual example: if your goal is to stick to a whole foods Mediterranean diet, but you are attending a wedding next week, then now is the time to decide in advance 1) what personal lines-in-the-sand you will or will not draw 2) what secondary, backup plan you will make to not go too far off track.
The same example in practice: wedding menus often offer meat/fish/vegetarian options, so you might choose the fish or vegetarian, and as for sugar and alcohol, you might limit yourself to “a small slice of wedding cake only; coffee/cheese option instead of dessert”, and “alcohol only for toasts”.
Giving yourself the permission well in advance for small (clearly defined and boundaried!) diversions from the plan, will stop you from falling into the trap of “well, since today’s a cheat-day now…”
Secret fourth stage
The secret here is to keep going back and reassessing at regular intervals. Set your own calendar; you might want to start out weekly and then move to monthly when you’re more strongly on-track.
For this reason, it’s good to keep a journal with your notes from your self-interview sessions, the scores you gave yourself, the goals and plans you set, etc.
When conducting your regular review, be sure to examine what worked for you, and what didn’t (and why). That way, you can practice trial-and-improvement as you go.
Want to learn more?
We only have so much room here, but there are lots of resources out there.
Here’s a high-quality page that:
- explains motivational interviewing in more depth than we have room for here
- offers a lot of free downloadable resource packs and the like
Check it out: Motivational Interviewing Theory & Resources
Enjoy!
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Science of Yoga – by Ann Swanson
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There are a lot of yoga books out there to say “bend this way, hold this that way” and so forth, but few that really explain what is going on, how, and why. And understanding those things is of course key to motivation and adherence. So that’s what this book provides!
The book is divided into sections, and in the first part we have a tour of human anatomy and physiology. This may seem almost unrelated to yoga, but is valuable necessary-knowledge to get the most out of the next section:
The next few parts are given over to yoga asanas (stretches, positions, poses, call them what you will in English) and now we are given a clear idea of what it is doing: we get to understand exactly what’s being stretched, what blood flow is being increased and how, what organs are being settled into their correct place, and many other such things.
Importantly, this means we also understand why certain things are the way they are, and why they can’t be done in some other slightly different but perhaps superficially easier way.
The style of the book is like a school textbook, really, but without patronizing the reader. The illustrations, of which there are many, are simple enough to be clear while being detailed enough to be informative.
Bottom line: if you’re ever doing yoga at home and wondering if you should cut a certain corner, this is the book that will tell you why you shouldn’t.
Click here to check out Science of Yoga, and optimize your practice!
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How Too Much Salt May Lead To Organ Failure
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Salt’s Health Risks… More Than Just Heart Disease!
It’s been well-established for a long time that too much salt is bad for cardiovascular health. It can lead to high blood pressure, which in turn can lead to many problems, including heart attacks.
A team of researchers has found that in addition to this, it may be damaging your organs themselves.
This is because high salt levels peel away the surfaces of blood vessels. How does this harm your organs? Because it’s through those walls that nutrients are selectively passed to where they need to be—mostly your organs. So, too much salt can indirectly starve your organs of the nutrients they need to survive. And you absolutely do not want your organs to fail!
❝We’ve identified new biomarkers for diagnosing blood vessel damage, identifying patients at risk of heart attack and stroke, and developing new drug targets for therapy for a range of blood vessel diseases, including heart, kidney and lung diseases as well as dementia❞
~ Newman Sze, Canada Research Chair in Mechanisms of Health and Disease, and lead researcher on this study.
See the evidence for yourself: Endothelial Damage Arising From High Salt Hypertension Is Elucidated by Vascular Bed Systematic Profiling
Diets high in salt are a huge problem in Canada, North America as a whole, and around the world. According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report released March 9, Canadians consume 9.1 grams of salt per day.
Read: WHO global report on sodium intake reduction
You may be wondering: who is eating over 9g of salt per day?
And the answer is: mostly, people who don’t notice how much salt is already in processed foods… don’t see it, and don’t think about it.
Meanwhile, the WHO recommends the average person to consume no more than five grams, or one teaspoon, of salt per day.
Read more: Massive efforts needed to reduce salt intake and protect lives
The American Heart Association, tasked with improving public health with respect to the #1 killer of Americans (it’s also the #1 killer worldwide—but that’s not the AHA’s problem), goes further! It recommends no more than 2.3g per day, and ideally, no more than 1.5g per day.
Some handy rules-of-thumb
Here are sodium-related terms you may see on food packages:
- Salt/Sodium-Free = Less than 5mg of sodium per serving
- Very Low Sodium = 35mg or less per serving
- Low Sodium = 140mg or less per serving
- Reduced Sodium = At least 25% less sodium per serving than the usual sodium level
- Light in Sodium or Lightly Salted = At least 50% less sodium than the regular product
Confused by milligrams? Instead of remembering how many places to move the decimal point (and potentially getting an “out by an order of magnitude error—we’ve all been there!), think of the 1.5g total allowance as being 1500mg.
See also: How much sodium should I eat per day? ← from the American Heart Association
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Stop Tinnitus, & Improve Your Hearing By 130%
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Caveat: this will depend on the cause of your tinnitus, but there’s a quick diagnostic test first, and it’s for the most common kind 🙂
Step by step
To address noise in the ears (tinnitus) and improve hearing, start by identifying whether the issue is treatable. The diagnostic tests are:
- First, turn your head to the side, tilt it forward and backward, and observe changes in the noise. If the intensity changes, then the noise can be managed.
- Additionally, open and close your mouth, clenching and unclenching your teeth, and note any variations; this is about muscular tension affecting hearing.
- Finally, tilt your head downward—if the noise increases, it may mean it is a venous outflow disorder—there’s a fix for this, too.
Effective exercises focus on releasing tension and improving blood flow:
- Begin with the neck’s scalene muscles, located behind the sternocleidomastoid muscle.
- Massage these areas by moving your hands up and down and varying head positions slightly forward and backward.
- Repeat on both sides to enhance blood circulation and reduce auditory interference. Next, target the chewing muscles.
- Massage painful areas of the jaw and temporalis muscle in circular motions, working along and across the muscle fibers.
- Divide the temporalis muscle into sections and address each thoroughly to relieve tension and improve hearing.
- Mobilize the outer auditory passage by gently pulling the ear in all directions—starting with the earlobe, middle part, and upper ear.
- Focus on the cartilage above the lobe, moving it up and down to restore mobility and improve blood flow.
These exercises should fix the most common kind of tinnitus, and improve hearing—you’ll know quickly whether it works for you or not. Regular practice is required for sustained results, though.
For more on all this, plus visual demonstrations (e.g. how to find that temporalis muscle, etc), enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Tinnitus: Quieting The Unwanted Orchestra In Your Ears ← our main feature on this topic, with more things to try if this didn’t help!
Take care!
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Super Gut – by Dr. William Davis
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You may be wondering: what sets this book apart from the other gut health books we’ve reviewed? For this one, mostly it’s depth.
This is the most scientifically dense book we’ve reviewed on gut health, so if you’re put off by that, this might not be one for you. However, you don’t need prior knowledge, as he does explain things as he goes. The advice in this book is not just the usual “gut health 101” stuff, either!
A particular strength of this book is that it looks at a wide variety of gut- and gut-related disorders, and ways certain readers may need to do different things than others, to address those problems on the path to good gut health.
The style, for all its hard science content, is quite sensationalist, and that may take some getting used to for non-Americans. However, it doesn’t affect the content!
Bottom line: if you just want simple basic advice, then probably best to skip this one. However, if you are sincerely serious about gut health (or just like reading this sort of thing because learning is satisfying), then this book is packed with relevant and detailed information.
Click here to check out Super Gut, and get to know and improve yours!
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