Good Energy – by Dr. Casey Means

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For a book with a title like “Good Energy” and chapters such as “Bad Energy Is the Root of Disease”, this is actually a very science-based book (and there are a flock of well-known doctors saying so in the “praise for” section, too).

The premise is simple: most of our health is a matter of what our metabolism is (or isn’t) doing, and it’s not just a case of “doing more” or “doing less”. Indeed, a lot of “our” energy is expended doing bad things (such as chronic inflammation, to give an obvious example).

Dr. Means outlines about a dozen things many people do wrong, and about a dozen things we can do right, to get our body’s energy system working for us, rather than against us.

The style here is pop-science throughout, and in the category of criticism, the bibliography is offloaded to her website (we prefer to have things in our hands). However, the information here is good, clearly-presented, and usefully actionable.

Bottom line: if you ever find yourself feeling run-down and like your body is using your resources against you rather than for you, this is the book to get you out of that slump!

Click here to check out Good Energy, and get your metabolism working for you!

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  • Thai-Style Kale Chips

    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.

    …that are actually crispy, tasty, and packed with nutrients! Lots of magnesium and calcium, and array of health-giving spices too.

    You will need

    • 7 oz raw curly kale, stalks removed
    • extra virgin olive oil, for drizzling
    • 3 cloves garlic, crushed
    • 2 tsp red chili flakes (or crushed dried red chilis)
    • 2 tsp light soy sauce
    • 2 tsp water
    • 1 tbsp crunchy peanut butter (pick one with no added sugar, salt, etc)
    • 1 tsp honey
    • 1 tsp Thai seven-spice powder
    • 1 tsp black pepper
    • 1 tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Pre-heat the oven to 180℃ / 350℉ / Gas mark 4.

    2) Put the kale in a bowl and drizzle a little olive oil over it. Work the oil in gently with your fingertips so that the kale is coated; the leaves will also soften while you do this; that’s expected, so don’t worry.

    3) Mix the rest of the ingredients to make a sauce; coat the kale leaves with the sauce.

    4) Place on a baking tray, as spread-out as there’s room for, and bake on a middle shelf for 15–20 minutes. If your oven has a fierce heat source at the top, it can be good to place an empty baking tray on a shelf above the kale chips, to baffle the heat and prevent them from cooking unevenly—especially if it’s not a fan oven.

    5) Remove and let cool, and then serve! They can also be stored in an airtight container if desired.

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    Take care!

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  • Food Expiration Dates Don’t Mean What Most People Think They Mean

    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.

    Have you ever wondered why rock salt that formed during the Precambrian era has a label on it saying that it expires next month? To take something more delicate, how about eggs that expire next Thursday; isn’t that oddly specific for something that is surely affected by many variables? What matters, and what doesn’t?

    Covering their assets

    The US in particular wastes huge amounts of food, with 37% of food waste coming from households. Confusion over date labels is a major contributor, accounting for 20% of household food waste. Many people misinterpret these labels, often discarding food that is still safe to eat—which is good for the companies selling the food, because then they get to sell you more.

    Date labels were introduced in the 70s with the “open dating” system to indicate optimal freshness, not safety. These dates are often conservative, set by manufacturers to ensure food is consumed at its best quality and encourage repeat purchases. However, many foods remain safe well past their labeled dates, including shelf-stable items like pasta, rice, and canned goods, as well as frozen foods stored properly.

    Some foods do pose safety risks, especially meat and dairy products, as well as many grain-based foods, all of which which can harbor harmful bacteria. Infant formula labels are strictly regulated for safety. However, most date labels are not linked to health risks, leading to unnecessary waste.

    When it comes down to it, our senses of sight, smell, and taste are more reliable than dates on packaging. Some quick pointers and caveats:

    • If it has changed color in some way that’s not associated with a healthily ripening fruit or vegetable, that’s probably bad
    • If it is moldy, that’s probably bad (but the degree of badness varies from food to food; see the link beneath today’s video for more on that)
    • If a container has developed droplets of water on the inside when it didn’t have those before, that’s probably bad (it means something is respiring, and is thus alive, that probably shouldn’t be)
    • If it smells bad, that’s probably bad—however this is not a good safety test, because a bad smell may often mean you are inhaling mold spores, which are not good for your lungs.
    • If it tastes different than that food usually does, that’s probably bad (especially if it became bitter, pungent, tangy, sour, or cheesy, and does nor normally taste that way).

    Some places have trialled clearer labelling, for example a distinction between “expires” and merely “best before”, but public awareness about the distinction is low. Some places have trialled removing dates entirely, to oblige the consumer to use their own senses instead. This is good for the seller in a different way than household food waste is, because it means the seller will have less in-store waste (because they can still sell something that might previously have been labelled as expired).

    For more on all of this, enjoy:

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

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Mythbusting Moldy Food

    Take care!

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  • I’ve been sick. When can I start exercising again?

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    You’ve had a cold or the flu and your symptoms have begun to subside. Your nose has stopped dripping, your cough is clearing and your head and muscles no longer ache.

    You’re ready to get off the couch. But is it too early to go for a run? Here’s what to consider when getting back to exercising after illness.

    Ketut Subiyanto/Pexels

    Exercise can boost your immune system – but not always

    Exercise reduces the chance of getting respiratory infections by increasing your immune function and the ability to fight off viruses.

    However, an acute bout of endurance exercise may temporarily increase your susceptibility to upper respiratory infections, such as colds and the flu, via the short-term suppression of your immune system. This is known as the “open window” theory.

    A study from 2010 examined changes in trained cyclists’ immune systems up to eight hours after two-hour high-intensity cycling. It found important immune functions were suppressed, resulting in an increased rate of upper respiratory infections after the intense endurance exercise.

    So, we have to be more careful after performing harder exercises than normal.

    Can you exercise when you’re sick?

    This depends on the severity of your symptoms and the intensity of exercise.

    Mild to moderate exercise (reducing the intensity and length of workout) may be OK if your symptoms are a runny nose, nasal congestion, sneezing and minor sore throat, without a fever.

    Exercise may help you feel better by opening your nasal passages and temporarily relieving nasal congestion.

    Man walks on a beach
    If you have a runny or blocked nose and no fever, low-intensity movement such as a walk might help. Laker/Pexels

    However, if you try to exercise at your normal intensity when you are sick, you risk injury or more serious illness. So it’s important to listen to your body.

    If your symptoms include chest congestion, a cough, upset stomach, fever, fatigue or widespread muscle aches, avoid exercising. Exercising when you have these symptoms may worsen the symptoms and prolong the recovery time.

    If you’ve had the flu or another respiratory illness that caused a high fever, make sure your temperature is back to normal before getting back to exercise. Exercising raises your body temperature, so if you already have a fever, your temperature will become high quicker, which makes you sicker.

    If you have COVID or other contagious illnesses, stay at home, rest and isolate yourself from others.

    When you’re sick and feel weak, don’t force yourself to exercise. Focus instead on getting plenty of rest. This may actually shorten the time it takes to recover and resume your normal workout routine.

    I’ve been sick for a few weeks. What has happened to my strength and fitness?

    You may think taking two weeks off from training is disastrous, and worry you’ll lose the gains you’ve made in your previous workouts. But it could be just what the body needs.

    It’s true that almost all training benefits are reversible to some degree. This means the physical fitness that you have built up over time can be lost without regular exercise.

    To study the effects of de-training on our body functions, researchers have undertaken “bed rest” studies, where healthy volunteers spend up to 70 days in bed. They found that V̇O₂max (the maximum amount of oxygen a person can use during maximal exercise, which is a measure of aerobic fitness) declines 0.3–0.4% a day. And the higher pre-bed-rest V̇O₂max levels, the larger the declines.

    In terms of skeletal muscles, upper thigh muscles become smaller by 2% after five days of bed rest, 5% at 14 days, and 12% at 35 days of bed rest.

    Muscle strength declines more than muscle mass: knee extensor muscle strength gets weaker by 8% at five days, 12% at 14 days and more than 20% after around 35 days of bed rest.

    This is why it feels harder to do the same exercises after resting for even five days.

    Man sits on the side of his bed
    In bed rest studies, participants don’t get up. But they do in real life. Olly/Pexels

    But in bed rest studies, physical activities are strictly limited, and even standing up from a bed is prohibited during the whole length of a study. When we’re sick in bed, we have some physical activities such as sitting on a bed, standing up and walking to the toilet. These activities could reduce the rate of decreases in our physical functions compared with study participants.

    How to ease back into exercise

    Start with a lower-intensity workout initially, such as going for a walk instead of a run. Your first workout back should be light so you don’t get out of breath. Go low (intensity) and go slow.

    Gradually increase the volume and intensity to the previous level. It may take the same number of days or weeks you rested to get back to where you were. If you were absent from an exercise routine for two weeks, for example, it may require two weeks for your fitness to return to the same level.

    If you feel exhausted after exercising, take an extra day off before working out again. A day or two off from exercising shouldn’t affect your performance very much.

    Ken Nosaka, Professor of Exercise and Sports Science, Edith Cowan University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Related Posts

  • Scarcity Brain – by Michael Easter
  • Dietary Changes for Artery Health

    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.

    It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

    Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!

    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

    ❝How does your diet change clean out your arteries of the bad cholesterol?❞

    There’s good news and bad news here, and they can both be delivered with a one-word reply:

    Slowly.

    Or rather: what’s being cleaned out is mostly not the LDL (bad) cholesterol, but rather, the result of that.

    When our diet is bad for cardiovascular health, our arteries get fatty deposits on their walls. Cholesterol gets stuck here too, but that’s not the main physical problem.

    Our body’s natural defenses come into action and try to clean it up, but they (for example macrophages, a kind of white blood cell that consumes invaders and then dies, before being recycled by the next part of the system) often get stuck and become part of the buildup (called atheroma), which can lead to atherosclerosis and (if calcium levels are high) hardening of the arteries, which is the worst end of this.

    This can then require medical attention, precisely because the body can’t remove it very well—especially if you are still maintaining a heart-unhealthy diet, thus continuing to add to the mess.

    However, if it is not too bad yet, yes, a dietary change alone will reverse this process. Without new material being added to the arterial walls, the body’s continual process of rejuvenation will eventually fix it, given time (free from things making it worse) and resources.

    In fact, your arteries can be one of the quickest places for your body to make something better or worse, because the blood is the means by which the body moves most things (good or bad) around the body.

    All the more reason to take extra care of it, since everything else depends on it!

    You might also like our previous main feature:

    All Things Heart Health

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  • Alzheimer’s may have once spread from person to person, but the risk of that happening today is incredibly low

    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.

    An article published this week in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine documents what is believed to be the first evidence that Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted from person to person.

    The finding arose from long-term follow up of patients who received human growth hormone (hGH) that was taken from brain tissue of deceased donors.

    Preparations of donated hGH were used in medicine to treat a variety of conditions from 1959 onwards – including in Australia from the mid 60s.

    The practice stopped in 1985 when it was discovered around 200 patients worldwide who had received these donations went on to develop Creuztfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which causes a rapidly progressive dementia. This is an otherwise extremely rare condition, affecting roughly one person in a million.

    What’s CJD got to do with Alzehimer’s?

    CJD is caused by prions: infective particles that are neither bacterial or viral, but consist of abnormally folded proteins that can be transmitted from cell to cell.

    Other prion diseases include kuru, a dementia seen in New Guinea tribespeople caused by eating human tissue, scrapie (a disease of sheep) and variant CJD or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as mad cow disease. This raised public health concerns over the eating of beef products in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.

    Human growth hormone used to come from donated organs

    Human growth hormone (hGH) is produced in the brain by the pituitary gland. Treatments were originally prepared from purified human pituitary tissue.

    But because the amount of hGH contained in a single gland is extremely small, any single dose given to any one patient could contain material from around 16,000 donated glands.

    An average course of hGH treatment lasts around four years, so the chances of receiving contaminated material – even for a very rare condition such as CJD – became quite high for such people.

    hGH is now manufactured synthetically in a laboratory, rather than from human tissue. So this particular mode of CJD transmission is no longer a risk.

    Scientist in a lab
    Human growth hormone is now produced in a lab.
    National Cancer Institute/Unsplash

    What are the latest findings about Alzheimer’s disease?

    The Nature Medicine paper provides the first evidence that transmission of Alzheimer’s disease can occur via human-to-human transmission.

    The authors examined the outcomes of people who received donated hGH until 1985. They found five such recipients had developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

    They considered other explanations for the findings but concluded donated hGH was the likely cause.

    Given Alzheimer’s disease is a much more common illness than CJD, the authors presume those who received donated hGH before 1985 may be at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

    Alzheimer’s disease is caused by presence of two abnormally folded proteins: amyloid and tau. There is increasing evidence these proteins spread in the brain in a similar way to prion diseases. So the mode of transmission the authors propose is certainly plausible.

    However, given the amyloid protein deposits in the brain at least 20 years before clinical Alzheimer’s disease develops, there is likely to be a considerable time lag before cases that might arise from the receipt of donated hGH become evident.

    When was this process used in Australia?

    In Australia, donated pituitary material was used from 1967 to 1985 to treat people with short stature and infertility.

    More than 2,000 people received such treatment. Four developed CJD, the last case identified in 1991. All four cases were likely linked to a single contaminated batch.

    The risks of any other cases of CJD developing now in pituitary material recipients, so long after the occurrence of the last identified case in Australia, are considered to be incredibly small.

    Early-onset Alzheimer’s disease (defined as occurring before the age of 65) is uncommon, accounting for around 5% of all cases. Below the age of 50 it’s rare and likely to have a genetic contribution.

    Older man places his hands on his head
    Early onset Alzheimer’s means it occurs before age 65.
    perfectlab/Shutterstock

    The risk is very low – and you can’t ‘catch’ it like a virus

    The Nature Medicine paper identified five cases which were diagnosed in people aged 38 to 55. This is more than could be expected by chance, but still very low in comparison to the total number of patients treated worldwide.

    Although the long “incubation period” of Alzheimer’s disease may mean more similar cases may be identified in the future, the absolute risk remains very low. The main scientific interest of the article lies in the fact it’s first to demonstrate that Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted from person to person in a similar way to prion diseases, rather than in any public health risk.

    The authors were keen to emphasise, as I will, that Alzheimer’s cannot be contracted via contact with or providing care to people with Alzheimer’s disease.The Conversation

    Steve Macfarlane, Head of Clinical Services, Dementia Support Australia, & Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Monash University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)

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    How To Be An Expert Nap-Artist

    There’s a lot of science to say that napping can bring us health benefits—but mistiming it can just make us more tired. So, how to get some refreshing shut-eye, without ending up with a case of the midday melatonin blues?

    First, why do we want to nap?

    Well, maybe we’re just tired, but there are specific benefits even if we’re not. For example:

    What can go wrong?

    There are two main things that can go wrong, physiologically speaking:

    1. We can overdo it, and not sleep well at night
    2. We can awake groggy and confused and tired

    The first is self-explanatory—it messes with the circadian rhythm. For this reason, we should not sleep more than 90 minutes during the day. If that seems like a lot, and maybe you’ve heard that we shouldn’t sleep more than half an hour, there is science here, so read on…

    The second is a matter of sleep cycles. Our brain naturally organizes our sleep into multiples of 20-minute segments, with a slight break of a few minutes between each. Consequently, naps should be:

    • 25ish minutes
    • 40–45 minutes
    • 90ish minutes

    If you wake up mid-cycle—for example, because your alarm went off, or someone disturbed you, or even because you needed to pee, you will be groggy, disoriented, and exhausted.

    For this reason, a nap of one hour (a common choice, since people like “round” numbers) is a recipe for disaster, and will only work if you take 15 minutes to fall asleep. In which case, it’d really be a nap of 45 minutes, made up of two 20-minute sleep cycles.

    Some interruptions are better/worse than others

    If you’re in light or REM sleep, a disruption will leave you not very refreshed, but not wiped out either. And as a bonus, if you’re interrupted during a REM cycle, you’re more likely to remember your dreams.

    If you’re in deep sleep, a disruption will leave you with what feels like an incredible hangover, minus the headache, and you’ll be far more tired than you were before you started the nap.

    The best way to nap

    Taking these factors into account, one of the “safest” ways to nap is to set your alarm for the top end of the time-bracket above the one you actually want to nap for (e.g., if you want to nap for 25ish minutes, set your alarm for 45).

    Unless you’re very sleep-deprived, you’ll probably wake up briefly after 20–25 minutes of sleep. This may seem like nearer 30 minutes, if it took you some minutes to fall asleep!

    If you don’t wake up then, or otherwise fail to get up, your alarm will catch you later at what will hopefully be between your next sleep cycles, or at the very least not right in the middle of one.

    When you wake up from a nap before your alarm, get up. This is not the time for “5 more minutes” because “5 more minutes” will never, ever, be refreshing.

    Rest well!

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