The Truth About Handwashing

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Washing Our Hands Of It

In Tuesdays’s newsletter, we asked you how often you wash your hands, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of self-reported answers:

  • About 54% said “More times per day than [the other options]”
  • About 38% said “Whenever using the bathroom or kitchen
  • About 5% said “Once or twice per day”
  • Two (2) said “Only when visibly dirty”
  • Two (2) said “I prefer to just use sanitizer gel”

What does the science have to say about this?

People lie about their handwashing habits: True or False?

True and False (since some people lie and some don’t), but there’s science to this too. Here’s a great study from 2021 that used various levels of confidentiality in questioning (i.e., there were ways of asking that made it either obvious or impossible to know who answered how), and found…

❝We analysed data of 1434 participants. In the direct questioning group 94.5% of the participants claimed to practice proper hand hygiene; in the indirect questioning group a significantly lower estimate of only 78.1% was observed.❞

~ Dr. Laura Mieth et al.

Source: Do they really wash their hands? Prevalence estimates for personal hygiene behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic based on indirect questions

Note: the abstract alone doesn’t make it clear how the anonymization worked (it is explained later in the paper), and it was noted as a limitation of the study that the participants may not have understood how it works well enough to have confidence in it, meaning that the 78.1% is probably also inflated, just not as much as the 94.5% in the direct questioning group.

Here’s a pop-science article that cites a collection of studies, finding such things as for example…

❝With the use of wireless devices to record how many people entered the restroom and used the pumps of the soap dispensers, researchers were able to collect data on almost 200,000 restroom trips over a three-month period.

The found that only 31% of men and 65% of women washed their hands with soap.❞

Source: Study: Men Wash Their Hands Much Less Often Than Women (And People Lie About Washing Their Hands)

Sanitizer gel does the job of washing one’s hands with soap: True or False?

False, though it’s still not a bad option for when soap and water aren’t available or practical. Here’s an educational article about the science of why this is so:

UCI Health | Soap vs. Hand Sanitizer

There’s also some consideration of lab results vs real-world results, because while in principle the alcohol gel is very good at killing most bacteria / inactivating most viruses, it can take up to 4 minutes of alcohol gel contact to do so, as in this study with flu viruses:

Situations Leading to Reduced Effectiveness of Current Hand Hygiene against Infectious Mucus from Influenza Virus-Infected Patients

In contrast, 20 seconds of handwashing with soap will generally do the job.

Antibacterial soap is better than other soap: True or False?

False, because the main way that soap protects us is not in its antibacterial properties (although it does also destroy the surface membrane of some bacteria and for that matter viruses too, killing/inactivating them, respectively), but rather in how it causes pathogens to simply slide off during washing.

Here’s a study that found that handwashing with soap reduced disease incidence by 50–53%, and…

❝Incidence of disease did not differ significantly between households given plain soap compared with those given antibacterial soap.❞

~ Dr. Stephen Luby et al.

Read more: Effect of handwashing on child health: a randomised controlled trial

Want to wash your hands more than you do?

There have been many studies into motivating people to wash their hands more (often with education and/or disgust-based shaming), but an effective method you can use for yourself at home is to simply buy more luxurious hand soap, and generally do what you can to make handwashing a more pleasant experience (taking a moment to let the water run warm is another good thing to do if that’s more comfortable for you).

Take care!

Don’t Forget…

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  • Overdosing on Chemo: A Common Gene Test Could Save Hundreds of Lives Each Year

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    One January morning in 2021, Carol Rosen took a standard treatment for metastatic breast cancer. Three gruesome weeks later, she died in excruciating pain from the very drug meant to prolong her life.

    Rosen, a 70-year-old retired schoolteacher, passed her final days in anguish, enduring severe diarrhea and nausea and terrible sores in her mouth that kept her from eating, drinking, and, eventually, speaking. Skin peeled off her body. Her kidneys and liver failed. “Your body burns from the inside out,” said Rosen’s daughter, Lindsay Murray, of Andover, Massachusetts.

    Rosen was one of more than 275,000 cancer patients in the United States who are infused each year with fluorouracil, known as 5-FU, or, as in Rosen’s case, take a nearly identical drug in pill form called capecitabine. These common types of chemotherapy are no picnic for anyone, but for patients who are deficient in an enzyme that metabolizes the drugs, they can be torturous or deadly.

    Those patients essentially overdose because the drugs stay in the body for hours rather than being quickly metabolized and excreted. The drugs kill an estimated 1 in 1,000 patients who take them — hundreds each year — and severely sicken or hospitalize 1 in 50. Doctors can test for the deficiency and get results within a week — and then either switch drugs or lower the dosage if patients have a genetic variant that carries risk.

    Yet a recent survey found that only 3% of U.S. oncologists routinely order the tests before dosing patients with 5-FU or capecitabine. That’s because the most widely followed U.S. cancer treatment guidelines — issued by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network — don’t recommend preemptive testing.

    The FDA added new warnings about the lethal risks of 5-FU to the drug’s label on March 21 following queries from KFF Health News about its policy. However, it did not require doctors to administer the test before prescribing the chemotherapy.

    The agency, whose plan to expand its oversight of laboratory testing was the subject of a House hearing, also March 21, has said it could not endorse the 5-FU toxicity tests because it’s never reviewed them.

    But the FDA at present does not review most diagnostic tests, said Daniel Hertz, an associate professor at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy. For years, with other doctors and pharmacists, he has petitioned the FDA to put a black box warning on the drug’s label urging prescribers to test for the deficiency.

    “FDA has responsibility to assure that drugs are used safely and effectively,” he said. The failure to warn, he said, “is an abdication of their responsibility.”

    The update is “a small step in the right direction, but not the sea change we need,” he said.

    Europe Ahead on Safety

    British and European Union drug authorities have recommended the testing since 2020. A small but growing number of U.S. hospital systems, professional groups, and health advocates, including the American Cancer Society, also endorse routine testing. Most U.S. insurers, private and public, will cover the tests, which Medicare reimburses for $175, although tests may cost more depending on how many variants they screen for.

    In its latest guidelines on colon cancer, the Cancer Network panel noted that not everyone with a risky gene variant gets sick from the drug, and that lower dosing for patients carrying such a variant could rob them of a cure or remission. Many doctors on the panel, including the University of Colorado oncologist Wells Messersmith, have said they have never witnessed a 5-FU death.

    In European hospitals, the practice is to start patients with a half- or quarter-dose of 5-FU if tests show a patient is a poor metabolizer, then raise the dose if the patient responds well to the drug. Advocates for the approach say American oncology leaders are dragging their feet unnecessarily, and harming people in the process.

    “I think it’s the intransigence of people sitting on these panels, the mindset of ‘We are oncologists, drugs are our tools, we don’t want to go looking for reasons not to use our tools,’” said Gabriel Brooks, an oncologist and researcher at the Dartmouth Cancer Center.

    Oncologists are accustomed to chemotherapy’s toxicity and tend to have a “no pain, no gain” attitude, he said. 5-FU has been in use since the 1950s.

    Yet “anybody who’s had a patient die like this will want to test everyone,” said Robert Diasio of the Mayo Clinic, who helped carry out major studies of the genetic deficiency in 1988.

    Oncologists often deploy genetic tests to match tumors in cancer patients with the expensive drugs used to shrink them. But the same can’t always be said for gene tests aimed at improving safety, said Mark Fleury, policy director at the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network.

    When a test can show whether a new drug is appropriate, “there are a lot more forces aligned to ensure that testing is done,” he said. “The same stakeholders and forces are not involved” with a generic like 5-FU, first approved in 1962, and costing roughly $17 for a month’s treatment.

    Oncology is not the only area in medicine in which scientific advances, many of them taxpayer-funded, lag in implementation. For instance, few cardiologists test patients before they go on Plavix, a brand name for the anti-blood-clotting agent clopidogrel, although it doesn’t prevent blood clots as it’s supposed to in a quarter of the 4 million Americans prescribed it each year. In 2021, the state of Hawaii won an $834 million judgment from drugmakers it accused of falsely advertising the drug as safe and effective for Native Hawaiians, more than half of whom lack the main enzyme to process clopidogrel.

    The fluoropyrimidine enzyme deficiency numbers are smaller — and people with the deficiency aren’t at severe risk if they use topical cream forms of the drug for skin cancers. Yet even a single miserable, medically caused death was meaningful to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where Carol Rosen was among more than 1,000 patients treated with fluoropyrimidine in 2021.

    Her daughter was grief-stricken and furious after Rosen’s death. “I wanted to sue the hospital. I wanted to sue the oncologist,” Murray said. “But I realized that wasn’t what my mom would want.”

    Instead, she wrote Dana-Farber’s chief quality officer, Joe Jacobson, urging routine testing. He responded the same day, and the hospital quickly adopted a testing system that now covers more than 90% of prospective fluoropyrimidine patients. About 50 patients with risky variants were detected in the first 10 months, Jacobson said.

    Dana-Farber uses a Mayo Clinic test that searches for eight potentially dangerous variants of the relevant gene. Veterans Affairs hospitals use a 11-variant test, while most others check for only four variants.

    Different Tests May Be Needed for Different Ancestries

    The more variants a test screens for, the better the chance of finding rarer gene forms in ethnically diverse populations. For example, different variants are responsible for the worst deficiencies in people of African and European ancestry, respectively. There are tests that scan for hundreds of variants that might slow metabolism of the drug, but they take longer and cost more.

    These are bitter facts for Scott Kapoor, a Toronto-area emergency room physician whose brother, Anil Kapoor, died in February 2023 of 5-FU poisoning.

    Anil Kapoor was a well-known urologist and surgeon, an outgoing speaker, researcher, clinician, and irreverent friend whose funeral drew hundreds. His death at age 58, only weeks after he was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, stunned and infuriated his family.

    In Ontario, where Kapoor was treated, the health system had just begun testing for four gene variants discovered in studies of mostly European populations. Anil Kapoor and his siblings, the Canadian-born children of Indian immigrants, carry a gene form that’s apparently associated with South Asian ancestry.

    Scott Kapoor supports broader testing for the defect — only about half of Toronto’s inhabitants are of European descent — and argues that an antidote to fluoropyrimidine poisoning, approved by the FDA in 2015, should be on hand. However, it works only for a few days after ingestion of the drug and definitive symptoms often take longer to emerge.

    Most importantly, he said, patients must be aware of the risk. “You tell them, ‘I am going to give you a drug with a 1 in 1,000 chance of killing you. You can take this test. Most patients would be, ‘I want to get that test and I’ll pay for it,’ or they’d just say, ‘Cut the dose in half.’”

    Alan Venook, the University of California-San Francisco oncologist who co-chairs the panel that sets guidelines for colorectal cancers at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, has led resistance to mandatory testing because the answers provided by the test, in his view, are often murky and could lead to undertreatment.

    “If one patient is not cured, then you giveth and you taketh away,” he said. “Maybe you took it away by not giving adequate treatment.”

    Instead of testing and potentially cutting a first dose of curative therapy, “I err on the latter, acknowledging they will get sick,” he said. About 25 years ago, one of his patients died of 5-FU toxicity and “I regret that dearly,” he said. “But unhelpful information may lead us in the wrong direction.”

    In September, seven months after his brother’s death, Kapoor was boarding a cruise ship on the Tyrrhenian Sea near Rome when he happened to meet a woman whose husband, Atlanta municipal judge Gary Markwell, had died the year before after taking a single 5-FU dose at age 77.

    “I was like … that’s exactly what happened to my brother.”

    Murray senses momentum toward mandatory testing. In 2022, the Oregon Health & Science University paid $1 million to settle a suit after an overdose death.

    “What’s going to break that barrier is the lawsuits, and the big institutions like Dana-Farber who are implementing programs and seeing them succeed,” she said. “I think providers are going to feel kind of bullied into a corner. They’re going to continue to hear from families and they are going to have to do something about it.”

    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.

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  • The Diabetes Drugs That Can Cut Asthma Attacks By 70%

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    Asthma, obesity, and type 2 diabetes are closely linked, with the latter two greatly increasing asthma attack risk.

    While bronchodilators / corticosteroids can have immediate adverse effects due to sympathetic nervous system activation, and lasting adverse effects due to the damage it does to metabolic health, diabetes drugs, on the other hand, can improve things with (for most people) fewer unwanted side effects.

    Great! Which drugs?

    Metformin, and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs).

    Specifically, researchers have found:

    • Metformin is associated with a 30% reduction in asthma attacks
    • GLP-1RAs are associated with a 40% reduction in asthma attacks

    …and yes, they stack, making for a 70% reduction in the case of people taking both. Furthermore, the results are independent of weight, glycemic control, or asthma phenotype.

    In terms of what was counted, the primary outcome was asthma attacks at 12-month follow-up, defined by oral corticosteroid use, emergency visits, hospitalizations, or death.

    The effect of metformin on asthma attacks was not affected by BMI, HbA1c levels, eosinophil count, asthma severity, or sex.

    Of the various extra antidiabetic drugs trialled in this study, only GLP-1 receptor agonists showed a further and sustained reduction in asthma attacks.

    Here’s the study itself, hot off the press, published on Monday:

    JAMA Int. Med. | Antidiabetic Medication and Asthma Attacks

    “But what if I’m not diabetic?”

    Good news:

    More than half of all US adults are eligible for semaglutide therapy ← this is because they’ve expanded the things that semaglutide (the widely-used GLP-1 receptor agonist drug) can be prescribed for, now going beyond just diabetes and/or weight loss 😎

    And metformin, of course, is more readily available than semaglutide, so by all means speak with your doctor/pharmacist about that, if it’s of interest to you.

    Take care!

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  • Butter vs Ghee – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing butter to ghee, we picked the butter.

    Why?

    Assuming a comparable source for each—e.g. butter from grass-fed cows, or ghee made from butter from grass-fed cows—both have a mostly comparable nutritional profile.

    Note: the above is not a safe assumption to make in the US, unless you’re paying attention. Grass-fed cows are not the norm in the US, so it’s something that has to be checked for. On the other hand, ghee is usually imported, and grass-fed cows are the norm in most of the rest of the world, including the countries that export ghee the most. So if “buying blind”, ghee will be the safer bet. However, checking labels can overcome this.

    Many of the Internet-popular health claims for ghee are exaggerated. For example, yes it contains butyrate… But at 1% or less. You’d be better off getting your butyrate from fibrous fruit and vegetables. Yes it contains medium-chain triglycerides (that’s also good), but in trace amounts. It even has conjugated linoleic acid, but you guessed it, the dose is insignificant.

    Meanwhile, both butter and ghee contain heart-unhealthy animal-based saturated fats (which are usually worse for the health than some, but not all, of their plant-based equivalents). However…

    • A tablespoon of butter contains about 7 grams of saturated fat
    • A tablespoon of ghee contains about 9 grams of saturated fat

    So, in this case, “ghee is basically butter, but purer” becomes a bad thing (and the deciding factor between the two).

    There is one reason to choose butter over ghee, but it’s not health-related—it simply has a higher smoke point, as is often the case for fats that have been more processed compared to fats that have been less processed.

    In short: either can be used in moderation, but even 2 tbsp of butter are taking an average person (because it depends on your metabolism, so we’ll say average) to the daily limit for saturated fats already, so we recommend to go easy even on that.

    Want to know more?

    Take care!

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Related Posts

  • Saunas: Health Benefits (& Caveats)
  • Revealed: The Soviet Secret Recipe For Success That The CIA Admits Put The US To Shame

    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.

    Today’s edition of 10almonds brings you a blast from the past with a modern twist: an ancient Russian peasant food that became a Soviet staple, and today, is almost unknown in the West.

    Before we get to that, let’s take a sneaky look at this declassified CIA memorandum from near the end of the Cold War:

    (Click here to see a bigger version)

    The take-away here is:

    • Americans were eating 2–3 times more meat than Soviets
    • Soviets were eating nearly double the amount of grain products and potatoes

    …and both of these statistics meant that nutritionally speaking, the Soviets were doing better.

    Americans also consumed more sugar and fats, which again, wasn’t the best dietary option.

    But was the American diet tastier? Depends on whom you ask.

    Which brings us to a literal recipe we’re going to be sharing with you today:

    It’s not well-known in the West, but in Russia, it’s a famous national comfort food, a bastion of health and nutrition, and it rose to popularity because it was not only cheap and nutritious, but also, you could eat it for days without getting sick of it. And it could be easily frozen for reheating later without losing any of its appeal—it’d still be just as good.

    In Russia there are sayings about it:

    Щи да каша — пища наша (Shchi da kasha — pishcha nasha)

    Shchi and buckwheat are what we eat

    Top tip: buckwheat makes an excellent (and naturally sweet) alternative to porridge oats if prepared the same way!

    Где щи, там и нас ищи (Gdye shchi, tam i nas ishchi)

    Where there’s shchi, us you’ll see

    Голь голью, а луковка во щах есть (Gol’ gol’yu, a lukovka vo shchakh yest’)

    I’m stark naked, but there’s shchi with onions

    There’s a very strong sentiment in Russia that really, all you need is shchi (shchi, shchi… shchi is all you need )

    But what, you may ask, is shchi?

    Our culinary cultural ambassador Nastja is here to offer her tried-and-tested recipe for…

    …Russian cabbage soup (yes, really—bear with us now, and you can thank us later)

    There are a lot of recipes for shchi (see for yourself what the Russian version of Lifehacker recommends), and we’ll be offering our favorite…

    Nastja’s Nutritious and Delicious Homemade Shchi

    Hi, Nastja here! I’m going to share with you my shchi recipe that is:

    • Cheap
    • So tasty
    • Super nutritious*
    • Vegan
    • Gluten Free

    You will also need:

    • A cabbage (I use sweetheart, but any white cabbage will do)
    • 1 cup (250g) red lentils (other kinds of lentils will work too)
    • ½ lb or so (250–300g) tomatoes (I use baby plum tomatoes, but any kind will do)
    • ½ lb or so (250–300g) mushrooms (the edible kind)
    • An onion (I use a brown onion; any kind will do)
    • Salt, pepper, rosemary, thyme, parsley, cumin
    • Marmite or similar yeast extract (do you hate it? Me too. Trust me, it’ll be fine, you’ll love it. Omit if you’re a coward.)
    • A little oil for sautéing (I use sunflower, but canola is fine, as is soy oil. Do not use olive oil or coconut oil, because the taste is too strong and the flashpoint too low)

    First, what the French call mise-en-place, the prep work:

    1. Chop the cabbage into small strips, ⅛–¼ inch x 1 inch is a good guideline, but you can’t really go wrong unless you go to extremes
    2. Chop the tomatoes. If you’re using baby plum tomatoes (or cherry tomatoes), cut them in half. If using larger tomatoes, cut them into eighths (halve them, halve the halves, then halve the quarters)
    3. Chop the mushrooms. If using button mushrooms, half them. If using larger mushrooms, quarter them.
    4. Chop the onion finely.
    5. Gather the following kitchenware: A big pan (stock pot or similar), a sauté pan (a big wok or frying pan will do), a small frying pan (here a wok will not do), and a saucepan (a rice cook will also do)

    Now, for actual cooking:

    1. Cook the red lentils until soft (I use a rice cooker, but a saucepan is fine) and set aside
    2. Sauté the cabbage, put it in the big pot (not yet on the heat!)
    3. Fry the mushrooms, put them in the big pot (still not yet on the heat!)

    When you’ve done this a few times and/or if you’re feeling confident, you can do the above simultaneously to save time

    1. Blend the lentils into the water you cooked them in, and then add to the big pot.
    2. Turn the heat on low, and if necessary, add more water to make it into a rich soup
    3. Add the seasonings to taste, except the parsley. Go easy on the cumin, be generous with the rosemary and thyme, let your heart guide you with the salt and pepper.
    4. When it comes to the yeast extract: add about one teaspoon and stir it into the pot. Even if you don’t like Marmite, it barely changes the flavour (makes it slightly richer) and adds a healthy dose of vitamin B12.

    We did not forget the tomatoes and the onion:

    1. Caramelize the onion (keep an eye on the big pot) and set it aside
    2. Fry the tomatoes and add them to the big pot

    Last but definitely not least:

    1. Serve!
    2. The caramelized onion is a garnish, so put a little on top of each bowl of shchi
    3. The parsley is also a garnish, just add a little

    Any shchi you don’t eat today will keep in the fridge for several days, or in the freezer for much longer.

    *That nutritious goodness I talked about? Check it out:

    • Lentils are high in protein and iron
    • Cabbage is high in vitamin C and calcium
    • Mushrooms are high in magnesium
    • Tomatoes are good against inflammation
    • Black pepper has a host of health benefits
    • Yeast extract contains vitamin B12

    Let us know how it went! We love to receive emails from our subscribers!

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  • Dealing with Thirst!

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    Busting The Myth of “Eight Glasses Of Water A Day”

    Everyone knows we must drink 8 glasses of water a day, or else we’re going to get a failing grade at being a healthy human—like not flossing, or not using adequate sunscreen.

    But… Do we? And does tea count? How about (we dare but whisper it) coffee? And soda drinks are mostly water, right? But aren’t some drinks dehydrating? Are special electrolyte drinks really better? There are so many things to consider, so many differing advices, and it’s easy to give up, or just choose what to believe in as a leap of faith.

    A quick brain-teaser for you first, though:

    If coffee and soda don’t count because they’re dehydrating, then what if you were to take:

    – A concentrated tiny cup of espresso, and then a glass of water, would the glass of water count?

    Or (we don’t relish the thought) what if you took a spoonful of soda syrup, and then a glass of water, would the glass of water count?

    If your answer was “yes, it’s a glass of water”, then why would it not count if it were taken all at once (e.g. as an Americano coffee, or a regular soda)?

    If your answer was “yes, but that water might only offset the dehydration caused by the coffee/syrup, so I might only be breaking even”, then you were thinking about this the right way:

    How much water you need depends on many factors that can be affected by what else you are consuming and what else you are doing. Science loves averages, so eight glasses a day may be great if you are of average health, and average body size, in a temperate climate, doing moderate exercise, and so on and so on.

    If you’re not the most average person of all time? You may need to take into account a lot of factors, ranging from what you ate for dinner to how much you perspired during your morning exercises. As you (probably) don’t live in laboratory conditions, this can become an impossible task—and if you missed (or guessed incorrectly) even one factor, the whole calculation will be thrown off. But is there any other way to know?

    What of the infamous pee test? Drink enough to make your urine as clear as possible, and if it’s dark, you’re dehydrated, common wisdom says.

    In reality, however, that tells you not what’s in your body, but rather, what got ejected from your body. If your urine is dark, it might mean you had too little water, but it also could just mean you had the right amount of water but too much sodium, for instance. A study of this was done on athletes, and found no correlation between urine color and actual bodily hydration when measured directly via a blood test.

    So, if we can’t just have an app tell us “drink this many glasses of water”, and we can’t trust urine color, what can we do?

    What we can do is trust that our body comes with (for free!) a wonderful homeostatic system and it will try to correct any imbalances. If you are thirsty, you’re dehydrated. Drink something with plenty of water in, if not plain water.

    But what about special electrolyte drinks? If you need salts, you will crave them. Craving a salty snack? Go for it! Or if you prefer not to snack, do a salt lick test (just put a little salt on your finger, and taste it; if it tastes good, wait a minute or two, and then have a little more, and repeat until it doesn’t).

    Bonus Tip:

    1. Make sure you always have a source of hydration (that you enjoy!) to hand. Maybe it’s chilled water, maybe it’s a pot of tea, maybe it’s a sports drink, it doesn’t matter too much. Even coffee is actually fine, by the way (but don’t overdo it).
    2. Make a personal rule: “I will always make time for hydration”. That means, if you’re thirsty, have something with water in it now. Not when you’ve finished what you’re doing (unless you really can’t stop, because you are a racecar driver mid-race, or a surgeon mid-operation, or something), but now. Do not postpone it until after you’ve done some other thing first; you will forget and it will keep getting postponed. Always make time for water.

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  • The Science Of Sounds

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    We Think You Might Like The Sound Of This…

    We’ve written before about the benefits of mindfulness meditation, and how to do it.

    We also reviewed a great book on a related topic:

    This is Your Brain On Music – by Dr. Daniel Levitin

    (yes, that’s the same neuroscientist that we featured as an expert talking about The Five Keys of Aging Healthily)

    But what happens when we combine the two?

    Mantra meditation & music

    Most scientific studies that have been undertaken with regard to meditation tend to focus on mindfulness meditation. It’s easy, effective, and (which makes a difference when it comes to publication bias) is a very safe bet when it comes to funding.

    However, today we’re going to look at mantra meditation, which has a lot in common, neurologically speaking, with music. Indeed, when the two were compared separately in a randomized control trial:

    ❝Daily mantra meditation or classical music listening may be beneficial for cognitive outcomes and quality of life of breast cancer survivors with cancer-related cognitive impairment.

    The cognitive benefits appear to be sustained beyond the initial intervention period.❞

    ~ Dr. Ashley Henneghan et al.

    Read in full: Sustained Effects of Mantra Meditation Compared to Music Listening on Neurocognitive Outcomes of Breast Cancer Survivors: A Brief Report of a Randomized Control Trial

    One possible reason for some of the similar benefits is the vagus nerve—whether intoning a mantra, or humming along to music, the vibrations can stimulate the vagus nerve, which in turn activates the parasympathetic nervous system, resulting in body-wide relaxation:

    The Vagus Nerve (And How You Can Make Use Of It)

    How effective is mantra meditation?

    According to a large recent narrative review, it depends on your goal:

    ❝Based on the studies in the four important areas presented, there is no doubt of a strong connection between mantra meditation and human health.

    Strong evidence has been found that practicing mantra meditation is effective in relieving stress and in coping with hypertension.

    For the other two areas: anxiety and immunity, the evidence is inconclusive or not strong enough to firmly support the claim that the mantra meditation can be used to reduce anxiety or to improve immunity. ❞

    ~ Dr. Dr. Ampere Tseng

    Read in full: Scientific Evidence of Health Benefits by Practicing Mantra Meditation: Narrative Review

    this is a very interesting read if you do have the time!

    How do I practice mantra meditation?

    The definition is broad, but the critical criteria are:

    1. You meditate
    2. …using a mantra

    Lest that seem flippant: those really are the two key points!

    Meditation comes in various forms, and mantra meditation is a form of focussed meditation. While some focussed meditation forms may use a candle or some other focal point, in mantra meditation, the mantra itself provides the focus.

    You may be wondering: what should the mantra be?

    Classic and well-tested mantras include such simple things as the monosyllabic Sanskrit “Om” or “Ham”. We’re a health science newsletter, so we’ll leave esoteric meanings to other publications as they are beyond our scope, but we will say that these result, most naturally, in the humming sound that we mentioned earlier stimulates the vagus nerve.

    But that’s not the only way. Practitioners of religions that have repetitive prayer systems (e.g. anything that uses prayer beads, for example) also provide the basis of focused meditation, using a mantra (in this case, usually a very short oft-repeated prayer phrase).

    How long is needed for benefits?

    Most studies into mantra meditation have used timed sessions of 15–30 minutes, with 20 minutes being a commonly-used session length, once per day. However…

    • Vagus nerve benefits should appear a lot more quickly than that (under 5 minutes) in the case of mantras that cause that vibration we mentioned.
    • Repetitive spoken prayers (or similar repeated short phrases, for the irreligious) will generally effect relaxation in whatever period of time it takes for your brain to be fully focused on what you are doing now, instead of what you were thinking about before. If using counting beads, then you probably already know what number works for you.

    (again, as a health science publication, we cannot comment on any otherworldly benefits, but the worldly benefits seem reason enough to consider these practices for their potential therapeutic effects)

    10almonds tip: for any meditative practice that you want to take approximately a given period of time, we recommend investing in a nice sand timer like this one, as this will not result in a jarring alarm going off!

    Like to jazz things up a little?

    Enjoy: Meditation That You’ll Actually Enjoy ← Meditation games!

    Prefer to keep things to the basics?

    Enjoy: No Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness ← The simplest scientific approach

    Take care!

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