Your Health Audit, From Head To Toe

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Health Audit Time

Here at 10almonds, we often cover quite specific things, ranging from “the effect of sodium on organs other than your heart” to “make this one small change to save your knees while driving”.

But, we’re each a whole person, and we need to take care of the whole organism that makes up the wonderful being that we each are. If we let one part of it drop in health too much, the others will soon follow suit because of the knock-on effects.

So, let’s do a quick self-check-up, and see what can be done for each! How’s your…

Mental Health

We’re doing this audit head-to-to, so let’s start it here, because mental health is also just health, and it’s difficult to tackle the others without having this one at least under control!

Are you experiencing chronic stress? Anxiety? Depression? Joy?

If you answered “no” to “joy” but also “no” to “depression”, you might want to rethink your answer to “depression”, by the way. Life should be a joyous thing!

Some resources to address your mental health:

Brain Health

Your brain is a big, powerful organ. It uses more of your daily energy (in the physiological sense of the word, we’re talking calories and mitochondria and ATP) than any other organ, by far.

And when it comes to organ failure, if your brain fails, then having the best joints in the world won’t help you, for example.

Some resources to address your brain health:

Heart Health

Everything depends on your heart, head to toe. Tirelessly pumping blood with oxygen, nutrients, and agents of your immune system all around your body, all day every day for your entire life.

What’s your resting heart rate like? How about your blood pressure? And while we’re on the topic of blood… how’s your blood sugar health?

These are all important things to a) know about and b) keep on top of!

Some resources to address your heart health:

Gut Health

By cell count, we’re about 10% human and 90% bacteria. By gene count, also. Pretty important, therefore, that we look after our trillions of tiny friends that keep our organism working.

Most people in N. America, for example, get vastly under the recommended daily amount of fiber, and that’s just the most basic courtesy we could do for these bugs that keep us alive (they need that fiber to live, and their process of consuming it is beneficial to us in a stack of ways).

Some resources to address your gut health:

Hormonal Health

Hormones are weird and wonderful and affect so much more than the obvious sex-related functions (but yes, those too). A lot of people don’t realize it, but having our hormones in good order or not can make the difference between abject misery and a happy, fulfilling life.

Some resources to address your hormonal health:

Bone/Joint Health

Fear nothing! For you are a ghost operating a skeleton clad in flesh. But also, you know, look after that skeleton; you only get one! Being animals, we’re all about movement, and being humans, we’ve ended up with some lifestyle situations that aren’t great for that mobility. We sit too much; we walk too little; we cramp ourselves into weird positions (driving, anyone?), and we forget the range of motion we’re supposed to have. But let’s remember…

Some resources to address your bone/joint health:

Lastly…

While it’s good to do a little self-audit like this every now and again, it’s even better to get a professional check-up!

As engineers say: if you don’t schedule time for maintenance, your equipment will schedule it for you.

Don’t Forget…

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  • Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook – by Sarah Raven

    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.

    Note: the US Amazon site currently (incorrectly) lists the author as “Jonathan Buckley”. The Canadian, British, and Australian sites all list the author correctly as Sarah Raven, and some (correctly) credit Jonathan Buckley as the photographer she used.

    First, what it’s not: a gardening book. Beyond a few helpful tips, pointers, and “plant here, harvest here” instructions, this book assumes you are already capable of growing your own vegetables.

    She does assume you are in a temperate climate, so if you are not, this might not be the book for you. Although! The recipes are still great; it’s just you’d have to shop for the ingredients and they probably won’t be fresh local produce for the exact same reason that you didn’t grow them.

    If you are in a temperate climate though, this will take you through the year of seasonal produce (if you’re in a temperate climate but it’s in for example Australia, you’ll need to make a six-month adjustment for being in the S. Hemisphere), with many recipes to use not just one ingredient from your garden at a time, but a whole assortment, consistent with the season.

    About the recipes: they (which are 450 in number) are (as you might imagine) very plant-forward, but they’re generally not vegan and often not vegetarian. So, don’t expect that you’ll produce everything yourself—just most of the ingredients!

    Bottom line: if you like cooking, and are excited by the idea of growing your own food but are unsure how regularly you can integrate that, this book will keep you happily busy for a very long time.

    Click here to check out Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook, and level-up your home cooking!

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  • Dreams: Relevance, Meanings, Interpretations

    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? We love to hear from you!

    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

    ❝I have a question or a suggestion for coverage in your “Psychology Sunday”. Dreams: their relevance, meanings ( if any) interpretations? I just wondered what the modern psychological opinions are about dreams in general.❞

    We’ll indeed do that one of these Psychology Sundays! Thanks for suggesting it.

    What we can say in advance is that there’s certainly not a single unified scientific consensus yet, but there are two or three prevailing views definitely worth covering, e.g. randomly generated, a by-product of reorganizing information in the brain, or expressions of subconscious thoughts/feelings.

    There are also differences between a top-down/bottom-up approach to understanding dreaming, and efforts to tie those two together.

    Watch this space!

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  • The Purple Parsnip’s Bioactive Brain Benefits (& more)

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    This Root Might Be A Guardian Angel

    Sometimes we go searching for supplements to research; sometimes supplements present themselves for examination! In this case, our attention was grabbed by a headline:

    Angelica gigas extract emerges as a potential treatment for vascular disease

    Angelica who?

    Angelica gigas, also called the purple parsnip (amongst other names), is a flowering plant native to Korea. It has assorted medicinal properties, and in this case, it was its heart-healthy benefits that were making news:

    ❝Ultimately, this study presents clearly evidence that Angelica gigas extract is a promising natural product-based functional food/herbal medicine candidate for preventing or regulating hyperlipidemic cardiovascular complications❞

    Source: Angelica gigas extract inhibits acetylation of eNOS via IRE1α sulfonation/RIDD-SIRT1-mediated posttranslational modification in vascular dysfunction

    But it has a lot more to offer…

    The root has various bioactive metabolites, but the compounds that most studies are most interested in are decursin and decursinol, for their neuroprotective and cognitive enhancement effects:

    ❝[C]rude extracts and isolated components from the root of A. gigas exhibited neuroprotective and cognitive enhancement effects.

    Neuronal damage or death is the most important factor for many neurodegenerative diseases.

    In addition, recent studies have clearly demonstrated the possible mechanisms behind the neuroprotective action of extracts/compounds from the root of A. gigas.❞

    That middle paragraph there? That’s one of the main pathogenic processes of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and Multiple Sclerosis.

    Angelica gigas attenuates (reduces the force of) that process:

    ❝The published reports revealed that the extracts and isolated components from the root of A. gigas showed neuroprotective and cognitive enhancement properties through various mechanisms such as anti-apoptosis, antioxidative actions, inhibiting mRNA and protein expressions of inflammatory mediators and regulating a number of signaling pathways.

    In conclusion, the A. gigas root can serve as an effective neuroprotective agent by modulating various pathophysiological processes❞

    Read more: Neuroprotective and Cognitive Enhancement Potentials of Angelica gigas Nakai Root: A Review

    Beyond neuroprotection & cognitive enhancement

    …and also beyond its protection against vascular disease, which is what got our attention…

    Angelica gigas also has antioxidant properties, anti-cancer properties, and general immune-boosting properties.

    We’ve only so much room, so: those links above will take you to example studies for those things, but there are plenty more where they came from, so we’re quite confident in this one.

    Of course, what has antioxidant properties is usually anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, and anti-aging, because these things are reliant on many of the same processes as each other, with a lot of overlap.

    Where can we get it?

    We don’t sell it, but here’s an example product on Amazon, for your convenience

    Enjoy!

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  • Montana Eyes $30M Revamp of Mental Health, Developmental Disability Facilities

    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.

    HELENA, Mont. — As part of a proposed revamping of the state’s behavioral health system, Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte’s administration is looking into moving a facility for people with developmental disabilities, beefing up renovations at the Montana State Hospital, and creating a Helena unit of that psychiatric hospital.

    The changes, backers say, would fill gaps in services and help people better prepare for life outside of the locked, secure setting of the two state facilities before they reenter their own communities.

    “I think part of the theme is responsibly moving people in and out of the state facilities so that we create capacity and have people in the appropriate places,” state Sen. Dave Fern (D-Whitefish) said of the proposed capital projects during a recent interview.

    Fern served on the Behavioral Health System for Future Generations Commission, a panel created by a 2023 law to suggest how to spend $300 million to revamp the system. The law set aside the $300 million for improving state services for people with mental illness, substance abuse disorders, and developmental disabilities.

    Gianforte’s proposed budget for the next two years would spend about $100 million of that fund on 10 other recommendations from the commission. The capital projects are separate ideas for using up to $32.5 million of the $75 million earmarked within the $300 million pool of funds for building new infrastructure or remodeling existing buildings.

    The state Department of Public Health and Human Services and consultants for the behavioral health commission presented commission members with areas for capital investments in October. In December, the commission authorized state health department director Charlie Brereton to recommend the following projects to Gianforte:

    • Move the 12-bed Intensive Behavior Center for people with developmental disabilities out of Boulder, possibly to either Helena or Butte, at an estimated cost of up to $13.3 million.
    • Establish a “step-down” facility of about 16 beds, possibly on the campus of Shodair Children’s Hospital in Helena, to serve adults who have been committed to the Montana State Hospital but no longer need the hospital’s intensive psychiatric services.
    • Invest $19.2 million to upgrade the Montana State Hospital’s infrastructure and buildings at Warm Springs, on top of nearly $16 million appropriated in 2023 for renovations already underway there in an effort to regain federal certification of the facility.

    The state Architecture & Engineering Division is reviewing the health department’s cost estimates and developing a timeline for the projects so the information can be sent to the governor. Gianforte ultimately must approve the projects.

    Health department officials have said they plan to take the proposals to legislative committees as needed. “With Commission recommendation and approval from the governor, the Department believes that it has the authority to proceed with capital project expenditures but must secure additional authority from the Legislature to fund operations into future biennia,” said department spokesperson Jon Ebelt.

    The department outlined its facility plans to the legislature’s health and human services budget subcommittee on Jan. 22 as part of a larger presentation on the commission’s work and the 10 noncapital proposals in the governor’s budget. Time limits prevented in-depth discussion and public comment on the facility-related ideas.

    One change the commission didn’t consider: moving the Montana State Hospital to a more populated area from its rural and relatively remote location near Anaconda, in southwestern Montana, in an attempt to alleviate staffing shortages.

    “The administration is committed to continuing to invest in MSH as it exists today,” Brereton told the commission in October, referring to the Montana State Hospital.

    The hospital provides treatment to people with mental illness who have been committed to the state’s custody through a civil or criminal proceeding. It’s been beset by problems, including the loss of federal Medicaid and Medicare funding due to decertification by the federal government in April 2022, staffing issues that have led to high use of expensive traveling health care providers, and turnover in leadership.

    State Sen. Chris Pope (D-Bozeman) was vice chair of a separate committee that met between the 2023 and 2025 legislative sessions and monitored progress toward a 2023 legislative mandate to transition patients with dementia out of the state hospital. He agreed in a recent interview that improving — not moving — MSH is a top priority for the system right now.

    “Right now, we have an institution that is failing and needs to be brought back into the modern age, where it is located right now,” he said after ticking off a list of challenges facing the hospital.

    State Sen. John Esp (R-Big Timber) also noted at the October commission meeting that moving the hospital was likely to run into resistance in any community considered for a new facility.

    Fern, the Whitefish senator, questioned in October whether similar concerns might exist for moving the Intensive Behavior Center out of Boulder. For more than 130 years, the town 30 miles south of Helena has been home, in one form or another, to a state facility for people with developmental disabilities. But Brereton said he believes relocation could succeed with community and stakeholder involvement.

    The 12-bed center in Boulder serves people who have been committed by a court because their behaviors pose an immediate risk of serious harm to themselves or others. It’s the last residential building for people with developmental disabilities on the campus of the former Montana Developmental Center, which the legislature voted in 2015 to close.

    Drew Smith, a consultant with the firm Alvarez & Marsal, told the commission in October that moving the facility from the town of 1,300 to a bigger city such as Helena or Butte would provide access to a larger labor pool, possibly allow a more homelike setting for residents, and open more opportunities for residents to interact with the community and develop skills for returning to their own communities.

    Ideally, Brereton said, the center would be colocated with a new facility included in the governor’s proposed budget, for crisis stabilization services to people with developmental disabilities who are experiencing significant behavioral health issues.

    Meanwhile, the proposed subacute facility with up to 16 beds for state hospital patients would provide a still secure but less structured setting for people who no longer need intensive treatment at Warm Springs but aren’t yet ready to be discharged from the hospital’s care. Brereton told the commission in October the facility would essentially serve as a less restrictive “extension” of the state hospital. He also said the agency would like to contract with a company to staff the subacute facility.

    Health department officials don’t expect the new facility to involve any construction costs. Brereton has said the agency believes an existing building on the Shodair campus would be a good spot for it.

    The state began leasing the building Nov. 1 for use by about 20 state hospital patients displaced by the current remodeling at Warm Springs — a different purpose than the proposed subacute facility.

    Shodair CEO Craig Aasved said Shodair hasn’t committed to having the state permanently use the building as the step-down facility envisioned by the agency and the commission.

    But Brereton said the option is attractive to the health department now that the building has been set up and licensed to serve adults.

    “It seems like a natural place to start,” he told the commission in December, “and we don’t mind that it’s in our backyard here in Helena.”

    Republish This Story

    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.

    This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • Overcoming Gravity – by Steven Low

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    The author, a professional gymnast and coach with a background in the sciences, knows his stuff here. This is what it says on the tin: it’s rigorously systematic. It’s also the most science-based calisthenics book this reviewer has read to date.

    If you just wanted to know how to do some exercises, then this book would be very much overkill, but if you want to be able to go from no knowledge to expert knowledge, then the nearly 600 pages of this weighty tome will do that for you.

    This is a textbook, it’s a “the bible of…” style book, it’s the one that if you’re serious, will engage you thoroughly and enable you to craft the calisthenics-forged body you want, head to toe.

    As if it weren’t already overdelivering, it also has plenty of information on injury avoidance (or injury/condition management if you have some existing injury or chronic condition), and building routines in a dynamic fashion that avoids becoming a grind, because it’s going from strength to strength while cycling through different body parts.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to get serious about calisthenics, then this is the book for you.

    Click here to check out Overcoming Gravity, and do just that!

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  • Demystifying Cholesterol

    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.

    All About Cholesterol

    When it comes to cholesterol, the most common lay understanding (especially under a certain age) is “it’s bad”.

    A more informed view (and more common after a certain age) is “LDL cholesterol is bad; HDL cholesterol is good”.

    A more nuanced view is “LDL cholesterol is established as significantly associated with (and almost certainly a causal factor of) atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and related mortality in men; in women it is less strongly associated and may or may not be a causal factor”

    You can read more about that here:

    Statins: His & Hers? ← we highly recommend reading this, especially if you are a woman and/or considering/taking statins. To be clear, we’re not saying “don’t take statins!”, because they might be the right medical choice for you and we’re not your doctors. But we are saying: here’s something to at least know about and consider.

    Beyond HDL & LDL

    There is also VLDL cholesterol, which as you might have guessed, stands for “very low-density lipoprotein”. It has a high, unhealthy triglyceride content, and it increases atherosclerotic plaque. In other words, it hardens your arteries more quickly.

    The term “hardening the arteries” is an insufficient descriptor of what’s happening though, because while yes it is hardening the arteries, it’s also narrowing them. Because minerals and detritus passing through in the blood (the latter sounds bad, but there is supposed to be detritus passing through in the blood; it’s got to get out of the body somehow, and it’s off to get filtered and excreted) get stuck in the cholesterol (which itself is a waxy substance, by the way) and before you know it, those minerals and other things have become a solid part of the interior of your artery wall, like a little plastering team came and slapped plaster on the inside of the walls, then when it hardened, slapped more plaster on, and so on. Macrophages (normally the body’s best interior clean-up team) can’t eat things much bigger than themselves, so that means they can’t tackle the build-up of plaque.

    Impact on the heart

    Narrower less flexible arteries means very poor circulation, which means that organs can start having problems, which obviously includes your heart itself as it is not only having to do a harder job to keep the blood circulating through the narrower blood vessels, but also, it is not immune to also being starved of oxygen and nutrients along with the rest of the body when the circulation isn’t good enough. It’s a catch 22.

    What if LDL is low and someone is getting heart disease anyway?

    That’s often a case of apolipoprotein B, and unlike lipoprotein A, which is bound to LDL so usually* isn’t a problem if LDL is in “safe” ranges, Apo-B can more often cause problems even when LDL is low. Neither of these are tested for in most standard cholesterol tests by the way, so you might have to ask for them.

    *Some people, around 1 in 20 people, have hereditary extra risk factors for this.

    What to do about it?

    Well, get those lipids tests! Including asking for the LpA and Apo-B tests, especially if you have a history of heart disease in your family, or otherwise know you have a genetic risk factor.

    With or without extra genetic risks, it’s good to get lipids tests done annually from 40 onwards (earlier, if you have extra risk factors).

    See also: Understanding your cholesterol numbers

    Wondering whether you have an increased genetic risk or not?

    Genetic Testing: Health Benefits & Methods ← we think this is worth doing; it’s a “one-off test tells many useful things”. Usually done from a saliva sample, but some companies arrange a blood draw instead. Cost is usually quite affordable; do shop around, though.

    Additionally, talk to your pharmacist to check whether any of your meds have contraindications or interactions you should be aware of in this regard. Pharmacists usually know contraindications/interactions stuff better than doctors, and/but unlike doctors, they don’t have social pressure on them to know everything, which means that if they’re not sure, instead of just guessing and reassuring you in a confident voice, they’ll actually check.

    Lastly, shocking nobody, all the usual lifestyle medicine advice applies here, especially get plenty of moderate exercise and eat a good diet, preferably mostly if not entirely plant-based, and go easy on the saturated fat.

    Note: while a vegan diet contains zero dietary cholesterol (because plants don’t make it), vegans can still get unhealthy blood lipid levels, because we are animals and—like most animals—our body is perfectly capable of making its own cholesterol (indeed, we do need some cholesterol to function), and it can make its own in the wrong balance, if for example we go too heavy on certain kinds of (yes, even some plant-based) saturated fat.

    Read more: Can Saturated Fats Be Healthy? ← see for example how palm oil and coconut oil are both plant-based, and both high in saturated fat, but palm oil’s is heart-unhealthy on balance, while coconut oil’s is heart-healthy on balance (in moderation).

    Want to know more about your personal risk?

    Try the American College of Cardiology’s ASCVD risk estimator (it’s free)

    Take care!

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