The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic
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The Many Health Benefits of Garlic
We’re quite confident you already know what garlic is, so we’re going to leap straight in there with some science today:
First, let’s talk about allicin
Allicin is a compound in garlic that gives most of its health benefits. A downside of allicin is that it’s not very stable, so what this means is:
- Garlic is best fresh—allicin breaks down soon after garlic is cut/crushed
- So while doing the paperwork isn’t fun, buying it as bulbs is better than buying it as granules or similar
- Allicin also breaks down somewhat in cooking, so raw garlic is best
- Our philosophy is: still use it in cooking as well; just use more!
- Supplements (capsule form etc) use typically use extracts and potency varies (from not great to actually very good)
Read more about that:
- Short-term heating reduces the anti-inflammatory effects of fresh raw garlic extracts
- Allicin Bioavailability and Bioequivalence from Garlic Supplements and Garlic Foods
Now, let’s talk benefits…
Benefits to heart health
Garlic has been found to be as effective as the drug Atenolol at reducing blood pressure:
It also lowers LDL (bad cholesterol):
Benefits to the gut
We weren’t even looking for this, but as it turns out, as an add-on to the heart benefits…
Benefits to the immune system
Whether against the common cold or bringing out the heavy guns, garlic is a booster:
- Preventing the common cold with a garlic supplement: a double-blind, placebo-controlled survey
- Supplementation with aged garlic extract improves both NK and γδ-T cell function and reduces the severity of cold and flu symptoms: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled nutrition intervention
Benefits to the youthfulness of body and brain
Garlic is high in antioxidants that, by virtue of reducing oxidative stress, help slow aging. This effect, combined with the cholesterol and blood pressure benefits, means it may also reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia:
- Antioxidant health effects of aged garlic extract
- Effects of garlic consumption on plasma and erythrocyte antioxidant parameters in elderly subjects
- Garlic reduces heart disease and dementia risk
There are more benefits too…
That’s all we have time to dive into study-wise today, but for the visually-inclined, here are yet more benefits to garlic (at a rate of 3–4 cloves per day):
An incredible awesome recipe using lots of garlic:
- Take small potatoes (still in their skins), cut in half
- Add enough peeled cloves of garlic so that you have perhaps a 1:10 ratio of garlic to potato by mass
- Boil (pressure-cooking is ideal) until soft, and drain
- Keeping them in the pan, add a lashing of olive oil, and any additional seasonings per your preference (consider black pepper, rosemary, thyme, parsley)
- Put a lid on the pan, and holding it closed, shake the pan vigorously
- Note: if you didn’t leave the skins on, or you chopped much larger potatoes smaller instead of cutting in half, the potatoes will break up into a rough mash now. This is actually also fine and still tastes (and honestly, looks) great, but it is different, so just be aware, so that you get the outcome you want.
- The garlic, which—unlike the potatoes—didn’t have a skin to hold it together, will now have melted over the potatoes like butter
You can serve like this (it’s delicious already) or finish up in the oven or air-fryer or under the grill, if you prefer a roasted style dish (an amazing option too).
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Why Adult ADHD Often Leads To Anxiety & Depression
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ADHD’s Knock-On Effects On Mental Health
We’ve written before about ADHD in adult life, often late-diagnosed because it’s not quite what people think it is:
In women in particular, it can get missed and/or misdiagnosed:
Miss Diagnosis: Anxiety, ADHD, & Women
…but what we’re really here to talk about today is:
It’s the comorbidities that get you
When it comes to physical health conditions:
- if you have one serious condition, it will (usually) be taken seriously
- if you have two, they will still be taken seriously, but people (friends and family members, as well as yes, medical professionals) will start to back off, as it starts to get too complicated for comfort
- if you have three, people will think you are making at least one of them up for attention now
- if you have more than three, you are considered a hypochondriac and pathological liar
Yet, the reality is: having one serious condition increases your chances of having others, and this chance-increasing feature compounds with each extra condition.
Illustrative example: you have fibromyalgia (ouch) which makes it difficult for you to exercise much, shop around when grocery shopping, and do much cooking at home. You do your best, but your diet slips and it’s hard to care when you just want the pain to stop; you put on some weight, and get diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, which in time becomes diabetes with high cardiovascular risk factors. Your diabetes is immunocompromising; you get COVID and find it’s now Long COVID, which brings about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, when you barely had the spoons to function in the first place. At this point you’ve lost count of conditions and are just trying to get through the day.
If this is you, by the way, we hope at least something in the following might ease things for you a bit:
- Stop Pain Spreading
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
- Eat To Beat Chronic Fatigue (While Having The Limitations Of Chronic Fatigue)
- When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might
- The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
It’s the same for mental health
In the case of ADHD as a common starting point (because it’s quite common, may or may not be diagnosed until later in life, and doesn’t require any external cause to appear), it is very common that it will lead to anxiety and/or depression, to the point that it’s perhaps more common to also have one or more of them than not, if you have ADHD.
(Of course, anxiety and/or depression can both pop up for completely unrelated reasons too, and those reasons may be physiological, environmental, or a combination of the above).
Why?
Because all the good advice that goes for good mental health (and/or life in general), gets harder to actuate when one had ADHD.
- “Strong habits are the core of a good life”, but good luck with that if your brain doesn’t register dopamine in the same way as most people’s do, making intentional habit-forming harder on a physiological level.
- “Plan things carefully and stick to the plan”, but good luck with that if you are neurologically impeded from forming plans.
- “Just do it”, but oops you have the tendency-to-overcommitment disorder and now you are seriously overwhelmed with all the things you tried to do, when each of them alone were already going to be a challenge.
Overwhelm and breakdown are almost inevitable.
And when they happen, chances are you will alienate people, and/or simply alienate yourself. You will hide away, you will avoid inflicting yourself on others, you will brood alone in frustration—or distract yourself with something mind-numbing.
Before you know it, you’re too anxious to try to do things with other people or generally show your face to the world (because how will they react, and won’t you just mess things up anyway?), and/or too depressed to leave your depression-lair (because maybe if you keep playing Kingdom Vegetables 2, you can find a crumb of dopamine somewhere).
What to do about it
How to tackle the many-headed beast? By the heads! With your eyes open. Recognize and acknowledge each of the heads; you can’t beat those heads by sticking your own in the sand.
Also, get help. Those words are often used to mean therapy, but in this case we mean, any help. Enlist your partner or close friend as your support in your mental health journey. Enlist a cleaner as your support in taking that one thing off your plate, if that’s an option and a relevant thing for you. Set low but meaningful goals for deciding what constitutes “good enough” for each life area. Decide in advance what you can safely half-ass, and what things in life truly require your whole ass.
Here’s a good starting point for that kind of thing:
When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
And this is an excellent way to “get the ball rolling” if you’re already in a bit of a prison of your own making:
Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety
If things are already bad, then you might also consider:
- How To Set Anxiety Aside and
- The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← this is about getting out of depression
And if things are truly at the worst they can possibly be, then:
How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)
Take care!
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Osteoarthritis Of The Knee
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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
❝Very informative thank you. And made me think. I am a 72 yr old whitewoman, have never used ( or even been offered) HRT since menopause ~15 yrs ago. Now I’m wondering if it would have delayed the onset of osteoarthritis ( knee) and give me more energy in general. And is it wise to start taking hrt after being without those hormones for so long?❞
(this was in response to our article about menopausal HRT)
Thanks for writing! To answer your first question, obviously we can never know for sure now, but it certainly is possible, per for example a large-ish (n=1003) study of women aged 45–64, in which:
- Those with HRT were significantly less likely to have knee arthritis than those without
- However, to enjoy this benefit depended on continued use (those who used it for a bit and then stopped did not enjoy the same results)
- While it made a big difference to knee arthritis, it made only a small (but still beneficial) difference to wrist/hand arthritis.
We could hypothesize that this is because the mechanism of action is more about strengthening the bones (proofing against osteoporosis is one of the main reasons many people take HRT) and cartilage than it is against inflammation directly.
Since the knee is load-bearing and the hand/wrist joints usually are not, this would mean the HRT strengthening the bones makes a big difference to the “wear and tear” aspect of potential osteoarthritis of the knee, but not the same level of benefit for the hand/wrist, which is less about wear and tear and more about inflammatory factors. But that latter, about it being load-bearing, is just this writer’s hypothesis as to why the big difference.
The researchers do mention:
❝In OA the mechanisms by which HRT might act are highly speculative, but could entail changes in cartilage repair or bone turnover, perhaps with cytokines such as interleukin 6, for example.❞
What is clear though, is that it does indeed appear to have a protective effect against osteoarthritis of the knee.
With regard to the timing, the researchers do note:
❝Why as little as three years of HRT should have a demonstrable effect is unclear. Given the difficulty in ascertaining when the disease starts, it is hard to be sure of the importance of the timing of HRT, and whether early or subclinical disease was present.
These results taken together suggest that HRT has a metabolic action that is only effective if given continuously, perhaps by preventing disease initiation; once HRT is stopped there might be a ‘rebound’ effect, explaining the rapid return to normal risk❞
~ Ibid.
You can read the study here:
On whether it is worth it now…
Again, do speak with an endocrinologist because your situation may vary, but:
- hormones are simply messengers, and your body categorically will respond to those messages regardless of age, or time elapsed without having received such a message. Whether it will repair all damage done is another matter entirely, but it would take a biological miracle for it to have no effect at all.
- anecdotally, many women do enjoy life-changing benefits upon starting HRT at your age and older!
(We don’t like to rely on “anecdotally”, but we couldn’t find studies isolating according to “length of time since menopause”—we’ll keep an eye out and if we find something in the future, we’ll mention it!)
Meanwhile, take care!
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8 Signs On Your Breast You Shouldn’t Ignore
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Can you name the 8 signs that may indicate breast cancer? This video discusses them, and also shows what they look like on various different skintones:
Stay abreast:
Dr Simi Adedeji bids us watch out for:
- Inverted nipple: a newly inverted nipple (pointing inward or folded) should be checked by a doctor, especially if it’s a recent change.
- Flaky rash: a flaky, itchy, or red rash around the nipple or areola could indicate an underlying issue and should not be dismissed as just a skin condition.
- Tethering: skin pulling or denting, noticeable when raising your arms, may signal a deeper problem.
- Dimpling: skin resembling an orange peel (po orang sign) with dips and accentuated pores could indicate swelling or thickening and requires medical evaluation.
- Redness or heat: unusual warmth, redness, or tenderness in the breast, particularly if not breastfeeding, should be investigated.
- Nipple discharge: any unusual fluid from the nipple (be it yellow, green, milky, clear, or blood-stained) warrants attention, especially if spontaneous or only from one side.
- Change in size: sudden changes in the size or shape of one breast should not be ignored.
- Breast lump: a firm, irregular, or persistent lump in the breast, armpit, or collarbone area should be checked promptly, even if it’s not always harmful.
The above signs may indicate cancer or something else, but none of them are things that should be ignored (even if you get just one sign).
For more on each of these, plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
The Hormone Therapy That Reduces Breast Cancer Risk & More
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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5 Golden Rules To Lose Belly Fat
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Our belly is often the first place we gain fat and the last to lose it—due to hormonal changes, poor blood flow, and fat cell types. This also means that weight loss efforts can result in it looking worse before it looks better, as we lose weight from elsewhere around it. But, there is a way forwards:
What to do about it
Cori Lefkowith, of “Redefining Strength” and “Strength At Any Age” fame, advise that we follow the following “5 golden rules”:
- Mindset: avoid “All or Nothing” thinking; focus on small, sustainable changes and consistent habits.
- Macros: prioritize protein (40%+ of calories), balance fats and carbs for hormonal health, and avoid extreme calorie deficits (your body will try to save you from starvation by slowing your metabolism to conserve energy, and storing fat).
- Nutrition quality: focus on whole, nutrient-dense foods for better satiety, gut health, and energy. Get plenty of fiber and water; your body still needs those too.
- Muscle building: strength training preserves muscle, boosts metabolism, and improves body composition—don’t ditch your strength training for cardio; it won’t help and that swap would hinder..
- Daily walks: 15–20 minutes of walking after dinner aids digestion, and reduces stress (remember: stress invites your body to store extra fat, especially at the belly). It also incidentally burns calories without stressing the body, but honestly, it’s really not very many calories, so that’s not the main reason to do it.
For more on each of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It ← this is not the same thing as subcutaneous fat; the remedy is partly the same though, and it’s important to do both if you’re carrying excess weight both on your belly and in your viscera, if you want to reduce your overall waist size.
Take care!
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Too Much Or Too Little Testosterone?
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One Man’s Saw Palmetto Is Another Woman’s Serenoa Repens…
Today we’re going to look at saw palmetto. So, first:
What is it?
Saw palmetto is a type of palm native to the southeastern United States. Its scientific name is “Serenoa repens”, so if that name appears in studies we cite, it’s the same thing. By whichever name, it’s widely enjoyed as a herbal supplement.
Why do people take it?
Here’s where it gets interesting, because people take it for some completely opposite reasons…
Indeed, searching for it on the Internet will cause Google to suggest “…for men” and “…for women” as the top suggestions.
That’s because it works on testosterone, and testosterone can be a bit of a double-edged sword, so some people want to increase or decrease certain testosterone-related effects on their body.
And it works for both! Here be science:
- Testosterone (henceforth, “T”) is produced in the human body.
- Yes, all human bodies, to some extent.
- An enzyme called 5-alpha-reductase converts T in to DHT (dihydrogen testosterone)
- DHT is a much more potent androgen (masculinizing agent) than T alone, such that its effects are often unwanted, including:
- Enlarged prostate (if you have one)
- Hair loss (especially in men)
- New facial hair growth (usually unwanted by women)
- Women are more likely to get this due to PCOS and/or the menopause
To avoid those effects, you really want less of your T to be converted into DHT.
Saw palmetto is a 5α-reductase inhibitor, so if you take it, you’ll have less DHT, and you’ll consequently lose less hair, have fewer prostate problems, etc.
^The above study showed that saw palmetto extract performed comparably to finasteride. Finasteride is the world’s main go-to prescription drug for treating enlarged prostate and/or hair loss.
See also: Natural Hair Supplement: Friend or Foe? Saw Palmetto, a Systematic Review in Alopecia
Hair today… Growing tomorrow!
So, what was that about increasing T levels?
Men usually suffer declining T levels as they get older, with a marked drop around the age of 45. With lower T comes lower energy, lower mood, lower libido, erectile dysfunction, etc.
Guess what… It’s T that’s needed for those things, not DHT. So if you block the conversion of T to DHT, you’ll have higher blood serum T levels, higher energy, higher mood, higher libido, and all that.
(the above assumes you have testicles, without which, your T levels will certainly not increase)
Saw Palmetto Against Enlarged Prostate?
With higher DHT levels in mid-late life, prostate enlargement (benign prostatic hyperlasia) can become a problem for many men. The size of that problem ranges from urinary inconvenience (common, when the prostate presses against the bladder) to prostate cancer (less common, much more serious). Saw palmetto, like other 5α-reductase inhibitors such as finasteride, may be used to prevent or treat this.
Wondering how safe/reliable it is? We found a very high-quality fifteen-year longitudinal observational study of the use of saw palmetto, and it found:
❝The 15 years’ study results suggest that taking S. repens plant extract continuously at a daily dose of 320 mg is an effective and safe way to prevent the progression of benign prostatic hyperplasia.❞
Want a second opinion? We also found a 10-year study (by different researchers with different people taking it), which reached the same conclusion:
❝The results of study showed the absence of progression, both on subjective criteria (IPSS, and QoL scores), and objective criteria (prostate volume, the rate of urination, residual urine volume). Furthermore, patients had no undesirable effects directly related to the use of this drug.❞
- IPSS = International Prostate Symptom Score
- QoL = Quality of Life
❝But wait a minute; I, a man over the age of 45 with potentially declining T levels but a fabulous beard, remember that you said just a minute ago that saw palmetto is used by women to avoid having facial hair; I don’t want to lose mine!❞
You won’t. Once your facial hair follicles were fully developed and activated during puberty, they’ll carry on doing what they do for life. That’s no longer regulated by hormones once they’re up and running.
The use of saw palmetto can only be used to limit facial hair if caught early—so it’s more useful at the onset of menopause, for those who have (or will have) such, or else upon the arrival of PCOS symptoms or hirsuitism from some other cause.
Take The Test!
Do you have a prostate, and would like to know your IPSS score, and what that means for your prostate health?
(takes 1 minute, no need to pee or go probing for anything)
Bottom Line on Saw Palmetto
- It blocks the conversion of T into DHT
- It will increase blood serum T levels, thus boosting mood, energy, libido, etc in men (who typically have more T, but whose T levels decline with age)
- It will decrease DHT levels, thus limiting hair loss (especially in men) and later-life new facial hair growth (especially in women).
- It can be used to prevent or treat prostate enlargement
- Bonus: it’s a potent antioxidant and thus reduces general inflammation (in everyone)
Want To Try Saw Palmetto?
We don’t sell it (or anything else), but for your convenience…
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- Testosterone (henceforth, “T”) is produced in the human body.
