Healthy Choco-Banoffee Ice Cream
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Chocolate, banana, and coffee—quite a threesome, whether for breakfast or dessert, and this is healthy enough for breakfast while being decadent enough for dessert! With no dairy or added sugar, and lots of antioxidants, this is a healthy way to start or end your day.
You will need
- 3 bananas
- 2 tbsp cocoa powder, no additives
- 2 shots espresso, chilled
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- On standby: milk of your choice—we recommend almond or hazelnut
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Peel, slice, and freeze the bananas (let them freeze for at least 2–3 hours)
2) Blend the ingredients, except the milk. Add milk as necessary if the mixture is too thick to blend. Be careful not to add too much at once though, or it will become less of an ice cream and more of a milkshake!
3) Scoop into a sundae glass to serve:
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Which Plant Milk?
- The Bitter Truth About Coffee (or is it?)
- Cacao vs Carob – Which is Healthier?
- Apples vs Bananas – Which is Healthier?
- Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
- Tasty Polyphenols
Take care!
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Tuna vs Catfish – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing tuna to catfish, we picked the tuna.
Why?
Today in “that which is more expensive and/or harder to get is not necessarily healthier”…
Looking at their macros, tuna has more protein and less fat (and overall, less saturated fat, and also less cholesterol).
In the category of vitamins, both are good but tuna distinguishes itself: tuna has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, and D, while catfish has more of vitamins B5, B9, B12, E, and K. They are both approximately equal in choline, and as an extra note in tuna’s favor (already winning 6:5), tuna is a very good source of vitamin D, while catfish barely contains any. All in all: a moderate, but convincing, win for tuna.
When it comes to minerals, things are clearer still: tuna has more copper, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and selenium, while catfish has more calcium, manganese, and zinc. Oh, and catfish is also higher in one other mineral: sodium, which most people in industrialized countries need less of, on average. So, a 6:3 win for tuna, before we even take into account the sodium content (which makes the win for tuna even stronger).
In short: tuna wins the day in every category!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Farmed Fish vs Wild Caught (It Makes Quite A Difference)
Take care!
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Unprocessed 10th Anniversary Edition – by Abbie Jay
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The main premise of this book is cooking…
- With nutritious whole foods
- Without salt, oil, sugar (“SOS”)
It additionally does it without animal products and without gluten, and (per “nutritious whole foods”), and, as the title suggests, avoiding anything that’s more than very minimally processed. Remember, for example, that if something is fermented, then that fermentation is a process, so the food has been processed—just, minimally.
This is a revised edition, and it’s been adjusted to, for example, strip some of the previous “no salt” low-sodium options (such as tamari with 233mg/tsp sodium, compared to salt’s 2,300mg/tsp sodium).
You may be wondering: what’s left? Tasty, well-seasoned, plant-based food, that leans towards the “comfort food” culinary niche.
Enough to sate the author, after her own battles with anorexia and obesity (in that order) and finally, after various hospital trips, getting her diet where it needed to be for the healthy lifestyle that she lives now, while still getting to eat such dishes as “Chef AJ’s Disappearing Lasagna” and peanut butter fudge truffles and 151 more.
Bottom line: if you want whole-food plant-based comfort-food cooking that’s healthy in general and especially heart-healthy, this book has plenty of that.
Click here to check out Unprocessed: 10th Anniversary Edition, and… Enjoy!
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How To Improve Your Heart Rate Variability
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How’s your heart rate variability?
The hallmarks of a good, strong cardiovascular system include a medium-to-low resting heart rate (for adults: under 60 beats per minute is good; under 50 is typical of athletes), and healthy blood pressure (for adults: under 120/80, while still above 90/60, is generally considered good).
Less talked-about is heart rate variability, but it’s important too…
What is heart rate variability?
Heart rate variability is a measure of how quickly and easily your heart responds to changes in demands placed upon it. For example:
- If you’re at rest and then start running your fastest (be it for leisure or survival or anything in between), your heart rate should be able to jump from its resting rate to about 180% of that as quickly as possible
- When you stop, your heart rate should be able to shift gears back to your resting rate as quickly as possible
The same goes, to a commensurately lesser extent, to changes in activity between low and moderate, or between moderate and high.
- When your heart can change gears quickly, that’s called a high heart rate variability
- When your heart is sluggish to get going and then takes a while to return to normal after exertion, that’s called a low heart rate variability.
The rate of change (i.e., the variability) is measured in microseconds per beat, and the actual numbers will vary depending on a lot of factors, but for everyone, higher is better than lower.
Aside from quick response to crises, why does it matter?
If heart rate variability is low, it means the sympathetic nervous system is dominating the parasympathetic nervous system, which means, in lay terms, your fight-or-flight response is overriding your ability to relax.
See for example: Stress and Heart Rate Variability: A Meta-Analysis and Review of the Literature
This has a lot of knock-on effects for both physical and mental health! Your heart and brain will take the worst of this damage, so it’s good to improve things for them impossible.
This Saturday’s Life Hacks: how to improve your HRV!
Firstly, the Usual Five Things™:
- A good diet (that avoids processed foods)
- Good exercise (that includes daily physical activity—more often is more important than more intense!)
- Good sleep (7–9 hours of good quality sleep per night)
- Reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption (this is dose-dependent; any reduction is an improvement)
- Don’t smoke (just don’t)
Additional regular habits that help a lot:
- Breathing exercises, mindfulness, meditation
- Therapy, especially CBT and DBT
- Stress-avoidance strategies, for example:
- Get (and maintain) your finances in good order
- Get (and maintain) your relationship(s) in good order
- Get (and maintain) your working* life in good order
*Whatever this means to you. If you’re perhaps retired, or otherwise a home-maker, or even a student, the things you “need to do” on a daily basis are your working life, for these purposes.
In terms of simple, quick-fix, physical tweaks to focus on if you’re already broadly leading a good life, two great ones are:
- Exercise: get moving! Walk to the store even if you buy nothing but a snack or drink to enjoy while walking back. If you drove, make more trips with the shopping bags rather than fewer. If you like to watch TV, consider an exercise bike or treadmill to use while watching. If you have a partner, double-up and make it a thing you do together! Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Take the scenic route when walking someplace. Go to the bathroom that’s further away. Every little helps!
- Breathe: even just a couple of times a day, practice mindful breathing. Start with even just a minute a day, to get the habit going. What breathing exercise you do isn’t so important as that you do it. Notice your breathing; count how long each breath takes. Don’t worry about “doing it right”—you’re doing great, just observe, just notice, just slowly count. We promise that regular practice of this will have you feeling amazing
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Hard to Kill – by Dr. Jaime Seeman
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.
We’ve written before about Dr. Seeman’s method for robust health at all ages, focussing on:
- Nutrition
- Movement
- Sleep
- Mindset
- Environment
In this book, she expands on these things far more than we have room to in our little newsletter, including (importantly!) how each interplays with the others. She also follows up with an invitation to take the “Hard to Kill 30-Day Challenge”.
That said, in the category of criticism, it’s only 152 pages, and she takes some of that to advertise her online services in an effort to upsell the reader.
Nevertheless, there’s a lot of worth in the book itself, and the writing style is certainly easy-reading and compelling.
Bottom line: this book is half instructional, half motivational, and covers some very important areas of health.
Click here to check out “Hard to Kill”, and enjoy robust health at every age!
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A New Free App Offers Relief For Dry Eyes (Yes, Really)
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Firstly, eye drops are an obvious go-to in the case of dry eyes, so let’s speak on those first. Indeed, even the app we’re going to talk about recommends also using eye drops.
Do you want to use eye drops, but you find it’s difficult to take them? Here’s a method that is much easier than trying to put anything in an open eye:
- Step 0: if you are wearing eyeliner/mascara, please remove that first!
- Step 1: lie down, flat on your back (unlike tilting your head back, you won’t accidentally revert posture and lose the eye drop down your cheek)
- Step 2: close your eyes!
- Step 3: with your eyes still closed, apply the correct number of drops as close to the inner corner of your eye as possible
- Step 4: open your eyes; the drop(s) will just flow into place.
- Step 5 (bonus): blink a few times to distribute, if necessary. If it was just one drop, this is probably not needed
Still, eye drops are not the only way: Eye Drops: Safety & Alternatives
Now, to deliver on the headline promise…
About the app
A team of researchers, Dr. Sònia Travé-Huarte et al., investigated how blinking exercises can improve dry eye symptoms (in this context, improve = reduce or ideally eliminate).
Blinking exercises have been well-established as a way of diagnosing dry eyes, but when it comes to using blinking exercises to treat dry eyes, little science has been done before this.
The tested 98 participants diagnosed with dry eyes (and their dryness scores recorded before the study began), and gave them various sets of blinking and/or squeezing exercises (using the muscles around the eye, not one’s hands! The facial movement colloquially called screwing one’s eyes tightly closed), with various permutations of sets and reps.
A second part of the study optimized the app parameters, based on symptom severity and frequency, blink rate/completeness, tear film stability and volume, along with ocular surface staining. In short, much was done and much was measured.
What they found (after a lot of testing and subsequent mathematics):
❝Fifteen repeats of close-squeeze-open cycles, 3x/day was the optimum blinking exercise routine, reducing symptoms, number of incomplete blinks and conjunctival staining.❞
Read in full: Optimisation of blinking exercises for dry eye disease ← the research paper
One of the researchers is the head of Aston University’s School of Optometry, and had this to say:
❝This research confirmed that blink exercises can be a way of overcoming the bad habit of only partially closing our eyes during a blink, that we develop when using digital devices.
The research demonstrated that the most effective way to do the exercises is three times a day, 15 repeats of close, squeeze shut and reopen—just three minutes in total out of your busy lifestyle.
To make it easier, we have made our MyDryEye app freely available on iOS and Android so you can choose when you want to be reminded to do the exercises and for this to map your progress and how it affects your symptoms.❞
Read in full: New app helps relieve dry eye through optimized blinking routine ← a pop-science article about the aforementioned research paper
Want the app?
Notwithstanding that they mention having made it freely available on the iOS and Android app store, we were (at time of writing) only able to find it for iOS:
See MyDryEye in the Apple App Store
We suspect that this simply means that for Android, it’s still going through the “approval” stage and will be publicly available shortly—so Android users, you might want to check later whether it’s available in the Google Play Store.
Want to learn more?
Check out:
What Your Eyes Say About Your Health (If You Have A Mirror, You Can Do This Now!)
Take care!
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Lyme Disease At-A-Glance
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
❝Good info as always…was wondering if you have any recommendations for fighting Lyme disease naturally along wDr advice? Dr’s aren’t real keen on alternatives so always interested. Thanks❞
That depends on whether we’re looking at prevention or cure!
Prevention:
- Try not to get bitten by Lyme-disease-carrying ticks. Boots and long socks are your friends. As are long-gauntletted gloves for gardening.
- If you are in a high-risk area and/or engage in high-risk activities, check your body daily.
- This is because it usually takes 36–48 hours of being attached for a tick to cause an infection
- Obviously best if you can get a partner or close friend to help you with this, unless you have mastered some advanced pretzel positions of yoga.
- Contrary to many folk remedies, the safest way to remove a tick is with tweezers (carefully!).
- If you find and remove a tick, or otherwise suspect you have developed symptoms, go to your doctor immediately (not next week; today; time really counts for this).
Cure:
- No. Sorry. Regretfully, antibiotics are the only known effective treatment.
However! As with almost any kind of recovery, getting good rest, including good quality sleep, will hasten things. Also sensible is reducing stress if possible, and anything that could worsen inflammation.
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