Healthy Kids, Happy Kids – by Dr. Elisa Song

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If you have young children or perhaps grandchildren, you probably care deeply about those children and their wellbeing, but there can often be a lot more guesswork than would be ideal, when it comes to ensuring they be and remain healthy.

Nevertheless, a lot of common treatments for children are based (whether parents know it or not—and often they dont) on what is most convenient for the parent, not necessarily what is best for the child. Dr. Song looks to correct that.

Rather than dosing kids with acetaminophen or even antibiotics, assuming eczema can be best fixed with a topical cream (treating the symptom rather than the cause, much?), and that some things like asthma “just are”, and “that’s unfortunate”, Dr. Song takes us on a tour of pediatric health, centered around the gut.

Why the gut? Well, it’s pretty central to us as adults, and it’s the same for kids, except one difference: their gut microbiome is changing even more quickly than ours (along with the rest of their body), and as such, is even more susceptible to little nudges for better or for worse, having a big impact in either direction. So, might as well make it a good one!

After an explanatory overview, most of the book is given over to recognizing and correcting what things can go wrong, including the top 25 acute childhood conditions, and the most critical chronic ones, and how to keep things on-track as a team (the child is part of the team! An important part!).

The style of the book is very direct and instructional; easy to understand throughout. It’s a lot like being in a room with a very competent pediatrician who knows her stuff and explains it well, thus neither patronizing nor mystifying.

Bottom line: if there are kids in your life, be they yours or your grandkids or someone else, this is a fine book for giving them the best foundational health.

Click here to check out Healthy Kids, Happy Kids, and take care of yours!

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  • Yoga that Helps You on the Loo

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    How This Video Helps You Poo

    When you’re feeling a bit bloated, Yoga With Bird’s 10-minute yoga routine promises to help you release…your gas. And, perhaps, more.

    From a tabletop flow to soothing twists, each pose allows you to sync your breath with movement, helping to promote organic relief.

    With options to modify with pillows for extra support, this video (below) caters to everyone needing a digestive reset.

    Other Toilet Tricks

    If yoga isn’t your thing, or you’re interested in trying to use different methods to make your visits to the bathroom a bit easier, we’ve spoken about the ways to manage gut health, and use of probiotics or fiber, and even the prevention of hemorrhoids.

    Namaste and goodbye to bloat!

    How was the video? If you’ve discovered any great videos yourself that you’d like to share with fellow 10almonds readers, then please do email them to us!

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  • How anti-vaccine figures abuse data to trick you

    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.

    The anti-vaccine movement is nearly as old as vaccines themselves. For as long as humans have sought to harness our immune system’s incredible ability to recognize and fight infectious invaders, critics and conspiracy theorists have opposed these efforts. 

    Anti-vaccine tactics have advanced since the early days of protesting “unnatural” smallpox inoculation, and the rampant abuse of scientific data may be the most effective strategy yet. 

    Here’s how vaccine opponents misuse data to deceive people, plus how you can avoid being manipulated.

    Misappropriating raw and unverified safety data

    Perhaps the oldest and most well-established anti-vaccine tactic is the abuse of data from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration maintain VAERS as a tool for researchers to detect early warning signs of potential vaccine side effects. 

    Anyone can submit a VAERS report about any symptom experienced at any point after vaccination. That does not mean that these symptoms are vaccine side effects.

    VAERS was not designed to determine if a specific vaccine caused a specific adverse event. But for decades, vaccine opponents have misinterpreted, misrepresented, and manipulated VAERS data to convince people that vaccines are dangerous. 

    Anyone relying on VAERS to draw conclusions about vaccine safety is probably trying to trick you. It isn’t possible to determine from VAERS data alone if a vaccine caused a specific health condition.

    VAERS isn’t the only federal data that vaccine opponents abuse. Originally created for COVID-19 vaccines, V-safe is a vaccine safety monitoring system that allows users to report—via text message surveys—how they feel and any health issues they experience up to a year after vaccination. Anti-vaccine groups have misrepresented data in the system, which tracks all health experiences, whether or not they are vaccine-related.

    The U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) has also become a target of anti-vaccine misinformation. Vaccine opponents have falsely claimed that DMED data reveals massive spikes in strokes, heart attacks, HIV, cancer, and blood clots among military service members since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. The spike was due to an updated policy that corrected underreporting in the previous years

    Misrepresenting legitimate studies

    A common tactic vaccine opponents use is misrepresenting data from legitimate sources such as national health databases and peer-reviewed studies. For example, COVID-19 vaccines have repeatedly been blamed for rising cancer and heart attack rates, based on data that predates the pandemic by decades. 

    A prime example of this strategy is a preliminary FDA study that detected a slight increase in stroke risk in older adults after a high-dose flu vaccine alone or in combination with the bivalent COVID-19 vaccine. The study found no “increased risk of stroke following administration of the COVID-19 bivalent vaccines.”

    Yet vaccine opponents used the study to falsely claim that COVID-19 vaccines were uniquely harmful, despite the data indicating that the increased risk was almost certainly driven by the high-dose flu vaccine. The final peer-reviewed study confirmed that there was no elevated stroke risk following COVID-19 vaccination. But the false narrative that COVID-19 vaccines cause strokes persists.

    Similarly, the largest COVID-19 vaccine safety study to date confirmed the extreme rarity of a few previously identified risks. For weeks, vaccine opponents overstated these rare risks and falsely claimed that the study proves that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe. 

    Citing preprint and retracted studies

    When a study has been retracted, it is no longer considered a credible source. A study’s retraction doesn’t deter vaccine opponents from promoting it—it may even be an incentive because retracted papers can be held up as examples of the medical establishment censoring so-called “truthtellers.” For example, anti-vaccine groups still herald Andrew Wakefield nearly 15 years after his study falsely linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism was retracted for data fraud. 

    The COVID-19 pandemic brought the lasting impact of retracted studies into sharp focus. The rush to understand a novel disease that was infecting millions brought a wave of scientific publications, some more legitimate than others. 

    Over time, the weaker studies were reassessed and retracted, but their damage lingers. A 2023 study found that retracted and withdrawn COVID-19 studies were cited significantly more frequently than valid published COVID-19 studies in the same journals. 

    In one example, a widely cited abstract that found that ivermectin—an antiparasitic drug proven to not treat COVID-19—dramatically reduced mortality in COVID-19 patients exemplifies this phenomenon. The abstract, which was never peer reviewed, was retracted at the request of its authors, who felt the study’s evidence was weak and was being misrepresented. 

    Despite this, the study—along with the many other retracted ivermectin studies—remains a touchstone for proponents of the drug that has shown no effectiveness against COVID-19.

    In a more recent example, a group of COVID-19 vaccine opponents uploaded a paper to The Lancet’s preprint server, a repository for papers that have not yet been peer reviewed or published by the prestigious journal. The paper claimed to have analyzed 325 deaths after COVID-19 vaccination, finding COVID-19 vaccines were linked to 74 percent of the deaths. 

    The paper was promptly removed because its conclusions were unsupported, leading vaccine opponents to cry censorship. 

    Applying animal research to humans

    Animals are vital to medical research, allowing scientists to better understand diseases that affect humans and develop and screen potential treatments before they are tested in humans. Animal research is a starting point that should never be generalized to humans, but vaccine opponents do just that.

    Several animal studies are frequently cited to support the claim that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous during pregnancy. These studies found that pregnant rats had adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines. The results are unsurprising given that they were injected with doses equal to or many times larger than the dose given to humans rather than a dose that is proportional to the animal’s size. 

    Similarly, a German study on rat heart cells found abnormalities after exposure to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccine opponents falsely insinuated that this study proves COVID-19 vaccines cause heart damage in humans and was so universally misrepresented that the study’s author felt compelled to dispute the claims. 

    The author noted that the study used vaccine doses significantly higher than those administered to humans and was conducted in cultured rat cells, a dramatically different environment than a functioning human heart. 

    How to avoid being misled

    The internet has empowered vaccine opponents to spread false information with an efficiency and expediency that was previously impossible. Anti-vaccine narratives have advanced rapidly due to the rampant exploitation of valid sources and the promotion of unvetted, non-credible sources. 

    You can avoid being tricked by using multiple trusted sources to verify claims that you encounter online. Some examples of credible sources are reputable public health entities like the CDC and World Health Organization, personal health care providers, and peer-reviewed research from experts in fields relevant to COVID-19 and the pandemic. 

    Read more about anti-vaccine tactics:

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

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  • The Calorie Myth – by Jonathan Bailor

    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.

    First we’ll mention: the author is not a doctor, but the book is endorsed by assorted well-known doctors in the field, and the science described is consistent with current scientific consensus (and, for that matter, consistent with what we wrote in our mythbusting feature: Are You A Calorie-Burning Machine?).

    It’s often (correctly) said that “not all calories are created equal”, but how should we quantify them? He proposes his “SANE solution”, which is based around the ideas of:

    • Satiety: how quickly calories fill us up
    • Aggression: how likely calories are to be stored as fat
    • Nutrition: how many micronutrients calories bring with them, and how much
    • Efficiency: how easily calories are converted

    To this end, he recommends a diet high in foods that score well on his “SANE” factors, and provides such things as recipes, meal plans etc to help, as well principles for exercising more usefully in the context of metabolic base rate, and moving (rather than fighting) one’s “set point”, which is usually associated with one’s weight but it really has more to do with metabolic base rate. In fact, Bailor recommends throwing out the bathroom scale and focusing on pursuing good health itself, rather than obsessing over changing one’s relationship with the Earth’s gravitational field.

    Yes, it says “lose weight” in the subtitle, but the idea is that this will be a by-product rather than the thing actively pursued. After all, we can control our actions, so that input variable is where we should put our focus, not the output variable of the numbers on the scale which can often be misleading (muscle weighing more than fat, tendency to water weight fluctuations, etc).

    The style is a little flashy and salesy for this reviewer’s personal taste (a lot of references to his own businesses and neologisms associated with such), but it doesn’t take away from the quality of the content, and in terms of science, study references come at a rate of about one per page on average.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to rethink your relationship with calories, then this book can help give you a much more practical angle.

    Click here to check out The Calorie Myth, and take control of your metabolic base rate!

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Related Posts

  • Ultra-Processed People – by Dr. Chris van Tulleken
  • The Lupus Solution – by Dr. Tiffany Caplan & Dr. Brent Caplan

    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.

    Lupus is not fun, and this book sets out to make it easier.

    Starting off by explaining the basics of autoimmunity and how lupus works, the authors go on the address the triggers of lupus and how to avoid them—which if you’ve been suffering from lupus for a while, you probably know this part already, but it’s as well to give them a look over just in case you missed something.

    The real value of the book though comes in the 8 chapters of the section “Tools & Therapies” which are mostly lifestyle adjustments though there are additionally some pharmaceutical approaches that can also help, and they are explained too. And no, it’s not just “reduce inflammation” (but yes, also that); rather, a whole array of things are examined that often aren’t thought of as related to lupus, but in fact can have a big impact.

    The style is to-the-point and informational, and formatted for ease of reading. It doesn’t convey more hard science than necessary, but it does have a fair bibliography at the back.

    It’s a short book, weighing in at 182 pages. If you want something more comprehensive, check out our review of The Lupus Encyclopedia, which is 848 pages of information-dense text and diagrams.

    Bottom line: if you have lupus and would like fewer symptoms, this book can help you with that quite a bit without getting so technical as the aforementioned encyclopedia.

    Click here to check out The Lupus Solution, and live more comfortably!

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  • Almond Butter vs Cashew Butter – Which is Healthier?

    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.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing almond butter to cashew butter, we picked the almond.

    Why?

    It’s not just our pro-almonds bias! And of course exact nutritional values may vary depending on the recipe, but we’re using the USDA’s standardized figures which should represent a reasonable average. Specifically, we’re looking at the USDA entries for “[Nut] butter, plain, without salt added”.

    In terms of macros, almond butter takes the lead immediately with nearly 2x the protein and over 3x the fiber. In contrast, cashew butter has 1.5x the carbs, and the two nut butters are approximately equal on fat. An easy win for almond butter so far.

    When it comes to vitamins, almond butter has more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B5, E, and choline, while cashew butter has more of vitamins B1, B6, and K. Thus, a 6:3 win for almond butter.

    In the category of minerals, things are closer, but almond butter has more calcium, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and potassium, while cashew butter has more copper, iron, zinc, and selenium. So, a 5:4 win for almond butter.

    In short, these three wins for almond butter add up to one total win for almond butter, unless you have a pressing reason to have different priorities in what you’re looking for in terms of nutrition.

    Enjoy both, of course! Unless you are allergic, in which case, please don’t.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts

    Take care!

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  • No Bad Parts – by Dr. Richard Schwartz

    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 previously reviewed Dr. Schwartz’s “You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For” and whereas that book doesn’t require having read this one, this one would be an excellent place to start, as it focuses on perhaps the most important core issues of IFS therapy.

    We all have different aspects that have developed within us for different reasons, and can generally “become as though a different person when…” and some condition that is met. Those are our “parts”, per IFS.

    This book makes the case that even the worst of our parts arose for reasons, that they often looked after us when no other part could or would, and at the very least, they tried. Rather than arguing for “so, everything’s just great”, though, Dr. Schwartz talks the reader through making peace with those parts, and then, where appropriate, giving them the retirement they deserve—of if that’s not entirely practical, arranging for them to at least take a seat and wait until called on, rather than causing problems in areas of life to which they are not well-suited.

    Throughout, there is a good balance of compassion and no-bullshit, both of which are really necessary in order to make this work.

    Bottom line: if there are parts of you you’re not necessarily proud of, this book can help you to put them peacefully to rest.

    Click here to check out No Bad Parts, and take care of yours!

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