Healthy Tiramisu
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Tiramisu (literally “pick-me-up”, “tira-mi-su”) is a delightful dish that, in its traditional form, is also a trainwreck for the health, being loaded with inflammatory cream and sugar, not to mention the cholesterol content. Here we recreate the dish in healthy fashion, being loaded with protein, fiber, and healthy fats, not to mention that the optional sweetener is an essential amino acid. The coffee and cocoa, of course, are full of antioxidants too. All in all, what’s not celebrate?
You will need
- 2 cups silken tofu (no need to press it) (do not substitute with any other kind of tofu or it will not work)
- 1 cup oat cream (you can buy this ready-made, or make it yourself by blending oats in water until you get the desired consistency) (you can also just use dairy cream, but that will be less healthy)
- 1 cup almond flour (also simply called “ground almonds”)
- 1 cup espresso ristretto, or otherwise the strongest black coffee you have facility to make
- ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder, plus more for dusting
- 1 pack savoiardi biscuits, also called “ladyfinger” biscuits (this was the only part we couldn’t make healthy—if you figure out a way to make it healthy, let us know!) (if vegan, obviously use a vegan substitute biscuit; this writer uses Lotus/Biscoff biscuits, which work well)
- 1 tsp vanilla essence
- ½ tsp almond essence
- Optional: glycine, per taste
- Garnish: roasted coffee beans
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Add glycine to the coffee first if you want the overall dish to be sweeter. Glycine has approximately the same sweetness as sugar, and can be used as a 1:1 substitution. Use that information as you see fit.
2) Blend the tofu and the cream together in a high-speed blender until smooth. It should have a consistency like cake-batter; if it is too liquidy, add small amounts of almond flour until it is thicker. If it’s too thick, add oat cream until it isn’t. If you want it to be sweeter than it is, add glycine to taste. When happy with its taste and consistency, divide it evenly into two bowls.
3) Add the vanilla essence and almond essence to one bowl, and the cocoa powder to the other, mixing well (in a food processor, or just by using a whisk)
4) Coat the base of a glass dish (such as a Pyrex oven dish, but any dish is fine, and any glass dish will allow for viewing the pretty layers we’ll be making) with a very thin layer of almond flour (if you want sweetness there, you can mix some glycine in with the almond flour first).
4) One by one, soak the biscuits briefly in the coffee, and use them to line to base of the dish.
5) Add a thin layer of chocolate cream, ensuring the surface is as flat as possible. Dust it with cocoa powder, to increase the surface tension.
6) Add a thin layer of vanilla-and-almond cream, ensuring the surface is as flat as possible. Dust it with cocoa powder, to increase the surface tension.
7) Stop and assess: do you have enough ingredients left to repeat these layers? It will depend on the size and shape dish you used. If you do, repeat them, finishing with a vanilla-and-almond cream layer.
8) Dust the final layer with cocoa powder if you haven’t already, and add the coffee bean garnish, if using.
9) Refrigerate for at least 8 hours, and if you have time to prepare it the day before you will eat it, that is best of all.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Easily Digestible Vegetarian Protein Sources
- Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!
- The Bitter Truth About Coffee (or is it?)
- The Sweet Truth About Glycine
- Tiramisu Crunch Bites ← craving tiramisu but not keen on all that effort? Enjoy these!
Take care!
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Sunflower Oil vs Canola Oil – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing sunflower oil to canola oil, we picked the sunflower oil.
Why?
They’re both terrible! But canola oil is worse. Sunflower oil is marketed as being higher in polyunsaturated fats, which it is, albeit not by much.
Canola oil is very bad for the heart, and sunflower oil is only moderately bad for the heart, to the point that it can be heart-neutral if used sparingly.
As seed oils, they are both sources of vitamin E, but you’d need to drink a cup of oil to get your daily dose, so please just eat some seeds (or nuts, or fruit, or something) instead. It can even be sunflower seeds if you like! Rapeseed* itself (the seed that canola oil is made from) isn’t really sold as a foodstuff, so that one’s less of an option.
*Fun fact: if you’re N. American and wondering what this “rapeseed” is, know that most of the rest of the Anglosphere calls canola oil “rapeseed oil”, as it’s made from rapeseed, which comes from a plant called rape, whose name is unrelated to the crime of the same name, and comes from rāpa, the Latin word for turnip. Anyway, “canola” is a portmanteau of “Canadian” and “Ola” meaning oil, and is a trademark that has made its way into generic use throughout N. America, as a less alarming name.
Back to health matters: while sunflower seeds are healthy in moderation, the ultraprocessed and refined sunflower and canola oils are not.
Canola oil has also been found to be implicated in age-related cognitive decline, whereas sunflower oil has had mixed results in that regard.
In summary
Sunflower oil is relatively, and we stress relatively, healthier than canola oil. Please use a healthier oil than either if you can. Olive oil is good for most things, and if you need something with a higher smoke point (and/or less distinctive flavor), consider avocado oil, which is also very healthy and whose smoke point is even higher than the seed oils we’ve been discussing today.
Want to know more?
Check out:
Avocado Oil vs Olive Oil – Which is Healthier?
Enjoy!
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Less Common Oral Hygiene Options
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Less Common Alternatives For Oral Hygiene!
You almost certainly brush your teeth. You might use mouthwash. A lot of people floss for three weeks at a time, often in January.
There are a lot of options for oral hygiene; variations of the above, and many alternatives too. This is a big topic, so rather than try to squeeze it all in one, this will be a several-part series.
- The first part was: Toothpastes & Mouthwashes: Which Help And Which Harm?
- The second part was: Flossing, Better (And Easier!)
- The third (and for now at least, final) part will look at some less common alternatives.
Tooth soap
The idea here is simplicity, and brushing with as few ingredients as possible. Soap cleans your teeth the same way it cleans your (sometimes compositionally quite similar—enamel and all) dishes, without damaging them.
We’d love to link to some science here, but alas, it appears to have not yet been done—at least, we couldn’t find any!
You can make your own tooth soap if you are feeling confident, or you might prefer to buy one ready-made (here’s an example product on Amazon, with various flavor options)
Oil pulling
We are getting gradually more scientific now; there is science for this one… But the (scientific) reviews are mixed:
Wooley et al., 2020, conducted a review of extant studies, and concluded:
❝The limited evidence suggests that oil pulling with coconut oil may have a beneficial effect on improving oral health and dental hygiene❞
The “Science-Based Medicine” project was less positive in its assessment, and declared that all and any studies that found oil pulling to be effective were a matter of researcher/publication bias. We would note that SBM is a private project and is not without its own biases, but for balance, here is what they had to offer:
A more rounded view seems to be that it is a good method for cleaning your teeth if you don’t have better options available (whereby, “better options” is “almost any other method”).
One final consideration, which the above seemed not to consider, is:
If you have sensitive teeth/gums, oil-pulling is the gentlest way of cleaning them, and getting them back into sufficient order that you can comfortably use other methods.
Want to try it? You can use any food-grade oil (coconut oil or olive oil are common choices).
Chewing stick
Not just any stick—a twig of the Salvadora persica tree. This time, there’s lots of science for it, and it’s uncontroversially effective:
❝A number of scientific studies have demonstrated that the miswak (Salvadora persica) possesses antibacterial, anti-fungal, anti-viral, anti-cariogenic, and anti-plaque properties.
Several studies have also claimed that miswak has anti-oxidant, analgesic, and anti-inflammatory effects. The use of a miswak has an immediate effect on the composition of saliva.
Several clinical studies have confirmed that the mechanical and chemical cleansing efficacy of miswak chewing sticks are equal and at times greater than that of the toothbrush❞
Read in full: A review of the therapeutic effects of using miswak (Salvadora Persica) on oral health
And about the efficacy vs using a toothbrush, here’s an example:
Comparative effect of chewing sticks and toothbrushing on plaque removal and gingival health
Want to try the miswak stick? Here’s an example product on Amazon.
Enjoy!
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Glycemic Index vs Glycemic Load vs Insulin Index
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How To Actually Use Those Indices
Carbohydrates are essential for our life, and/but often bring about our early demise. It would be a very conveniently simple world if it were simply a matter of “enjoy in moderation”, but the truth is, it’s not that simple.
To take an extreme example, for the sake of clearest illustration: The person who eats an 80% whole fruit diet (and makes up the necessary protein and fats etc in the other 20%) will probably be healthier than the person who eats a “standard American diet”, despite not practising moderation in their fruit-eating activities. The “standard American diet” has many faults, and one of those faults is how it promotes sporadic insulin spikes leading to metabolic disease.
If your breakfast is a glass of orange juice, this is a supremely “moderate” consumption, but an insulin spike is an insulin spike.
Quick sidenote: if you’re wondering why eating immoderate amounts of fruit is unlikely to cause such spikes, but a single glass of orange juice is, check out:
Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Glycemic Index
The first tool in our toolbox here is glycemic index, or GI.
GI measures how much a carb-containing food raises blood glucose levels, also called blood sugar levels, but it’s just glucose that’s actually measured, bearing in mind that more complex carbs will generally get broken down to glucose.
Pure glucose has a GI of 100, and other foods are ranked from 0 to 100 based on how they compare.
Sometimes, what we do to foods changes its GI.
- Some is because it changed form, like the above example of whole fruit (low GI) vs fruit juice (high GI).
- Some is because of more “industrial” refinement processes, such as whole grain wheat (medium GI) vs white flour and white flour products (high GI)
- Some is because of other changes, like starches that were allowed to cool before being reheated (or eaten cold).
Broadly speaking, a daily average GI of 45 is considered great.
But that’s not the whole story…
Glycemic Load
Glycemic Load, or GL, takes the GI and says “ok, but how much of it was there?”, because this is often relevant information.
Refined sugar may have a high GI, but half a teaspoon of sugar in your coffee isn’t going to move your blood sugar levels as much as a glass of Coke, say—the latter simply has more sugar in, and just the same zero fiber.
GL is calculated by (grams of carbs / 100) x GI, by the way.
But it still misses some important things, so now let’s look at…
Insulin Index
Insulin Index, which does not get an abbreviation (probably because of the potentially confusing appearance of “II”), measures the rise in insulin levels, regardless of glucose levels.
This is important, because a lot of insulin response is independent of blood glucose:
- Some is because of other sugars, some some is in response to fats, and yes, even proteins.
- Some is a function of metabolic base rate.
- Some is a stress response.
- Some remains a mystery!
Another reason it’s important is that insulin drives weight gain and metabolic disorders far more than glucose.
Note: the indices of foods are calculated based on average non-diabetic response. If for example you have Type 1 Diabetes, then when you take a certain food, your rise in insulin is going to be whatever insulin you then take, because your body’s insulin response is disrupted by being too busy fighting a civil war in your pancreas.
If your diabetes is type 2, or you are prediabetic, then a lot of different things could happen depending on the stage and state of your diabetes, but the insulin index is still a very good thing to be aware of, because you want to resensitize your body to insulin, which means (barring any urgent actions for immediate management of hyper- or hypoglycemia, obviously) you want to eat foods with a low insulin index where possible.
Great! What foods have a low insulin index?
Many factors affect insulin index, but to speak in general terms:
- Whole plant foods are usually top-tier options
- Lean and/or white meats generally have lower insulin index than red and/or fatty ones
- Unprocessed is generally lower than processed
- The more solid a food is, generally the lower its insulin index compared to a less solid version of the same food (e.g. baked potatoes vs mashed potatoes; cheese vs milk, etc)
But do remember the non-food factors too! This means where possible:
- reducing/managing stress
- getting frequent exercise
- getting good sleep
- practising intermittent fasting
See for example (we promise you it’s relevant):
Fix Chronic Fatigue & Regain Your Energy, By Science
…as are (especially recommendable!) the two links we drop at the bottom of that page; do check them out if you can
Take care!
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What You Should Have Been Told About The Menopause Beforehand
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What You Should Have Been Told About Menopause Beforehand
This is Dr. Jen Gunter. She’s a gynecologist, specializing in chronic pain and vulvovaginal disorders. She’s also a woman on a mission to demystify things that popular culture, especially in the US, would rather not talk about.
When was the last time you remember the menopause being referenced in a movie or TV show? If you can think of one at all, was it just played for laughs?
And of course, the human body can be funny, so that’s not necessarily the problem, but it sure would be nice if that weren’t all that there is!
So, what does Dr. Gunter want us to know?
It’s a time of changes, not an end
The name “menopause” is misleading. It’s not a “pause”, and those menses aren’t coming back.
And yet, to call it a “menostop” would be differently misleading, because there’s a lot more going on than a simple cessation of menstruation.
Estrogen levels will drop a lot, testosterone levels may rise slightly, mood and sleep and appetite and sex drive will probably be affected (progesterone can improve all these things!) and
not to mention butwe’re going to mention: vaginal atrophy, which is very normal and very treatable with a topical estrogen cream. Untreated menopause can also bring a whole lot of increased health risks (for example, heart disease, osteoporosis, and, counterintuitively given the lower estrogen levels, breast cancer).However, with a little awareness and appropriate management, all these things can usually be navigated with minimal adverse health outcomes.
Dr Gunter, for this reason, refers to it interchangeably as “the menopausal transition”. She describes it as being less like a cliff edge we fall off, and more like a bridge we cross.
Bridges can be dangerous to cross! But they can also get us safely where we’re going.
Ok, so how do we manage those things?
Dr. Gunter is a big fan of evidence-based medicine, so we’ll not be seeing any yonic crystals or jade eggs. Or “goop”.
See also: Meet Goop’s Number One Enemy
For most people, she recommends Menopausal Hormone Therapy (MHT), which falls under the more general category of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT).
This is the most well-evidenced, science-based way to avoid most of the risks associated with menopause.
Nevertheless, there are scare-stories out there, ranging from painful recommencement of bleeding, to (once again) increased risk of breast cancer. However, most of these are either misunderstandings, or unrelated to menopause and MHT, and are rather signs of other problems that should not be ignored.
To get a good grounding in this, you might want to read her Hormone Therapy Guide, freely available as a standalone section on her website. This series of posts is dedicated to hormone therapy. It starts with some basics and builds on that knowledge with each post:
Dr. Gunter’s Guide To The Hormone Menoverse
What about natural therapies?
There are some non-hormonal things that work, but these are mostly things that:
- give a statistically significant reduction in symptoms
- give the same statistically significant reduction in symptoms as placebo
As Dr. Gunter puts it:
❝While most of the studies of prescription medications for hot flashes have an appropriate placebo arm, this is rarely the case with so-called alternative therapies.
In fact, the studies here are almost always low quality, so it’s often not possible to conclude much.
Many reviews that look at these studies often end with a line that goes something like, “Randomized trials with a placebo arm, a low risk of bias, and adequate sample sizes are urgently needed.”
You should interpret this kind of conclusion as the polite way of saying, “We need studies that aren’t BS to say something constructive.”❞
However, if it works, it works, whatever its mechanism. It’s just good, when making medical decisions, to do so with the full facts!
For that matter, even Dr. Gunter acknowledges that while MHT can be lifechanging (in a positive way) for many, it’s not for everyone:
Informed Decisions: When Menopause Hormone Therapy Isn’t Recommended
Want to know more?
Dr. Gunter also has an assortment of books available, including The Menopause Manifesto (which we’ve reviewed previously), and some others that we haven’t, such as “Blood” and “The Vagina Bible”.
Enjoy!
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Only walking for exercise? Here’s how to get the most out of it
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We’re living longer than in previous generations, with one in eight elderly Australians now aged over 85. But the current gap between life expectancy (“lifespan”) and health-adjusted life expectancy (“healthspan”) is about ten years. This means many of us live with significant health problems in our later years.
To increase our healthspan, we need planned, structured and regular physical activity (or exercise). The World Health Organization recommends 150–300 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise – such as brisk walking, cycling and swimming – per week and muscle strengthening twice a week.
Yet few of us meet these recommendations. Only 10% meet the strength-training recommendations. Lack of time is one of the most common reasons.
Walking is cost-effective, doesn’t require any special equipment or training, and can be done with small pockets of time. Our preliminary research, published this week, shows there are ways to incorporate strength-training components into walking to improve your muscle strength and balance.
Why walking isn’t usually enough
Regular walking does not appear to work as muscle-strengthening exercise.
In contrast, exercises consisting of “eccentric” or muscle-lengthening contractions improve muscle strength, prevent muscle wasting and improve other functions such as balance and flexibility.
Typical eccentric contractions are seen, for example, when we sit on a chair slowly. The front thigh muscles lengthen with force generation.
When you sit down slowly on a chair, the front thigh muscles lengthen.
buritora/ShutterstockOur research
Our previous research found body-weight-based eccentric exercise training, such as sitting down on a chair slowly, improved lower limb muscle strength and balance in healthy older adults.
We also showed walking down stairs, with the front thigh muscles undergoing eccentric contractions, increased leg muscle strength and balance in older women more than walking up stairs. When climbing stairs, the front thigh muscles undergo “concentric” contractions, with the muscles shortening.
It can be difficult to find stairs or slopes suitable for eccentric exercises. But if they could be incorporated into daily walking, lower limb muscle strength and balance function could be improved.
This is where the idea of “eccentric walking” comes into play. This means inserting lunges in conventional walking, in addition to downstairs and downhill walking.
In our new research, published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, we investigated the effects of eccentric walking on lower limb muscle strength and balance in 11 regular walkers aged 54 to 88 years.
The intervention period was 12 weeks. It consisted of four weeks of normal walking followed by eight weeks of eccentric walking.
The number of eccentric steps in the eccentric walking period gradually increased over eight weeks from 100 to 1,000 steps (including lunges, downhill and downstairs steps). Participants took a total of 3,900 eccentric steps over the eight-week eccentric walking period while the total number of steps was the same as the previous four weeks.
We measured the thickness of the participants’ front thigh muscles, muscle strength in their knee, their balance and endurance, including how many times they could go from a sitting position to standing in 30 seconds without using their arms. We took these measurements before the study started, at four weeks, after the conventional walking period, and at four and eight weeks into the eccentric walking period.
We also tested their cognitive function using a digit symbol-substitution test at the same time points of other tests. And we asked participants to complete a questionnaire relating to their activities of daily living, such as dressing and moving around at home.
Finally, we tested participants’ blood sugar, cholesterol levels and complement component 1q (C1q) concentrations, a potential marker of sarcopenia (muscle wasting with ageing).
Regular walking won’t contract your muscles in the same way as eccentric walking.
alexei_tm/ShutterstockWhat did we find?
We found no significant changes in any of the outcomes in the first four weeks when participants walked conventionally.
From week four to 12, we found significant improvements in muscle strength (19%), chair-stand ability (24%), balance (45%) and a cognitive function test (21%).
Serum C1q concentration decreased by 10% after the eccentric walking intervention, indicating participants’ muscles were effectively stimulated.
The sample size of the study was small, so we need larger and more comprehensive studies to verify our findings and investigate whether eccentric walking is effective for sedentary people, older people, how the different types of eccentric exercise compare and the potential cognitive and mental health benefits.
But, in the meantime, “eccentric walking” appears to be a beneficial exercise that will extend your healthspan. It may look a bit eccentric if we insert lunges while walking on the street, but the more people do it and benefit from it, the less eccentric it will become.
Ken Nosaka, Professor of Exercise and Sports Science, Edith Cowan University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The DASH Diet Mediterranean Solution – by Dr. Marla Heller
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Sometimes, an author releases a series of books that could have just been one book, with various padding and rehashes. In some cases, naming no names
Dr. Mark Hyman, it means we have to carefully pick out the honestly very good and highly recommendable ones from the “you just republished for the extra income, didn’t you?” ones.In this case, today’s book is part of a series of books with very similar titles, and this one seems the most useful as a standalone book
The Mediterranean Diet is still the scientific world’s current “gold standard” in terms of most evidence-based diet for general health, and as we’ve written about, it can be tweaked to focus on being best for [your particular concern here]. In this case, it’s the DASH variant of the Mediterranean Diet, considered best for heart health specifically.
The style is repetitive, and possibly indicative of the author getting into a habit of having to pad books. Nevertheless, saying things too often is better than forgetting to say them, so hey. On which note, it is more of an educational book than a cookbook—it does have recipes, but not many.
Bottom line: if you’d like an introduction to the DASH variant of the Mediterranean Diet, this book will get you well-acquainted.
Click here to check out The DASH Diet Mediterranean Solution, and learn all about it!
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