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 firmer 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 oat 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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Just One Heart – by Dr. Jonathan Fisher
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First, what this is not: a book to say eat fiber, go easy on the salt, get some exercise, and so forth.
What this rather is: a book about the connection between the heart and mind; often written poetically, the simple biological reality is that our emotional state does have a genuine impact on our heart health, and as such, any effort to look after our heart (healthwise) would be incomplete without an effort to look after our heart (emotionally).
Dr. Fisher talks about the impact of stress and uncertainty, as well as peace and security, on heart health—and then, having sorted emotional states into “heart breakers” and “heart wakers”, he goes about laying out a plan for what is, emotionally and thus also physiologically, good for our heart.
Chapter by chapter, he walks us through the 7 principles to live by:
- Steadiness: how to steady your heart amid chaos
- Wisdom: how to develop a wise heart in uncertain times
- Openness: how to safely open your heart in a threatening world
- Wholeness: how to show up with your whole heart without going to pieces
- Courage: how to lead with a courageous heart when fear surrounds you
- Lightness: how to live with a light heart in a heavy world
- Warmth: how to love with a warm heart when life feels cold
The style is anything but clinical; it’s well-written, certainly, and definitely informed in part by his medical understanding of the heart, but it’s entirely the raw human element that shines throughout, and that makes the ideas a lot more tangible.
Bottom line: if you’d like your heart to be healthy (cardiac health) and your heart to be healthy (emotional health), this book is a very worthwhile read.
Click here to check out Just One Heart, and take care of yours!
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Apricot vs Cantaloupe – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing apricots to cantaloupe, we picked the apricots.
Why?
In terms of macros, apricots have 2x the fiber, for slightly more carbs and protein, winning in this first category.
In the category of vitamins, apricots have more of vitamins B2, B5, B7, E, and K, while cantaloupe has more of vitamins A, B1, B6, B9, and C, which would be a 5:5 tie, but it’s worth noticing the outlier that is the huge margin of difference when it comes to apricots having nearly 17x more vitamin E, so we say apricots win this round.
Looking at minerals, apricots have more calcium, copper, iron, manganese, phosphorus, and zinc, while cantaloupe has more magnesium, potassium, and selenium yielding a tidy 6:3 win to apricots here.
In other considerations, apricots are much higher in polyphenols, and also have some specific anticancer properties that cantaloupe can’t boast, so that’s another round in apricots’ favor.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for apricots, but by all means do enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Top 8 Fruits That Prevent & Kill Cancer
Enjoy!
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Measles, Memory, & Mouths
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Three important items from this week’s health news:
It’s not about obesity
This news is based on a rodent study, so we don’t know for sure if it’s applicable to humans yet, but there’s no reason to expect that it won’t be.
The crux of the matter is that while it’s long been assumed that when it comes to diet and cognitive decline, obesity is the main driver of problems, it turns out that rats fed a high fat diet—for three days or three months—did much worse in memory tests.
This was observed in older rats, but not in younger ones—the researchers hypothesized that the younger rats benefited from their ability to activate compensatory anti-inflammatory responses, which the older rats could not.
Notably, the three-day window of high-fat diet wasn’t sufficient to cause any metabolic problems or obesity yet, but markers of neuroinflammation skyrocketed immediately, and memory test scores declined at the same rate:
Read in full: High-fat diet could cause memory problems in older adults after just a few days
Related: Can Saturated Fats Be Healthy?
Vax, Lies, & Mortality Rates
Measles is making a comeback in the US.
100 cases were reported in Gaines county, TX, recently, with 1 death there so far (an unvaccinated child). And of course, it’s spreading; in the neighboring Lea county, NM, they now have an outbreak of 30 confirmed cases, and 1 death there so far (an unvaccinated adult).
This comes with the rise of the anti-vax movement which comes with a lot of misleading rhetoric (and some things that are simply factually incorrect), and an increase in “measles parties” whereby children are deliberately exposed to measles in order to “get it out of the way” and confer later immunity. That technically does work if everyone survives, but the downside is your child may die:
Read in full: New Mexico reports 30 measles cases a day after second US death in decade
Related: 4 Ways Vaccine Skeptics Mislead You on Measles and More
What your gums say about your hormones
Times of hormonal change (so, including menopause) can show in one’s gums,
❝Recent research shows that 84% of women over 50 did not know that menopause could affect their oral health; 70% of menopausal women reported at least one new oral health symptom (like dry mouth or sensitive gums), yet only 2% had discussed these issues with their dentist.❞
Because gum disease can progress painlessly for a long while, it’s very important to stay on top of any changes, and look for the cause (enlisting the help of your doctor and/or dentist), lest you find yourself very far into periodontal disease when it could have been stopped and reversed much more easily before getting that bad.
Different life stages’ hormonal changes have different effects; the article we’ll link below also list puberty, menstrual variations, and pregnancy, but for brevity we’ll just quote what they say about menopause:
❝Menopause: the hormonal changes of menopause—primarily the drop in estrogen—can lead to oral health issues. Many menopausal women experience dry mouth, which increases the risk of cavities and gum disease, since saliva helps protect teeth. Gums may also recede or become more sensitive, and some women feel burning sensations in the mouth or changes in taste.❞
As for the rest…
Read in full: Gum health: A key indicator of women’s overall well-being
Related: How To Regrow Receding Gums
Take care!
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3 Ways To Increase Your Push-Ups (In Just 30-Days!)
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Cori Lefkowitz, of “Strong at Every Age”, shows us how:
Pushing it up
A lot of people who struggle with push-ups will do make-it-easier modifications; doing them one one’s knees is a popular one, for example. However, more reps of a modified push-up only makes you stronger at that modification, not at the full push-up.
So, how to get around this problem?
Three ways:
- Cluster sets: do 3–5 rounds at the start of your workout; set a target of 6–10 total reps per round, and do 1–3 reps of the hardest variation you can, resting 15–30 seconds between mini-sets until the round is complete (rest for at least a minute between rounds).
- Slow eccentric push-ups: for 3–5 seconds, focus only on lowering yourself down, then reset at the top. This lets you train harder variations and build control even if you can’t push back up yet.
- Push-up holds: hold the push-up at weak points (e.g. bottom, halfway, or top—whatever it is for you) to build slow-twitch tension and improve your form (so that you no longer find yourself wobbly). This helps develop mind–muscle connection, which in turn helps pretty much all other parts of this endeavor.
For an extra upwards push, you can combine these three ways with incline push-ups. As a very strong general rule, it’s almost always better to push towards harder variations rather than higher reps of the same easier version.
Why “almost always”? Well, if you’re doing some push-up challenge and specifically want to do very many reps for the sake of it, then building rep count will be what you want. But for anything that’s not “high reps for the sake high reps”, the above method will stand you in better stead.
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You might also like:
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Inverse Vaccines for Autoimmune Diseases
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Inverse Vaccines for Autoimmune Diseases
This is Dr. Jeffrey Hubbell. He’s a molecular engineer, with a focus on immunotherapy, immune response, autoimmune diseases, and growth factor variants.
He’s held 88 patents, and was the recipient of the Society for Biomaterials’ Founders Award for his “long-term, landmark contributions to the discipline of biomaterials”, amongst other awards and honours that would make our article too long if we included them all.
And, his latest research has been about developing…
Inverse Vaccines
You may be thinking: “you mean diseases; he’s engineering diseases?”
And no, it’s not that. Here’s how it works:
Normally in the case of vaccine, it’s something to tell the body “hey, if you see something that looks like this, you should kill it on sight” and the body goes “ok, preparing countermeasures according to these specifications; thanks for the heads-up”
In the case of an inverse vaccine, it’s the inverse. It’s something to tell the body “hey, this thing you seem to think is a threat, it’s actually not, and you should leave it alone”.
Why this matters for people with autoimmune diseases
Normally, autoimmune diseases are treated in one or more of the following ways:
- Dampen the entire immune system (bad for immunity against actual diseases, obviously, and is part of why many immunocompromised people have suffered and died disproportionately from COVID, for example)
- Give up and find a workaround (a good example of this is Type 1 Diabetes, and just giving up on the pancreas not being constantly at war with itself, and living on exogenous insulin instead)
Neither of those are great.
What inverse vaccines do is offer a way to flag the attacked-in-error items as acceptable things to have in the body. Those might be things that are in our body by default, as in the case of many autoimmune diseases, or they may even be external items that should be allowed but aren’t, as in the case of gluten, in the context of Celiac disease.
The latest research is not yet accessible for free, alas, but you can read the abstract here:
Or if you prefer a more accessible pop-science approach, here’s a great explanatory article:
“Inverse vaccine” shows potential to treat multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases
Where can we get such inverse vaccines?
❝There are no clinically approved inverse vaccines yet, but we’re incredibly excited about moving this technology forward❞
~ Dr. Jeffrey Hubbell
But! Lest you be disappointed, you can get in line already, in the case of the Celiac disease inverse vaccine, if you’d like to be part of their clinical trial:
Click here to see if you are eligible to be part of their clinical trial
If you’re not up for that, or if your autoimmune disease is something else (most of the rest of their research is presently focusing on Multiple Sclerosis and Type 1 Diabetes), then:
- The phase 1 MS trial is currently active, estimated completion in summer 2024.
- They are in the process of submitting an investigational new drug (IND) application for Type 1 Diabetes
- This is the first step to starting clinical safety and efficacy trials
…so, watch this space!
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The Disordered Mind – by Dr. Eric Kandel
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We don’t generally include author bios in these reviews, but it’s worth mentioning that Dr. Kandel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine, for studies related to the topics in this book.
The premise in this book is as per the subtitle: what unusual brains tell us about ourselves. He assumes that the reader has a “usual” brain, but if you don’t, then all is not lost, and in fact he probably talks about your brain in the book too.
Examining the brains of people with conditions ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia to Parkinson’s, or even such common things as depression and anxiety and addiction, tells us a lot about what in our brain (anatomically and physiologically) is responsible for what, and how those things can be thrown out of balance.
By inference, that also tells us how to keep things from being thrown out of balance. Even if the genetic deck is stacked against you, there are still things that can be done to avoid actual disease. After all, famously, “genes load the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger”.
Dr. Kandel writes in a clear and lucid fashion, such that even the lay reader can quite comfortably learn about such things as prion-folding and inhibitory neurons and repressed transcription factors and more.
Bottom line: if you’d like to understand more about what goes wrong and how and why and what it means for your so-far-so-good healthy brain, this is the book for that.
Click here to check out The Disordered Mind, and understand more!
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