Hemp Seeds vs Flax Seeds – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing hemp seeds to flax seeds, we picked the flax.
Why?
Both are great, but quite differently so! In other words, they both have their advantages, but on balance, we prefer the flax’s advantages.
Part of this come from the way in which they are sold/consumed—hemp seeds must be hulled first, which means two things as a result:
- Flax seeds have much more fiber (about 8x more)
- Hemp seeds have more protein (about 2x more), proportionally, at least ← this is partly because they lost a bunch of weight by losing their fiber to the hulling, so the “per 100g” values of everything else go up, even though the amount per seed didn’t change
Since people’s diets are more commonly deficient in fiber than protein, and also since 8x is better than 2x, we consider this a win for flax.
Of course, many people enjoy hemp or flax specifically for the healthy fatty acids, so how do they stack up in that regard?
- Flax seeds have more omega-3s
- Hemp seeds have more omega-6s
This, for us, is a win for flax too, as the omega-3s are generally what we need more likely to be deficient in. Hemp enthusiasts, however, may argue that the internal balance of omega-3s to omega-6s is closer to an ideal ratio in hemp—but nutrition doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so we have to consider things “as part of a balanced diet” (because if one were trying to just live on hemp seeds, one would die), and most people’s diets are skewed far too far in favor or omega-6 compared to omega-3. So for most people, the higher levels of omega-3s are the more useful.
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Fruit, Fiber, & Leafy Greens… On A Low-FODMAP Diet!
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Fiber For FODMAP-Avoiders
First, let’s quickly cover: what are FODMAPs?
FODMAPs are fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols.
In plainer English: they’re carbohydrates that are resistant to digestion.
This is, for most people most of the time, a good thing, for example:
When Is A Fiber Not A Fiber? When It’s A Resistant Starch.
Not for everyone…
However, if you have inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS), including ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, or similar, then suddenly a lot of common dietary advice gets flipped on its head:
While digestion-resistant carbohydrates making it to the end parts of our digestive tract are good for our bacteria there, in the case of people with IBS or similar, it can be a bit too good for our bacteria there.
Which can mean gas (a natural by-product of bacterial respiration) accumulation, discomfort, water retention (as the pseudo-fiber draws water in and keeps it), and other related symptoms, causing discomfort, and potentially disease such as diarrhea.
Again: for most people this is not so (usually: quite the opposite; resistant starches improve things down there), but for those for whom it’s a thing, it’s a Big Bad Thing™.
Hold the veg? Hold your horses.
A common knee-jerk reaction is “I will avoid fruit and veg, then”.
Superficially, this can work, as many fruit & veg are high in FODMAPs (as are fermented dairy products, by the way).
However, a diet free from fruit and veg is not going to be healthy in any sustainable fashion.
There are, however, options for low-FODMAP fruit & veg, such as:
Fruits: bananas (if not overripe), kiwi, grapefruit, lemons, limes, melons, oranges, passionfruit, strawberries
Vegetables: alfalfa, bell peppers, bok choy, carrots, celery, cucumbers, eggplant, green beans, kale, lettuce, olives, parsnips, potatoes (and sweet potatoes, yams etc), radishes, spinach, squash, tomatoes*, turnips, zucchini
*our stance: botanically it’s a fruit, but culinarily it’s a vegetable.
For more on the science of this, check out:
Strategies for Producing Low FODMAPs Foodstuffs: Challenges and Perspectives ← table 2 is particularly informative when it comes to the above examples, and table 3 will advise about…
Bonus
Grains: oats, quinoa, rice, tapioca
…and wheat if the conditions in table 3 (linked above) are satisfied
(worth mentioning since grains also get a bad press when it comes to IBS, but that’s mostly because of wheat)
See also: Gluten: What’s The Truth?
Enjoy!
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You Are Not a Before Picture – by Alex Light
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It’s that time of year, and many of us are looking at what we’ll do in the coming days, weeks, and months to level-up our health. So… Is this a demotivational book?
Quite the opposite! It’s rather a case of an often much-needed reminder to ensure that our plans are really our own, and really are what’s best for us. Why wouldn’t they be, you ask?
Much of diet culture (ubiquitous! From magazine covers to movie stars to the models advertising anything from health insurance to water filters) has us reaching for “body goals” that are not possible without a different skeleton and genes and compromises and post-production edits.
Alex Light—herself having moved from the fashion and beauty industry into health education—sets out in a clear, easy-reading manner, how we can look after ourselves, not be neglectful of our bodies, and/but also not get distracted into unhelpful, impossible, castles-in-the-air.
Bottom line: you cannot self-hate your way into good health, and good health will always be much more attainable than a body that’s just not yours. This book can help you sort out which is which.
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How Nature Provides Us With A Surprisingly Powerful Painkiller
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It’s well-known (at least to regular 10almonds-readers) that seeing nature, ideally green leaves and blue sky, improves our mood by stimulating production of serotonin.
See also: Neurotransmitter Cheatsheet
But it does a lot more.
Reducing the actual signals of pain
Researchers at the University of Vienna have discovered that viewing nature scenes (even if just on video) alleviates physical pain—not just in self-reported subjective assessments, but also by a reduction of the neural activity that signals pain:
❝Pain is like a puzzle, made up of different pieces that are processed differently in the brain. Some pieces of the puzzle relate to our emotional response to pain, such as how unpleasant we find it. Other pieces correspond to the physical signals underlying the painful experience, such as its location in the body and its intensity.
Unlike placebos, which usually change our emotional response to pain, viewing nature changed how the brain processed early, raw sensory signals of pain.
Thus, the effect appears to be less influenced by participants’ expectations, and more by changes in the underlying pain signals❞
This was tested against, varyingly, viewing an urban environment or viewing an indoor environment, neither of which gave the same benefits.
The setup of the experiment is relevant, so…
Matching soundscape accompanied each visual stimulus. The three pain runs had a total duration of 9 min each, during which one environment was accompanied by 16 painful and 16 non-painful shocks. Neuroimaging was used for all parts, and participants were exposed to all environments:
- First, a cue indicating the intensity of the next shock (red = painful, yellow = not painful) was presented for 2000 milliseconds (ms).
- Second, a variable interval of 3500 ± 1500 ms was shown.
- Third, a cue indicating the intensity of the shock was presented for 1000 ms, accompanied by an electrical shock with a duration of 500 ms.
- Fourth, a variable interval of 3500 ± 1500 ms followed.
- Fifth, after each third trial, participants rated the shock’s intensity and unpleasantness at 6000 ms each.
- Sixth, each trial ended with an intertrial interval (ITI) presented for 2000 ms.
They found that as well as the self-assessment reports being as expected (nature scenes reduced subjective experience of pain),
❝In summary, the multivoxel and region of interest analyses converged in showing that pain responses when exposed to nature as compared to urban or indoor stimuli were associated with a decrease in neural processes related to lower-level nociception-related features (NPS, thalamus), as well as in regions of descending modulatory circuitry associated with attentional alterations of pain that also encode sensory-discriminative aspects (S2, pINS).❞
In other words—to the extent that pain can be quantified objectively by neural imaging—the pain was also objectively reduced, much like with a chemical painkiller.
You can read the paper in full, here:
Nature exposure induces analgesic effects by acting on nociception-related neural processing
How to benefit from this
Well, first there is the obvious, “view nature“.
However, note the timescales involved in the testing periods: 2000 milliseconds is two seconds, and that was the intertrial interval used—the equivalent of a washout phase in an interventional trial (but a drug/supplement/diet washout is usually a number of weeks).
The fact that the test periods were a matter of seconds, and the intertrial period was also literally two seconds, this means:
It works quickly, and the effect disappears quickly, too.
In other words: if you want pain relief from nature, the good news is you can get it immediately while viewing nature, and the bad news is that you have to keep viewing nature to continue enjoying the painkilling effect.
So that’s a limitation, but it’s still clearly a very worthy option for a little respite from chronic pain now and again, for example.
Want to learn more?
We’ve written quite a bit about pain management, including:
- Before You Reach For That Tylenol…
- How To Stop Pain Spreading
- How To Dial Down Your Pain
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
- Get The Right Help For Your Pain
- The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
- Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief (When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might)
Take care!
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The Kitchen Doctor
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Dr. Rupy Aujla: The Kitchen Doctor
This is Dr. Rupy Aujla, and he’s a medical doctor. He didn’t set out to become a “health influencer”.
But then, a significant heart condition changed his life. Having a stronger motivation to learn more about nutritional medicine, he did a deep dive into the scientific literature, because that’s what you do when your life is on the line, especially if you’re a doctor!
Using what he learned, he was able to reverse his condition using a food and lifestyle approach. Now, he devotes himself to sharing what he learned—and what he continues to learn as he goes along.
One important thing he learned because of what happened to him, was that he hadn’t been paying enough attention to what his body was trying to tell him.
He wants us to know about interoception—which isn’t a Chris Nolan movie. Rather, interoception is the sense of what is going on inside one’s own body.
The counterpart of this is exteroception: our ability to perceive the outside world by means of our various senses.
Interoception is still using the senses, but is sensing internal body sensations. Effectively, the brain interprets and integrates what happens in our organs.
When interoception goes wrong, researchers found, it can lead to a greater likelihood of mental health problems. Having an anxiety disorder, depression, mood disorder, or an eating disorder often comes with difficulties in sensing what is going on inside the body.
Improving our awareness of body cues
Those same researchers suggested therapies and strategies aimed at improving awareness of mind-body connections. For example, mindfulness-based stress reduction, yoga, meditation and movement-based treatments. They could improve awareness of body cues by attending to sensations of breathing, cognitions and other body states.
But where Dr. Aujla puts his focus is “the heart of the home”, the kitchen.
The pleasure of food
❝Eating is not simply ingesting a mixture of nutrients. Otherwise, we would all be eating astronaut food. But food is not only a tool for health. It’s also an important pleasure in life, allowing us to connect to others, the present moment and nature.❞
Dr. Rupy Aujla
Dr. Aujla wants to help shift any idea of a separation between health and pleasure, because he believes in food as a positive route to well-being, joy and health. For him, it starts with self-awareness and acceptance of the sensory pleasures of eating and nourishing our bodies, instead of focusing externally on avoiding perceived temptations.
Most importantly:
We can use the pleasure of food as an ally to healthy eating.
Instead of spending our time and energy fighting the urge to eat unhealthy things that may present a “quick fix” to some cravings but aren’t what our body actually wants, needs, Dr. Aujla advises us to pay just a little more attention, to make sure the body’s real needs are met.
His top tips for such are:
- Create an enjoyable relaxing eating environment
To help cultivate positive emotions around food and signal to the nervous system a shift to food-processing time. Try setting the table with nothing else on it beyond what’s relevant to the dinner, putting away distractions, using your favorite plates, tablecloth, etc.
- Take 3 deep abdominal breaths before eating
To help you relax and ground yourself in the present moment, which in turn is to prepare your digestive system to receive and digest food.
- Pay attention to the way you sit
Take some time to sit comfortably with your feet grounded on the floor, not slouching, to give your stomach space to digest the food.
- Appreciate what it took to bring this food to your plate
Who was involved in the growing process and production, the weather and soil it took to grow the food, and where in the world it came from.
- Enjoy the sensations
When you’re cooking, serving, and eating your food, be attentive to color, texture, aroma and even sound. Taste the individual ingredients and seasonings along the way, when safe and convenient to do so.
- Journal
If you like journaling, you can try adding a mindful eating section to that. Ask questions such as: “how did I feel before, during, and after the meal?”
In closing…
Remember that this is a process, not only on an individual level but as a society too.
Oftentimes it’s hard to eat healthily… We can be given to wonder even “what is healthy, after all?”, and we can be limited by what is available, what is affordable, and what we have time to prepare.
But if we make a conscious commitment to make the best choices we reasonably can as we go along, then small changes can soon add up.
Interested in what kind of recipes Dr. Aujla goes for?
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Intermittent Fasting for Women Over 50 – by Emma Sanchez
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Intermittent fasting is promoted as a very healthful (evidence-based!) way to trim the fat and slow aging, along with other health benefits. But, physiologically and especially metabolically, the average woman is quite different from the average man! And most resources are aimed at men. So, what’s the difference?
Emma Sanchez gives an overview not just of intermittent fasting, but also, how it goes with specifically female physiology. From hormonal cycles, to different body composition and fat distribution, to how we simply retain energy better—which can be a mixed blessing!
We’re given advice about how to optimize all those things and more.
She also covers issues that many writers on the topic of intermittent fasting will tend to shy away from, such as:
- mood swings
- risk of eating disorder
- impact on cognitive thinking
…and she does this evenly and fairly, making the case for intermittent fasting while acknowledging potential pitfalls that need to be recognized in order to be managed.
Lastly, the “over 50” thing. This is covered in detail quite late in the book, but there are a lot of changes that occur (beyond the obvious!), and once again, Sanchez has tips and tricks for holding back the clock where possible, and working with it rather than against it, when appropriate.
All in all, a great book for any woman over 50, or really also for women under 50, especially if that particular milestone is on the horizon.
Get your copy of Intermittent Fasting for Women over 50 from Amazon today!
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5 Ways to Beat Menopausal Weight Gain!
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As it turns out, “common” does not mean “inevitable”!
Health Coach Kait’s advice
Her 5 tips are…
- Understand your metabolism: otherwise you’re working the dark and will get random results. Learn about how different foods affect your metabolism, and note that hormonal changes due to menopause can mean that some food types have different effects now.
- Eat enough protein: one thing doesn’t change—protein helps with satiety, thus helping to avoid overeating.
- Focus on sleep: prioritizing sleep is essential for hormone regulation, and that means not just sex hormones, but also food-related hormones such as insulin, ghrelin, and leptin.
- Be smart about carbs: taking a lot of carbs at once can lead to insulin spikes and thus metabolic disorder, which in turn leads to fat in places you don’t want it (especially your liver and belly). Enjoying a low-carb diet, and/or pairing your carbs with proteins and fats, does a lot to help avoid insulin spikes too. Not mentioned in the video, but we’re going to mention here: don’t underestimate fiber’s role either, especially if you take it before the carbs, which is best for blood sugars, as it gives a buffer to the digestive process, thus slowing down absorption of carbs.
- Build muscle: if trying to avoid/lose fat, it’s tempting to focus on cardio, but we generally can’t exercise our way out of having fat, whereas having more muscle increases the body’s metabolic base rate, burning fat just by existing. So for this reason, enjoy muscle-building resistance exercises at least a few times per week.
For more information 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
Take care!
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