High-Protein Plant-Based Diet for Beginners – by Maya Howard with Ariel Warren
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Seasoned vegans (well-seasoned vegans?) will know that getting enough protein from a plant-based diet is really not the challenge that many think it is, but for those just embarking on cutting out the meat, it’s not useful to say “it’s easy!”; it’s useful to show how.
That’s what this book does. And not just by saying “these foods” and leaving people to wonder if they need to eat a pound of tofu each day to get their protein in. Instead, recipes. Enough for a 4-week meal plan, and the idea is that after a month of eating that way, it won’t be nearly so mysterious.
The recipes are very easy to execute, while still having plenty of flavor (which is what happens when one uses a lot of flavorsome main ingredients and then seasons them well too). The ingredients are not obscure, and you should be able to find everything easily in any medium-sized supermarket.
As for the well-roundedness of the diet, we’ll mention that the “with Ariel Warren” in the by-line means that while the book was principally authored by Maya Howard (who is, at time of writing, a nutritionist-in-training), she had input throughout from Ariel Warren (a Registered Dietician Nutritionist) to ensure she didn’t go off-piste anyway and it gets the professional stamp of approval.
Bottom line: if you’d like to cook plant based while still prioritizing protein and you’re not sure how to make that exciting and fun instead of a chore, then this book will show you how to please your taste buds and improve your body composition at the same time.
Click here to check out High-Protein Plant-Based Diet for Beginners, and dig in!
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Non-Sleep Deep Rest: A Neurobiologist’s Take
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How to get many benefits of sleep, while awake!
Today we’re talking about Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and professor in the department of neurobiology at Stanford School of Medicine.
He’s also a popular podcaster, and as his Wikipedia page notes:
❝In episodes lasting several hours, Huberman talks about the state of research in a specific topic, both within and outside his specialty❞
Today, we won’t be taking hours, and we will be taking notes from within his field of specialty (neurobiology). Specifically, in this case:
Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR)
What is it? To quote from his own dedicated site on the topic:
❝What is NSDR (Yoga Nidra)? Non-Sleep Deep Rest, also known as NSDR, is a method of deep relaxation developed by Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University School of Medicine.
It’s a process that combines controlled breathing and detailed body scanning to bring you into a state of heightened awareness and profound relaxation. The main purpose of NSDR is to reduce stress, enhance focus, and improve overall well-being.❞
While it seems a bit bold of Dr. Huberman to claim that he developed yoga nidra, it is nevertheless reassuring to get a neurobiologist’s view on this:
How it works, by science
Dr. Huberman says that by monitoring EEG readings during NSDR, we can see how the brain slows down. Measurably!
- It goes from an active beta range of 13–30 Hz (normal waking) to a conscious meditation state of an alpha range of 8–13 Hz.
- However, with practice, it can drop further, into a theta range of 4–8 Hz.
- Ultimately, sustained SSDR practice can get us to 0.5–3 Hz.
This means that the brain is functioning in the delta range, something that typically only occurs during our deepest sleep.
You may be wondering: why is delta lower than theta? That’s not how I remember the Greek alphabet being ordered!
Indeed, while the Greek alphabet goes alpha beta gamma delta epsilon zeta eta theta (and so on), the brainwave frequency bands are:
- Gamma = concentrated focus, >30 Hz
- Beta = normal waking, 13–30 Hz
- Alpha = relaxed state, 8–13 Hz
- Theta = light sleep, 4–8 Hz
- Delta = deep sleep, 1–4 Hz
Source: Sleep Foundation ← with a nice infographic there too
NSDR uses somatic cues to engage our parasympathetic nervous system, which in turn enables us to reach those states. The steps are simple:
- Pick a time and place when you won’t be disturbed
- Lie on your back and make yourself comfortable
- Close your eyes as soon as you wish, and now that you’ve closed them, imagine closing them again. And again.
- Slowly bring your attention to each part of your body in turn, from head to toe. As your attention goes to each part, allow it to relax more.
- If you wish, you can repeat this process for another wave, or even a third.
- Find yourself well-rested!
Note: this engagement of the parasympathetic nervous system and slowing down of brain activity accesses restorative states not normally available while waking, but 10 minutes of NSDR will not replace 7–9 hours of sleep; nor will it give you the vital benefits of REM sleep specifically.
So: it’s an adjunct, not a replacement
Want to try it, but not sure where/how to start?
When you’re ready, let Dr. Huberman himself guide you through it in this shortish (10:49) soundtrack:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to try it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later
Take care!
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Thinking of using an activity tracker to achieve your exercise goals? Here’s where it can help – and where it probably won’t
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It’s that time of year when many people are getting started on their resolutions for the year ahead. Doing more physical activity is a popular and worthwhile goal.
If you’re hoping to be more active in 2024, perhaps you’ve invested in an activity tracker, or you’re considering buying one.
But what are the benefits of activity trackers? And will a basic tracker do the trick, or do you need a fancy one with lots of features? Let’s take a look.
Why use an activity tracker?
One of the most powerful predictors for being active is whether or not you are monitoring how active you are.
Most people have a vague idea of how active they are, but this is inaccurate a lot of the time. Once people consciously start to keep track of how much activity they do, they often realise it’s less than what they thought, and this motivates them to be more active.
You can self-monitor without an activity tracker (just by writing down what you do), but this method is hard to keep up in the long run and it’s also a lot less accurate compared to devices that track your every move 24/7.
By tracking steps or “activity minutes” you can ascertain whether or not you are meeting the physical activity guidelines (150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week).
It also allows you to track how you’re progressing with any personal activity goals, and view your progress over time. All this would be difficult without an activity tracker.
Research has shown the most popular brands of activity trackers are generally reliable when it comes to tracking basic measures such as steps and activity minutes.
But wait, there’s more
Many activity trackers on the market nowadays track a range of other measures which their manufacturers promote as important in monitoring health and fitness. But is this really the case? Let’s look at some of these.
Resting heart rate
This is your heart rate at rest, which is normally somewhere between 60 and 100 beats per minute. Your resting heart rate will gradually go down as you become fitter, especially if you’re doing a lot of high-intensity exercise. Your risk of dying of any cause (all-cause mortality) is much lower when you have a low resting heart rate.
So, it is useful to keep an eye on your resting heart rate. Activity trackers are pretty good at tracking it, but you can also easily measure your heart rate by monitoring your pulse and using a stopwatch.
Heart rate during exercise
Activity trackers will also measure your heart rate when you’re active. To improve fitness efficiently, professional athletes focus on having their heart rate in certain “zones” when they’re exercising – so knowing their heart rate during exercise is important.
But if you just want to be more active and healthier, without a specific training goal in mind, you can exercise at a level that feels good to you and not worry about your heart rate during activity. The most important thing is that you’re being active.
Also, a dedicated heart rate monitor with a strap around your chest will do a much better job at measuring your actual heart rate compared to an activity tracker worn around your wrist.
Maximal heart rate
This is the hardest your heart could beat when you’re active, not something you could sustain very long. Your maximal heart rate is not influenced by how much exercise you do, or your fitness level.
Most activity trackers don’t measure it accurately anyway, so you might as well forget about this one.
VO₂max
Your muscles need oxygen to work. The more oxygen your body can process, the harder you can work, and therefore the fitter you are.
VO₂max is the volume (V) of oxygen (O₂) we could breathe maximally (max) over a one minute interval, expressed as millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute (ml/kg/min). Inactive women and men would have a VO₂max lower than 30 and 40 ml/kg/min, respectively. A reasonably good VO₂max would be mid thirties and higher for women and mid forties and higher for men.
VO₂max is another measure of fitness that correlates well with all-cause mortality: the higher it is, the lower your risk of dying.
For athletes, VO₂max is usually measured in a lab on a treadmill while wearing a mask that measures oxygen consumption. Activity trackers instead look at your running speed (using a GPS chip) and your heart rate and compare these measures to values from other people.
If you can run fast with a low heart rate your tracker will assume you are relatively fit, resulting in a higher VO₂max. These estimates are not very accurate as they are based on lots of assumptions. However, the error of the measurement is reasonably consistent. This means if your VO₂max is gradually increasing, you are likely to be getting fitter.
So what’s the take-home message? Focus on how many steps you take every day or the number of activity minutes you achieve. Even a basic activity tracker will measure these factors relatively accurately. There is no real need to track other measures and pay more for an activity tracker that records them, unless you are getting really serious about exercise.
Corneel Vandelanotte, Professorial Research Fellow: Physical Activity and Health, CQUniversity Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Eating For Energy (In Ways That Actually Work)
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Snacks & Hacks: The Real Energy Boosters
Declining energy levels are a common complaint of people getting older, and this specific kind of “getting older” is starting earlier and earlier (even Gen-Z are already getting in line for this one). For people of all ages, however, diet is often a large part of the issue.
The problem:
It can sometimes seem, when it comes to food and energy levels, that we have a choice:
- Don’t eat (energy levels decline)
- Eat quick-release energy snacks (energy spikes and crashes)
- Eat slow-release energy meals (oh hi, post-dinner slump)
But, this minefield can be avoided! Advice follows…
Skip the quasi-injectables
Anything the supermarket recommends for rapid energy can be immediately thrown out (e.g. sugary energy drinks, glucose tablets, and the like).
Same goes for candy of most sorts (if the first ingredient is sugar, it’s not good for your energy levels).
Unless you are diabetic and need an emergency option to keep with you in case of a hypo, the above things have no place on a healthy shopping list.
Aside from that, if you have been leaning on these heavily, you might want to check out yesterday’s main feature:
The Not-So-Sweet Science Of Sugar Addiction
…and if your knee-jerk response is “I’m not addicted; I just enjoy…” then ok, test that! Skip it for this month.
- If you succeed, you’ll be in better health.
- If you don’t, you’ll be aware of something that might benefit from more attention.
Fruit and nuts are your best friends
Unless you are allergic, in which case, obviously skip your allergen(s).
But for most of us, we were born to eat fruit and nuts. Literally, those two things are amongst the oldest and most well-established parts of human diet, which means that our bodies have had a very long time to evolve the perfect fruit-and-nut-enjoying abilities, and reap the nutritional benefits.
Nuts are high in fat (healthy fats) and that fat is a great source of energy’s easy for the body to get from the food, and/but doesn’t result in blood sugar spikes (and thus crashes) because, well, it’s not a sugar.
See also: Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
Fruit is high in sugars, and/but high in fiber that slows the absorption into a nice gentle curve, and also contains highly bioavailable vitamins to perk you up and polyphenols to take care of your long-term health too.
Be warned though: fruit juice does not work the same as actual fruit; because the fiber has been stripped and it’s a liquid, those sugars are zipping straight in exactly the same as a sugary energy drink.
See also: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Slow release carbs yes, but…
Eating a bowl of wholegrain pasta is great if you don’t have to do anything much immediately afterwards, but it won’t brighten your immediately available energy much—on the contrary, energy will be being used for digestion for a while.
So if you want to eat slow-release carbs, make it a smaller portion of something more-nutrient dense, like oats or lentils. This way, the metabolic load will be smaller (because the portion was smaller) but the higher protein content will prompt satiety sooner (so you addressed your hunger with a smaller portion) and the iron and B vitamins will be good for your energy too.
See also: Should You Go Light Or Heavy On Carbs?
Animal, vegetable, or mineral?
At the mention of iron and B vitamins, you might be thinking about various animal products that might work too.
If you are vegetarian or vegan: stick to that; it’s what your gut microbiome is used to now, and putting an animal product in will likely make you feel ill.
If you have them in your diet already, here’s a quick rundown of how broad categories of animal product work (or not) for energy:
- Meat: nope. Well, the fat, if applicable, will give you some energy, but less than you need just to digest the meat. This, by the way, is a likely part of why the paleo diet is good for short term weight loss. But it’s not very healthy.
- Fish: healthier than the above, but for energy purposes, just the same.
- Dairy: high-fat dairy, such as cream and butter, are good sources of quick energy. Be aware if they contain lactose though, that this is a sugar and can be back to spiking blood sugars.
- As an aside for diabetics: this is why milk can be quite good for correcting a hypo: the lactose provides immediate sugar, and the fat keeps it more balanced afterwards
- Eggs: again the fat is a good source of quick energy, and the protein is easier to digest than that of meat (after all, egg protein is literally made to be consumed by an embryo, while meat protein is made to be a functional muscle of an animal), so the metabolic load isn’t too strenuous. Assuming you’re doing a moderate consumption (under 3 eggs per day) and not Sylvester Stallone-style 12-egg smoothies, you’re good to go.
See also: Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy?
…and while you’re at it, check out:
Eggs: Nutritional Powerhouse
or Heart-Health Timebomb?(spoiler: it’s the former; the title was because it was a mythbusting edition)
Hydration considerations
Lastly, food that is hydrating will be more energizing than food that is not, so how does your snack/meal rank on a scale of watermelon to saltines?
You may be thinking: “But you said to eat nuts! They’re not hydrating at all!”, in which case, indeed, drink water with them, or better yet, enjoy them alongside fruit (hydration from food is better than hydration from drinking water).
And as for those saltines? Salt is not your friend (unless you are low on sodium, because then that can sap your energy)
How to tell if you are low on sodium: put a little bit (e.g. ¼ tsp) of salt into a teaspoon and taste it; does it taste unpleasantly salty? If not, you were low on sodium. Have a little more at five minute intervals, until it tastes unpleasantly salty. Alternatively have a healthy snack that nonetheless contains a little salt.
If you otherwise eat salty food as an energy-giving snack, you risk becoming dehydrated and bloated, neither of which are energizing conditions.
Dehydrated and bloated at once? Yes, the two often come together, even though it usually doesn’t feel like it. Basically, if we consume too much salty food, our homeostatic system goes into overdrive to try to fix it, borrows a portion of our body’s water reserves to save us from the salt, and leaves us dehydrated, bloated, and sluggish.
For more on salt in general, check out:
How Too Much Salt Can Lead To Organ Failure: Lesser-Known Salt Health Risks
Take care!
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The Surprising Link Between Type 2 Diabetes & Alzheimer’s
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The Surprising Link Between Type 2 Diabetes & Alzheimer’s
This is Dr. Rhonda Patrick. She’s a biomedical scientist with expertise in the areas of aging, cancer, and nutrition. In the past five years she has expanded her research of aging to focus more on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as she has a genetic predisposition to both.
What does that genetic predisposition look like? People who (like her) have the APOE-ε4 allele have a twofold increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease—and if you have two copies (i.e., one from each of two parents), the risk can be up to tenfold. Globally, 13.7% of people have at least one copy of this allele.
So while getting Alzheimer’s or not is not, per se, hereditary… The predisposition to it can be passed on.
What’s on her mind?
Dr. Patrick has noted that, while we don’t know for sure the causes of Alzheimer’s disease, and can make educated guesses only from correlations, the majority of current science seems to be focusing on just one: amyloid plaques in the brain.
This is a worthy area of research, but ignores the fact that there are many potential Alzheimer’s disease mechanisms to explore, including (to count only mainstream scientific ideas):
- The amyloid hypothesis
- The tau hypothesis
- The inflammatory hypothesis
- The cholinergic hypothesis
- The cholesterol hypothesis
- The Reelin hypothesis
- The large gene instability hypothesis
…as well as other strongly correlated factors such as glucose hypometabolism, insulin signalling, and oxidative stress.
If you lost your keys and were looking for them, and knew at least half a dozen places they might be, how often would you check the same place without paying any attention to the others?
To this end, she notes about those latter-mentioned correlated factors:
❝50–80% of people with Alzheimer’s disease have type 2 diabetes; there is definitely something going on❞
There’s another “smoking gun” for this too, because dysfunction in the blood vessels and capillaries that line the blood-brain barrier seem to be a very early event that is common between all types of dementia (including Alzheimer’s) and between type 2 diabetes and APOE-ε4.
Research is ongoing, and Dr. Patrick is at the forefront of that. However, there’s a practical take-away here meanwhile…
What can we do about it?
Dr. Patrick hypothesizes that if we can reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, we may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s with it.
Obviously, avoiding diabetes if possible is a good thing to do anyway, but if we’re aware of an added risk factor for Alzheimer’s, it becomes yet more important.
Of course, all the usual advices apply here, including a Mediterranean diet and regular moderate exercise.
Three other things Dr. Patrick specifically recommends (to reduce both type 2 diabetes risk and to reduce Alzheimer’s risk) include:
(links are to her blog, with lots of relevant science for each)
You can also hear more from Dr. Patrick personally, as a guest on Dr. Peter Attia’s podcast recently. She discusses these topics in much greater detail than we have room for in our newsletter:
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Night School – by Dr. Richard Wiseman
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Sleep is a largely neglected part of health for most people. Compared to factors like food and exercise, it’s something that experientially we’re mostly not present for! Little wonder then that we also often feel like it’s outside of our control.
While Dr. Wiseman does cover the usual advices with regard to getting good sleep, this book has a lot more than that.
Assuming that they go beyond the above, resources about sleep can usually be divided into one of two categories:
- Hard science: lots about brainwaves, sleep phases, circadian rhythms, melatonin production, etc… But nothing very inspiring!
- Fantastical whimsy: lots about dreams, spiritualism, and not a scientific source to be found… Nothing very concrete!
This book does better.
We get the science and the wonder. When it comes to lucid dreaming, sleep-learning, sleep hypnosis, or a miraculously reduced need for sleep, everything comes with copious scientific sources or not at all. Dr. Wiseman is well-known in his field for brining scientific skepticism to paranormal claims, by the way—so it’s nice to read how he can do this without losing his sense of wonder. Think of him as the Carl Sagan of sleep, perhaps.
Style-wise, the book is pop-science and easy-reading. Unsurprising, for a professional public educator and science-popularizer.
Structurally, the main part of the book is divided into lessons. Each of these come with background science and principles first, then a problem that we might want to solve, then exercises to do, to get the thing we want. It’s at once a textbook and an instruction manual.
Bottom line: this is a very inspiring book with a lot of science. Whether you’re looking to measurably boost your working memory or heal trauma through dreams, this book has everything.
Click here to check out Night School and learn what your brain can do!
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The Core Program: – by Peggy Brill
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The author, a specialist women’s physiotherapist, has produced not only an exercise program, but also an explanation of various body-related matters can be easily neglected—but also, with the right knowledge and a small daily commitment of practice, easily addressed.
Thus, thus subtitular claim of “15 minutes a day that can change your life” is referring to a daily 15-minute exercise session, that’s very Pilates-like in its functional strength and mobility focus with little or no equipment, without actually being Pilates.
After some introductory chapters discussing the things we need to know in order to implement the program with full understanding, she gets into the program itself, which consists of three progressive parts:
- a foundation to get going
- an intermediate level to get things truly into good shape, and
- an advanced level for if one wants to take things further.
She also provides extra advice on maintaining what one gained, taking the program forwards for life.
The program is optimized for women, but there’s nothing truly exclusive to women here, just, occasional “this affects women more” things to include.
The style is a little dated (the book being published in 2003), but this does not meaningfully affect the content, as the information itself is timeless.
Bottom line: if you’d like to get into good condition without overcomplicating things and without needing a lot of resources, this book is quite a comprehensive course!
Click here to check out The Core Program, and get into shape sustainably!
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