
Honeydew vs Cantaloupe – 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 honeydew to cantaloupe, we picked the cantaloupe.
Why?
In terms of macros, there’s not a lot between them—they’re both mostly water. Nominally, honeydew has more carbs while cantaloupe has more fiber and protein, but the differences are very small. So, a very slight win for cantaloupe.
Looking at vitamins: honeydew has slightly more of vitamins B5 and B6 (so, the vitamins that are in pretty much everything), while cantaloupe has a more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, C, and E (especially notably 67x more vitamin A, whence its color). A more convincing win for cantaloupe.
The minerals category is even more polarized: honeydew has more selenium (and for what it’s worth, more sodium too, though that’s not usually a plus for most of us in the industrialized world), while cantaloupe has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc. An overwhelming win for cantaloupe.
No surprises: adding up the slight win for cantaloupe, the convincing win for cantaloupe, and the overwhelming win for cantaloupe, makes cantaloupe the overall best pick here.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose Cs: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
PTSD, But, Well…. Complex.
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.
PTSD is typically associated with military veterans, for example, or sexual assault survivors. There was a clear, indisputable, Bad Thing™ that was experienced, and it left a psychological scar. When something happens to remind us of that—say, there are fireworks, or somebody touches us a certain way—it’ll trigger an immediate strong response of some kind.
These days the word “triggered” has been popularly misappropriated to mean any adverse emotional reaction, often to something trivial.
But, not all trauma is so clear. If PTSD refers to the result of that one time you were smashed with a sledgehammer, C-PTSD (Complex PTSD) refers to the result of having been hit with a rolled-up newspaper every few days for fifteen years, say.
This might have been…
- childhood emotional neglect
- a parent with a hair-trigger temper
- bullying at school
- extended financial hardship as a young adult
- “just” being told or shown all too often that your best was never good enough
- the persistent threat (real or imagined) of doom of some kind
- the often-reinforced idea that you might lose everything at any moment
If you’re reading this list and thinking “that’s just life though”, you might be in the estimated 1 in 5 people with (often undiagnosed) C-PTSD.
How About You? Take The (5mins) Test Here
Now, we at 10almonds are not doctors or therapists and even if we were, we certainly wouldn’t try to diagnose from afar. But, even if there’s only a partial match, sometimes the same advice can help.
So what are the symptoms of C-PTSD?
- A feeling that nothing is safe; we might suddenly lose what we have gained
- The body keeps the score… And it shows. We may have trouble relaxing, an aversion to exercise for reasons that don’t really add up, or an aversion to being touched.
- Trouble sleeping, born of nagging sense that to sleep is to be vulnerable to attack, and/or lazy, and/or negligent of our duties
- Poor self-image, about our body and/or about ourself as a person.
- We’re often drawn to highly unavailable people—or we are the highly unavailable person to which our complementary C-PTSD sufferers are attracted.
- We are prone to feelings of rage. Whether we keep a calm lid on it or lose our temper, we know it’s there. We’re angry at the world and at ourselves.
- We are not quick to trust—we may go through the motions of showing trust, but we’re already half-expecting that trust to have been misplaced.
- “Hell is other people” has become such a rule of life that we may tend to cloister ourselves away from company.
- We may try to order our environment around us as a matter of safety, and be easily perturbed by sudden changes being imposed on us, even if ostensibly quite minor or harmless.
- In a bid to try to find safety, we may throw ourselves into work—whatever that is for us. It could be literally our job, or passion projects, or our family, or community, and in and of itself that’s great! But the motivation is more of an attempt to distract ourselves from The Horrors™.
“Alright, I scored more of those than I care to admit. What now?”
A lot of the answer lies in first acknowledging to yourself what happened, to make you feel the way you do now. If you, for example, have an abject hatred of Christmas, what were your childhood Christmases like? If you fear losing money that you’ve accumulated, what underpins that fear? It could be something that directly happened to you, but it also could just be repeated messages you received from your parents, for example.
It could even be that you had superficially an idyllic perfect childhood. Health, wealth, security, a loving family… and simply a chemical imbalance in your brain made it a special kind of Hell for you that nobody understood, and perhaps you didn’t either.
Unfortunately, a difficult task now lies ahead: giving love, understanding, compassion, and reassurance to the person for whom you may have the most contempt in the world: yourself.
If you’d like some help with that, here are some resources:
ComplexTrauma.org (a lot of very good free resources, with no need for interaction)
CPTSD Foundation (mostly paid courses and the like)
Some final words about healing…
- You are in fact amazing,
- You can do it, and
- You deserve it.
Share This Post
-
Health Care AI, Intended To Save Money, Turns Out To Require a Lot of Expensive Humans
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.
Preparing cancer patients for difficult decisions is an oncologist’s job. They don’t always remember to do it, however. At the University of Pennsylvania Health System, doctors are nudged to talk about a patient’s treatment and end-of-life preferences by an artificially intelligent algorithm that predicts the chances of death.
But it’s far from being a set-it-and-forget-it tool. A routine tech checkup revealed the algorithm decayed during the covid-19 pandemic, getting 7 percentage points worse at predicting who would die, according to a 2022 study.
There were likely real-life impacts. Ravi Parikh, an Emory University oncologist who was the study’s lead author, told KFF Health News the tool failed hundreds of times to prompt doctors to initiate that important discussion — possibly heading off unnecessary chemotherapy — with patients who needed it.
He believes several algorithms designed to enhance medical care weakened during the pandemic, not just the one at Penn Medicine. “Many institutions are not routinely monitoring the performance” of their products, Parikh said.
Algorithm glitches are one facet of a dilemma that computer scientists and doctors have long acknowledged but that is starting to puzzle hospital executives and researchers: Artificial intelligence systems require consistent monitoring and staffing to put in place and to keep them working well.
In essence: You need people, and more machines, to make sure the new tools don’t mess up.
“Everybody thinks that AI will help us with our access and capacity and improve care and so on,” said Nigam Shah, chief data scientist at Stanford Health Care. “All of that is nice and good, but if it increases the cost of care by 20%, is that viable?”
Government officials worry hospitals lack the resources to put these technologies through their paces. “I have looked far and wide,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said at a recent agency panel on AI. “I do not believe there’s a single health system, in the United States, that’s capable of validating an AI algorithm that’s put into place in a clinical care system.”
AI is already widespread in health care. Algorithms are used to predict patients’ risk of death or deterioration, to suggest diagnoses or triage patients, to record and summarize visits to save doctors work, and to approve insurance claims.
If tech evangelists are right, the technology will become ubiquitous — and profitable. The investment firm Bessemer Venture Partners has identified some 20 health-focused AI startups on track to make $10 million in revenue each in a year. The FDA has approved nearly a thousand artificially intelligent products.
Evaluating whether these products work is challenging. Evaluating whether they continue to work — or have developed the software equivalent of a blown gasket or leaky engine — is even trickier.
Take a recent study at Yale Medicine evaluating six “early warning systems,” which alert clinicians when patients are likely to deteriorate rapidly. A supercomputer ran the data for several days, said Dana Edelson, a doctor at the University of Chicago and co-founder of a company that provided one algorithm for the study. The process was fruitful, showing huge differences in performance among the six products.
It’s not easy for hospitals and providers to select the best algorithms for their needs. The average doctor doesn’t have a supercomputer sitting around, and there is no Consumer Reports for AI.
“We have no standards,” said Jesse Ehrenfeld, immediate past president of the American Medical Association. “There is nothing I can point you to today that is a standard around how you evaluate, monitor, look at the performance of a model of an algorithm, AI-enabled or not, when it’s deployed.”
Perhaps the most common AI product in doctors’ offices is called ambient documentation, a tech-enabled assistant that listens to and summarizes patient visits. Last year, investors at Rock Health tracked $353 million flowing into these documentation companies. But, Ehrenfeld said, “There is no standard right now for comparing the output of these tools.”
And that’s a problem, when even small errors can be devastating. A team at Stanford University tried using large language models — the technology underlying popular AI tools like ChatGPT — to summarize patients’ medical history. They compared the results with what a physician would write.
“Even in the best case, the models had a 35% error rate,” said Stanford’s Shah. In medicine, “when you’re writing a summary and you forget one word, like ‘fever’ — I mean, that’s a problem, right?”
Sometimes the reasons algorithms fail are fairly logical. For example, changes to underlying data can erode their effectiveness, like when hospitals switch lab providers.
Sometimes, however, the pitfalls yawn open for no apparent reason.
Sandy Aronson, a tech executive at Mass General Brigham’s personalized medicine program in Boston, said that when his team tested one application meant to help genetic counselors locate relevant literature about DNA variants, the product suffered “nondeterminism” — that is, when asked the same question multiple times in a short period, it gave different results.
Aronson is excited about the potential for large language models to summarize knowledge for overburdened genetic counselors, but “the technology needs to improve.”
If metrics and standards are sparse and errors can crop up for strange reasons, what are institutions to do? Invest lots of resources. At Stanford, Shah said, it took eight to 10 months and 115 man-hours just to audit two models for fairness and reliability.
Experts interviewed by KFF Health News floated the idea of artificial intelligence monitoring artificial intelligence, with some (human) data whiz monitoring both. All acknowledged that would require organizations to spend even more money — a tough ask given the realities of hospital budgets and the limited supply of AI tech specialists.
“It’s great to have a vision where we’re melting icebergs in order to have a model monitoring their model,” Shah said. “But is that really what I wanted? How many more people are we going to need?”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Share This Post
-
Sun, Sea, And Sudden Killers To Avoid
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.
Stay Safe From Heat Exhaustion & Heatstroke!
For most of us, summer is upon us now. Which can be lovely… and also bring new, different health risks. Today we’re going to talk about heat exhaustion and heatstroke.
What’s the difference?
Heat exhaustion is a milder form of heatstroke, but the former can turn into the latter very quickly if left untreated.
Symptoms of heat exhaustion include:
- Headache
- Nausea
- Cold sweats
- Light-headedness
Symptoms of heatstroke include the above and also:
- Red/flushed-looking skin
- High body temperature (104ºF / 40ºC)
- Disorientation/confusion
- Accelerated heart rate
Click here for a handy downloadable infographic you can keep on your phone
What should we do about it?
In the case of heatstroke, call 911 or the equivalent emergency number for the country where you are.
Hopefully we can avoid it getting that far, though:
Prevention first
Here are some top tips to avoid heat exhaustion and thus also avoid heatstroke. Many are common sense, but it’s easy to forget things—especially in the moment, on a hot sunny day!
- Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate
- (Non-sugary) iced teas, fruit infusions, that sort of thing are more hydrating than water alone
- Avoid alcohol
- If you really want to imbibe, rehydrate between each alcoholic drink
- Time your exercise with the heat in mind
- In other words, make any exercise session early or late in the day, not during the hottest period
- Use sunscreen
- This isn’t just for skin health (though it is important for that); it will also help keep you cooler, as it blocks the UV rays that literally cook your cells
- Keep your environment cool
- Shade is good, air conditioning / cooling fans can help.
- A wide-brimmed hat is portable shade just for you
- Wear loose, breathable clothing
- We write about health, not fashion, but: light breathable clothes that cover more of your body are generally better healthwise in this context, than minimal clothes that don’t, if you’re in the sun.
- Be aware of any medications you’re taking that will increase your sensitivity to heat.
- This includes medications that are dehydrating, and includes most anti-depressants, many anti-nausea medications, some anti-allergy medications, and more.
- Check your labels/leaflets, look up your meds online, or ask your pharmacist.
Treatment
If prevention fails, treatment is next. Again, in the case of heatstroke, it’s time for an ambulance.
If symptoms are “only” of heat exhaustion and are more mild, then:
- Move to a cooler location
- Rehydrate again
- Remove clothing that’s confining or too thick
- What does confining mean? Clothing that’s tight and may interfere with the body’s ability to lose heat.
- For example, you might want to lose your sports bra, but there is no need to lose a bikini, for instance.
- What does confining mean? Clothing that’s tight and may interfere with the body’s ability to lose heat.
- Use ice packs or towels soaked in cold water, applied to your body, especially wear circulation is easiest to affect, e.g. forehead, wrists, back of neck, under the arms, or groin.
- A cool bath or shower, or a dip in the pool may help cool you down, but only do this if there’s someone else around and you’re not too dizzy.
- This isn’t a good moment to go in the sea, no matter how refreshing it would be. You do not want to avoid heatstroke by drowning instead.
If full recovery doesn’t occur within a couple of hours, seek medical help.
Stay safe and have fun!
Share This Post
Related Posts
-
Artichoke vs Brussels Sprouts – 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 artichoke to Brussels sprouts, we picked the sprouts.
Why?
Finally, a vegetable that beats artichoke—after it previously beat heart-of-palm, asparagus, and even cabbage! It was still close though, which is impressive for artichoke, considering what a nutritional powerhouse Brussels sprouts are:
In terms of macros, the only meaningful difference is that artichoke has slightly more carbs and fiber, so artichoke gets the most marginal of nominal wins in this category.
In the category of vitamins, however, artichoke has more of vitamins B3, B9, and choline, while Brussels sprouts have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, C, E, and K, giving sprouts the clear victory here, especially with much higher margins of difference (e.g. 58x more vitamin A, as well as 7x more vitamin C, and 10x more vitamin K).
When it comes to minerals, artichoke has more copper, magnesium, phosphorus, and zinc, while Brussels sprouts have more iron, manganese, potassium, and selenium, resulting in a 4:4 tie, and the small margins of difference are mostly comparable, with the exception that sprouts have 8x more selenium. So, Brussels sprouts win this category very marginally on that tie-breaker.
Adding up the sections we see that macros and minerals gave a small win each to artichoke and sprouts respectively, while the vitamins category was an overwhelming win for sprouts, so—with this deciding factor in mind—sprouts win the day today.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Sprout Your Seeds, Grains, Beans, Etc
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Natural Tips for Falling Asleep
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.
Questions and Answers at 10almonds
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
This newsletter has been growing a lot lately, and so have the questions/requests, and we love that! In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
How to get to sleep at night as fast and as naturally as possible? Thank you!
We’ll definitely write more on that! You might like these articles we wrote already, meanwhile:
- Beating The Insomnia Blues ← this one is general advice and tips
- Time For Some Pillow Talk ← this one compares and reviews some popular sleep apps
- Insomnia? High Blood Pressure? Try these! ← this one tackles the matter from a dietary angle
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Broccoli vs Red Cabbage – 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 broccoli to red cabbage, we picked the broccoli.
Why?
Both are certainly great! Which is usual for any Brassica oleracea cultivar (as both of these vegetables are). But there is a clear winner:
In terms of macros, broccoli has more fiber and protein, while red cabbage has more carbs. Now, nobody is getting metabolic disease from eating cabbage, but by the numbers, this is a simple win for broccoli, especially on account of the fiber.
In the category of vitamins, broccoli has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, C, E, K, and choline, while red cabbage has more of vitamins A and B6. Another win for broccoli.
When it comes to minerals, it’s a similar story: broccoli has more copper, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while red cabbage has more iron and manganese. They’re equal in calcium, by the way. Broccoli wins again.
Looking at polyphenols, both cultivars have plenty, but broccoli has more in total, as well as more variety, so yet another win for broccoli here.
Now, standing next to broccoli has made red cabbage look bad, but we want to assure you that red cabbage is itself a nutritional powerhouse—broccoli is just even more so.
So of course, by all means do enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
21 Most Beneficial Polyphenols & What Foods Have Them
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails: