Hormones & Health, Beyond The Obvious

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Wholesome Health

This is Dr. Sara Gottfried, who some decades ago got her MD from Harvard and specialized as an OB/GYN at MIT. She’s since then spent the more recent part of her career educating people (mostly: women) about hormonal health, precision, functional, & integrative medicine, and the importance of lifestyle medicine in general.

What does she want us to know?

Beyond “bikini zone health”

Dr. Gottfried urges us to pay attention to our whole health, in context.

“Women’s health” is often thought of as what lies beneath a bikini, and if it’s not in those places, then we can basically treat a woman like a man.

And that’s often not actually true—because hormones affect every living cell in our body, and as a result, while prepubescent girls and postmenopausal women (specifically, those who are not on HRT) may share a few more similarities with boys and men of similar respective ages, for most people at most ages, men and women are by default quite different metabolically—which is what counts for a lot of diseases! And note, that difference is not just “faster” or “slower””, but is often very different in manner also.

That’s why, even in cases where incidence of disease is approximately similar in men and women when other factors are controlled for (age, lifestyle, medical history, etc), the disease course and response to treatment may vary considerable. For a strong example of this, see for example:

  • The well-known: Heart Attack: His & Hers ← most people know these differences exist, but it’s always good to brush up on what they actually are
  • The less-known: Statins: His & Hers ← most people don’t know these differences exist, and it pays to know, especially if you are a woman or care about one

Nor are brains exempt from his…

The female brain (kinda)

While the notion of an anatomically different brain for men and women has long since been thrown out as unscientific phrenology, and the idea of a genetically different brain is… Well, it’s an unreliable indicator, because technically the cells will have DNA and that DNA will usually (but not always; there are other options) have XX or XY chromosomes, which will usually (but again, not always) match apparent sex (in about 1/2000 cases there’s a mismatch, which is more common than, say, red hair; sometimes people find out about a chromosomal mismatch only later in life when getting a DNA test for some unrelated reason), and in any case, even for most of us, the chromosomal differences don’t count for much outside of antenatal development (telling the default genital materials which genitals to develop into, though this too can get diverted, per many intersex possibilities, which is also a lot more common than people think) or chromosome-specific conditions like colorblindness…

The notion of a hormonally different brain is, in contrast to all of the above, a reliable and easily verifiable thing.

See for example:

Alzheimer’s Sex Differences May Not Be What They Appear

Dr. Gottfried urges us to take the above seriously!

Because, if women get Alzheimer’s much more commonly than men, and the disease progresses much more quickly in women than men, but that’s based on postmenopausal women not on HRT, then that’s saying “Women, without women’s usual hormones, don’t do so well as men with men’s usual hormones”.

She does, by the way, advocate for bioidentical HRT for menopausal women, unless contraindicated for some important reason that your doctor/endocrinologist knows about. See also:

Menopausal HRT: A Tale Of Two Approaches (Bioidentical vs Animal)

The other very relevant hormone

…that Dr. Gottfried wants us to pay attention to is insulin.

Or rather, its scrubbing enzyme, the prosaically-named “insulin-degrading enzyme”, but it doesn’t only scrub insulin. It also scrubs amyloid beta—yes, the same that produces the amyloid beta plaques in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s. And, there’s only so much insulin-degrading enzyme to go around, and if it’s all busy breaking down excess insulin, there’s not enough left to do the other job too, and thus can’t break down amyloid beta.

In other words: to fight neurodegeneration, keep your blood sugars healthy.

This may actually work by multiple mechanisms besides the amyloid hypothesis, by the way:

The Surprising Link Between Type 2 Diabetes & Alzheimer’s

Want more from Dr. Gottfried?

You might like this interview with Dr. Gottfried by Dr. Benson at the IMCJ:

Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal | Conversations with Sara Gottfried, MD

…in which she discusses some of the things we talked about today, and also about her shift from a pharmaceutical-heavy approach to a predominantly lifestyle medicine approach.

Enjoy!

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  • How To Engage Your Whole Brain

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    The Stroke Of Insight That Nobody Wants

    This is Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s a neuroanatomist, who, at the age of 37 (when she was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School), had what she refers to as her “stroke of insight”.

    That is to say, she had a massive stroke, and after a major brain surgery to remove a clot the size of a golf ball, she spent the next 8 years re-learning to do everything.

    Whereas previously she’d been busy mapping the brain to determine how cells communicate with each other, now she was busy mapping whether socks or shoes should go on first. Needless to say, she got an insight into neuroplasticity that few people would hope for.

    What does she want us to know?

    Dr. Taylor (now once again a successful scientist, lecturer, and author) advocates for “whole brain living”, which involves not taking parts of our brain for granted.

    About those parts…

    Dr. Taylor wants us to pay attention to all the parts regardless of size, ranging from the two hemispheres, all the way down to the billions of brain cells, and yet even further, to the “trillions of molecular geniuses”—because each brain cell is itself reliant on countless molecules of the many neurochemicals that make up our brain.

    For a quick refresher on some of the key players in that latter category, see our Neurotransmitter Cheatsheet 😎

    When it comes to the hemispheres, there has historically been a popular belief that these re divided into:

    • The right brain: emotional, imaginative, creative, fluid feeling
    • The left brain: intellectual, analytical, calculating, crystal thinking

    …which is not true, anatomically speaking, because there are cells on both sides doing their part of both of these broad categories of brain processes.

    However, Dr. Taylor found, while one hemisphere of her brain was much more damaged than the other, that nevertheless she could recover some functions more quickly than others, which, once she was able to resume her career, inspired her model of four distinct ways of cogitating that can be switched-between and played with or against each other:

    Meet The Four Characters Inside Your Brain

    Why this matters

    As she was re-learning everything, the way forward was not quick or easy, and she also didn’t know where she was going, because for obvious reasons, she couldn’t remember, much less plan.

    Looking backwards after her eventual full recovery, she noted a lot of things that she needed during that recovery, some of which she got and some of which she didn’t.

    Most notably for her, she needed the right kind of support that would allow all four of the above “characters” as she puts it, to thrive and grow. And, when we say “grow” here we mean that literally, because of growing new brain cells to replace the lost ones (as well as the simple ongoing process of slowly replacing brain cells).

    For more on growing new brain cells, by the way, see:

    How To Grow New Brain Cells (At Any Age)

    In order to achieve this in all of the required brain areas (i.e., and all of the required brain functions), she also wants us to know… drumroll please

    When to STFU

    Specifically, the ability to silence parts of our brain that while useful in general, aren’t necessarily being useful right now. Since it’s very difficult to actively achieve a negative when it comes to brain-stuff (don’t think of an elephant), this means scheduling time for other parts of our brain to be louder. And that includes:

    • scheduling time to feel (emotionally)
    • scheduling time to feel (gut feelings)
    • scheduling time to feel (kinesthetically)

    …amongst others.

    Note: those three are presented in that order, from least basic to most basic. And why? Because, clever beings that we are, we typically start from a position that’s not remotely basic, such as “overthinking”, for example. So, there’s a wind-down through thinking just the right amount, thinking through simpler concepts, feeling, noticing one’s feelings, noticing noticing one’s feelings, all the way down to what, kinesthetically, are we actually physically feeling.

    ❝It is interesting to note that although our limbic system fucntions throughout our lifetime, it does not mature. As a result, when our emotional “buttons” are pushed, we retain the ability to react to incoming stimulation as though we were a two-year-old, even when we are adults.❞

    ~ Dr. Jill Taylor

    Of course, sometimes the above is not useful, which is why the ability to switch between brain modes is a very important and useful skill to develop.

    And how do we do that? By practising. Which is something that it’s necessary to take up consciously, and pursue consistently. When children are at school, there are (hopefully, ideally) curricula set out to ensure they engage and train all parts of their brain. As adults, this does not tend to get the same amount of focus.

    “Children’s brains are still developing”—indeed, and so are adult brains:

    The Brain As A Work-In-Progress

    Dr. Taylor had the uncommon experience of having to, in many ways, neurologically speaking, redo childhood. And having had a second run at it, she developed an appreciation of the process that most of us didn’t necessarily get when doing childhood just the once.

    In other words: take the time to feel stuff; take the time to quiet down your chatty mind, take the time engage your senses, and take it seriously! Really notice, as though for the first time, what the texture of your carpet is like. Really notice, as though for the first time, what it feels like to swallow some water. Really notice, as though for the first time, what it feels like to experience joy—or sadness, or comfort, or anger, or peace. Exercise your imagination. Make some art (it doesn’t have to win awards; it just has to light up your brain!). Make music (again, it’s about wiring your brain in your body, not about outdoing Mozart in composition and/or performance). Make changes! Make your brain work in the ways it’s not in the habit of doing.

    If you need a little help switching off parts of your brain that are being too active, so that you can better exercise other parts of your brain that might otherwise have been neglected, you might want to try:

    The Off-Button For Your Brain

    Enjoy!

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  • Cherries vs Blackberries – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing cherries to blackberries, we picked the blackberries.

    Why?

    In terms of macros, cherries have more carbs while blackberries have more protein and fiber. The protein of course is a tiny amount and an even tinier difference, and/but it’s worth noting that the fiber isn’t, and blackberries have more than 3x the fiber. So, a win for blackberries in this category.

    In the category of vitamins, cherries have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, and B6, while blackberries have more of vitamins B3, B5, B9, C, E, K, and choline. Another win for blackberries.

    When it comes to minerals, cherries have a tiny bit more potassium, while blackberries have considerably more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc. Another easy win for blackberries.

    Both fruits have abundant antioxidants, but as many are different, and comparison between them becomes more subjective than we have room for here.

    In short, enjoy either or both, but we say blackberries win overall on macro- and micronutrients!

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Cherries’ Very Healthy Wealth Of Benefits

    Take care!

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  • Here’s how to help protect your family from norovirus

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    What you need to know

    • Norovirus is a very contagious infection that causes vomiting and diarrhea.
    • The best way to help protect against norovirus is to wash your hands often with soap and warm water, since hand sanitizer may not be effective at killing the virus.
    • If someone in your household has symptoms of norovirus, isolate them away from others, watch for signs of dehydration, and take steps to help prevent it from spreading.

    If you feel like everyone is sick right now, you’re not alone. Levels of respiratory illnesses like COVID-19, flu, and RSV remain remain high in many states, and the U.S. is also battling a wave of norovirus, one of several viruses that cause a very contagious infection of the stomach and intestines. 

    Although norovirus infections are more common during the colder months—it’s also called the “winter vomiting disease”—the virus can spread at any time. Right now, however, cases have more than doubled since last year’s peak.

    Read on to learn about the symptoms of norovirus, how it spreads, and what to do if someone in your household gets sick.

    What are the symptoms of norovirus?

    Norovirus is a very contagious infection that causes vomiting and diarrhea, which typically begins 12 to 48 hours after exposure to the virus. Additional symptoms may include stomach pain, body aches, headaches, and a fever. Norovirus typically resolves within three days, but people who are infected may still be contagious for up to two days after symptoms resolve.

    Norovirus may cause dehydration, or a dangerous loss of fluids, especially in young children and older adults. See a health care provider if you or someone in your household shows signs of dehydration, which may include decreased urination, dizziness, a dry mouth and throat, sleepiness, and crying without tears.

    How can you help protect against norovirus?

    You can get norovirus if you have close contact with someone who is infected, touch a contaminated surface and then touch your mouth or nose, or consume contaminated food or beverages.

    The best way to help protect yourself and others against norovirus is to wash your hands often with soap and warm water, since hand sanitizer may not be effective at killing the virus. Other ways to help protect yourself may include cooking food thoroughly and washing fruits and vegetables before eating them.

    You can get sick with norovirus even if you’ve had it before, since there are many different strains.

    How can families help protect against the spread of norovirus at home?

    If someone in your household has symptoms of norovirus, isolate them away from others and watch for signs of dehydration. If you are sick with norovirus, do not prepare food for others in your household and use a separate bathroom, if possible.

    When cleaning up after someone who has norovirus, wear rubber, latex, or nitrile gloves. Then wash your hands thoroughly.

    Clean surfaces using a solution containing five to 25 tablespoons of bleach (that’s 12.5 fluid ounces, or just  over ¾ cup), per gallon of water. Leave the bleach-water mix on surfaces for at least five minutes before wiping it off.

    For more information, talk to your health care provider.

    This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • The Science of Self-Learning – by Peter Hollins

    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.

    Teaching oneself new things is often the most difficult kind of bootstrapping, especially when one is unsure of such critical things as:

    • Where to begin? How, for that matter, do we find where to begin?
    • What can/should a learning journey look like?
    • What challenges should we expect, and how will we overcome them?

    Hollins answers all of these questions and more. The greatest value of this book is perhaps in its clear presentation of concrete step-by-step instructions. Hollins gives illustrated examples too, but most importantly, he gives models that can be applied to any given type of learning.

    The book also covers the most difficult problems most people face when trying to learn something by themselves, including:

    • Keeping oneself on-task (maintaining discipline)
    • Measuring progress (self-testing beyond memorization)
    • Keeping a fair pace of progress (avoiding plateaus)
    • How to know when one’s knowledge is sufficient or not (avoiding Dunning-Kruger Club)

    All in all, if you’re looking to learn a new subject or skill, this could be a first step that saves you a lot of time later!

    Get your copy of the Science of Self-Learning on Amazon today!

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  • Amid Wildfire Trauma, L.A. County Dispatches Mental Health Workers to Evacuees

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    PASADENA, Calif. — As Fernando Ramirez drove to work the day after the Eaton Fire erupted, smoke darkened the sky, ash and embers rained onto his windshield, and the air smelled of melting rubber and plastic.

    He pulled to the side of the road and cried at the sight of residents trying to save their homes.

    “I could see people standing on the roof, watering it, trying to protect it from the fire, and they just looked so hopeless,” said Ramirez, a community outreach worker with the Pasadena Public Health Department.

    That evening, the 49-year-old volunteered for a 14-hour shift at the city’s evacuation center, as did colleagues who had also been activated for emergency medical duty. Running on adrenaline and little sleep after finding shelter for homeless people all day, Ramirez spent the night circulating among more than a thousand evacuees, offering wellness checks, companionship, and hope to those who looked distressed.

    Local health departments, such as Ramirez’s, have become a key part of governments’ response to wildfires, floods, and other extreme weather events, which scientists say are becoming more intense and frequent due to climate change. The emotional toll of fleeing and possibly losing a home can help cause or exacerbate mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation, and substance use, according to health and climate experts.

    Wildfires have become a recurring experience for many Angelenos, making it difficult for people to feel safe in their home or able to go about daily living, said Lisa Wong, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. However, with each extreme weather event, the county has improved its support for evacuees, she said.

    For instance, Wong said the county deployed a team of mental health workers trained to comfort evacuees without retraumatizing them, including by avoiding asking questions likely to bring up painful memories. The department has also learned to better track people’s health needs and redirect those who may find massive evacuation settings uncomfortable to other shelters or interim housing, Wong said. In those first days, the biggest goal is often to reduce people’s anxiety by providing them with information.

    “We’ve learned that right when a crisis happens, people don’t necessarily want to talk about mental health,” said Wong, who staffed the evacuation site Jan. 8 with nine colleagues.

    Instead, she and her team deliver a message of support: “This is really bad right now, but you’re not going to do this alone. We have a whole system set up for recovery too. Once you get past the initial shock of what happened — initial housing needs, medication needs, all those things — then there’s this whole pathway to recovery that we set up.”

    The convention center in downtown Pasadena, which normally hosts home shows, comic cons, and trade shows, was transformed into an evacuation site with hundreds of cots. It was one of at least 13 shelters opened to serve more than 200,000 residents under evacuation orders.

    The January wildfires have burned an estimated 64 square miles — an area larger than the city of Paris — and destroyed at least 12,300 buildings since they started Jan. 7. AccuWeather estimates the region will likely face more than $250 billion in economic losses from the blazes, surpassing the estimates from the state’s record-breaking 2020 wildfire season.

    Lisa Patel, executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, said she’s most concerned about low-income residents, who are less likely to access mental health support.

    “There was a mental health crisis even before the pandemic,” said Patel, who is also a clinical associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford School of Medicine, referring to the covid-19 pandemic. “The pandemic made it worse. Now you lace in all of this climate change and these disasters into a health care system that isn’t set up to care for the people that already have mental health illness.”

    Early research suggests exposure to large amounts of wildfire smoke can damage the brain and increase the risk of developing anxiety, she added.

    At the Pasadena Convention Center, Elaine Santiago sat on a cot in a hallway as volunteers pulled wagons loaded with soup, sandwiches, bottled water, and other necessities.

    Santiago said she drew comfort from being at the Pasadena evacuation center, knowing that she wasn’t alone in the tragedy.

    “It sort of gives me a sense of peace at times,” Santiago said. “Maybe that’s weird. We’re all experiencing this together.”

    She had been celebrating her 78th birthday with family when she fled her home in the small city of Sierra Madre, east of Pasadena. As she watched flames whip around her neighborhood, she, along with children and grandkids, scrambled to secure their dogs in crates and grabbed important documents before they left.

    The widower had leaned on her husband in past emergencies, and now she felt lost.

    “I did feel helpless,” Santiago said. “I figured I’m the head of the household; I should know what to do. But I didn’t know.”

    Donny McCullough, who sat on a neighboring green cot draped in a Red Cross blanket, had fled his Pasadena home with his family early on the morning of Jan. 8. Without power at home, the 68-year-old stayed up listening for updates on a battery-powered radio. His eyes remained red from smoke irritation hours later.

    “I had my wife and two daughters, and I was trying not to show fear, so I quietly, inside, was like, ‘Oh my God,’” said McCullough, a music producer and writer. “I’m driving away, looking at the house, wondering if it’s going to be the last time I’m going to see it.”

    He saved his master recording from a seven-year music project, but he left behind his studio with all his other work from a four-decade career in music.

    Not all evacuees arrived with family. Some came searching for loved ones. That’s one of the hardest parts of his shift, Ramirez said. The community outreach worker helped walk people around the building, cot by cot.

    A week in, at least two dozen people had been killed in the wildfires.

    The work takes a toll on disaster relief workers too. Ramirez said many feared losing their homes in the fires and some already had. He attends therapy weekly, which he said helps him manage his emotions.

    At the evacuation center, Ramirez described being on autopilot.

    “Some of us react differently. I tend to go into fight mode,” Ramirez said. “I react. I run towards the fire. I run towards personal service. Then once that passes, that’s when my trauma catches up with me.”

    Need help? Los Angeles County residents in need of support can call the county’s mental health helpline at 1-800-854-7771. The national Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, 988, is also available for those who’d like to speak with someone confidentially, free of charge.

    This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. 

    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.

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  • The Other Alzheimer’s Risk Factor

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    The usually-listed 7 known risk factors of dementia (in general, not just Alzheimer’s) do not include today’s item. For a recap, those were:

    The 7 Known Risk Factors For Dementia

    The bonus risk factor

    This idea is not completely novel; it’s been known for a while that traumatic brain injury (TBI) can increase the risk of dementia, but it has generally been chalked up to “if you damage an organ, then that organ does not function so well afterwards”.

    However, in the case of Alzheimer’s, it seems there’s something deeper at play. Specifically, a study that found…

    ❝…traumatic brain injury alters the small vessels in the brain, resulting in an accumulation of amyloid beta—a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.

    The findings suggest that vascular dysfunction could be an early driver in neurodegenerative disorders rather than being caused by neuronal damage.❞

    This association held true even in quite young patients!

    The study from Sweden looked at brain tissue from TBI patients (who had had to have brain tissue removed for medical reasons due to bleeding and swelling), and found that the (traumatic) changes to the vascular smooth muscle cells were associated with increased aggregation of amyloid-β.

    In terms of establishing cause and effect: since it could be safely concluded the amyloid-β had not caused the TBI (which all had external explanations such as “car crash” or such), it can be deduced that almost* certainly the TBI caused the amyloid-β aggregation.

    *because little to nothing in science is every truly certain. As in life in general, really; the difference is that scientists admit it!

    You may be wondering: what was the control? It would be a very generous group of citizens indeed who would volunteer bits of their brains that hadn’t needed removing. However, the answer is that the control brain bits came from a biobank, and were from uninjured patients with no history of TBI or neurodegenerative disorders, and who had died from systemic, unrelated causes. Having been dead for a matter of hours, and the fixation time for the brain bits from the living people taking long enough that everybody’s brain bits had been out of their respective living bodies for a similar length of time, this was deemed an acceptable, if imperfect, control.

    You can read the study in its entirety here; it is fascinating:

    Traumatic brain injury causes early aggregation of beta-amyloid peptides and NOTCH3 reduction in vascular smooth muscle cells of leptomeningeal arteries

    The practical take-away

    The practical take-away, of course, is: look after your brain

    Not just in the sense of eat fiber, get healthy fats, move more, get good sleep, stay intellectually stimulated, etc*, but also in the sense of “keep your brain physically safe”.

    Now, you may think that you already try not to get into car crashes, and perhaps you do not compete in contact sports, but do be aware that one of the leading causes of TBI in older people is, ignominiously, falling down.

    And if you think “that only happens to older/other people”, then be aware: there’s a first time for everything and you are not immune. With that in mind, do check out:

    Fall Special! ← the seasonal title notwithstanding, this is about not falling down in the first place, and being less injurable if you do fall down

    *This was a modest and vague list for brevity’s sake, so for much more detail, enjoy:

    How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk ← this is rather more comprehensive

    Want to know more?

    Here you can read about the largest study of its kind into lifestyle factors and Alzheimer’s disease:

    Alzheimer’s Causative Factors To Avoid ← the methods and conclusions of Dr. David Snowdon’s famous “Nun Study”

    Take care!

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