It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

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

❝Does intermittent fasting differ for women, and if so, how?❞

For the sake of layout, we’ve put a shortened version of this question here, but the actual wording was as below, and merits sharing in full for context

Went down a rabbit hole on your site and now can’t remember how I got to the “Fasting Without Crashing” article on intermittent fasting so responding to this email lol, but was curious what you find/know about fasting for women specifically? It’s tough for me to sift through and find legitimate studies done on the results of fasting in women, knowing that our bodies are significantly different from men. This came up when discussing with my sister about how I’ve been enjoying fasting 1-2 days/week. She said she wanted more reliable sources of info that that’s good, since she’s read more about how temporary starvation can lead to long-term weight gain due to our bodies feeling the need to store fat. I’ve also read about that, but also that fasting enables more focused autophagy in our bodies, which helps with long-term staving off of diseases/ailments. Curious to know what you all think!

~ 10almonds subscriber

So, first of all, great question! Thanks for asking it

Next up, isn’t it strange? Books come in the format:

• [title]
• [title, for women]

You would not think women are a little over half of the world’s population!

Anyway, there has been some research done on the difference of intermittent fasting in women, but not much.

For example, here’s a study that looked at 1–2 days/week IF, in other words, exactly what you’ve been doing. And, they did have an equal number of men and women in the study… And then didn’t write down whether this made a difference or not! They recorded a lot of data, but neglected to note down who got what per sex:

Intermittent fasting two days versus one day per week, matched for total energy intake and expenditure, increases weight loss in overweight/obese men and women

Here’s a more helpful study, that looked at just women, and concluded:

❝In conclusion, intermittent fasting could be a nutritional strategy to decrease fat mass and increase jumping performance.

However, longer duration programs would be necessary to determine whether other parameters of muscle performance could be positively affected by IF. ❞

~ Dr. Martínez-Rodríguez et al.

Read in full: Effect of High-Intensity Interval Training and Intermittent Fasting on Body Composition and Physical Performance in Active Women

Those were “active women”; another study looked at just women who were overweight or obese (we realize that “active women” and “obese or overweight women” is a Venn diagram with some overlap, but still, the different focus is interesting), and concluded:

❝IER is as effective as CER with regard to weight loss, insulin sensitivity and other health biomarkers, and may be offered as an alternative equivalent to CER for weight loss and reducing disease risk.❞

~ Dr. Michelle Harvie et al.

Read in full: The effects of intermittent or continuous energy restriction on weight loss and metabolic disease risk markers: a randomised trial in young overweight women

As for your sister’s specific concern about yo-yoing, we couldn’t find studies for this yet, but anecdotally and based on books on Intermittent Fasting, this is not usually an issue people find with IF. This is assumed to be for exactly the reason you mention, the increased cellular apoptosis and autophagy—increasing cellular turnover is very much the opposite of storing fat!

You might, by the way, like Dr. Mindy Pelz’s “Fast Like A Girl”, which we reviewed previously

Take care!

It’s Q&A Time!

This is the bit whereby each week, we respond to subscriber questions/requests/etc

Have something you’d like to ask us, or ask us to look into? Hit reply to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom, and a Real Human™ will be glad to read it!

Q: Love to have someone research all the additives in our medicines, (risk of birth control and breast cancer) and what goes in all of our food and beverages. So much info out there, but there are so many variations, you never know who to believe.

That’s a great idea! There are a lot of medicines and food and beverages out there, so that’s quite a broad brief, but! We could well do a breakdown of very common additives, and demystify them, sorting them into good/bad/neutral, e.g:

• Ascorbic acid—Good! This is Vitamin C
• Acetic acid—Neutral! This is vinegar
• Acetylsalicylic acid—Good or Bad! This is aspirin (a painkiller and blood-thinning agent, can be good for you or can cause more problems than it solves, depending on your personal medical situation. If in doubt, check with your doctor)
• Acesulfame K—Generally Neutral! This is a sweetener that the body can’t metabolize, so it’s also not a source of potassium (despite containing potassium) and will generally do nothing. Unless you have an allergy to it, which is rare but is a thing.
• Sucralose—Neutral! This is technically a sugar (as is anything ending in -ose), but the body can’t metabolize it and processes it as a dietary fiber instead. We’d list it as good for that reason, but honestly, we doubt you’re eating enough sucralose to make a noticeable difference to your daily fiber intake.
• Sucrose—Bad! This is just plain sugar

Sometimes words that sound the same can ring alarm bells when they need not, for example there’s a big difference between:

• Potassium iodide (a good source of potassium and iodine)
• Potassium cyanide (the famous poison; 300mg will kill you; half that dose will probably kill you)
• Cyanocobalamine (Vitamin B12)

Let us know if there are particular additives (or particular medications) you’d like us to look at!

While for legal reasons we cannot give medical advice, talking about common contraindications (e.g., it’s generally advised to not take this with that, as one will stop the other from working, etc) is definitely something we could do.

For example! St. John’s Wort, very popular as a herbal mood-brightener, is on the list of contraindications for so many medications, including:

• Antidepressants
• Birth control pills
• Cyclosporine, which prevents the body from rejecting transplanted organs
• Some heart medications, including digoxin and ivabradine
• Some HIV drugs, including indinavir and nevirapine
• Some cancer medications, including irinotecan and imatinib
• Warfarin, an anticoagulant (blood thinner)
• Certain statins, including simvastatin

Q: As I am a retired nurse, I am always interested in new medical technology and new ways of diagnosing. I have recently heard of using the eyes to diagnose Alzheimer’s. When I did some research I didn’t find too much. I am thinking the information may be too new or I wasn’t on the right sites.

(this is in response to last week’s piece on lutein, eyes, and brain health)

We’d readily bet that the diagnostic criteria has to do with recording low levels of lutein in the eye (discernible by a visual examination of macular pigment optical density), and relying on the correlation between this and incidence of Alzheimer’s, but we’ve not seen it as a hard diagnostic tool as yet either—we’ll do some digging and let you know what we find! In the meantime, we note that the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (which may be of interest to you, if you’re not already subscribed) is onto this:

Read: Cognitive Function and Its Relationship with Macular Pigment Optical Density and Serum Concentrations of its Constituent Carotenoids

See also:

• Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (mixture of free and paid content)
• Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Reports (open access—all content is free)

Q: As to specific health topics, I would love to see someone address all these Instagram ads targeted to women that claim “You only need to ‘balance your hormones’ to lose weight, get ripped, etc.” What does this mean? Which hormones are they all talking about? They all seem to be selling a workout program and/or supplements or something similar, as they are ads, after all. Is there any science behind this stuff or is it mostly hot air, as I suspect?

Thank you for asking this, as your question prompted yesterday’s main feature, What Does “Balancing Your Hormones” Even Mean?

That’s a great suggestion also about addressing ads (and goes for health-related things in general, not just hormonal stuff) and examining their claims, what they mean, how they work (if they work!), and what’s “technically true but may be misleading* cause confusion”

*We don’t want companies to sue us, of course.

Only, we’re going to need your help for this one, subscribers!

See, here at 10almonds we practice what we preach. We limit screen time, we focus on our work when working, and simply put, we don’t see as many ads as our thousands of subscribers do. Also, ads tend to be targeted to the individual, and often vary from country to country, so chances are good that we’re not seeing the same ads that you’re seeing.

So, how about we pull together as a bit of a 10almonds community project?

• Step 1: add our email address to your contacts list, if you haven’t already
• Step 2: When you see an ad you’re curious about, select “share” (there is usually an option to share ads, but if not, feel free to screenshot or such)
• Step 3: Send the ad to us by email

We’ll do the rest! Whenever we have enough ads to review, we’ll do a special on the topic.

We will categorically not be able to do this without you, so please do join in—Many thanks in advance!