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 😎

❝There seems to be a lot of suggestions to take supplements for every thing, from your head to your toes. I know it’s up to the individual but what are the facts or stats to support taking them versus not?❞

Short answer:

• supplementary vitamins and minerals are probably neither needed nor beneficial for most (more on this later) people, with the exception of vitamin D which most people over a certain age need unless they are white and getting a lot of sun.
• other kinds of supplement can be very beneficial or useless, depending on what they are, of course, and also your own personal physiology.

With regard to vitamins and minerals, in most cases they should be covered by a healthy balanced diet, and the bioavailability is usually better from food anyway (bearing in mind, we say vitamin such-and-such, or name an elemental mineral, but there are usually multiple, often many, forms of each—and supplements will usually use whatever is cheapest to produce and most chemically stable).

However! It is also quite common for food to be grown in whatever way is cheapest and produces the greatest visible yield, rather than for micronutrient coverage.

This goes for most if not all plants, and it goes extra for animals (because of the greater costs and inefficiencies involved in rearing animals).

We wrote about this a while back in a mythbusting edition of 10almonds, covering:

• Food is less nutritious now than it used to be: True or False?
• Supplements aren’t absorbed properly and thus are a waste of money: True or False?
• We can get everything we need from our diet: True or False?

You can read the answers and explanations, and see the science that we presented, here:

Do We Need Supplements, And Do They Work?

You may be wondering: what was that about “most (more on this later) people”?

Sometimes someone will have a nutrient deficiency that can’t be easily remedied with diet. Often this occurs when their body:

1. has trouble absorbing that nutrient, or
2. does something inconvenient with it that makes a lot of it unusable when it gets it.

…which is why calcium, iron, vitamin B12, and vitamin D are quite common supplements to get prescribed by doctors after a certain age.

Still, it’s best to try getting things from one’s diet first all of all, of course.

Things we can’t (reasonably) get from food

This is another category entirely. There are many supplements that are convenient forms of things readily found in a lot of food, such as vitamins and minerals, or phytochemicals like quercetin, fisetin, and lycopene (to name just a few of very many).

Then there are things not readily found in food, or at least, not in food that’s readily available in supermarkets.

For example, if you go to your local supermarket and ask where the mimosa is, they’ll try to sell you a cocktail mix instead of the roots, bark, or leaves of a tropical tree. It is also unlikely they’ll stock lion’s mane mushroom, or reishi.

If perchance you do get the chance to acquire fresh lion’s mane mushroom, by the way, give it a try! It’s delicious shallow-fried in a little olive oil with black pepper and garlic.

In short, this last category, the things most of us can’t reasonably get from food without going far out of our way, are the kind of thing whereby supplements actually can be helpful.

And yet, still, not every supplement has evidence to support the claims made by its sellers, so it’s good to do your research beforehand. We do that on Mondays, with our “Research Review Monday” editions, of which you can find in our searchable research review archive ← we also review some drugs that can’t be classified as supplements, but mostly, it’s supplements.

Take care!

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 😎

❝What are the signs that a senior is falling due to health issues rather than just aging?❞

Superficial answer: having an ear infection can result in a loss of balance, and is not particularly tied to age as a risk factor

More useful answer: first, let’s consider these two true statements:

• The risks of falling (both the probability and the severity of consequences) increase with age
• Health issues (in general) tend to increase with age

With this in mind, it’s difficult to disconnect the two, as neither exist in a vacuum, and each is strongly associated with the other.

So the question is easier to answer by first flipping it, to ask:

❝What are the health issues that typically increase with age, that increase the chances of falling?❞

A non-exhaustive list includes:

• Loss of strength due to sarcopenia (reduced muscle mass)
• Loss of mobility due to increased stiffness (many causes, most of which worsen with age)
• Loss of risk-awareness due to diminished senses (for example, not seeing an obstacle until too late)
• Loss of risk-awareness due to reduced mental focus (cognitive decline producing absent-mindedness)

Note that in the last example there, and to a lesser extent the third one, reminds us that falls also often do not happen in a vacuum. There is (despite how it may sometimes feel!) no actual change in our physical relationship with gravity as we get older; most falls are about falling over things, even if it’s just one’s own feet:

The 4 Bad Habits That Cause The Most Falls While Walking

Disclaimer: sometimes a person may just fall down for no external reason. An example of why this may happen is if a person’s joint (for example an ankle or a knee) has a particular weakness that means it’ll occasionally just buckle and collapse under one’s own weight. This doesn’t even have to be a lot of weight! The weakness could be due to an old injury, or Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (with its characteristic joint hypermobility symptoms), or something else entirely.

Now, notice how:

• all of these things can happen at any age
• all of these things are more likely to happen the older we get
• none of these things have to happen at any age

That last one’s important to remember! Aging is often viewed as an implacable Behemoth, but the truth is that it is many-faceted and every single one of those facets can be countered, to a greater or lesser degree.

Think of a room full of 80-year-olds, and now imagine that…

• One has the hearing of a 20-year-old
• One has the eyesight of a 20-year-old
• One has the sharp quick mind of a 20-year-old
• One has the cardiovascular fitness of a 20-year-old

…etc. Now, none of those things in isolation is unthinkable, so remember, there is no magic law of the universe saying we can’t have each of them:

Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?

Which means: that goes for the things that increase the risk of falling, too. In other words, we can combat sarcopenia with protein and resistance training, maintain our mobility, look after our sensory organs as best we can, nourish our brain and keep it sharp, etc etc etc:

Train For The Event Of Your Life! (Mobility As A Long-Term “Athletic” Goal For Personal Safety)

Which doesn’t mean: that we will necessarily succeed in all areas. Your writer here, broadly in excellent health, and whose lower body is still a veritable powerhouse in athletic terms, has a right ankle and left knee that will sometimes just buckle (yay, the aforementioned hypermobility).

So, it becomes a priority to pre-empt the consequences of that, for example:

• being able to fall with minimal impact (this is a matter of knowing how, and can be learned from “soft” martial arts such as aikido), and
• ensuring the skeleton can take a knock if necessary (keeping a good balance of vitamins, minerals, protein, etc; keeping an eye on bone density).

See also:

Fall Special ← appropriate for the coming season, but it’s about avoiding falling, and reducing the damage of falling if one does fall, including some exercises to try at home.

Take care!