Why Some People Get Sick More (And How To Not Be One Of Them)
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Some people have never yet had COVID (so far so good, this writer included); others are on their third bout already; others have not been so lucky and are no longer with us to share their stories.
Obviously, even the healthiest and/or most careful person can get sick, and it would be folly to be complacent and think “I’m not a person who gets sick; that happens to other people”.
Nor is COVID the only thing out there to worry about; there’s always the latest outbreak-du-jour of something, and there are always the perennials such as cold and flu—which are also not to be underestimated, because both weaken us to other things, and flu has killed very many, from the 50,000,000+ in the 1918 pandemic, to the 700,000ish that it kills each year nowadays.
And then there are the combination viruses:
Move over, COVID and Flu! We Have “Hybrid Viruses” To Contend With Now
So, why are some people more susceptible?
Firstly, some people are simply immunocompromised. This means for example that:
- perhaps they have an inflammatory/autoimmune disease of some kind (e.g. lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes), or…
- perhaps they are taking immunosuppressants for some reason (e.g. because they had an organ transplant), or…
- perhaps they have a primary infection that leaves them vulnerable to secondary infections. Most infections will do this to some degree or another, but some are worse for it than others; untreated HIV is a clear example. The HIV itself may not kill people, but (if untreated) the resultant AIDS will leave a person open to being killed by almost any passing opportunistic pathogen. Pneumonia of various kinds being high on the list, but it could even be something as simple as the common cold, without a working immune system to fight it.
See also: How To Prevent (Or Reduce) Inflammation
And for that matter, since pneumonia is a very common last-nail-in-the-coffin secondary infection (especially: older people going into hospital with one thing, getting a secondary infection and ultimately dying as a result), it’s particularly important to avoid that, so…
See also: Pneumonia: What We Can & Can’t Do About It
Secondly, some people are not immunocompromised per the usual definition of the word, but their immune system is, arguably, compromised.
Cortisol, the stress hormone, is an immunosuppressant. We need cortisol to live, but we only need it in small bursts here and there (such as when we are waking up the morning). When high cortisol levels become chronic, so too does cortisol’s immunosuppressant effect.
Top things that cause elevated cortisol levels include:
- Stress
- Alcohol
- Smoking
Thus, the keys here are to 1) not smoke 2) not drink, ideally, or at least keep consumption low, but honestly even one drink will elevate cortisol levels, so it’s better not to, and 3) manage stress.
See also: Lower Your Cortisol! (Here’s Why & How)
Other modifiable factors
Being aware of infection risk and taking steps to reduce it (e.g. avoiding being with many people in confined indoor places, masking as appropriate, handwashing frequently) is a good preventative strategy, along with of course getting any recommended vaccines as they come available.
What if they fail? How can we boost the immune system?
We talked about not sabotaging the immune system, but what about actively boosting it? The answer is yes, we certainly can (barring serious medical reasons why not), as there are some very important lifestyle factors too:
Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!
One final last-line thing…
Since if we do get an infection, it’s better to know sooner rather than later… A recent study shows that wearable activity trackers can (if we pay attention to the right things) help predict disease, including highlighting COVID status (positive or negative) about as accurately (88% accuracy) as rapid screening tests. Here’s a pop-science article about it:
Wearable activity trackers show promise in detecting early signals of disease
Take care!
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The 4 Bad Habits That Cause The Most Falls While Walking
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The risk of falling becomes greater (both in probability and in severity of consequences) as we get older. But, many people who do fall do so for the same reasons, some of which are avoidable. Dr. Doug Weiss has advice based on extensive second-hand experience:
Best foot forward!
If any of these prompt a “surely nobody does that” response, then, good for you to not have that habit, but Dr. Weiss has seen many patients who thusly erred. And if any of these do describe how you walk, then well, you’re not alone—time to fix it, though!
- Walking with Stiff Legs: walking with a hyperextended (straight) knee instead of a slight bend (5-15°) makes it harder to adjust balance, increasing the risk of falls. This can also put extra pressure on the joints, potentially leading to osteoarthritis.
- Crossing Legs While Turning: turning by crossing one leg over the other is a common cause of falls, particularly in the elderly. To avoid this, when turning step first with the foot that is on the side you are going to go. If you have the bad habit, this may feel strange at first, but you will soon adapt.
- Looking Down While Walking: focusing only on the ground directly in front of you can cause you to miss obstacles ahead, leading to falls. Instead, practice “scanning”, alternating between looking down at the ground and looking up to maintain awareness of your surroundings.
- Shuffling Instead of Tandem Walking: shuffling with feet far apart, rather than walking with one foot in front of the other, reduces balance and increases the risk of tripping. Tandem walking, where one foot is placed directly in front of the other, is the safer and more balanced way to walk.
It also helps disguise your numbers.
For more details on all of these, plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Fall Special (How To Not Fall, And How To Minimize Injury If You Do) ← this never seems like an urgent thing to learn, but trust us, it’s more fun to read it now, than from your hospital bed later
Take care!
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Smart Sex – by Dr. Emily Morse
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First, what this isn’t: this isn’t a mere book of sex positions and party tricks, nor is it a book of Cosmo-style “drive your man wild by using hot sauce as lube” advice.
What it offers instead, is a refreshingly mature take on sex, free from the “teehee” titillations and blushes that many books of the genre go for.
Dr. Emily Morse outlines five pillars of sex:
- Embodiment
- Health
- Collaboration
- Self-knowledge
- Self-acceptance
…and talks about each of them in detail, and how we can bring them together. And, of course, how we or our partner(s) could accidentally sabotage ourselves or each other, and the conversations we can (and should!) have, to work past that.
She also, critically, and this is a big source of value in the book, looks at “pleasure thieves”: stress, trauma, and shame. The advice for overcoming these is not “don’t worry; be happy” but rather is actual practical steps one can take.
The style throughout is direct and unpatronizing. Since the advice within pertains to everyone who has and/or wants an active sex life, very little is divided by gender etc.
There is some attention given to anatomy and physiology, complete with clear diagrams. Honestly, most people could benefit from these, because most people’s knowledge of the relevant anatomy stopped with a very basic high school text book diagram that missed a lot out.
Bottom line: this book spends more time on what’s between your ears than what’s between your legs, and yet is very comprehensive in all areas. Everyone has something to gain from this one.
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Hormone Replacement
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It’s Q&A Day 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!
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
❝I cant believe 10 Almonds addresses questions. Thanks. I see the word symptoms for menopause. I don’t know what word should replace it but maybe one should be used or is symptom accurate? And I recently read that there was a great disservice for women in my era as they were denied/scared of hormones replacement. Unnecessarily❞
You’d better believe it! In fact we love questions; they give us things to research and write about.
“Symptom” is indeed an entirely justified word to use, being:
- General: any phenomenon or circumstance accompanying something and serving as evidence of it.
- Medical: any phenomenon that arises from and accompanies a particular disease or disorder and serves as an indication of it.
If the question is more whether the menopause can be considered a disease/disorder, well, it’s a naturally occurring and ultimately inevitable change, yes, but then, so is cancer (it’s in the simple mathematics of DNA replication and mutation that, unless a cure for cancer is found, we will always eventually get cancer, if nothing else kills us first).
So, something being natural/inevitable isn’t a reason to not consider it a disease/disorder, nor a reason to not treat it as appropriate if it is causing us harm/discomfort that can be safely alleviated.
Moreover, and semantics aside, it is medical convention to consider menopause to be a medical condition, that has symptoms. Indeed, for example, the US’s NIH (and its constituent NIA, the National Institute of Aging) and the UK’s NHS, both list the menopause’s symptoms, using that word:
- NIA (NIH): What are the signs and symptoms of menopause?
- NHS: Common symptoms of menopause and perimenopause
With regard to fearmongering around HRT, certainly that has been rife, and there were some very flawed (and later soundly refuted) studies a while back that prompted this—and even those flawed studies were not about the same (bioidentical) hormones available today, in any case. So even if they had been correct (they weren’t), it still wouldn’t be a reason to not get treatment nowadays, if appropriate!
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What Mattress Is Best, By Science?
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.
The Foundations of Good Sleep
You probably know the importance of good sleep for good health. If not, here’s a quick refresher:
- Why You Probably Need More Sleep
- How Sleep-Deprived Are You, Really?
- The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter)
You should also definitely check out this quite famous book on the topic:
Why We Sleep – by Dr Matthew Walker
What helps, to get that good sleep
We’ve covered this a little before too, for example:
- Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors
- Sleep Better With Better Air
- How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)
How to level-up from there
One of the biggest barriers to good sleep for many people is obstructive sleep apea:
Healthier, Natural Sleep Without Obstruction!
We covered (in the above article) a whole lot of ways of mitigating/managing obstructive sleep apnea. One of the things we mentioned as beneficial was avoiding sleeping on one’s back, and this is something Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Somers agreed with:
Back Sleeping, And Sleeping Differently After 50
“But side-sleeping is uncomfortable”
If this is you, then chances are you have the wrong mattress.
If your mattress is too firm, you can get around it by using this “five pillow” method:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically
If your mattress is too soft, then sorry, you really just have to throw that thing out and start again.
The Goldilocks mattress
While different people will have different subjective preferences, the science is quite clear on what is actually best for people’s spines. As this review of 39 qualified scholarly articles concluded:
❝Results of this systematic review show that a medium-firm mattress promotes comfort, sleep quality and rachis alignment❞
~ Dr. Gianfilippo Caggiari et al.
Read in full: What type of mattress should be chosen to avoid back pain and improve sleep quality? Review of the literature
Note: to achieve “medium-firm” that remains “medium firm” has generally been assumed to require a memory-foam mattress.
How memory-foam works: memory-foam is a moderately thermosoftening material, designed to slightly soften at the touch of human body temperature, and be firmer at room temperature. This will result in it molding itself to the form of a human body, providing what amounts to personalized support for your personal shape and size, meaning your spine can stay exactly as it’s supposed to when you’re sleeping on your side, instead of (for example) your hips being wider meaning that your lumbar vertebrae are raised higher than your thoracic vertebrae, giving you the equivalent of a special nocturnal scoliosis.
It will, therefore, stop working if
- the ambient temperature is comparable to human body temperature (as happens in some places sometimes, and increasingly often these days)
- you die, and thus lose your body temperature (but in that case, your spinal alignment will be the least of your concerns)
Here’s a good explanation of the mechanics of memory foam from the Sleep Foundation:
Sleep Foundation | What is Memory Foam?
An alternative to memory foam?
If you don’t like memory foam (one criticism is that it doesn’t allow good ventilation underneath the body), there is an alterative, the grid mattress.
It’s very much “the new kid on the block” and the science is young for this, but for example this recent (April 2024) study that concluded:
❝The grid mattress is a simple, noninvasive, and nonpharmacological intervention that improved adults sleep quality and health. Controlled trials are encouraged to examine the effects of this mattress in a variety of populations and environments.❞
~ Dr. Heather Hausenblas et al.
Read in full: Effectiveness of a grid mattress on adults’ sleep quality and health: A quasi-experimental intervention study
However, that was a small (n=39) uncontrolled (i.e. there was no control group) study, and the conflict of interest statement is, well, interesting:
❝Heather A. Hausenblas, Stephanie L. Hooper, Martin Barragan, and Tarah Lynch declare no conflict of interest. Michael Breus served as a former consultant for Purple, LLC.❞
~ Ibid.
…which is a fabulous way of distracting from the mention in the “Acknowledgements” section to follow, that…
❝Purple, LLC, provided financial support for the study❞
~ Ibid.
Purple is the company that invented the mattress being tested. So while this doesn’t mean the study is necessarily dishonest and/or corrupt, it does at the very least raise a red flag for a potential instance of publication bias (because Purple may have funded multiple studies and then pulled funding of the ones that weren’t going their way).
If you are interested in Purple’s mattress and how it works, you can check it out here ← this is a link for your interest and information; not an advertisement or an endorsement. We look forward to seeing more science for this though, and echo their own call for randomized controlled trials!
Summary
Sleep is important, and while it’s a popular myth that we need less as we get older, the truth is that we merely get less on average, while still needing the same amount.
A medium-firm memory-foam mattress is a very good, well-evidenced way to support that (both figuratively and literally!).
A grid mattress is an interesting innovation, and/but we’d like to see more science for it.
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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Knee Cracking & Popping: Should You Be Worried?
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Dr. Tom Walters (Doctor of Physical Therapy) explains about what’s going on behind our musical knees, and whether or not this synovial symphony is cause for concern.
When to worry (and when not to)
If the clicking/cracking/popping/etc does not come with pain, then it is probably being caused by the harmless movement of fluid within the joints, in this case specifically the patellofemoral joint, just behind the kneecap.
As Dr. Walters says:
❝It is extremely important that people understand that noises from the knee are usually not associated with pathology and may actually be a sign of a healthy, well-lubricated joint. let’s be careful not to make people feel bad about their knee noise as it can negatively influence how they view their body!❞
On the other hand, there is also such a thing as patellofemoral joint pain syndrome (PFPS), which is very common, and involves pain behind the kneecap, especially upon over-stressing the knee(s).
In such cases, it is good to get that checked out by a doctor/physiotherapist.
Dr. Walters advises us to gradually build up strength, and not try for too much too quickly. He also advises us to take care to strengthen our glutes in particular, so our knees have adequate support. Gentle stretching of the quadriceps and soft tissue mobilization with a foam roller, are also recommended, to reduce tension on the kneecap.
For more on these things and especially about the exercises, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
How To Really Take Care Of Your Joints
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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Avocado Oil vs Olive Oil – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing avocado oil to olive oil, we picked the olive oil.
Why?
We’ll be honest, we were going to do “avocados vs olives”, but they are both so healthy and contain so many good nutrients, that it was impossible to call it (we recommend enjoying both!).
However, when they are made into oils, there’s an important distinguishing factor:
Olive oil usually retains a lot of the micronutrients from the olives (including vitamins E and K), whereas no measurable micronutrients usually remain in avocado oil.
So while both olive oil and avocado oil have a similar (excellent; very heart-healthy!) lipids profile, the olive oil has some bonuses that the avocado oil doesn’t.
We haven’t written about the nutritional profiles of either avocados or olives yet, but here’s what we had to say on the different kinds of olive oil available:
And here’s an example of a good one on Amazon, for your convenience 😎
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