Immunity – by Dr. William Paul

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This book gives a very person-centric (i.e., focuses on the contributions of named individuals) overview of advances in the field of immunology—up to its publication date in 2015. So, it’s not cutting edge, but it is very good at laying the groundwork for understanding more recent advances that occur as time goes by. After all, immunology is a field that never stands still.

We get a good grounding in how our immune system works (and how it doesn’t), the constant arms race between pathogens and immune responses, and the complexities of autoimmune disorders and—which is functionally in an overlapping category of disease—cancer. And, what advances we can expect soon to address those things.

Given the book was published 8 years ago, how did it measure up? Did we get those advances? Well, for the mostpart yes, we have! Some are still works in progress. But, we’ve also had obvious extra immunological threats in years since, which have also resulted in other advances along the way!

If the book has a downside, it’s that sometimes the author can be a little too person-centric. It’s engaging to focus on human characters, and helps us bring information to life; name-dropping to excess, along with awards won, can sometimes feel a little like the book was co-authored by Tahani Al-Jamil.

Nevertheless, it certainly does keep the book from getting too dry!

Bottom line: this book is a great overview of immunology and immunological research, for anyone who wants to understand these things better.

Click here to check out Immunity, and boost your knowledge of yours!

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  • The Lifestyle Factors That Matter >8 Times More Than Genes

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    We’ve said before that “genes predispose; they don’t predetermine”. It can be good to know one’s genes, of course, and we’ve written about this here:

    Genetic Testing: Health Benefits & Methods

    …which can include some quite contemporary risks, such as:

    Genetic Risk Factors For Long COVID

    And yet…

    Nurture Over Nature

    A very large (n=492,567) study looked into the impact of 25 lifestyle/environmental factors, of which 23 are considered modifiable, and found that lifestyle/environmental factors accounted for 17% of the variation in mortality risk, while genetic predisposition accounted for less than 2%.

    Which is good news, because it means we can improve our lot.

    But how?

    The strongest negative factors (that increased mortality the most) were:

    • Smoking
    • Not owning your home (interestingly, “live in accommodation rent-free vs own” performed just as badly as various kinds of “renting home vs own”, while “own house with mortgage, vs own outright” had only a marginal negative effect)
    • Sleeping more than 9 hours per day (performed even worse than sleeping under 7 hours per day, which also increased mortality risk, but not by as much as oversleeping)
    • Financial difficulties in the past two years
    • Homosexuality
    • Unemployment
    • Being an evening person
    • Lonely lifestyle
    • Frequent napping

    We may hypothesize that homosexuality probably makes the list because of how it makes one more likely to have other items on the list, especially unemployment, and the various poverty-related indicators that come from unemployment.

    Being an evening person, whatever its pathology, is a well-established risk factor that we’ve talked about before:

    Early Bird Or Night Owl? Genes vs Environment ← this is also, by the way, an excellent example of how “genes predispose; they don’t predetermine”, because there is a genetic factor involved, and/but we absolutely can switch it up, if we go about it correctly, and become a morning person without trying to force it.

    The strongest positive factors (that decreased mortality the most) were:

    • The inverse of all of the various above things, e.g. never having smoked, owning your own home, etc
    • Household income, specifically
    • Living with a partner
    • Having oil central heating
    • Gym use
    • Sun protection use
    • Physical activity, especially if in leisure time rather than as part of one’s work
    • Glucosamine supplements
    • Family visit frequency
    • Cereal fiber intake (i.e. whole grains)

    We may hypothesize that having oil central heating is simply a more expensive option to install than many, and therefore likely one enjoyed by homeowners more often than renters.

    We may hypothesize that glucosamine supplementation is an indication of the type of person who takes care of a specific condition (inflammation of the joints) without an existential threat; notably, multivitamin supplements don’t get the same benefit, probably because of their ubiquity.

    We may hypothesize that “family visit frequency” is highly correlated to having a support network, being social (and thus not lonely), and likely is associated with household income too.

    You can see the full list of factors and their impacts, here:

    Environmental architecture of mortality in the UKB ← that’s the UK Biobank

    You can read the paper in full, here:

    Integrating the environmental and genetic architectures of aging and mortality

    Practical takeaways

    The priorities seem to be as follows:

    Don’t smoke. Ideally you will never have smoked, but short of a time machine, you can’t change that now, so: what you can do is quit now if you haven’t already.

    See also: Which Addiction-Quitting Methods Work Best?

    Note that other factors often lumped in with such, for example daily alcohol consumption, red meat intake, processed meat intake, and salt intake, all significantly increased mortality risk, but none of them in the same league of badness as smoking.

    See also: Is Sugar The New Smoking? ← simply put: no, it is not. Don’t get us wrong; added sugar is woeful for the health, but smoking is pretty much the worst thing you can do for your health, short of intentionally (and successfully) committing suicide.

    Be financially secure, ideally owning your own home. For many (indeed, for most people in the world) this may be an “easier said than done” thing, but if you can make decisions that will improve your financial security, the mortality numbers are very clear on this matter.

    Be social, as loneliness indeed kills, in numerous ways. Loneliness means a lack of a support network, and it means a lack of social contact (thus increased risk of cognitive decline), and likely decreased ikigai, unless your life’s purpose is something inherently linked to solitude (e.g. the “meditating on top of a mountain” archetype).

    See also: What Loneliness Does To Your Brain And Body

    And to fix it: How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation

    Be active: especially in your leisure time; being active because you have to does convey benefits, but on the same level as physical activity because you want to.

    See also: No-Exercise Exercises (That Won’t Feel Like “Having To Do” Exercise)

    Use sunscreen: we’re surprised this one made the list; it’s important to avoid skin cancer of course, but we didn’t think it’d be quite such a driver of mortality risk mitigation as the numbers show it is, and we can’t think of a clear alternative explanation, as we could with some of the other “why did this make the list?” items. At worst, it could be a similar case to that of glucosamine use, and thus is a marker of a conscientious person making a regular sustained effort for their health. Either way, it seems like a good idea based on the numbers.

    See also: Do We Need Sunscreen In Winter, Really?

    Enjoy whole grains: fiber is super-important, and that mustn’t be underestimated!

    See also: What Matters Most For Your Heart? ← hint: it isn’t about salt intake or fat

    And, for that matter: The Best Kind Of Fiber For Overall Health?

    Take care!

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  • How Useful Are Our Dreams

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    What’s In A Dream?

    We were recently asked:

    ❝I have a question or a suggestion for coverage in your “Psychology Sunday”. Dreams: their relevance, meanings ( if any) interpretations? I just wondered what the modern psychological opinions are about dreams in general.❞

    ~ 10almonds subscriber

    There are two main schools of thought, and one main effort to reconcile those two. The third one hasn’t quite caught on so far as to be considered a “school of thought” yet though.

    The Top-Down Model (Psychoanalysts)

    Psychoanalysts broadly follow the theories of Freud, or at least evolved from there. Freud was demonstrably wrong about very many things. Most of his theories have been debunked and ditched—hence the charitable “or at least evolved from there” phrasing when it comes to modern psychoanalytic schools of thought. Perhaps another day, we’ll go into all the ways Freud went wrong. However, for today, one thing he wasn’t bad at…

    According to Freud, our dreams reveal our subconscious desires and fears, sometimes directly and sometimes dressed in metaphor.

    Examples of literal representations might be:

    • sex dreams (revealing our subconscious desires; perhaps consciously we had not thought about that person that way, or had not considered that sex act desirable)
    • getting killed and dying (revealing our subconscious fear of death, not something most people give a lot of conscious thought to most of the time)

    Examples of metaphorical representations might be:

    • dreams of childhood (revealing our subconscious desires to feel safe and nurtured, or perhaps something else depending on the nature of the dream; maybe a return to innocence, or a clean slate)
    • dreams of being pursued (revealing our subconscious fear of bad consequences of our actions/inactions, for example, responsibilities to which we have not attended, debts are a good example for many people; or social contact where the ball was left in our court and we dropped it, that kind of thing)

    One can read all kinds of guides to dream symbology, and learn such arcane lore as “if you dream of your teeth crumbling, you have financial worries”, but the truth is that “this thing means that other thing” symbolic equations are not only highly personal, but also incredibly culture-bound.

    For example:

    • To one person, bees could be a symbol of feeling plagued by uncountable small threats; to another, they could be a symbol of abundance, or of teamwork
    • One culture’s “crow as an omen of death” is another culture’s “crow as a symbol of wisdom”
      • For that matter, in some cultures, white means purity; in others, it means death.

    Even such classically Freudian things as dreaming of one’s mother and/or father (in whatever context) will be strongly informed by one’s own waking-world relationship (or lack thereof) with same. Even in Freud’s own psychoanalysis, the “mother” for the sake of such analysis was the person who nurtured, and the “father” was the person who drew the nurturer’s attention away, so they could be switched gender roles, or even different people entirely than one’s parents.

    The only real way to know what, if anything, your dreams are trying to tell you, is to ask yourself. You can do that…

    The idea with lucid dreaming is that since any dream character is a facet of your subconscious generated by your own mind, by talking to that character you can ask questions directly of your subconscious (the popular 2010 movie “Inception” was actually quite accurate in this regard, by the way).

    To read more about how to do this kind of self-therapy through lucid dreaming, you might want to check out this book we reviewed previously; it is the go-to book of lucid dreaming enthusiasts, and will honestly give you everything you need in one go:

    Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life – by Dr. Stephen LaBerge

    The Bottom-Up Model (Neuroscientists)

    This will take a lot less writing, because it’s practically a null hypothesis (i.e., the simplest default assumption before considering any additional evidence that might support or refute it; usually some variant of “nothing unusual going on here”).

    The Bottom-Up model holds that our brains run regular maintenance cycles during REM sleep (a biological equivalent of defragging a computer), and the brain interprets these pieces of information flying by and, because of the mind’s tendency to look for patterns, fills in the rest (much like how modern generative AI can “expand” a source image to create more of the same and fill in the blanks), resulting in the often narratively wacky, but ultimately random, vivid hallucinations that we call dreams.

    The Hybrid Model (per Cartwright, 2012)

    This is really just one woman’s vision, but it’s an incredibly compelling one, that takes the Bottom-Up model and asks “what if we did all that bio-stuff, and then our subconscious mind influenced the interpretation of the random patterns, to create dreams that are subjectively meaningful, and thus do indeed represent our subconscious?

    It’s best explained in her own words, though, so it’s time for another book recommendation (we’ve reviewed this one before, too):

    The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives – by Dr. Rosalind Cartwright

    Enjoy!

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  • Healthy Longevity As A Lifestyle Choice

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    7 Keys To Healthy Longevity

    This is Dr. Luigi Fontana. He’s a research professor of Geriatrics & Nutritional Science, and co-director of the Longevity Research Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

    What does he want us to know?

    He has a many-fold approach to healthy longevity, most of which may not be news to you, but you might want to prioritize some things:

    Consider caloric restriction with optimal nutrition (CRON)

    This is about reducing the metabolic load on your body, which frees up bodily resources for keeping yourself young.

    Keeping your body young and healthy is your body’s favorite thing to do, but it can’t do that if it never gets a chance because of all the urgent metabolic tasks you’re giving it.

    If CRON isn’t your thing (isn’t practicable for you, causes undue suffering, etc) then intermittent fasting is a great CR mimetic, and he recommends that too. See also:

    Keep your waistline small

    Whichever approach you prefer to use to look after your metabolic health, keeping your waistline down is much more important for health than BMI.

    Specifically, he recommends keeping it:

    • under 31.5” for women
    • under 37” for men

    The disparity here is because of hormonal differences that influence both metabolism and fat distribution.

    Exercise as part of your lifestyle

    For Dr. Fontana, he loves mountain-biking (this writer could never!) and weight-lifting (also not my thing). But what’s key is not the specifics, but what’s going on:

    • Some kind of frequent movement
    • Some kind of high-intensity interval training
    • Some kind of resistance training

    Frequent movement because our bodies are evolved to be moving more often than not:

    The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, & Move More

    High-Intensity Interval Training because unlike most forms of exercise (which slow metabolism afterwards to compensate), it boosts metabolism for up to 2 hours after training:

    How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)

    Resistance training because strength (of muscles and bones) matters too:

    Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)

    Writer’s examples:

    So while I don’t care for mountain-biking or weight-lifting, what I do is:

    1) movement: walk (briskly!) everywhere and also use a standing desk
    2) HIIT: 2-minute bursts of hindu squats and/or exercise bike sprints
    3) resistance: pilates and other calisthenics

    Moderation is not key

    Dr. Fontana advises that we do not smoke, and that we do not drink alcohol, for example. He also notes that just as the only healthy amount of alcohol is zero, less ultra-processed food is always better than more.

    Maybe you don’t want to abstain completely, but mindful wilful consumption of something unhealthy is preferable to believing “moderate consumption is good for the health” and an unhealthy habit develops!

    Greens and beans

    Shocking absolutely nobody, Dr. Fontana advocates for (what has been the most evidence-based gold standard of healthy-aging diets for quite some years now) the Mediterranean diet.

    See also: Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet ← this is about tweaking the Mediterranean diet per personal area of focus, e.g. anti-inflammatory bonus, best for gut, heart healthiest, and most neuroprotective.

    Take it easy

    Dr. Fontana advises us (again, with a wealth of evidence) Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and to get good sleep.

    Not shocked?

    To quote the good doctor,

    ❝There are no shortcuts. No magic pills or expensive procedures can replace the beneficial effects of a healthy diet, exercise, mindfulness, or a regenerating night’s sleep.❞

    Always a good reminder!

    Want to know more?

    You might enjoy his book “The Path to Longevity: How to Reach 100 with the Health and Stamina of a 40-Year-Old”, which we reviewed previously

    You might also like this video of his, about changing the conversation from “chronic disease” to “chronic health”:

    !

    Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later

    Take care!

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Related Posts

  • Codependent No More – by Melody Beattie
  • The Lies That Depression Tells Us

    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.

    In this short (6:42) video, psychiatrist Dr. Tracey Marks talks about 8 commonly-believed lies that depression often tells us. They are:

    • “I don’t measure up”
    • “No one cares about me”
    • “I’m better off alone”
    • “No one understands”
    • “It’s all my fault”
    • “I have no reason to be depressed”
    • “Nothing matters”
    • “I’ll never get better”

    Some of these can be reinforced by people around us; it’s easy to believe that “no one understands” if for example the few people we interact with the most don’t understand, or that “I have no reason to be depressed” if people try to cheer you up by pointing out your many good fortunes.

    The reality, of course, is that depression is a large, complex, and many-headed beast, with firm roots in neurobiology.

    There are things we can do that may ameliorate it… But they also may not, and sometimes life is just going to suck for a while. That doesn’t mean we should give up (that, too, is depression lying to us, per “I’ll never get better”), but it does mean that we should not be so hard on ourselves for not having “walked it off” the way one might “just walk off” a broken leg.

    Oh, you can’t “just walk off” a broken leg? Well then, perhaps it’s not surprising if we don’t “just think off” a broken brain, either. The brain can rebuild itself, but that’s a slow process, so buckle in:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to know more?

    You might like these previous articles of ours about depression (managing it, and overcoming it):

    Take care!

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  • Can We Drink To Good Health?

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    Can we drink to good health?

    We asked you for your thoughts on alcohol and heart health, and we got quite an even spread of results!

    If perchance that’s too tiny to read, the figures were:

    • 32% voted for “Alcohol is a relaxant, reduces stress, and can contain resveratrol too. It’s good for the heart!”
    • 32% voted for: “Moderate alcohol consumption can be at least neutral for the health, if not positive ⚖️”
    • 36% voted for: “Alcohol is bad for pretty much everything, including heart health ✋”

    One subscriber who voted for “Alcohol is a relaxant, reduces stress, and can contain resveratrol too. It’s good for the heart!” added the following thoughts:

    ❝While it isn’t necessary to consume alcohol, moderate amounts can be beneficial and contribute to well-being through social activity, celebrations, etc.❞

    That’s an interesting point, and definitely many people do see alcohol that way! Of course, that does not mean that one will find no social activities, celebrations, etc, in parts of the world where alcohol consumption is uncommon. Indeed, in India, wedding parties where no alcohol is consumed can go on for days!

    But, “we live in a society” and all that, and while we’re a health newsletter not a social issues newsletter, it’d be remiss of us to not acknowledge the importance of socialization for good mental health—and thus the rest of our health too.

    So, if indeed all our friends and family drink alcohol, it can certainly make abstaining more of a challenge.

    On that note, let’s take a moment to considerThe French Paradox” (an observation of a low prevalence of ischemic heart disease despite high intakes of saturated fat, a phenomenon accredited to the consumption of red wine).

    As it happens, a comprehensive review in “Circulation”, a cardiovascular health journal, has suggested the French Paradox may not be so paradoxical after all.

    Research suggests it has more to do with other lifestyle factors (and historic under-reporting of cardiovascular disease by French doctors), which would explain why Japan has lower rates of heart disease, despite drinking little wine, and more beer and spirits.

    So, our subscriber’s note may not be completely without reason! It’s just about the party, not the alcohol.

    One subscriber who voted for “Moderate alcohol consumption can be at least neutral for the health, if not positive ⚖️” wrote:

    ❝Keeping in mind, moderate means one glass of wine for women a day and two for men. Hard alcohol doesn’t have the same heart benefits as wine❞

    That is indeed the guideline according to some health bodies!

    In other places with different guiding advisory bodies, that’s been dropped down to one a day for everyone (the science may be universal, but how government institutions interpret that is not).

    About that wine… Specifically, red wine, for its resveratrol content:

    While there are polyphenols such as resveratrol in red wine that could boost heart health, there’s so little per glass that you may need 100–1000 glasses to get the dosage that provides benefits in mouse studies. If you’re not a mouse, you might even need more.

    To this end, many people prefer resveratrol supplementation. ← link is to an example product, but there are plenty more so feel free to shop around

    A subscriber who voted for “Alcohol is bad for pretty much everything, including heart health ✋” says:

    ❝New guidelines suggest 1 to 2 drinks a week are okay but the less the better.❞

    If you haven’t heard these new guidelines, we’ll mention again: every government has its own official bodies and guidelines so perhaps your local guidelines differ, but for example here’s what that World Health Organization has to say (as of January this year):

    WHO: No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health

    So, whom to believe? The governments who hopefully consider the welfare of their citizenry more important than the tax dollars from alcohol sales, or the World Health Organization?

    It’s a tough one, but we’ll always err on the side of the science.

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  • Meals That Heal – by Dr. Carolyn Williams

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    Inflammation is implicated as a contributory or casual factor in almost all chronic diseases (and still exacerbates the ones in which it’s not directly implicated causally), so if there’s one area of health to focus on with one’s diet, then reducing inflammation is a top candidate.

    This book sets about doing exactly that.

    You may be wondering whether, per the book’s subtitle, they can really all be done in 30 minutes or under. The answer is: no, not unless you have a team of sous-chefs to do all the prep work for you, and line up everything mise-en-place style for when you start the clock. If you do have that team of sous-chefs working for you, then you can probably do most of them in under 30 minutes. If you don’t have that team, then budget about an hour in total, sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on the recipe.

    The recipes themselves are mostly Mediterranean-inspired, though you might want to do a few swaps where the author has oddly recommended using seed oils instead of olive oil, or plant milk in place of where she has used dairy milk in a couple of “recipes” for smoothies. You might also want to be a little more generous with the seasonings, if you’re anything like this reviewer.

    Bottom line: if you’re looking for an anti-inflammatory starter cookbook, you could do worse than this. You could probably do better, too, such as starting with The Inflammation Spectrum – by Dr. Will Cole.

    Alternatively, click here if you want to check out Meals That Heal, and dive straight in!

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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