International Day of Women and Girls in Science
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Today is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, so we’ve got a bunch of content for the ladies out there. Let’s start with the statement Sima Bahous (the Executive Director of UN Women) made:
❝This year, the sixty-seventh session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67) will consider as its priority theme “Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls”.
This is an unprecedented opportunity for the Commission to develop a definitive agenda for progress towards women’s full and equal participation and representation in STEM. Its implementation will require bold, coordinated, multi-stakeholder action.❞
Here at 10almonds, we are just one newsletter, and maybe we can’t change the world (…yet), but we’re all for this!
We’re certainly all in favour of education in the digital age, and more of our subscribers are women and girls than not (highest of fives from your writer today, also a woman—and I do bring most of the sciency content).
Medical News Today asks “Why Are Women Less Likely To Survive Cardiac Arrest Than Men?”
You can read the full article here, but the short version is:
- People (bystanders and EMS professionals alike!) are less likely to intervene to give CPR when the patient is a woman (we appreciate that “your hands on an unknown woman’s chest” is a social taboo, but there’s a time and a place!)
- People trained to give CPR (volunteers or professionals!) are often less confident about how to do so with female anatomy—training is almost entirely on “male” dummies.
A quick take-away from this is: to give effective CPR, you need to be giving two-inch compressions!
On a side note, do you want to learn how to correctly do chest compressions on female anatomy? This short (1:55) video could save a woman’s life!
As a science-based health and productivity newsletter, we make no apologies if occasional issues sometimes have a slant to women’s health! Heaven help us, the bias in science at large is certainly the opposite:
The list of examples is far too long for us to include here, but two that spring immediately to mind are:
- PCOS (Polycystic ovary syndrome), which affects nearly 1 in 5 women, can lead to infertility, never mind the inconvenience of irregular bleeding, chronic pain, and diabetes (amongst other things), and… nobody knows what causes it, or what to do about it.
- Endometriosis (the lining of the womb starts growing in other places), meanwhile, affects around 1 in 10 women. It causes chronic pain and fatigue, and again, nobody knows what causes it or how to cure it.
Maybe if women in STEM weren’t on the receiving end of rampant systemic misogyny, we’d have more women in science, and some answers by now!
❗️NOT-SO-FUN FACT:
Women make up only 28% of the workforce in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and men vastly outnumber women majoring in most STEM fields in college. The gender gaps are particularly high in some of the fastest-growing and highest-paid jobs of the future, like computer science and engineering.
Source: AAUW
The US census suggests change is happening, but is a very long way from equality!
WHAT OUR SUBSCRIBERS SAY:
❝Women are slowly gaining more of a place in academia, and slowly making more of a difference when they get there, and start doing research that reflects ourselves. But I still think that it’s a struggle to get there, and it’s a struggle to be heard and be respected.
It’s a matter of pride, it’s a matter of proving yourself, being in STEM, and [women in STEM] still report being extremely disrespected, not taken seriously all, despite being very very good.
It’s worth noting as well, that we’ve had women in STEM for a while and there are so many things we appreciate nowadays that they were a part of, but they were never given credit for—it’s still a problem today and something we need to more actively fight.❞
Isabella F. Lima, Occupational Psychologist
Are you a woman in STEM, and have a story to tell? We’d love to hear it! Just reply to this email 🙂
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What You Should Have Been Told About The Menopause Beforehand
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What You Should Have Been Told About Menopause Beforehand
This is Dr. Jen Gunter. She’s a gynecologist, specializing in chronic pain and vulvovaginal disorders. She’s also a woman on a mission to demystify things that popular culture, especially in the US, would rather not talk about.
When was the last time you remember the menopause being referenced in a movie or TV show? If you can think of one at all, was it just played for laughs?
And of course, the human body can be funny, so that’s not necessarily the problem, but it sure would be nice if that weren’t all that there is!
So, what does Dr. Gunter want us to know?
It’s a time of changes, not an end
The name “menopause” is misleading. It’s not a “pause”, and those menses aren’t coming back.
And yet, to call it a “menostop” would be differently misleading, because there’s a lot more going on than a simple cessation of menstruation.
Estrogen levels will drop a lot, testosterone levels may rise slightly, mood and sleep and appetite and sex drive will probably be affected (progesterone can improve all these things!) and
not to mention butwe’re going to mention: vaginal atrophy, which is very normal and very treatable with a topical estrogen cream. Untreated menopause can also bring a whole lot of increased health risks (for example, heart disease, osteoporosis, and, counterintuitively given the lower estrogen levels, breast cancer).However, with a little awareness and appropriate management, all these things can usually be navigated with minimal adverse health outcomes.
Dr Gunter, for this reason, refers to it interchangeably as “the menopausal transition”. She describes it as being less like a cliff edge we fall off, and more like a bridge we cross.
Bridges can be dangerous to cross! But they can also get us safely where we’re going.
Ok, so how do we manage those things?
Dr. Gunter is a big fan of evidence-based medicine, so we’ll not be seeing any yonic crystals or jade eggs. Or “goop”.
See also: Meet Goop’s Number One Enemy
For most people, she recommends Menopausal Hormone Therapy (MHT), which falls under the more general category of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT).
This is the most well-evidenced, science-based way to avoid most of the risks associated with menopause.
Nevertheless, there are scare-stories out there, ranging from painful recommencement of bleeding, to (once again) increased risk of breast cancer. However, most of these are either misunderstandings, or unrelated to menopause and MHT, and are rather signs of other problems that should not be ignored.
To get a good grounding in this, you might want to read her Hormone Therapy Guide, freely available as a standalone section on her website. This series of posts is dedicated to hormone therapy. It starts with some basics and builds on that knowledge with each post:
Dr. Gunter’s Guide To The Hormone Menoverse
What about natural therapies?
There are some non-hormonal things that work, but these are mostly things that:
- give a statistically significant reduction in symptoms
- give the same statistically significant reduction in symptoms as placebo
As Dr. Gunter puts it:
❝While most of the studies of prescription medications for hot flashes have an appropriate placebo arm, this is rarely the case with so-called alternative therapies.
In fact, the studies here are almost always low quality, so it’s often not possible to conclude much.
Many reviews that look at these studies often end with a line that goes something like, “Randomized trials with a placebo arm, a low risk of bias, and adequate sample sizes are urgently needed.”
You should interpret this kind of conclusion as the polite way of saying, “We need studies that aren’t BS to say something constructive.”❞
However, if it works, it works, whatever its mechanism. It’s just good, when making medical decisions, to do so with the full facts!
For that matter, even Dr. Gunter acknowledges that while MHT can be lifechanging (in a positive way) for many, it’s not for everyone:
Informed Decisions: When Menopause Hormone Therapy Isn’t Recommended
Want to know more?
Dr. Gunter also has an assortment of books available, including The Menopause Manifesto (which we’ve reviewed previously), and some others that we haven’t, such as “Blood” and “The Vagina Bible”.
Enjoy!
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In Defense of Food – by Michael Pollan
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Eat more like the French. Or the Italians. Or the Japanese. Or…
Somehow, whatever we eat is not good enough, and we should always be doing it differently!
Michael Pollan takes a more down-to-Earth approach.
He kicks off by questioning the wisdom of thinking of our food only in terms of nutritional profiles, and overthinking healthy-eating. He concludes, as many do, that a “common-sense, moderate” approach is needed.
And yet, most people who believe they are taking a “common-sense, moderate” approach to health are in fact over-fed yet under-nourished.
So, how to fix this?
He offers us a reframe: to think of food as a relationship, and health being a product of it:
- If we are constantly stressing about a relationship, it’s probably not good.
- On the other hand, if we are completely thoughtless about it, it’s probably not good either.
- But if we can outline some good, basic principles and celebrate it with a whole heart? It’s probably at the very least decent.
The style is very casual and readable throughout. His conclusions, by the way, can be summed up as “Eat real food, make it mostly plants, and make it not too much”.
However, to summarize it thusly undercuts a lot of the actual value of the book, which is the principles for discerning what is “real food” and what is “not too much”.
Bottom line: if you’re tired of complicated eating plans, this book can help produce something very simple, attainable, and really quite good.
Click here to check out In Defense of Food, for some good, hearty eating.
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The Easiest Way To Take Up Journaling
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Dear Diary…
It’s well-established that journaling is generally good for mental health. It’s not a magical panacea, as evidenced by The Diaries of Franz Kafka for example (that man was not in good mental health). But for most of us, putting our thoughts and feelings down on paper (or the digital equivalent) is a good step for tidying our mind.
And as it can be said: mental health is also just health.
But…
What to write about?
It’s about self-expression (even if only you will read it), and…
❝Writing about traumatic, stressful or emotional events has been found to result in improvements in both physical and psychological health, in non-clinical and clinical populations.
In the expressive writing paradigm, participants are asked to write about such events for 15–20 minutes on 3–5 occasions.
Those who do so generally have significantly better physical and psychological outcomes compared with those who write about neutral topics.❞
Source: Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing
In other words, write about whatever moves you.
Working from prompts
If you read the advice above and thought “but I don’t know what moves me”, then fear not. It’s perfectly respectable to work from prompts, such as:
- What last made you cry?
- What last made you laugh?
- What was a recent meaningful moment with family?
- What is a serious mistake that you made and learned from?
- If you could be remembered for just one thing, what would you want it to be?
In fact, sometimes working from prompts has extra benefits, precisely because it challenges us to examine things we might not otherwise think about.
If a prompt asks “What tends to bring you most joy recently?” and the question stumps you, then a) you now are prompted to look at what you can change to find more joy b) you probably wouldn’t have thought of this question—most depressed people don’t, and if you cannot remember recent joy, then well, we’re not here to diagnose, but let’s just say that’s a symptom.
A quick aside: if you or a loved oneare prone to depressive episodes, here’s a good resource, by the way:
The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need
And in the event of the mental health worst case scenario:
The six prompts we gave earlier are just ideas that came to this writer’s mind, but they’re (ok, some bias here) very good ones. If you’d like more though, here’s a good resource:
550+ Journal Prompts: The Ultimate List
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
While it’s not good to get stuck in ruminative negative thought spirals, it is good to have a safe outlet to express one’s negative thoughts/feelings:
Remember, your journal is (or ideally, should be) a place without censure. If you fear social consequences should your journal be read, then using an app with a good security policy and encryption options can be a good idea for journaling
Finch App is a good free option if it’s not too cutesy for your taste, because in terms of security:
- It can’t leak your data because your data never leaves your phone (unless you manually back up your data and then you choose to put it somewhere unsafe)
- It has an option to require passcode/biometrics etc to open the app
As a bonus, it also has very many optional journaling prompts, and also (optional) behavioral activation prompts, amongst more other offerings that we don’t have room to list here.
Take care!
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Get Fitter As You Go
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Dr. Jaime Seeman: Hard To Kill?
This is Dr. Jaime Seeman. She’s a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist with a background in nutrition, exercise, and health science. She’s also a Fellow in Integrative Medicine, and a board-certified nutrition specialist.
However, her biggest focus is preventative medicine.
What does she want us to know?
The Five Pillars of being “Hard to Kill”!
As an athlete when she was younger, she got away with poor nutrition habits with good exercise, but pregnancy (thrice) brought her poor thyroid function, other hormonal imbalances, and pre-diabetes.
So, she set about getting better—not something the general medical establishment focuses on a lot! Doctors are pressured to manage symptoms, but are under no expectation to actually help people get better.
So, what are her five pillars?
Nutrition
Dr. Seeman unsurprisingly recommends a whole-foods diet with lots of plants, but unlike many plant-enjoyers, she is also an enjoyer of the ketogenic diet.
While keto-enthusiasts say “carbs are bad” and vegans say “meat is bad”, the reality is: both of those things can be bad, and in both cases, avoiding the most harmful varieties is a very good first step:
Movement
This is in two parts:
- get your 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week
- keep your body mobile!
See also:
Sleep
This one’s quite straightforward, and Dr. Seeman uncontroversially recommends getting 7–9 hours per night; yes, even you:
Mindset
This is key to Dr. Seeman’s approach, and it is about not settling for average, because the average is undernourished, overmedicated, sedentary, and suffering.
She encourages us all to keep working for better health, wherever we’re at. To not “go gentle into that good night”, to get stronger whatever our age, to showcase increasingly robust vitality as we go.
To believe we can, and then to do it.
Environment
That previous item usually won’t last beyond a 10-day health-kick without the correct environment.
As for how to make sure we have that? Check out:
Want more?
She does offer coaching:
Hard To Kill Academy: Master The Mindset To Maximize Your Years
Take care!
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HRT & Your Heart
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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
❝So the reason that someone on estrogen has a slightly higher chance of a heart attack is…what? Is it just because there’s a higher body fat?❞
There shouldn’t be higher chance of a heart attack once everything’s been taken into account, and indeed estrogen has some cardioprotective benefits, along with competing properties, e.g:
❝The cardiovascular effects of estrogen require a careful balancing act between possible advantages, such as enhanced lipid profiles and vascular function, and possible concerns, like increased thrombotic risk.
Estrogen has cardioprotective properties in premenopausal women❞
Source: The Relationship Between Myocardial Infarction and Estrogen Use: A Literature Review
The risks and benefits of HRT are numerous, and/but a lot of the risks are associated only with animal-derived HRT rather bioidentitical, so you might want to check out our previous article:
HRT: A Tale Of Two Approaches (Bioidentical vs Animal)
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Lettuce vs Arugula – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing lettuce to arugula, we picked the arugula.
Why?
These two salad leaves that often fulfil quite similar culinary roles (base of a green salad) are actually of different families, and it shows…
In terms of macros, arugula is lower in carbs, and much higher in protein and fiber—to the point that the protein content in arugula is almost equal to the carb content, which for leaves, is not that common a thing to see.
When it comes to vitamins, things are more even: lettuce has more of vitamins A, B1, B3, B6, and K, while arugula has more of vitamins B5, B9, C, E, and choline. All in all, we can comfortably call it a tie on the vitamin front.
In the category of minerals, things are once again more decided: arugula has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc. In contrast, lettuce boasts only more selenium. An easy win for arugula.
Both of these plants have plenty of health-giving phytochemicals, including flavonoids and carotenoids along with other less talked-about things, and while the profiles are quite different for each of them, they stack up about the same in terms of overall benefits in this category.
Taking the various categories into account, this of course adds up to an easy win for arugula, but do enjoy both, especially as lettuce brings benefits that arugula doesn’t in the two categories where they tied!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- How To Avoid Age-Related Macular Degeneration
- Brain Food? The Eyes Have It!
- Spinach vs Kale – Which is Healthier?
Take care!
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