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.❞

Read Her Full Statement Here!

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:

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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  • Syringe Exchange Fears Hobble Fight Against West Virginia HIV Outbreak

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    CHARLESTON, http://w.va/. — More than three years have passed since federal health officials arrived in central Appalachia to assess an alarming outbreak of HIV spread mostly between people who inject opioids or methamphetamine.

    Infectious disease experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made a list of recommendations following their visit, including one to launch syringe service programs to stop the spread at its source. But those who’ve spent years striving to protect people who use drugs from overdose and illness say the situation likely hasn’t improved, in part because of politicians who contend that such programs encourage illegal drug use.

    Joe Solomon is a Charleston City Council member and co-director of SOAR WV, a group that works to address the health needs of people who use drugs. He’s proud of how his close-knit community has risen to this challenge but frustrated with the restraints on its efforts.

    “You see a city and a county willing to get to work at a scale that’s bigger than ever before,” Solomon said, “but we still have one hand tied behind our back.”

    The hand he references is easier access to clean syringes.

    In April 2021, the CDC came to Charleston — the seat of Kanawha County and the state capital, tucked into the confluence of the Kanawha and Elk rivers — to investigate dozens of newly detected HIV infections. The CDC’s HIV intervention chief called it “the most concerning HIV outbreak in the United States” and warned that the number of reported diagnoses could be just “the tip of the iceberg.”

    Now, despite attention and resources directed toward the outbreak, researchers and health workers say HIV continues to spread. In large part, they say, the outbreak lingers because of restrictions state and local policymakers have placed on syringe exchange efforts.

    Research indicates that syringe service programs are associated with an estimated 50% reduction in HIV and hepatitis C, and the CDC issued recommendations to steer a response to the outbreak that emphasized the need for improved access to those services.

    That advice has thus far gone unheeded by local officials.

    In late 2015, the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department launched a syringe service program but shuttered it in 2018 under pressure, with then-Mayor Danny Jones calling it a “mini-mall for junkies and drug dealers.”

    SOAR stepped in, hosting health fairs at which it distributed naloxone, an opioid overdose reversal drug; offered treatment and referrals; provided HIV testing; and exchanged clean syringes for used ones.

    But in April 2021, the state legislature passed a bill limiting the number of syringes people could exchange and made it mandatory to present a West Virginia ID. The Charleston City Council subsequently added guidelines of its own, including requiring individual labeling of syringes.

    As a result of these restrictions, SOAR ceased exchanging syringes. West Virginia Health Right now operates an exchange program in the city under the restrictions.

    Robin Pollini is a West Virginia University epidemiologist who conducts community-based research on injection drug use. “Anyone I’ve talked to who’s used that program only used it once,” she said. “And the numbers they report to the state bear that out.”

    A syringe exchange run by the health department in nearby Cabell County — home to Huntington, the state’s largest city after Charleston — isn’t so constrained. As Solomon notes, that program exchanges more than 200 syringes for every one exchanged in Kanawha.

    A common complaint about syringe programs is that they result in discarded syringes in public spaces. Jan Rader, director of Huntington’s Mayor’s Office of Public Health and Drug Control Policy, is regularly out on the streets and said she seldom encounters discarded syringes, pointing out that it’s necessary to exchange a used syringe for a new one.

    In August 2023, the Charleston City Council voted down a proposal from the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia to operate a syringe exchange in the city’s West Side community, with opponents expressing fears of an increase in drug use and crime.

    Pollini said it’s difficult to estimate the number of people in West Virginia with HIV because there’s no coordinated strategy for testing; all efforts are localized.

    “You would think that in a state that had the worst HIV outbreak in the country,” she said, “by this time we would have a statewide testing strategy.”

    In addition to the testing SOAR conducted in 2021 at its health fairs, there was extensive testing during the CDC’s investigation. Since then, the reported number of HIV cases in Kanawha County has dropped, Pollini said, but it’s difficult to know if that’s the result of getting the problem under control or the result of limited testing in high-risk groups.

    “My inclination is the latter,” she said, “because never in history has there been an outbreak of injection-related HIV among people who use drugs that was solved without expanding syringe services programs.”

    “If you go out and look for infections,” Pollini said, “you will find them.”

    Solomon and Pollini praised the ongoing outreach efforts — through riverside encampments, in abandoned houses, down county roads — of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program to test those at highest risk: people known to be injecting drugs.

    “It’s miracle-level work,” Solomon said.

    But Christine Teague, Ryan White Program director at the Charleston Area Medical Center, acknowledged it hasn’t been enough. In addition to HIV, her concerns include the high incidence of hepatitis C and endocarditis, a life-threatening inflammation of the lining of the heart’s chambers and valves, and the cost of hospital resources needed to address them.

    “We’ve presented that data to the legislature,” she said, “that it’s not just HIV, it’s all these other lengthy hospital admissions that, essentially, Medicaid is paying for. And nothing seems to penetrate.”

    Frank Annie is a researcher at CAMC specializing in cardiovascular diseases, a member of the Charleston City Council, and a proponent of syringe service programs. Research he co-authored found 462 cases of endocarditis in southern West Virginia associated with injection drug use, at a cost to federal, state, and private insurers of more than $17 million, of which less than $4 million was recovered.

    Teague is further concerned for West Virginia’s rural counties, most of which don’t have a syringe service program.

    Tasha Withrow, a harm reduction advocate in bordering rural Putnam County, said her sense is that HIV numbers aren’t alarmingly high there but said that, with little testing and heightened stigma in a rural community, it’s difficult to know.

    In a January 2022 follow-up report, the CDC recommended increasing access to harm reduction services such as syringe service programs through expansion of mobile services, street outreach, and telehealth, using “patient-trusted” individuals, to improve the delivery of essential services to people who use drugs.

    Teague would like every rural county to have a mobile unit, like the one operated by her organization, offering harm reduction supplies, medication, behavioral health care, counseling, referrals, and more. That’s an expensive undertaking. She suggested opioid settlement money through the West Virginia First Foundation could pay for it.

    Pollini said she hopes state and local officials allow the experts to do their jobs.

    “I would like to see them allow us to follow the science and operate these programs the way they’re supposed to be run, and in a broader geography,” she said. “Which means that it shouldn’t be a political decision; it should be a public health decision.”

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

    This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • California Becomes Latest State To Try Capping Health Care Spending

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    California’s Office of Health Care Affordability faces a herculean task in its plan to slow runaway health care spending.

    The goal of the agency, established in 2022, is to make care more affordable and accessible while improving health outcomes, especially for the most disadvantaged state residents. That will require a sustained wrestling match with a sprawling, often dysfunctional health system and powerful industry players who have lots of experience fighting one another and the state.

    Can the new agency get insurers, hospitals, and medical groups to collaborate on containing costs even as they jockey for position in the state’s $405 billion health care economy? Can the system be transformed so that financial rewards are tied more to providing quality care than to charging, often exorbitantly, for a seemingly limitless number of services and procedures?

    The jury is out, and it could be for many years.

    California is the ninth state — after Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington — to set annual health spending targets.

    Massachusetts, which started annual spending targets in 2013, was the first state to do so. It’s the only one old enough to have a substantial pre-pandemic track record, and its results are mixed: The annual health spending increases were below the target in three of the first five years and dropped beneath the national average. But more recently, health spending has greatly increased.

    In 2022, growth in health care expenditures exceeded Massachusetts’ target by a wide margin. The Health Policy Commission, the state agency established to oversee the spending control efforts, warned that “there are many alarming trends which, if unaddressed, will result in a health care system that is unaffordable.”

    Neighboring Rhode Island, despite a preexisting policy of limiting hospital price increases, exceeded its overall health care spending growth target in 2019, the year it took effect. In 2020 and 2021, spending was largely skewed by the pandemic. In 2022, the spending increase came in at half the state’s target rate. Connecticut and Delaware, by contrast, both overshot their 2022 targets.

    It’s all a work in progress, and California’s agency will, to some extent, be playing it by ear in the face of state policies and demographic realities that require more spending on health care.

    And it will inevitably face pushback from the industry as it confronts unreasonably high prices, unnecessary medical treatments, overuse of high-cost care, administrative waste, and the inflationary concentration of a growing number of hospitals in a small number of hands.

    “If you’re telling an industry we need to slow down spending growth, you’re telling them we need to slow down your revenue growth,” says Michael Bailit, president of Bailit Health, a Massachusetts-based consulting group, who has consulted for various states, including California. “And maybe that’s going to be heard as ‘we have to restrain your margins.’ These are very difficult conversations.”

    Some of California’s most significant health care sectors have voiced disagreement with the fledgling affordability agency, even as they avoid overtly opposing its goals.

    In April, when the affordability office was considering an annual per capita spending growth target of 3%, the California Hospital Association sent it a letter saying hospitals “stand ready to work with” the agency. But the proposed number was far too low, the association argued, because it failed to account for California’s aging population, new investments in Medi-Cal, and other cost pressures.

    The hospital group suggested a spending increase target averaging 5.3% over five years, 2025-29. That’s slightly higher than the 5.2% average annual increase in per capita health spending over the five years from 2015 to 2020.

    Five days after the hospital association sent its letter, the affordability board approved a slightly less aggressive target that starts at 3.5% in 2025 and drops to 3% by 2029. Carmela Coyle, the association’s chief executive, said in a statement that the board’s decision still failed to account for an aging population, the growing need for mental health and addiction treatment, and a labor shortage.

    The California Medical Association, which represents the state’s doctors, expressed similar concerns. The new phased-in target, it said, was “less unreasonable” than the original plan, but the group would “continue to advocate against an artificially low spending target that will have real-life negative impacts on patient access and quality of care.”

    But let’s give the state some credit here. The mission on which it is embarking is very ambitious, and it’s hard to argue with the motivation behind it: to interject some financial reason and provide relief for millions of Californians who forgo needed medical care or nix other important household expenses to afford it.

    Sushmita Morris, a 38-year-old Pasadena resident, was shocked by a bill she received for an outpatient procedure last July at the University of Southern California’s Keck Hospital, following a miscarriage. The procedure lasted all of 30 minutes, Morris says, and when she received a bill from the doctor for slightly over $700, she paid it. But then a bill from the hospital arrived, totaling nearly $9,000, and her share was over $4,600.

    Morris called the Keck billing office multiple times asking for an itemization of the charges but got nowhere. “I got a robotic answer, ‘You have a high-deductible plan,’” she says. “But I should still receive a bill within reason for what was done.” She has refused to pay that bill and expects to hear soon from a collection agency.

    The road to more affordable health care will be long and chock-full of big challenges and unforeseen events that could alter the landscape and require considerable flexibility.

    Some flexibility is built in. For one thing, the state cap on spending increases may not apply to health care institutions, industry segments, or geographic regions that can show their circumstances justify higher spending — for example, older, sicker patients or sharp increases in the cost of labor.

    For those that exceed the limit without such justification, the first step will be a performance improvement plan. If that doesn’t work, at some point — yet to be determined — the affordability office can levy financial penalties up to the full amount by which an organization exceeds the target. But that is unlikely to happen until at least 2030, given the time lag of data collection, followed by conversations with those who exceed the target, and potential improvement plans.

    In California, officials, consumer advocates, and health care experts say engagement among all the players, informed by robust and institution-specific data on cost trends, will yield greater transparency and, ultimately, accountability.

    Richard Kronick, a public health professor at the University of California-San Diego and a member of the affordability board, notes there is scant public data about cost trends at specific health care institutions. However, “we will know that in the future,” he says, “and I think that knowing it and having that information in the public will put some pressure on those organizations.”

    This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. 

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    USE OUR CONTENT

    This story can be republished for free (details).

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

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  • Managing Major Chronic Diseases – by Alexis Dupree

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    Our author, Alexis Dupree, is herself in her 70s, and writing with more than three decades of experience of surviving multiple chronic diseases (in her case, Multiple Sclerosis, and then a dozen comorbidities that came with such).

    She is not a doctor or a scientist, but for more than 30 years she’s been actively working to accumulate knowledge not just on her own conditions, but on the whole medical system, and what it means to be a “forever patient” without giving up hope.

    She talks lived-experience “life management” strategies for living with chronic disease, and she talks—again from lived experience—about navigating the complexities of medical care; not on a legalistic “State regulations say…” level, because that kind of thing changes by the minute, but on a human level.

    Perhaps most practically: how to advocate strongly for yourself while still treating medical professionals with the respect and frankly compassion that they deserve while doing their best in turn.

    But also: how to change your attitude to that of a survivor, and yet also redefine your dreams. How to make a new game plan of life—while working to make life easier for yourself. How to deal, psychologically, with the likelihood that not only will you probably not get better, but also, you will probably get worse, while still never, ever, giving up.

    After all, many things are easily treatable today that mere decades ago were death sentences, and science is progressing all the time. We just have to stay alive, and in as good a condition as we reasonably can, to benefit from those advances!

    Bottom line: if you have a chronic disease, or if a loved one does, then this is an immensely valuable book to read.

    Click here to check out Managing Major Chronic Diseases, and make life easier!

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  • The Book of Lymph – by Lisa Levitt Gainsely

    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 book starts with an overview of what lymph is and why it matters, before getting into the main meat of the book, which is lymphatic massage techniques to improve lymphatic flow/drainage throughout different parts of the body, and in the context of an assortment of common maladies that may merit particular attention.

    There’s an element of aesthetic medicine here, and improving beauty, but there’s also a whole section devoted to such things as breast care and the like (bearing in mind, the lymphatic system is one of our main defenses against cancer). There’s also a lot about managing lymph in the context of chronic health conditions.

    The style is light pop-science; the science is explained clearly throughout, but without academic citations every few lines as some books might have. The author is, after all, a practitioner (CLT) and/but not an academic.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to improve your lymphatic health, whether for beauty or health maintenance or recovery, this book will walk you through it.

    Click here to check out The Book of Lymph, and give yours some love!

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  • Stimulant Users Are Caught in Fatal ‘Fourth Wave’ of Opioid Epidemic

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    In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, near a storefront advertising “free” cellphones, J.R. sat in an empty back stairwell and showed a reporter how he tries to avoid overdosing when he smokes crack cocaine. KFF Health News is identifying him by his initials because he fears being arrested for using illegal drugs.

    It had been several hours since his last hit, and the chatty, middle-aged man’s hands moved quickly. In one hand, he held a glass pipe. In the other, a lentil-size crumb of cocaine.

    Or at least J.R. hoped it was cocaine, pure cocaine — uncontaminated by fentanyl, a potent opioid that was linked to about 75% of all overdose deaths in Rhode Island in 2022. He flicked his lighter to “test” his supply. He believed that if it had a “cigar-like sweet smell,” he said, it would mean that the cocaine was laced with fentanyl. He put the pipe to his lips and took a tentative puff. “No sweet,” he said, reassured.

    But this method offers only false and dangerous reassurance. A mistake can be fatal.

    It is impossible to tell whether a drug contains fentanyl by the taste or smell. “Somebody can believe that they can smell it or taste it, or see it … but that’s not a scientific test,” said Josiah “Jody” Rich, an addiction specialist and researcher who teaches at Brown University. “People are going to die today because they buy some cocaine that they don’t know has fentanyl in it.”

    The first wave of the long-running and devastating opioid epidemic began in the United States with the abuse of prescription painkillers in the early 2000s. The second wave involved an increase in heroin use, starting around 2010. The third wave began when powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl started appearing in the supply around 2015. Now experts are observing a fourth phase of the deadly epidemic.

    The mix of stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamines with fentanyl — a synthetic opioid 50 times as powerful as heroin — is driving what experts call the opioid epidemic’s “fourth wave.” The mixture of stimulants and fentanyl presents powerful challenges to efforts to reduce overdoses because many users of stimulants don’t know they are at risk of ingesting opioids, so they don’t take overdose precautions.

    The only way to know whether cocaine or other stimulants contain fentanyl is to use drug-checking tools such as fentanyl test strips — a best practice for what’s known as “harm reduction,” now embraced by federal health officials in combating drug overdose deaths. Fentanyl test strips cost as little as $2 for a two-pack online, but many front-line organizations also give them out free.

    Nationwide, illicit stimulants mixed with fentanyl were the most common drugs found in fentanyl-related overdoses, according to a study published in 2023 in the scientific journal Addiction. The stimulant in the fatal mixture tends to be cocaine in the Northeast, and methamphetamine in the West and much of the Midwest and South.

    “The No. 1 thing that people in the U.S. are dying from in terms of drug overdoses is the combination of fentanyl and a stimulant,’’ said Joseph Friedman, a researcher at UCLA and the study’s lead author. “Black and African Americans are disproportionately affected by this crisis to a large magnitude, especially in the Northeast.”

    Friedman was also the lead author of another new study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, that shows the fourth wave of the opioid epidemic is driving up the mortality rate among older Black Americans (ages 55-64) and, more recently, Hispanic people. Friedman said part of the reason street fentanyl is so deadly is that there’s no way to tell how potent it is. Hospitals have safely used medical-grade fentanyl for surgical pain because the potency is strictly regulated, but “the potency fluctuates wildly in the illicit market” Friedman said.

    Studies of street drugs, he said, show that in illicit drugs the potency can vary from 1% to 70% fentanyl.

    “Imagine ordering a mixed drink in a bar and it contains one to 70 shots,” Friedman said, “and the only way you know is to start drinking it. … There would be a huge number of alcohol overdose deaths.”

    Drug-checking technology can provide a rough estimate of fentanyl concentration, he said, but to get a precise measure requires sending drugs to a laboratory.

    It’s not clear how much of the latest trend in polydrug use — in which users mix substances, such as cocaine and fentanyl, for example — is accidental versus intentional. It can vary for individual users: a recent study from Millennium Health found that most people who use fentanyl do so at times intentionally and other times unintentionally.

    People often use stimulants to power through the rapid withdrawal from fentanyl, Friedman said. And the high-risk practice of using cocaine or meth with heroin, known as “speedballing,” has been around for decades. Other factors include manufacturers’ adding the cheap synthetic opioid to a stimulant to stretch their supply, or dealers mixing up bags.

    Researchers say many people still think they are using unadulterated cocaine or crack — a misconception that can be deadly. “Folks who are using stimulants, and not intentionally using opioids, are unprepared to respond to an opioid overdose,” said Brown University epidemiologist Jaclyn White Hughto, “because they don’t perceive themselves to be at risk.” Hughto is a principal investigator in a new, unpublished study called “Preventing Overdoses Involving Stimulants.”

    Hughto and the team surveyed more than 260 people in Rhode Island and Massachusetts who use drugs, including some who manufacture and distribute stimulants such as cocaine. More than 60% of the people they interviewed in Rhode Island had bought or used stimulants that they later found out had fentanyl in them. And many of the people interviewed in the study also use drugs alone. That means that if they do overdose, they may not be found until it’s too late.

    In 2022, Rhode Island had the fourth-highest rate of overdose deaths involving cocaine in 2022, after Washington, D.C., Delaware, and Vermont, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    The fourth wave is also hitting stimulant users who choose pills over what they perceive as more dangerous drugs such as cocaine in an effort to avoid fentanyl. That’s what happened to Jennifer Dubois’ son Cliffton.

    Dubois was a single mother raising two Black sons. The older son, Cliffton, had been struggling with addiction since he was 14, she said. Cliffton also had been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and a mood disorder.

    In March 2020, Cliffton had checked into a rehab program as the pandemic ramped up, Dubois said. Because of the lockdown at rehab, Cliffton was upset about not being able to visit with his mother. “He said, ‘If I can’t see my mom, I can’t do treatment,’” Dubois recalled. “And I begged him” to stay in treatment.

    But soon after, Cliffton left the rehab program. He showed up at her door. “And I just cried,” she said.

    Dubois’ younger son was living at home. She didn’t want Cliffton doing drugs around his younger brother. So she gave Cliffton an ultimatum: “If you want to stay home, you have to stay drug-free.”

    Cliffton went to stay with family friends, first in Atlanta and later in Woonsocket, an old mill city that has Rhode Island’s highest rate of drug overdose deaths.

    In August 2020, Cliffton overdosed but was revived. Cliffton later confided that he’d been snorting cocaine in a car with a friend, Dubois said. Hospital records show he tested positive for fentanyl.

    “He was really scared,” Dubois said. After the overdose, he tried to “leave the cocaine and the hard drugs alone,” she said. “But he was taking pills.” Eight months later, on April 17, 2021, Cliffton was found unresponsive in the bedroom of a family member’s home.

    The night before, Cliffton had bought counterfeit Adderall, according to the police report. What he didn’t know was that the Adderall pill was laced with fentanyl. “He thought by staying away from the street drugs and just taking pills, he was doing better,” Dubois said.

    A fentanyl test strip could have saved his life.

    This article is from a partnership that includes The Public’s Radio, NPR, and KFF Health News.

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    USE OUR CONTENT

    This story can be republished for free (details).

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

    This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • Cashews vs Peanuts – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing cashews to peanuts, we picked the peanuts.

    Why?

    Another one for “that which is more expensive is not necessarily the healthier”! Although, certainly both are good:

    In terms of macros, cashews have about 2x the carbs while peanuts have a little more (healthy!) fat and more than 2x the fiber, meaning that peanuts also enjoy the lower glycemic index. All in all, a fair win for peanuts here.

    When it comes to vitamins, cashews have more of vitamins B6 and K, while peanuts have a lot more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B7, B9, and E. Another easy win for peanuts.

    In the category of minerals; cashews have more copper, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, and selenium, while peanuts have more calcium, manganese, and potassium. A win for cashews, this time.

    Adding up the sections makes for an overall win for peanuts, but (assuming you are not allergic) enjoy either or both! In fact, enjoying both is best; diversity is good.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!

    Take care!

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