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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Water Fluoridation, Atheroma, & More
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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 watched a documentary recently on Fluoride in our drinking water & the dangers of it. Why are we poisoning our water?❞
This is a great question, and it certainly is controversial. It sounds like the documentary you watched was predominantly or entirely negative, but there’s a lot of science to back both sides of this, and it’s not even that the science is contradictory (it’s not). It’s that what differs is people’s opinions about whether benefiting one thing is worth creating a risk to another, and that means looking at:
- What is the risk associated with taking no action (error of omission)?
- What is the risk associated with taking an action (error of commission)?
The whole topic is worth a main feature, but to summarize a few key points:
- Water fluoridation is considered good for the prevention of dental cavities
- Water fluoridation aims to deliver fluoride and doses far below dangerous levels
- This requires working on consumer averages, though
- ”Where do we put the safety margins?” is to some extent a subjective question, in terms of trading off one aspect of health for another
- Too much fluoride can also be bad for the teeth (at least cosmetically, creating little white* spots)
- Detractors of fluoride tend to mostly be worried about neurological harm
- However, the doses in public water supplies are almost certainly far below the levels required to cause this harm.
- That said, again this is working on consumer averages, though.
- However, the doses in public water supplies are almost certainly far below the levels required to cause this harm.
- A good guide is: watch your teeth! Those white* spots will be “the canary in the coal mine” of more serious harm that could potentially come from higher levels due to overconsumption of fluorine.
*Teeth are not supposed to be pure white. The “Hollywood smile” is a lie. Teeth are supposed to be a slightly off-white, ivory color. Anything whiter than that is adding something else that shouldn’t be there, or stripping something off that should be there.
❝How does your diet change clean out your arteries of the bad cholesterol?❞
There’s good news and bad news here, and they can both be delivered with a one-word reply:
Slowly.
Or rather: what’s being cleaned out is mostly not the LDL (bad) cholesterol, but rather, the result of that.
When our diet is bad for cardiovascular health, our arteries get fatty deposits on their walls. Cholesterol gets stuck here too, but that’s not the main physical problem.
Our body’s natural defenses come into action and try to clean it up, but they (for example macrophages, a kind of white blood cell that consumes invaders and then dies, before being recycled by the next part of the system) often get stuck and become part of the buildup (called atheroma), which can lead to atherosclerosis and (if calcium levels are high) hardening of the arteries, which is the worst end of this.
This can then require medical attention, precisely because the body can’t remove it very well—especially if you are still maintaining a heart-unhealthy diet, thus continuing to add to the mess.
However, if it is not too bad yet, yes, a dietary change alone will reverse this process. Without new material being added to the arterial walls, the body’s continual process of rejuvenation will eventually fix it, given time (free from things making it worse) and resources.
In fact, your arteries can be one of the quickest places for your body to make something better or worse, because the blood is the means by which the body moves most things (good or bad) around the body.
All the more reason to take extra care of it, since everything else depends on it!
You might also like our previous main feature:
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Rehab Science – by Dr. Tom Walters
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Many books of this kind deal with the injury but not the pain; some source talk about pain but not the injury; this one does both, and more.
Dr. Walters discusses in detail the nature of pain, various different kinds of pain, the factors that influence pain, and, of course, how to overcome pain.
He also takes us on a tour of various different categories of injury, because some require very different treatment than others, and while there are some catch-all “this is good/bad for healing” advices, sometimes what will help with one injury with hinder healing another. So, this information alone would make the book a worthwhile read already.
After this two-part theory-heavy introduction, the largest part of the book is given over to rehab itself, in a practical fashion.
We learn about how to make an appropriate rehab plan, get the material things we need for it (if indeed we need material things), and specific protocols to follow for various different body parts and injuries.
The style is very much that of a textbook, well-formatted and with plenty of illustrations throughout (color is sometimes relevant, so we recommend a print edition over Kindle for this one).
Bottom line: if you have an injury to heal, or even just believe in being prepared, this book is an excellent guide.
Click here to check out Rehab Science, to overcome pain and heal from injury!
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Beat Cancer Kitchen – by Chris Wark & Micah Wark
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When we eat, many things can increase our cancer risk. Some we might remember to avoid, like ultra-processed foods and red meat. Others might be more neutral when it comes to cancer, neither good nor bad.
But! Some foods also have cancer-fighting properties. Which means reducing cancer risk, and/or having an anti-proliferative effect (i.e., shrinks or at least slows growth of tumors), in the event of already having cancer.
That’s what Chris & Micah Wark are offering here; a cookbook built around anti-cancer foods—after the former beat his own cancer with the help of the latter. He had surgery, but skipped chemo, preferring to look to nutrition to keep cancer-free. Now 18 years later, and so far, so good.
The dietary advice here is entirely consistent with what we’d offer at 10almonds; it’s plant-based, and high in anti-cancer phytonutrients.
The recipes themselves (of which there are about 70-ish) are as delicious and simple as the title suggests, and/but you might want to know:
- On the one hand, many recipes are things like sauces, condiments, or dressings, which in a recipe book can sometimes feel like underdelivering on the promise of recipes when we expect full meals
- On the other hand, those things if you just purchase them ready-made are usually the things with the most ultra-processed products, thus, having anticancer homemade versions instead here can actually make a very big difference
- On the third hand, there areplenty of starters/mains/desserts too!
Bottom line: if you’re looking for an anti-cancer cookbook, this is a very good one whose ingredients aren’t obscure (which can otherwise be a problem for some books of this kind)
Click here to check out Beat Cancer Kitchen, and take good care of yourself and your loved ones!
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Banana Bread vs Bagel – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing banana bread to bagel, we picked the bagel.
Why?
Unlike most of the items we compare in this section, which are often “single ingredient” or at least highly standardized, today’s choices are rather dependent on recipe. Certainly, your banana bread and your bagels may not be the same as your neighbor’s. Nevertheless, to compare averages, we’ve gone with the FDA’s Food Central Database for reference values, using the most default average recipes available. Likely you could make either or both of them a little healthier, but as it is, this is how we’ve gone about making it a fair comparison. With that in mind…
In terms of macros, bagels have more than 2x the protein and about 4x the fiber, while banana bread has slightly higher carbs and about 7x more fat. You may be wondering: are the fats healthy? And the answer is, it could be better, could be worse. The FDA recipe went with margarine rather than butter, which lowered the saturated fat to being only ¼ of the total fat (it would have been higher, had they used butter) whereas bagels have no saturated fat at all—which characteristic is quite integral to bagels, unless you make egg bagels, which is rather a different beast. All in all, the macros category is a clear win for bagels, especially when we consider the carb to fiber ratio.
In the category of vitamins, bagels have on average more vitamin B1, B3, B5, and B9, while banana bread has on average more of vitamins A and C. A modest win for bagels.
When it comes to minerals, bagels are the more nutrient dense with more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while banana bread is not higher in any minerals. An obvious and easy win for bagels.
Closing thoughts: while the micronutrient profile quite possibly differs wildly from one baker to another, something that will probably stay more or less the same regardless is the carb to fiber ratio, and protein to fat. As a result, we’d weight the macros category as the more universally relevant. Bagels won in all categories today, as it happened, but it’s fairly safe to say that, on average, a baker who makes bagels and banana bread with the same levels of conscientiousness for health (or lack thereof) will tend to make bagels that are healthier than banana bread, based on the carb to fiber ratio, and the protein to fat ratio.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Should You Go Light Or Heavy On Carbs?
- Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
- Wholewheat Bread vs Seeded White – Which is Healthier?
Take care!
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Prostate Health: What You Should Know
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Prostate Health: What You Should Know
We’re aware that very many of our readers are women, who do not have a prostate.
However, dear reader: if you do have one, and/or love someone who has one, this is a good thing to know about.
The prostate gland is a (hopefully) walnut-sized gland (it actually looks a bit like a walnut too), that usually sits just under the bladder.
See also: How to Locate Your Prostate*
*The scale is not great in these diagrams, but they’ll get the job done. Besides, everyone is different on the inside, anyway. Not in a “special unique snowflake” way, but in a “you’d be surprised how much people’s insides move around” way.
Fun fact: did you ever feel like your intestines are squirming? That’s because they are.
You can’t feel it most of the time due to the paucity of that kind of nervous sensation down there, but the peristaltic motion that they use to move food along them on the inside, also causes them push against the rest of your guts, on the outside of them. This is the exact same way that many snakes move about.
If someone has to perform an operation in that region, sometimes it will be necessary to hang the intestines on a special rack, to keep them in one place for the surgery.
What can go wrong?
There are two very common things that can go wrong with the prostate:
- Benign Prostate Hyperplasia (BPH), otherwise known as an enlarged prostate
- Prostate cancer
For most men, the prostate gland continues to grow with age, which is how the former comes about so frequently.
For everyone, due to the nature of the mathematics involved in cellular mutation and replication, we will eventually get cancer if something else doesn’t kill us first.
- Prostate cancer affects 12% of men overall, and 60% of men aged 60+, with that percentage climbing each year thereafter.
- Prostate cancer can look like BPH in the early stages (and/or, an enlarged prostate can turn cancerous) so it’s important to not shrug off the symptoms of BPH.
How can BPH be avoided/managed?
There are prescription medications that can help reduce the size of the prostate, including testosterone blockers (such as spironolactone and bicalutamide) and 5α-reductase inhibitors, such as finasteride. Each have their pros and cons:
- Testosterone-blockers are the heavy-hitters, and work very well… but have more potential adverse side effects (your body is used to running on testosterone, after all)
- 5α-reductase inhibitors aren’t as powerful, but they block the conversion of free testosterone to dihydrogen testosterone (DHT), and it’s primarily DHT that causes the problems. By blocking the conversion of T to DHT, you may actually end up with higher serum testosterone levels, but fewer ill-effects. Exact results will vary depending on your personal physiology, and what else you are taking, though.
There are also supplements that can help, including saw palmetto and pumpkin seed oil. Here’s a good paper that covers both:
We have recommended saw palmetto before for a variety of uses, including against BPH:
Too much or too little testosterone? This one supplement may fix that
You might want to avoid certain medications that can worsen BPH symptoms (but not actually the size of the prostate itself). They include:
- Antihistamines
- Decongestants
- Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs)
- Tricyclic antidepressants (most modern antidepressants aren’t this kind; ask your pharmacist/doctor if unsure)
You also might want to reduce/skip:
- Alcohol
- Caffeine
In all the above cases, it’s because of how they affect the bladder, not the prostate, but given their neighborliness, each thing affects the other.
What if it’s cancer? How do I know and what do I do?
The creator of the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test has since decried it as “a profit-driven health disaster” that is “no better than a coin toss”, but it remains the first go-to of many medical services.
However, there’s a newer, much more accurate test, called the Prostate Screening Episwitch (PSE) test, which is 94% accurate, so you might consider asking your healthcare provider whether that’s an option:
The new prostate cancer blood test with 94 per cent accuracy
As for where to go from there, we’re out of space for today, but we previously reviewed a very good book about this, Dr. Patrick Walsh’s Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer, and we highly recommend it—it could easily be a literal lifesaver.
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Nicotine Benefits (That We Don’t Recommend)!
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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
❝Does nicotine have any benefits at all? I know it’s incredibly addictive but if you exclude the addiction, does it do anything?❞
Good news: yes, nicotine is a stimulant and can be considered a performance enhancer, for example:
❝Compared with the placebo group, the nicotine group exhibited enhanced motor reaction times, grooved pegboard test (GPT) results on cognitive function, and baseball-hitting performance, and small effect sizes were noted (d = 0.47, 0.46 and 0.41, respectively).❞
Read in full: Acute Effects of Nicotine on Physiological Responses and Sport Performance in Healthy Baseball Players
However, another study found that its use as a cognitive enhancer was only of benefit when there was already a cognitive impairment:
❝Studies of the effects of nicotinic systems and/or nicotinic receptor stimulation in pathological disease states such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia show the potential for therapeutic utility of nicotinic drugs.
In contrast to studies in pathological states, studies of nicotine in normal-non-smokers tend to show deleterious effects.
This contradiction can be resolved by consideration of cognitive and biological baseline dependency differences between study populations in terms of the relationship of optimal cognitive performance to nicotinic receptor activity.
Although normal individuals are unlikely to show cognitive benefits after nicotinic stimulation except under extreme task conditions, individuals with a variety of disease states can benefit from nicotinic drugs❞
Read in full: Effects of nicotinic stimulation on cognitive performance
Bad news: its addictive qualities wipe out those benefits due to tolerance and thus normalization in short order. So you may get those benefits briefly, but then you’re addicted and also lose the benefits, as well as also ruining your health—making it a lose/lose/lose situation quite quickly.
As an aside, while nicotine is poisonous per se, in the quantities taken by most users, the nicotine itself is not usually what kills. It’s mostly the other stuff that comes with it (smoking is by far and away the worst of all; vaping is relatively less bad, but that’s not a strong statement in this case) that causes problems.
See also: Vaping: A Lot Of Hot Air?
However, this is still not an argument for, say, getting nicotine gum and thinking “no harmful effects” because then you’ll be get a brief performance boost yes before it runs out and being addicted to it and now being in a position whereby if you stop, your performance will be lower than before you started (since you now got used to it, and it became your new normal), before eventually recovering:
In summary
We recommend against using nicotine in the first place, and for those who are addicted, we recommend quitting immediately if not contraindicated (check with your doctor if unsure; there are some situations where it is inadvisable to take away something your body is dependent on, until you correct some other thing first).
For more on quitting in general, see:
Addiction Myths That Are Hard To Quit
Take care!
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