How To Really Look After Your Joints
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The Other Ways To Look After Your Joints
When it comes to joint health, most people have two quick go-to items:
- Stretching
- Supplements like omega-3 and glucosamine sulfate
Stretching, and specifically, mobility exercises, are important! We’ll have to do a main feature on these sometime soon. But for today, we’ll just say: yes, gentle daily stretches go a long way, as does just generally moving more.
And, those supplements are not without their merits. For example:
- Effect of omega-3 on painful symptoms of patients with osteoarthritis of the synovial joints: systematic review and meta-analysis
- Glucosamine sulfate in the treatment of knee osteoarthritis symptoms: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study using acetaminophen as a side comparator
Of those, glucosamine sulfate may have an extra benefit in now just alleviating the symptoms, but also slowing the progression of degenerative joint conditions (like arthritis of various kinds). This is something it shares with chondroitin sulfate:
Effect of glucosamine or chondroitin sulfate on the osteoarthritis progression: a meta-analysis
An unlikely extra use for the humble cucumber…
As it turns out, cucumber extract beats glucosamine and chondroitin by 200%, at 1/135th of the dose.
You read that right, and it’s not a typo. See for yourself:
Reduce inflammation, have happier joints
Joint pain and joint degeneration in general is certainly not just about inflammation; there is physical wear-and-tear too. But combatting inflammation is important, and turmeric, which we’ve done a main feature on before, is a potent helper in this regard:
See also: Keep Inflammation At Bay
(a whole list of tips for, well, keeping inflammation at bay)
About that wear-and-tear…
Your bones and joints are made of stuff, and that stuff needs to be replaced. As we get older, the body typically gets worse at replacing it in a timely and efficient fashion. We can help it do its job, by giving it more of the stuff it needs.
And what stuff is that?
Well, minerals like calcium and phosphorus are important, but a lot is also protein! Specifically, collagen. We did a main feature on this before, which is good, as it’d take us a lot of space to cover all the benefits here:
We Are Such Stuff As Fish Are Made Of
Short version? People take collagen for their skin, but really, its biggest benefit is for our bones and joints!
Wrap up warmly and… No wait, skip that.
If you have arthritis, you may indeed “feel it in your bones” when the weather changes. But the remedy for that is not to try to fight it, but rather, to strengthen your body’s ability to respond to it.
The answer? Cryotherapy, with ice baths ranking top:
- Effects of an Exercise Program and Cold-Water Immersion Recovery in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA): Feasibility Study
- Effectiveness of home-based conventional exercise and cryotherapy on daily living activities in patients with knee osteoarthritis: A randomized controlled clinical trial
- Local Cryotherapy, Comparison of Cold Air and Ice Massage on Pain and Handgrip Strength in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis
Note that this can be just localized, so for example if the problem joints are your wrists, a washing-up bowl with water and ice will do just nicely.
Note also that, per that last study, a single session will only alleviate the pain, not the disease itself. For that (per the other studies) more sessions are required.
We did a main feature about cryotherapy a while back, and it explains how and why it works:
A Cold Shower A Day Keeps The Doctor Away?
Take care!
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The Household Cleaner That Triples Liver Disease Risk
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Our liver is a remarkable organ that can regenerate itself better than any other—even better than our skin!
Unlike our skin, our liver can regrow itself if 49% of it is removed (if you tried that with your skin, not only would it not regrow itself, but also you’d be dead very quickly unless in exceptional circumstances).
The liver’s regenerative ability helps defend against MASLD (metabolic dysfunction–associated steatotic liver disease*), formerly known as NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease).
*If you noticed that the new initialism doesn’t add up to the letters in name, yes, we noticed that too, and no, we can’t explain it either
You can read about how the liver performs this trick and others, here: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver
But, what’s to blame when someone gets liver disease despite not drinking alcohol or being subject to the other common risk factors for such?
Scientists have found a newly-identified culprit for previously unexplained instances of liver disease:
All about tetrachloroethylene (PCE)
Researchers (Dr. Jennifer Dodge et al.), have found that people exposed to PCE were three times more likely to develop significant liver fibrosis, even without alcohol use, excess fat, or viral infection.
In other words: in situations where none of the usual culprits are to blame.
It gets worse: this risk rose fivefold for every one-nanogram-per-millilitre increase of PCE in the bloodstream, showing a clear dose–response relationship.
Quick mathematical note: to be clear, one nanogram is one billionth of a gram. This is very very little.
You may be wondering: how serious is this fibrosis, compared to MASLD?
And the answer is: the PCE-induced hepatic fibrosis (scar tissue buildup in the liver) can progress to cancer and/or failure and death if undetected.
About that cancer risk: PCE is believed to be a carcinogen, and is already tied to bladder cancer, multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and liver cancer. We say “believed to be”, because the causality isn’t technically proven, but it has to be said that the numbers look rather damning.
Per the research conducted by Dr. Dodge and her team, about 7.4% of US adults have detectable PCE; and whereas poverty is a risk factor for most diseases, in this case, higher-income groups and dry-cleaning workers had greater exposure. This is in part because the chemical evaporates from recently dry-cleaned clothes.
It’s also present in many spot-removers and metal polishes.
You can find the paper itself, here: Tetrachloroethylene Is Associated With Presence of Significant Liver Fibrosis: A National Cross-Sectional Study in US Adults
Want to look after your liver instead?
Consider: N-Acetyl Cysteine For The Liver & More
Want to learn more?
For a much deeper dive into this broader topic, you might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:
Healthy Living in a Contaminated World – by Dr. Donald Hoernschemeyer
Take care!
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Self-Defense – by Dr. Daniel Davis
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The author, a professor of immunology, sets out to bust some immune health myths in a time when those myths are spreading even faster (and sometimes with more mutations along the way) than the latest flu or COVID variants.
Writing from a position of stable academia rather than the latest flashy platform, he covers many topics including the roles of vitamins (especially: what vitamins C and D can and can’t do for you), the gut microbiome, weight and adiposity, exercise (especially: the right kinds, and where the “sweet spot” is when it comes to amount, because yes, exercise is good in general, but too much of certain kinds can harm immune health), stress management, sleep, and aging (i.e. how immune health changes as we age).
You’ll notice that vaccines are conspicuous by their absence in that list; while these are touched on from time to time, the focus here is on immune health overall, which vaccines only meaningfully affect in one way: giving our immune systems advance knowledge of pathogens to come. So the position of this book on that is “yes, obviously get your vaccines, but that doesn’t take much explaining, and doesn’t merit an entire chapter just to say it”.
Dr. Davis does also indulge, at the end of the book, in something that a lot of other research scientists do too, which is: discussion of what’s in the pipeline in terms of research and development (in this case, in the field of immunology).
The style is polished pop-science in long-form prose; written for a lay audience, and/but with the steady tone of academia; no hype and little to nothing in the way of personal touches. So, we get very little jargon (which makes for easy reading), but it’s also a little dry (which makes it very put-downable, in the sense of being the opposite of a “couldn’t put it down” book). There is a respectable bibliography, plus
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Soft Drinks & Your Liver: Sugar vs Sugar-Free Sweeteners
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First of all, how’s your liver health? If you’re not sure, then rather than guessing, you might like to quickly check out: 12 Signs Of Liver Disease That You Can See
…to make sure that your liver isn’t about to defy its name. The liver (when healthy) is a remarkably self-regenerative organ, but the flipside of this is that this means that very often problems do not get noticed until something goes very seriously wrong.
Now, about those soft drinks…
Not so sweet after all?
Firstly, while liver failure is commonly associated with excessive drinking of alcohol (and indeed, alcohol does very much harm the liver), actually most liver disease takes the form of the awkwardly-rebranded metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD). If you noticed that the words do not add up to the acronym, then, so did we and we haven’t found an explanation for it either*
In any case, it’s what is formerly known as, and for now at least still better known as, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
*We delved more into this, looking and why and how the name was changed (i.e. including the voting process for the new name), within part of a previous article of ours, here: Top Diets & Fasting vs Fatty Liver: What’s Best?
MASLD, as we will now begrudgingly refer to it, is often precipitated by a diet (including drinks) high in carbs, especially sugars, without sufficient fiber. We explained why this dietary imbalance does such harm to the liver, here: From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose Cs: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
So, it can safely be acknowledged that sugary beverages (including sugar-sweetened soft drinks, which we’re going to be talking about today, and also including fruit juices as these have been stripped of fiber, but not smoothies or whole fruit) are bad for the liver, by the mechanism described in the above-linked article.
But what of artificial sweeteners?
Since they do not contain sugar, or at least not sugar that is metabolized normally as such (since technically some artificial sweeteners are sugars, chemically speaking, but the body cannot metabolize them and so instead processes them as dietary fiber), they must be better for the liver, right?
New research presented at the United European Gasteroenterology week suggests otherwise.
In fact,
❝A higher intake of both low-or-no-sugar-sweetened beverages and sugar-sweetened beverages (>250g per day) was associated with a 60% (HR: 1.599) and 50% (HR: 1.469) elevated risk of developing MASLD, respectively.
Over the median 10.3-year follow-up, 1,178 participants developed MASLD and 108 died from liver-related causes.
Both beverage types were also positively associated with higher liver fat content.❞
Note: 250g is an odd way to measure drinks (usually measured in volume, not mass), but that equals 1 cup, in any case.
So, translating from sciencese:
- sugar-sweetened soft drinks increase the risk of MASLD by 50%
- diet soft drinks increase the risk of MASLD by 60%
Caveat: this was an observational study so when we say “increased the risk” really we mean “were associated with an increase in risk”, since it doesn’t strictly prove causality. However, with a sample size of 123,788 participants, the evidence does look rather damning, doesn’t it?
You can read more about the study here: Artificially-sweetened and sugary drinks linked to higher risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
If, perchance, you have decided that for you, artificial sweeteners are still the “lesser evil” (and indeed there may be reasons this could be appropriate for some), then you might want to check out:
What’s The Healthiest Sweetener?
Want to do more for your liver?
Consider: N-Acetyl Cysteine For The Liver & More
Or if you prefer a purely dietary approach, then: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver
Take care!
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The Surprising Place Fat Can Accumulate To Shrink Your Brain
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.
Popular belief: body fat is bad for the health
Counterpoint: body fat is necessary for health
Nuance: not all fat is created equal, and nor does it stay that way depending on where it goes
Let’s get metabolical
Fat (in the human body) has several purposes, including:
- Store energy for use later
- Provide thermal insulation
- Provide physical padding against injury
That latter may seem trivial, by the way, but it’s really not. Aside from subcutaneous fat cushioning certain parts of us in visible ways, the much-maligned fat of our viscera is important too, for it helps prevent damage to our organs—until we get too much of it, and then it can cause its own problems, which we wrote about here:
Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It
Another place fat can get stored that’s not ideal is the liver. This tends to happen when our glucose metabolism gets overloaded, and the body has to start stuffing glycogen wherever it can, and the result is overtaxing the liver, and that’s what happens in the case of what what used to be called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and is now called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD).
Attentive readers may have noticed that there appears to be a D missing from the acronym. We noticed that too, and were not able to find any explanation of why it’s not MDASLD.
However, you can read about why the change was made, and how the decision was agreed upon, here: A multisociety Delphi consensus statement on new fatty liver disease nomenclature
Anyway, whatever we want to call it, it’s a problem, and we wrote a practical guide to fixing it, here: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver
Further, when it comes to even just subcutaneous fat (i.e. the kind that lives just under your skin, that you can squish, unlike visceral fat or hepatic fat, which you can’t. Or if you can, then you have bigger problems, such your abdomen being open), there are some places it can go that are healthier than others.
For what’s best and worst in that regard, see: How To Make Your Body Fat Heart-Healthier
And, for that matter: Can We Do Fat Redistribution?
Sometimes, it’s the type of fat that makes a difference!
See: The BAT-pause! ← the title here refers to the production of highly beneficial brown adipose tissue (BAT) slowing down during the menopause, if we’re not careful—but there are things we can do to convert white adipose tissue to yellow and brown.
Sometimes, it isn’t!
See: The Fat That Fuels Alzheimer’s Disease
And today, it’s…
Pancreatic fat
No surprises that this should be an issue (the pancreas is where insulin is made, after all, unless you have Type 1 Diabetes, anyway), but it’s not much talked-about, and not well-known.
Recently, researchers (Dr. Miao Yu et al.) examined whether where fat is stored in your body matters for brain health more than overall weight or BMI, and their analysis used MRI and health data from 25,997 participants in the UK Biobank.
What they found, in few words, is that two previously unrecognized fat distribution patterns were most strongly linked to brain shrinkage, faster brain aging, cognitive decline, and higher neurological disease risk.
One of them was the well-known “skinny fat” pattern: this profile affects people who don’t appear fat, but carry a high proportion of fat relative to muscle, with fat tending to accumulate in the abdomen. There’s a lot of cross-over with what we talked about above, in terms of visceral fat, and also waist-centric subcutaneous fat distribution.
The other was pancreatic-predominant fat: this pattern involves unusually high fat in the pancreas, often without high liver fat, and showed particularly strong associations with negative brain outcomes. For example, people in this group had about 30% fat in the pancreas, which is two to three times higher than most other fat patterns, and up to six times higher than in lean people.
Which is a problem, because pancreatic fat appears to pose a greater neurological risk than fatty liver, but it’s often overlooked in routine imaging.
In the words of one of the researchers, Dr. Kai Liu,
❝From the perspectives of brain structure, cognitive impairment and neurological disease risk, increased pancreatic fat should be recognized as a potentially higher-risk imaging phenotype than fatty liver.❞
You can read the paper in full, here: Association of Body Fat Distribution Patterns at MRI with Brain Structure, Cognition, and Neurologic Diseases
Want to learn more?
Check out:
Why We Get Sick – by Dr. Benjamin Bikman ← this is about insulin resistance as the driver of much disease, long before blood sugar management becomes an issue, and this has pancreatic health at its core.
Take care!
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Anti-Inflammatory Khichri & Tadka
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This is halfway between a daal and a risotto; it’s delicious and it’s full of protein, fiber, heathy fats, and flavors. And those flavors? Mostly from health-giving phytochemicals of one kind of another.
You will need
For the khichri:
- 1 oz chana dal
- 1 oz red lentils
- 1 oz brown lentils
- 1 oz quinoa
- 4 oz wholegrain basmati rice
- 1 tbsp chia seeds
- 1 tsp ground turmeric
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
For the tadka:
- 2 tbsp avocado oil (or other oil suitable for high temperatures—so, not olive oil on this occasion!)
- ¼ bulb garlic, thinly sliced
- 1 fresh red chili (adjust per heat preferences)
- 1 fresh green chili (adjust per heat preferences)
- 1 tsp cumin seeds
- 6 curry leaves
- 12 twists of freshly ground black pepper
To serve:
- Optional: flatbreads or poppadoms
- Optional: lemon wedges or lime wedges
- Optional: chopped cilantro or parsley
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Simmer the khichri ingredients in 5 cups of water, stirring occasionally if necessary, until it has a risotto-like consistency; this will probably take about 30–40 minutes. This time can be greatly reduced by using a pressure cooker, but obviously you won’t be able to check or stir, so do that only if you know what you’re doing cooking those grains and pseudograins in there, and what settings/timings to use for your specific device.
2) Make the tadka when the khichri is nearly ready, by heating the 2 tbsp of avocado oil in a skillet until very hot but not smoking, Add the rest of the ingredients from the tadka section, and cook until the garlic is nice and golden.
3) Pour the tadka over the khichri to serve, with any of the optional accompaniments we mentioned.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
- The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic
- Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
- Why Curcumin (Turmeric) Is Worth Its Weight In Gold
- If You’re Not Taking Chia, You’re Missing Out
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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Bamboo Shoots vs Cabbage – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing bamboo to cabbage, we picked the bamboo.
Why?
Bamboo shoots… And scores!
In terms of macros, bamboo has 2x the protein for the same fiber and carbs; an easy first-round win for bamboo.
In the category of vitamins, bamboo has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B6, and E, while cabbage has more of vitamins A, B5, B9, C, and K, for a 5:5 tie in this round.
Looking at minerals, bamboo has more copper, iron, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while cabbage has more calcium and magnesium, adding up to a tidy 7:2 win for bamboo here.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for bamboo, but by all means enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Don’t Be Bamboozled By Bamboo! ← including how to eat bamboo, for those unfamiliar with such, as we have been asked about it 🙂
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
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