Kidney Beans or Black Beans – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing kidney beans to black beans, we picked the black beans.
Why?
First, do note that black beans are also known as turtle beans, or if one wants to hedge one’s bets, black turtle beans. It’s all the same bean. As a small linguistic note, kidney beans are known as “red beans” in many languages, so we could have called this “red beans vs black beans”, but that wouldn’t have landed so well with our largely anglophone readership. So, kidney beans vs black beans it is!
They’re certainly both great, and this is a close one today…
In terms of macros, they’re equal on protein and black beans have more carbs and/but also more fiber. So far, so equal—or rather, if one pulls ahead of the other here, it’s a matter of subjective priorities.
In the category of vitamins, they’re equal on vitamins B2, B3, and choline, while kidney beans have more of vitamins B6, B9, C, and K, and black beans have more of vitamins A, B1, B5, and E. In other words, the two beans are still tied with a 4:4 split, unless we want to take into account that that vitamin E difference is that black beans have 29x more vitamin E, in which case, black beans move ahead.
When it comes to minerals, finally the winner becomes apparent; while kidney beans have a little more manganese and zinc, on the other hand black beans have more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and selenium. However, it should be noted that honestly, the margins aren’t huge here and kidney beans are almost as good for all of these minerals.
In short, black beans win the day, but kidney beans are very close behind, so enjoy whichever you prefer, or better yet, both! They go great together in tacos, burritos, or similar, by the way.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Kidney Beans vs Fava Beans – Which is Healthier?
- Chickpeas vs Black Beans – Which is Healthier?
- Bold Beans – by Amelia Christie-Miller ← this is a recipe book; if you’re looking to incorporate more beans into your diet and want to make it good, this cookbook can lead the way!
Take care!
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Strong At Every Age: 15 Habits To Level Up Your Health & Fitness
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Not every increase in health and fitness needs to look like a training montage from the “Rocky” movies!
Making progress every day
We’ll not keep the 15 habits a secret; they are:
- Follow the one-minute rule: commit to just one minute of action—this makes starting easier, and often you’ll end up doing more once you’ve got started.
- Make the habit exciting: add fun elements to make the habit more enjoyable, like using new gear or accessories.
- Do it first: prioritize new habits by doing them early in the day to ensure they get done.
- Share the love: pair new habits with activities you already enjoy, where practical, to do “temptation bundling”.
- Embrace the uncomfortable: get used to discomfort daily to grow and build resilience for bigger changes.
- Do as little as possible: start small with habits, to minimize resistance and focus on consistency.
- Think how to be lazy: simplify processes and use shortcuts; there are no extra prizes for it having been difficult!
- Make the appointment: schedule habits with set dates and times, to increase accountability.
- Let habits evolve: adapt habits to fit current circumstances; that way you can still stay consistent over time.
- Plan ahead: prepare in advance to avoid setbacks—what could stop you from succeeding, and how can you pre-empt that?
- Pause to reflect: regularly evaluate what works and what doesn’t, to adjust and improve.
- Shut off your brain: avoid overthinking and start taking action now, not later, to build momentum.
- Question and learn: stay curious and open to learning, or else you will plateau quickly!
- Ask why: understand the deeper reasons behind any resistance, and make clear for yourself the value of the habit.
- Love your failures: embrace any setbacks as learning opportunities and, as such, stepping stones to success.
For more on all of each of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
How To Really Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits
Take care!
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Just Be Well – by Dr. Thomas Sult
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.
Firstly, what this is not: a “think yourself well” book. It’s not about just deciding to be well.
Rather, it’s about ensuring the foundations of wellness, from which the rest of good health can spring, and notably, an absence of chronic illness. In essence: enjoying chronic good health.
The prescription here is functional medicine, which stands on the shoulders of lifestyle medicine. This latter is thus briefly covered and the basics presented, but most of the book is about identifying the root causes of disease and eliminating them one by one, by taking into account the functions of the body’s processes, both in terms of pathogenesis (and thus, seeking to undermine that) and in terms of correct functioning (i.e., good health).
While the main focus of the book is on health rather than disease, he does cover a number of very common chronic illnesses, and how even in those cases where they cannot yet be outright cured, there’s a lot more that can be done for them than “take two of these and call your insurance company in the morning”, when the goal is less about management of symptoms (though that is also covered) and more about undercutting causes, and ensuring that even if one thing goes wrong, it doesn’t bring the entire rest of the system down with it (something that often happens without functional medicine).
The style is clear, simple, and written for the layperson without unduly dumbing things down.
Bottom line: if you would like glowingly good health regardless of any potential setbacks, this book can help your body do what it needs to for you.
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Why Going Gluten-Free Could Be A Bad Idea
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Is A Gluten-Free Diet Right For You?
This is Rachel Begun, MS, RD. She’s a nutritionist who, since her own diagnosis with Celiac disease, has shifted her career into a position of educating the public (and correcting misconceptions) about gluten sensitivity, wheat allergy, and Celiac disease. In short, the whole “gluten-free” field.
First, a quick recap
We’ve written on this topic ourselves before; here’s what we had to say:
On “Everyone should go gluten-free”
Some people who have gone gluten-free are very evangelical about the lifestyle change, and will advise everyone that it will make them lose weight, have clearer skin, more energy, and sing well, too. Ok, maybe not the last one, but you get the idea—a dietary change gets seen as a cure-all.
And for some people, it can indeed make a huge difference!
Begun urges us to have a dose of level-headedness in our approach, though.
Specifically, she advises:
- Don’t ignore symptoms, and/but…
- Don’t self-diagnose
- Don’t just quit gluten
One problem with self-diagnosis is that we can easily be wrong:
But why is that a problem? Surely there’s not a health risk in skipping the gluten just to be on the safe side? As it turns out, there actually is:
If we self-diagnose incorrectly, Begun points out, we can miss the actual cause of the symptoms, and by cheerfully proclaiming “I’m allergic to gluten” or such, a case of endometriosis, or Hashimoto’s, or something else entirely, might go undiagnosed and thus untreated.
“Oh, I feel terrible today, there must have been some cross-contamination in my food” when in fact, it’s an undiagnosed lupus flare-up, that kind of thing.
Similarly, just quitting gluten “to be on the safe side” can mask a different problem, if wheat consumption (for example) contributed to, but did not cause, some ailment.
In other words: it could reduce your undesired symptoms, but in so doing, leave a more serious problem unknown.
Instead…
If you suspect you might have a gluten sensitivity, a wheat allergy, or even Celiac disease, get yourself tested, and take professional advice on proceeding from there.
How? Your physician should be able to order the tests for you.
You can also check out resources available here:
Celiac Disease Foundation | How do I get tested?
Or for at-home gluten intolerance tests, here are some options weighed against each other:
MNT | 5 gluten intolerance tests and considerations
Want to learn more?
Begun has a blog:
Rachel Begun | More than just recipes
(it is, in fact, just recipes—but they are very simple ones!)
You also might enjoy this interview, in which she talks about gluten sensitivity, celiac disease, and bio-individuality:
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later
Take care!
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The Art Of Letting Go – by Nick Trenton
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.
You may be wondering: is this a basic CBT book? And, for the most part, no, it’s not.
It does touch on some of the time-tested CBT techniques, but a large part of the book is about reframing things in a different way, that’s a little more DBT-ish, and even straying into BA. But enough of the initialisms, let’s give an example:
It can be scary to let go of the past, or of present or future possibilities (bad ones as well as good!). However, it’s hard to consciously do something negative (same principle as “don’t think of a pink elephant”), so instead, look at it as taking hold of the present/future—and thus finding comfort and security in a new reality rather than an old memory or a never-actual imagining.
So, this book has a lot of ideas like that, and if even one of them helps, then it was worth reading.
The writing style is comprehensive, and goes for the “tell them what you’re gonna tell them; tell them; then tell them what you told them” approach, which a) is considered good for learning b) can feel a little like padding nonetheless.
Bottom line: this reviewer didn’t personally love the style, but the content made up for it.
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The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
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.
More Than One Way To Kill Pain
This is Dr. Deepak Ravindran (MD, FRCA. FFPMRCA, EDRA. FIPP, DMSMed). He has decades of experience and is a specialist in acute and chronic pain management, anesthesia, musculoskeletal medicine, and lifestyle medicine.
A quick catch-up, first:
We’ve written about chronic pain management before:
Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
As well as:
Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief
Dr. Ravindran’s approach
Dr. Ravindran takes a “trauma-informed care” approach to his professional practice, and recommends the same for others.
In a nutshell, this means starting from a position of not “what’s wrong with you?”, but rather “what happened to you?”.
This seemingly subtle shift is important, because it means actually dealing with a person’s issues, instead of “take one of these and call my secretary next month”. Read more:
Pain itself can be something of a many-headed hydra. Dr. Ravindran’s approach is equally many-headed; specifically, he has a 7-point plan:
Medications
Dr. Ravindran sees painkillers (and a collection of other drugs, like antidepressants and muscle relaxants) as a potential means to an end worth exploring, but he doesn’t expect them to be the best choice for everyone, and nor does he expect them to be a cure-all. Neither should we. He also advises being mindful of the drawbacks and potential complications of these drugs, too.
Interventions
Sometimes, surgery is the right choice. Sometimes it isn’t. Often, it will change a life—one way or the other. Similar to with medications, Dr. Ravindran is very averse to a “one size fits all” approach here. See also:
The Insider’s Guide To Making Hospital As Comfortable As Possible
Neuroscience and stress management
Often a lot of the distress of pain is not just the pain itself, but the fear associated with it. Will it get worse if I move wrong or eat the wrong thing? How long will it last? Will it ever get better? Will it get worse if I do nothing?. Dr. Ravindran advises tackling this, with the same level of importance as the pain itself. Here’s a good start:
Stress, And Building Psychological Resilience
Diet and the microbiome
Many chronic illnesses are heavily influenced by this, and Dr. Ravindran’s respect for lifestyle medicine comes into play here. While diet might not fix all our ills, it certainly can stop things from being a lot worse. Beyond the obvious “eat healthily” (Mediterranean diet being a good starting point for most people), he also advises doing elimination tests where appropriate, to screen out potential flare-up triggers. You also might consider:
Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet
Sleep
“Get good sleep” is easy advice for those who are not in agonizing pain that sometimes gets worse from staying in the same position for too long. Nevertheless, it is important, and foundational to good health. So it’s important to explore—whatever limitations one might realistically have—what can be done to improve it.
If you can only sleep for a short while at a time, you may get benefit from this previous main feature of ours:
How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)
Exercise and movement
The trick here is to move little and often; without overdoing it, but without permitting loss of mobility either. See also:
The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, And Move More
Therapies of the mind and body
This is about taking a holistic approach to one’s wellness. In Dr. Ravindran’s words:
❝Mind-body therapies are often an extremely sensitive topic about which people hold very strong opinions and sometimes irrational beliefs.
Some, like reiki and spiritual therapy and homeopathy, have hardly any scientific evidence to back them up, while others like yoga, hypnosis, and meditation/mindfulness are mainstream techniques with many studies showing the benefits, but they all work for certain patients.❞
In other words: evidence-based is surely the best starting point, but if you feel inclined to try something else and it works for you, then it works for you. And that’s a win.
Want to know more?
You might like his book…
The Pain-Free Mindset: 7 Steps to Taking Control and Overcoming Chronic Pain
He also has a blog and a podcast.
Take care!
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The Telomere Effect – by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Elissa Epel
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Telomeres can be pretty mystifying to the person with a lay interest in longevity. Beyond “they’re the little caps that sit on the end of your DNA, and longer is better, and when they get short, damage occurs, and aging”, how do they fit into the big picture?
Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Elissa Epel excel at explaining the marvelous world of telomeres…
- how they work
- what affects them
- and how and why
…and the extent to which changes are or aren’t reversible.
For some of us, the ship has sailed on avoiding a lot of early-life damage to our telomeres, and now we have a damage-mitigation task ahead. That’s where the authors get practical.
Indeed, the whole third part of the book is titled “Help Your Body Protect Its Cells“, and indeed covers not just “from now on” protection, but undoing some of the damage already done (yes, telomeres can be lengthened—it gets harder as we get older, but absolutely can be done).
In short: if you’d like to avoid further damage to your telomeres where possible, and reverse some of the damage done already, this book will set you on the right track.
Don’t Forget…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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