Lifestyle vs Multiple Sclerosis & More
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.
This is Dr. Saray Stancic. She’s another from the ranks of “doctors who got a serious illness and it completely changed how they view the treatment of serious illness”.
In her case, Stancic was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and wasn’t impressed with the results from the treatments offered, so (after 8 years of pain, suffering, and many medications, only for her condition to worsen) she set about doing better with an evidence-based lifestyle medicine approach.
After 7 years of her new approach, she would go on to successfully run a marathon and live symptom-free.
All this to say: her approach isn’t a magic quick fix, but it is a serious method for serious results, and after all, while it’d be nice to be magically in perfect health tomorrow, what’s important is being in good health for life, right?
If you’re interested in her impressive story, check out:
Doctor With Multiple Sclerosis On The Collapse Of US Healthcare
If you want to know what she did, then read on…
Six key lifestyle changes
Dr. Stancic credits her recovery to focus on the following evidence-based approaches:
The plant-centered plate
This is critical, and is the one she places most emphasis on. Most chronic diseases are exacerbated, if not outright caused, by chronic inflammation, and one cannot fix that without an anti-inflammatory diet.
An anti-inflammatory diet doesn’t have to be 100% plant-based, but broadly speaking, plants are almost always anti-inflammatory to a greater or lesser degree, while animal products are often pro-inflammatory—especially red meat and unfermented dairy.
For more details, see:
Anti-Inflammatory Diet 101 (What to Eat to Fight Inflammation)
Movement every day
While “exercise is good for you” is in principle not a shocker, remember that her starting point was being in terrible condition with badly flared-up MS.
Important to understand here is that excessive exercise can weaken the immune system and sometimes cause flare-ups of various chronic diseases.
Moving thoroughly and moving often, however, is best. So walking yes, absolutely, but also don’t neglect the rest of your body, do some gentle bodyweight squats (if you can; if you can’t, work up to them), stretch your arms as well as your legs, take all your joints through a full range of motion.
See also:
The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, & Move More
Mindful stress management
Stress in life is unavoidable, but how we manage it is up to us. Bad things will continue to happen, great and small, but we can take a deep breath, remember that those things aren’t the boss of us, and deal with it calmly and conscientiously.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is of course the evidence-based “gold standard” for this, but whatever (not substance-based) method works for you, works for you!
About MBSR:
No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness
Good sleeping habits
Getting good sleep can be hard for anyone, let alone if you have chronic pain. However, Dr. Stancic advocates for doing whatever we can to get good sleep—which means not just duration (the famous “7–9 hours”), but also quality.
Learn more:
The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter)
Substance intake awareness
This one’s not so much of a “don’t do drugs, kids” as the heading makes it look. Dr. Stancic assumes we already know, for example, that smoking is bad for us in a long list of ways, and alcohol isn’t much better.
However, she also advises us that in our eagerness to do that plant-based diet, we would do better to go for whole foods plant-based, rather than the latest processed meat substitutes, for example.
And supplements? She bids us exercise caution, and to make sure to get good quality, as poor quality supplements can be worse than taking nothing (looking at you, cheap turmeric supplements that contain heavy metals).
And of course, that nutrients gained from diet will almost always be better than nutrients gained from supplements, as our body can usually use them better.
And see also, some commonly-made supplements mistakes:
Do You Know Which Supplements You Shouldn’t Take Together? (10 Pairs!)
Human connection
Lastly, we humans are a social species by evolution; as individuals, we may enjoy relatively more or less social contact, but having access to such is important not just for our mental health, but our physical health too—we will tend to deteriorate much more quickly when we have to deal with everything alone, all other things being equal.
It doesn’t mean you need a busy social life if that’s not in your nature, but it does mean it’s incredibly beneficial to have at least a small number of people that you trust and whose company you enjoy, at least relatively accessible to you (i.e., their life need not revolve around you, but they are the kind of people who will generally happily spend time with you and provide support when needed if they can).
As for how:
How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation
Want to know more from Dr. Stancic?
We recently reviewed this very good book of hers, which goes over each of these six things in much more detail than we have room for here:
What’s Missing from Medicine – by Dr. Saray Stancic
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
GLP-1 Drugs: Safe For Pregnancy Or Not?
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.
…and other items from this week’s health news:
Beyond “Ozempic babies”
Briefly heralded as a potential boon to fertility (and advised against because of potential risks), GLP-1 receptor agonists have been re-examined in the context of pregnancy.
In this most recent study of 10,781 women, 232 pregnancies occurred within six months of starting treatment. Being on contraception reduced the risk of pregnancy by 40%, which is also the approximate percentage of pregnancies overall that were unplanned (though doubtlessly it is not a perfect overlap).
In terms of safety: animal studies show risks like fetal growth restriction, while limited human data (including a 2024 study of 938 pregnancies) found no higher risk of major birth defects compared with insulin (bearing in mind, GLP-1 RAs were initially most widely prescribed for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, before truly taking off as weight loss drugs).
Read in full: Are GLP-1 drugs safe for women planning pregnancy?
Related: What are “Ozempic babies”? Can the drug really increase your chance of pregnancy?
When the temperature goes up, so does sugar consumption
It’s not about food! No, not even about ice creams (mostly, anyway).
Rather, hot weather especially drives consumption of chilled, sugary drinks, which in turn raises risks of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers.
This most recent research analyzed food purchase data from 60,000 US households between 2004–2019 to measure added sugar intake in relation to weather conditions over time.
What they found: added sugar intake rises as temperatures increase, especially between 12–30℃ (54–86℉). After that, sugar intake still continues to rise with temperature rises, but the rise becomes less sharp. Outdoor workers were most affected, and higher-income groups were less affected, possibly due to access to air-conditioned environments.
Read in full: Climate change is fueling unhealthy sugar consumption in the US
Related: 4 surprising ways climate change is hurting your lungs
Fast food making a fast exit?
In recent years, one-third of US adults ate fast food on any given day. Which sounds like a lot, and it is, but 11.7% of daily calories came from fast food, which is a reduction from the 14.1% of the previous decade.
But, this wasn’t the same across of the population as whole, because intake fell most sharply in younger adults (19.0% in 2013–14 to 15.2% in 2021–23), whereas there was negligible change in the numbers for older age brackets.
And when it comes to body types, there were differences, but perhaps not so big as many might imagine: adults in the “obesity” category of BMI consumed 13.7% of daily calories from fast food, compared with 10.8% in the “overweight” category and 9.8% in the “normal” category.
Now, BMI’s a woeful system and it’s likely that BMI’s many flaws will have confounded that data somewhat, but the overall picture is not unreasonable (and the age-related data was unaffected by this).
Read in full: Fast food’s grip on American diets weakens as younger adults cut back
Related: How Likely Is It That Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs) Will Kill You?
Take care!
Share This Post
-
5 Stretches To Relieve The Pain From Sitting & Poor Posture
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.
Sitting is not good for the health, yes often it’s a necessity of modern life, especially if driving. To make things worse, it can often be difficult to remember to maintain good posture the rest of the time, if it’s not a habit. So, while reducing sitting and improving posture are both very good things to do, here are 5 stretches to mitigate the damage meanwhile:
Daily doses:
These are best done at a rate of 2–3 sets daily:
Cat-Cow Stretch:
- Benefits: eases spinal tension, boosts flexibility, improves posture.
- How to: start on all fours, alternate between arching and rounding your back while syncing with your breath (10-15 times).
Butterfly Stretch:
- Benefits: loosens tight hips, improves lower back flexibility, and enhances mobility for activities like squats.
- How to: sit with soles of feet together, let knees fall toward the floor, lean forward slightly, and hold for 30 seconds to 1 minute.
Supine Twist:
- Benefits: unlocks the spine, relieves post-workout tension, and relaxes the shoulders and hips.
- How to: lie on your back, bend knees, twist to one side while keeping shoulders grounded, and hold for 30 seconds to 1 minute per side.
Calf Stretch:
- Benefits: improves ankle mobility, loosens tight calves, and prevents injuries like Achilles tendinitis.
- How to: stand facing a wall, extend one leg back with the heel on the ground, lean into the stretch, or use a step for deeper stretches. Hold for 30 seconds to 1 minute per leg.
Child’s Pose:
- Benefits: decompresses the spine, relaxes hips, and relieves tension in back and thighs.
- How to: start on hands and knees, sit back onto your heels, stretch arms forward, and rest forehead on the mat. Hold for 30 seconds to 1 minute.
For more on each of these, plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
10 Tips To Reduce Morning Pain & Stiffness With Arthritis
Take care!
Share This Post
-
The Living Kitchen – by Tamara Green and Sarah Grossman
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.
For the most part, this is a very respectable book of recipes; plants-forward though not entirely plant-based (which from a cancer perspective is fine; poultry and fish are cancer-neutral, and fermented dairy may even be protective).
They do focus on including a lot of phytonutrient-rich foods (mostly: colorful plants), which indeed have a lot of anticancer potency between them.
It was an interesting choice to include some beef, since red meat is well-established as a carcinogen. The authors advise that it should be grass-fed, and this is a definite health improvement over the alternative, but still not great.
In a similar vein they recommend “sustainably farmed fish”. Not a known carcinogen, by the way (though watch out for antibiotics which are very high in farmed fish), but do you see the problem? Paying attention to sustainability is great; truly laudable. However, it won’t actually make any difference to the health impact on the consumer. Farmed fish is full of antibiotics, whether deemed sustainable or not.
The front cover shows a soup; the recipes in the book are a wide variety of different dishes, of which soups are just one category. There is a juices section, which not only was probably superfluous, but also is not amazing for the metabolism (and thus, not great in the context of cancer). On a more positive note though, the “mains” section is divided into “omnivore mains” and “vegetarian mains”, with equal attention given to both (20 pages each), so the recipes list isn’t entirely padded with juices and sauces and things (though yes, that also).
Bottom line: from an anticancer perspective, this one’s a bit of a mixed bag, but mostly good ones.
Click here to check out The Living Kitchen, and add to your culinary repertoire!
Share This Post
Related Posts
-
Sleeping Positions & Your Heart & 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.
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 😎
❝Is it true that sleeping on your left side is bad for the heart?❞
Short answer: it can be!
It has to do with how much room the heart has to move around.
Now, mostly we tend to assume that our organs stay put, but the reality is, they have quite a bit of leeway to move around (one of the reasons why sitting is so bad for the health; see: Death by Sitting – by Carolyne Thompson and for how to fix that besides “sit less”, check out Stand Up For Your Health (Or Don’t) ← our main feature on this also includes more things you can do if you must sit, to make sitting less bad!).
When it comes to our heart, this is broadly situated fairly centrally and/but a little to the left, behind our sternum. This means that when we sleep lying on our right-hand side, the pull of gravity on our heart is towards the center, where there the internal structure (namely the mediastinum) supports it and keeps it in place.
When we sleep lying on our left-hand side, however, the heart can squish downwards (i.e. to our left) a bit, which can affect how it beats:
Lying position classification based on ECG waveform and random forest during sleep in healthy people
For most people, this shouldn’t be a huge issue, as our heart (much like the rest of our body) is quite resilient, and capable of looking after itself. However, if one has a predisposition to certain kinds of heart condition, it can become more of a problem, and for everyone, it’s at the very least not ideal.
On the other hand (literally), sleeping on the left-hand side can be better to avoid acid reflux if that’s a problem for you, due to the orientation of the opening at the the top of the stomach.
Body position affects recumbent postprandial reflux
Meanwhile, the brain is also a consideration when it comes to sleep positions and health. Because the glymphatic system (glial cells doing the clean-up job of the lymphatic system, but in the brain, where lymph cannot go) is strongly affected by gravity, the brain’s ability to remove toxins is dependent on the orientation of the head. This is critical for avoiding Alzheimer’s (beta-amyloid clearance) and Parkinson’s (alpha-synuclein clearance) amongst others, and for this:
- sleeping sideways is far better than sleeping on one’s back.
- sleeping on one’s right side is better than sleeping on one’s left side.
For more details on that, see:
Goodnight, Glymphatic System: How Your Sleep Position Changes Dementia Risk
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Asparagus vs Peas – Which is Healthier?
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.
Our Verdict
When comparing asparagus to peas, we picked the peas.
Why?
Both have their merits! But…
In terms of macros, peas have more than 2x the fiber, carbs, and protein, winning this first round easily.
In the category of vitamins, asparagus has more of vitamins B5, E, and K, while peas have more of vitamins B1, B3, B6, B7, B9, and C, winning a second round tidily.
Looking at minerals, asparagus has more iron and selenium, while peas have more magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc, winning their third round in a row.
In other considerations, asparagus is richer in polyphenols, which is a point in its favor.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for peas, but by all means do enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Your Daily Dose Of B12 From Just 15g Of Pea Shoots!
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Dates vs Raisins – Which is Healthier?
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.
Our Verdict
When comparing dates to raisins, we picked the dates.
Why?
There are benefits for each fruit, but we say dates come out on top. See what you think:
In terms of macros, while they’re both dried fruits, dates contain more water (unless you leave them sitting open for a while), which will tend to mathematically lower the relative percentages of other components because they’re being held against water weight too. However, even though this is the case (i.e. dates are being mathematically disadvantaged), dates contain more than twice the fiber that raisins do (8g/100g compared to raisins’ 3.7g/100g).
While we’re talking macros, dates are also lower in total carbs, as well as obviously net carbs, and have a much lower glycemic index than raisins (dates have a glycemic index of 42, considered low, while raisins have a glycemic index of 64, considered medium; their respective glycemic loads are even more telling: 13 for raisins and just 2 for dates!).
About those carbs… For dates, it’s an approximately equal mix of sucrose, glucose, and fructose, while for raisins it’s 49% glucose and 49% fructose. Because sucrose is the only disaccharide here, this (as well as the fiber difference) is one of the reasons for the different glycemic indices and glycemic loads, since glucose and fructose are more quickly absorbed.
That’s more than we usually write about macros, but in this case, both fruits are ones especially often hit with the “aren’t they full of sugar though?” question, so it was important to cover the critical distinctions between the two, because they really are very different.
Summary of macros: dates win easily in every aspect we looked at
In the category of vitamins, raisins get a tally in their favor. Raisins are higher in vitamins B1, B2, C, E, K, and choline, while dates are higher in vitamins A, B3, B5, and B9, giving raisins a 6:4 lead here. In dates’ defense, the difference in vitamin K is marginal, and it’d make it a 5:4 lead if we considered that within the margin of error (because all these figures are of course based on averages), and the vitamins that dates are higher in, the margins are much wider indeed, meaning that both fruits have approximately the same overall levels of vitamins when looked at in total, but still, we’ll call this category a nominal win for raisins.
When it comes to minerals, dates have more magnesium, selenium, and zinc, while raisins have more copper, iron, phosphorus, and potassium. Nominally that’s a 4:3 lead for raisins, but if we consider that raisins also contain more sodium, it’s more like a tie here. If we have to pick one though, this is a very slight win for raisins.
Adding up the sections, we have one huge win for dates (macros) with two very marginal wins for raisins—hence, we say that dates win out.
Still, of course enjoy both; diversity is good for the health.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
