Mimosa For Healing Your Body & Mind
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Today we’re looking at mimosa (no relation to the cocktail!), which is a name given to several related plant species that belong to the same genus or general clade, look similar, and have similar properties and behavior.
As a point of interest that’s not useful: mimosa is one of those plants whereby if you touch it, it’ll retract its leaves and shrink away from you. The leaves also droop at nighttime (perfectly healthily; they’re not wilting or anything; this too is just plant movement), and spring back up in the daytime.
So that’s what we mean when we say “and behavior” 😉
Antidepressant & anxiolytic
Mimosa bark and leaves have long been used in Traditional Chinese Medicine, as well as (albeit different species) in the North-East of Brazil, and (again, sometimes different species) in Mexico.
Animal studies, in vivo studies, and clinical practice in humans, have found this to be effective, for example:
❝[Mimosa pudica extract] has anti-anxiety, anti-depressant and memory enhancing activities that are mediated through multiple mechanisms❞
Source: Effects of Mimosa pudica L. leaves extract on anxiety, depression and memory
Research is ongoing with regard to how, exactly, mimosa does what it does. Here’s a paper about another species mimosa:
(notwithstanding the genus name, it’s still part of the mimosa clade)
Anti-inflammatory & analgesic
In this case, mimosa has traditionally been used as a topical tincture (for skin damage of many kinds, ranging from cuts and abrasions to burns to autoimmune conditions and more), so what does the science say about that?
❝In summary, the present study provided evidence that the [mimosa extract], its fractions and the isolated compound sakuranetin showed significant anti-inflammatory and antinociceptive activities❞
Wound healing
About those various skin damages, here’s another application, and a study showing that it doesn’t just make it feel better, it actually helps it to heal, too:
❝Therapeutic effectiveness occurred in all patients of the extract group; after the 8th treatment week, ulcer size was reduced by 92% as mean value in this group, whereas therapeutic effectiveness was observed only in one patient of the control group (chi(2), p=0.0001). No side effects were observed in any patient in either group.❞
Very compelling stats!
Read more: Therapeutic effectiveness of a Mimosa tenuiflora cortex extract in venous leg ulceration treatment
Is it safe?
Yes, for most people, with some caveats:
- this one comes with a clear “don’t take if pregnant or breastfeeding” warning, as for unknown reasons it has caused a high incidence of fetal abnormalities or fetal death in animal studies.
- while the stem bark (the kind used in most mimosa supplements and most readily found online) has negligible psychoactivity, as do many species of mimosa in general, the root of M. tenuiflora has psychedelic effects similar to ayahuasca if taken orally, for example as a decoction, if in the presence of a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI), as otherwise MAO would metabolize the psychoactive component in the gut before it can enter the bloodstream.
That’s several “ifs”, meaning that the chances of unwanted psychedelic effects are slim if you’re paying attention, but as ever, do check with your doctor/pharmacist to be sure.
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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Why Your Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Day
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…and then covers its tracks so that you don’t notice:
Now you see it…
The world you experience is not an accurate representation of reality. Your brain actively constructs your perception, editing your memories as they happen and manipulating your sense of time. What you perceive as the present moment is actually a processed and reconstructed version of past events.
Nor is your vision anywhere near as detailed as it seems. Only a small central portion is in high resolution, while the rest is blurry. Your brain compensates for this by filling in the gaps with its best guess and/or what it believes is there from the last time you saw it. Your eyes constantly make rapid movements called saccades, and during these (i.e. when your eyes are moving), your vision momentarily shuts down—making you effectively blind for (in total, if we add them all up) about two hours every day (according to this video, anyway; our calculations find it to be more than that, but you get the idea). Your brain stitches together the visual input, creating a seamless experience that feels continuous (much like an animation reel composed of still images).
Why does it do this?
It’s because your senses operate at different speeds—light reaches your eyes in nanoseconds, sound in milliseconds, and touch signals in tens of milliseconds. However, your brain processes these inputs together, creating the illusion of a smooth and simultaneous experience. In reality, what you perceive as the present is actually a delayed and selectively edited version of the past.
Instead of showing you the world as it is, your brain predicts what will happen next. In high-speed situations, such as playing table tennis, if your brain relied on past sensory data, you wouldn’t react in time. Instead, it estimates an object’s future position and presents that prediction as your visual reality.
This also means that because your brain effectively sees things slightly sooner than you do, your brain has already prepared multiple possible responses and when an event occurs, it quickly selects the most likely course of action, deleting the alternatives before you are even aware of them. By the time you think you’ve made a decision, your body has already acted.
This goes for more than just the things we think of as requiring quick reactions!
Walking is a complex task that involves multiple time layers—your brain processes past feedback, assesses your current state, and predicts future movements. That’s why it was something that cyberneticists found difficult to recreate for a very long time. If something unexpected happens, like slipping cartoon-style on a banana peel, your body reacts before you consciously notice the danger. Your spinal cord and brainstem trigger emergency reflexes to stabilize you before your conscious mind even catches up.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
This Main Feature Should Take You Two Minutes (and 18 Seconds) To Read ← There’s a problem nobody wants to talk about when it comes to speed-reading; can you guess what it is based on what we just talked about above?
Take care!
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Fat’s Real Barriers To Health
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Fat Justice In Healthcare
This is Aubrey Gordon, an author, podcaster, and fat justice activist. What does that mean?
When it comes to healthcare, we previously covered some ideas very similar to her work, such as how…
There’s a lot of discrimination in healthcare settings
In this case, it often happens that a thin person goes in with a medical problem and gets treated for that, while a fat person can go in with the same medical problem and be told “you should try losing some weight”.
Top tip if this happens to you… Ask: “what would you advise/prescribe to a thin person with my same symptoms?”
Other things may be more systemic, for example:
When a thin person goes to get their blood pressure taken, and that goes smoothly, while a fat person goes to get their blood pressure taken, and there’s not a blood pressure cuff to fit them, is the problem the size of the person or the size of the cuff? It all depends on perspective, in a world built around thin people.
That’s a trivial-seeming example, but the same principle has far-reaching (and harmful) implications in healthcare in general, e.g:
- Surgeons being untrained (and/or unwilling) to operate on fat people
- Getting a one-size-fits-all dose that was calculated using average weight, and now doesn’t work
- MRI machines are famously claustrophobia-inducing for thin people; now try not fitting in it in the first place
…and so forth. So oftentimes, obesity will be correlated with a poor healthcare outcome, where the problem is not actually the obesity itself, but rather the system having been set up with thin people in mind.
It would be like saying “Having O- blood type results in higher risks when receiving blood transfusions”, while omitting to add “…because we didn’t stock O- blood”.
Read more on this topic: Shedding Some Obesity Myths
Does she have practical advice about this?
If she could have you understand one thing, it would be:
You deserve better.
Or if you are not fat: your fat friends deserve better.
How this becomes useful is: do not accept being treated as the problem!
Demand better!
If you meekly accept that you “just need to lose weight” and that thus you are the problem, you take away any responsibility from your healthcare provider(s) to actually do their jobs and provide healthcare.
See also Gordon’s book, which we’ve not reviewed yet but probably will one of these days:
“You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People – by Aubrey Gordon
Are you saying fat people don’t need to lose weight?
That’s a little like asking “would you say office workers don’t need to exercise more?”; there are implicit assumptions built into the question that are going unaddressed.
Rather: some people might benefit healthwise from losing weight, some might not.
In fact, over the age of 65, being what is nominally considered “overweight” reduces all-cause mortality risk.
For details of that and more, see: When BMI Doesn’t Measure Up
But what if I do want/need to lose weight?
Gordon’s not interested in helping with that, but we at 10almonds are, so…
Check out: Lose Weight, But Healthily
Where can I find more from Aubrey Gordon?
You might enjoy her blog:
Aubrey Gordon | Your Fat Friend
Or her other book, which we reviewed previously:
What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat – by Aubrey Gordon
Enjoy!
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Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet
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Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet
The Mediterranean Diet is considered by many to be the current “gold standard” of healthy eating, and with good reason. With 10,000+ studies underpinning it and counting, it has a pretty hefty weight of evidence.
(For contrast, the Ketogenic Diet for example has under 5,000 studies at time of writing, and many of those include mentioning the problems with it. That’s not to say the Keto is without its merits! It certainly can help achieve some short term goals, but that’s a topic for another day)
Wondering what the Mediterranean Diet consists of? We outlined it in a previous main feature, so here it is for your convenience 😎
To get us started today, we’ll quickly drop some links to a few of those Mediterranean Diet studies from the top:
- Definition of the Mediterranean Diet; a Literature Review
- Mediterranean Diet In Healthy Aging
- Cancer and Mediterranean Diet: A Review
- Impact of Mediterranean Diet on Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases and Longevity
- Mediterranean diet and cardiovascular disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies
- Adherence to Mediterranean diet and health status: meta-analysis
The short version is: it glows, in a good way.
The anti-inflammatory upgrade
One thing about the traditional Mediterranean Diet is… where are the spices?!
A diet focusing on fruits and non-starchy vegetables, healthy oils and minimal refined carbs, can be boosted by adding uses of spices such as chili, turmeric, cumin, fenugreek, and coriander:
The gut-healthy upgrade:
The Mediterranean Diet already gives for having a small amount of dairy, mostly in the form of cheeses, but this can be tweaked:
Mediterranean diet with extra dairy could be a gut gamechanger
The heart-healthy upgrade
The Mediterranean Diet is already highly recommended for heart health, and it offers different benefits to different parts of cardiovascular health:
The DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet can boost it further, specifically in the category of, as the name suggests, lowering blood pressure.
It’s basically the Mediterranean Diet with a few tweaks. Most notably, red meat no longer features (the Mediterranean Diet allows for a small amount of red meat), and fish has gone up in the list:
Description of the DASH Eating Plan
The brain-healthy upgrade:
The MIND (Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay) diet combines several elements from the above, as the name suggests. It also adds extra portions of specific brain-foods, that already exist in the above diets, but get a more substantial weighting in this one:
MIND and Mediterranean diets linked to fewer signs of Alzheimer’s brain pathology
See also: The cognitive effects of the MIND diet
Enjoy!
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Is thirst a good predictor of dehydration?
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Water is essential for daily functioning and health, and we can only survive a few days without it. Yet we constantly lose water through sweat, urination and even evaporation when we breathe.
This is why we have evolved a way to regulate and maintain water in our bodies. Like other animals, our survival relies on a strong biological drive that tells us to find and drink water to balance fluid loss.
This is thirst – a sensation of dryness in the mouth signalling we need to have a drink. This basic physiological mechanism is controlled mainly by part of the brain’s “control centre”, called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus receives signals from various regions of the body and in return, releases hormones that act as a messenger to signal the thirst sensation.
KieferPix/Shutterstock What is dehydration?
Staying hydrated (having enough water in our bodies) is important for several reasons, including:
- regulating body temperature through sweat and respiration
- lubricating joints and eyes
- preventing infections
- digesting and absorbing nutrients
- flushing out waste (via the kidneys)
- preventing constipation
- brain function (including memory and concentration)
- mood and energy levels
- physical performance and recovery from exercise
- skin health.
Dehydration occurs when our body doesn’t have enough water. Even slight drops in fluid levels have noticeable consequences, such as headaches, feeling dizzy, lethargy and struggling to concentrate.
Chronic dehydration can pose more serious health risks, including urinary tract infections, constipation and kidney stones.
What does the evidence say?
Despite thirst being one of the most basic biological drivers for good hydration, science suggests our feelings of thirst and subsequent fluid intake don’t always correlate with hydration levels.
For example, a recent study explored the impact of thirst on fluid intake and hydration status. Participants attended a lab in the morning and then later in the afternoon to provide markers of hydration status (such as urine, blood samples and body weight). The relationship between levels of thirst in the morning and afternoon hydration status was negligible.
Further, thirst may be driven by environmental factors, such as access to water. For example, one study looked at whether ample access to water in a lab influenced how much people drank and how hydrated they were. The link between how thirsty they felt and how hydrated they were was weak, suggesting the availability of water influenced their fluid intake more than thirst.
Exercise can also change our thirst mechanism, though studies are limited at this stage.
Being thirsty doesn’t necessarily mean we’re dehydrated. puhhha/Shutterstock Interestingly, research shows women experience thirst more strongly than men, regardless of hydration status. To understand gender differences in thirst, researchers infused men and women with fluids and then measured their thirst and how hydrated they were. They found women generally reported thirst at a lower level of fluid loss. Women have also been found to respond more to feeling thirsty by drinking more water.
Other ways to tell if you need to drink some water
While acknowledging some people will need to drink more or less, for many people, eight cups (or two litres) a day is a good amount of water to aim for.
But beyond thirst, there are many other ways to tell whether you might need to drink more water.
1. urine colour: pale yellow urine typically indicates good hydration, while darker, concentrated urine suggests dehydration
2. frequency of going to the toilet: urinating regularly (around four to six times a day) indicates good hydration. Infrequent urination can signal dehydration
3. skin turgor test: gently pinching the skin (for example, on the back of the hand) and observing how quickly the skin returns to its normal position can help assess hydration. Slow return may indicate dehydration
If skin stays elevated after pinching it may be a sign of dehydration. SusaZoom/Shutterstock 4. mouth and lips: a dry mouth or cracked lips can be early signs of dehydration
5. headaches and fatigue: frequent headaches, dizziness, or unexplained fatigue can be signs of inadequate hydration
6. sweating: in physically active people, monitoring how much they sweat during activity can help estimate fluid loss and hydration needs. Higher levels of sweat may predispose a person to dehydration if they are unable to replace the fluid lost through water intake
These indicators, used together, provide a more comprehensive picture of hydration without solely depending on the sensation of thirst.
Of course, if you do feel thirsty, it’s still a good idea to drink some water.
Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland and Kiara Too, PhD candidate, School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The Path To Revenue – by Theresa Marcroft
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So many books about start-ups skip right over the elephant in the room: survivorship bias. Not so for Marcroft! This book contains the most comprehensive and unapologetic treatment of it we’ve seen.
Less “here’s what Steve Jobs did right and here’s what Chocolate-Teapots-For-Dogs-R-Us did wrong; don’t mess up that badly and you’ll be fine”… and more realism. Marcroft gives us a many-angled critical analytic approach. In it, she examines why many things can seem similar in both content and presentation… but can cause growth or failure (and how and why), based on more than anecdotes and luck.
The book is information-dense (taking a marketing-centric approach) and/but well-presented in a very readable format.
If we can find any criticism of the book, it’s less about what’s in it and more about what’s not in it. This can never be a “your start-up bible!” book because it’s not comprehensive. It doesn’t cover assembling your team, for example. Nor does it give a lot of attention to management, preferring to focus on strategy.
But no single book can be all things, and we highly recommend this one—the marketing advice alone is more than worth the cost of the book!
Take Your First Step Along The Path To Revenue By Checking It Out On Amazon!
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What Harm Can One Sleepless Night Do?
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We’ll not bury the lede: a study found that just one night of 24-hour sleep deprivation can alter immune cell profiles in young, lean, healthy people to resemble those of people with obesity and chronic inflammation.
Chronic inflammation, in turn, causes very many other chronic diseases, and worsens most of the ones it doesn’t outright cause.
The reason this happens is because in principle, inflammation is supposed to be good for us—it’s our body’s defenses coming to the rescue. However, if we imagine our immune cells as firefighters, then compare:
- A team of firefighters who are in great shape and ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, are mostly allowed to rest, sometimes get training, and get called out to a fire from time time, just enough to keep them on their toes. Today, something in your house caught fire, and they showed up in 5 minutes and put it out safely.
- A team of firefighters who have been pulling 24-hour shifts every day for the past 20 years, getting called out constantly for lost cats, burned toast, wrong numbers, the neighbor’s music, a broken fridge, and even the occasional fire. Today, your printer got jammed so they broke down your door and also your windows just for good measure, and blasted your general desk area with a fire hose, which did not resolve the problem but now your computer itself is broken.
Which team would you rather have?
The former team is a healthy immune system; the latter is the immune system of someone with chronic inflammation.
But if it’s one night, it’s not chronic, right?
Contingently true. However, the problem is that because the immune profile was made to be like the bad team we described (imagine that chaos in your house, now remember that for this metaphor, it’s your body that that’s happening to), the immediate strong negative health impact will already have knock-on effects, which in turn make it more likely that you’ll struggle to get your sleep back on track quickly.
For example, the next night you may oversleep “to compensate”, but then the following day your sleep schedule is now slid back considerably; one thing leads to another, and a month later you’re thinking “I really must sort my sleep out”.
See also: How Regularity Of Sleep Can Be Even More Important Than Duration ← A recent, large (n=72,269) 8-year prospective* observational study of adults aged 40-79 found a strong association between irregular sleep and major cardiovascular events, to such an extent that it was worse than undersleeping.
*this means they started the study at a given point, and measured what happened for the next eight years—as opposed to a retrospective study, which would look at what had happened during the previous 8 years.
What about sleep fragmentation?
In other words: getting sleep, but heavily disrupted sleep.
The answer is: basically the same deal as with missed sleep.
Specifically, elevated proinflammatory cytokines (in this context, that’s bad) and an increase in nonclassical monocytes—as are typically seen in people with obesity and chronic inflammation.
Remember: these were young, lean, healthy participants going into the study, who signed up for a controlled sleep deprivation experiment.
This is important, because the unhealthy inflammatory profile means that people with such are a lot more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and many more things besides. And, famously, most people in the industrialized world are not sleeping that well.
Even amongst 10almonds readers, a health-conscious demographic by nature, 62% of 10almonds readers do not regularly get the prescribed 7–9 hours sleep (i.e. they get under 7 hours).
You can see the data on this one, here: Why You Probably Need More Sleep ← yes, including if you are in the older age range; we bust that myth in the article too!*
*Unless you have a (rare!) mutated ADRB1 gene, which reduces that. But we also cover that in the article, and how to know whether you have it.
With regard to “most people in the industrialized world are not sleeping that well”, this means that most people in the industrialized world are subject to an unseen epidemic of sleep-deprivation-induced inflammation that is creating vulnerability to many other diseases. In short, the lifestyle of the industrialized world (especially: having to work certain hours) is making most of the working population sick.
Dr. Fatema Al-Rashed, lead researcher, concluded:
❝In the long term, we aim for this research to drive policies and strategies that recognize the critical role of sleep in public health.
We envision workplace reforms and educational campaigns promoting better sleep practices, particularly for populations at risk of sleep disruption due to technological and occupational demands.
Ultimately, this could help mitigate the burden of inflammatory diseases like obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.❞
You can read the paper in full here: Impact of sleep deprivation on monocyte subclasses and function
What can we do about it?
With regard to sleep, we’ve written so much about this, but here are three key articles that contain a lot of valuable information:
- Get Better Sleep: Beyond The Basics
- Calculate (And Enjoy) The Perfect Night’s Sleep
- Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors
…and with regard to inflammation, a good concise overview of how to dial it down is:
How To Prevent Or Reduce Inflammation
Take care!
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