Moringa Oleifera Against CVD, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s & Arsenic?

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The Healthiest Drumstick

Moringa oleifera is a tree, whose leaves and pods have medicinal properties (as well as simply being very high in nutrients). It’s also called the drumstick tree in English, but equally often it’s referred to simply as Moringa. It has enjoyed use in traditional medicine for thousands of years, and its many benefits have caught scientists’ attention more recently. For an overview before we begin, see:

Medicinal utilization and nutritional properties of drumstick (Moringa oleifera)—A comprehensive review

Now, let’s break it down…

Anti-inflammatory

It is full of antioxidants, which we’ll come to shortly, and they have abundant anti-inflammatory effects. Research into these so far has mostly beennon-human animal studies or else in vitro, hence the guarded “potential” for now:

Potential anti-inflammatory phenolic glycosides from the medicinal plant Moringa oleifera fruits

Speaking of potential though, it has been found to also reduce neuroinflammation specifically, which is good, because not every anti-inflammatory agent does that:

In silico and pharmacokinetic studies of glucomoringin from Moringa oleifera root for Alzheimer’s disease like pathology

Antioxidant

It was hard to find studies that talked about its antioxidant powers that didn’t also add “and this, and this, and this” because of all its knock-on benefits, for example:

❝The results indicate that this plant possesses antioxidant, hypolipidaemic and antiatherosclerotic activities and has therapeutic potential for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases.

These effects were at degrees comparable to those of simvastatin.❞

~ Dr. Pilaipark Chumark et al.

Source: The in vitro and ex vivo antioxidant properties, hypolipidaemic and antiatherosclerotic activities of water extract of Moringa oleifera Lam. leaves

Likely a lot of its benefits in these regards come from the plant’s very high quercetin content, because quercetin does that too:

Quercetin reduces blood pressure in hypertensive subjects

For more about quercetin, you might like our previous main feature:

Fight Inflammation & Protect Your Brain, With Quercetin

Antidiabetic

It also has been found to lower fasting blood sugar levels by 13.5%:

Effect of supplementation of drumstick (Moringa oleifera) and amaranth (Amaranthus tricolor) leaves powder on antioxidant profile and oxidative status among postmenopausal women

Anti-arsenic?

We put a question mark there, because studies into this have only been done with non-human animals such as mice and rats so far, largely because there are not many human volunteers willing to sign up for arsenic poisoning (and no ethics board would pass it anyway).

However, as arsenic contamination in some foods (such as rice) is a big concern, this is very promising. Here are some example studies, with mice and rats respectively:

Is it safe?

A popular food product through parts of Africa and (especially) South & West Asia, it has a very good safety profile. Generally the only health-related criticism of it is that it contains some anti-nutrients (that hinder bioavailability of its nutrients), but the nutrients outweigh the antinutrients sufficiently to render this a trifling trivium.

In short: as ever, do check with your doctor/pharmacist to be sure, but in general terms, this is about as safe as most vegan whole foods; it just happens to also be something of a superfood, which puts it into the “nutraceutical” category. See also:

Review of the Safety and Efficacy of Moringa oleifera

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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  • The Most Underrated Hip Mobility Exercise (Not Stretching)

    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.

    Cori Lefkowith, of “Redefining Strength” and “Strong At Every Age” fame, is back to help us keep our hips in good order:

    These tips don’t lie

    It’s less about stretching, and more about range of motion and “use it or lose it”:

    • Full range of motion in lifting exercises enhances joint mobility and stability, whereas strengthening muscles through a limited range of motion (e.g., half squats) can cause tightness.
    • Lifting through a larger range of motion may result in faster strength gains too, so that’s a bonus.
    • Customize your range of motion based on your body type and capability, but do try for what you reasonably can—don’t give up!
    • Lower weights and focus on deeper movements like split squats or single-leg squats, but work up slowly if you have any difficulties to start with.
    • Using exercises like the Bulgarian split squat and deficit split squat can improve hip mobility and strength (you’ll really need to see the video for this one)
    • Fully controlling the range of motion is key to progress, even if it means going lighter; prioritize mobility over brute strength. Strength is good, but mobility is even more critical.
    • Adding instability, such as raising the front foot in lunges, challenges muscles and increases mobility. Obviously, please be safe while doing so, and slowly increase the range of motion while maintaining control, avoiding reliance on momentum.
    • Final tip that most don’t consider: try starting exercises from the bottom position to ensure proper form and muscle engagement!

    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 to read:

    Take care!

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  • Tight Hamstrings? Here’s A Test To Know If It’s Actually Your Sciatic Nerve

    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.

    Tight hamstrings are often not actually due to hamstring issues, but rather, are often being limited by the sciatic nerve. This video offers a home test to determine if the sciatic nerve is causing mobility problems (and how to improve it, if so):

    The Connection

    Try this test:

    • Sit down with a slumped posture.
    • Extend one leg with the ankle flexed.
    • Note any stretching or pulling sensation behind the knee or in the calf.
    • Bring your head down to your chest

    If this increases the sensation, it likely indicates sciatic nerve involvement.

    If only the hamstrings are tight, head movement won’t change the stretch sensation.

    This is because the nervous system is a continuous structure, so head movement can affect nerve tension throughout the body. While this can cause problems, it can also be integral in the solution. Here are two ways:

    • Flossing method: sit with “poor” slumped posture, extend the knee, keep the ankle flexed, and lift the head to relieve nerve tension. This movement helps the sciatic nerve slide without stretching it.
    • Even easier method: lie on your back, grab behind the knee, and extend the leg while extending the neck. This position avoids compression in the gluteal area, making it suitable for severely compromised nerves. Perform the movement without significant stretching or pain.

    In both cases: move gently to avoid straining the nerve, which can worsen muscle tension. Do 10 repetitions per leg, multiple times a day; after a week, increase to 20 reps.

    A word of caution: speak with your doctor before trying these exercises if you have underlying neurological diseases, cut or infected nerves, or other severe conditions.

    For more on all of this, plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Exercises for Sciatica Pain Relief

    Take care!

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  • Remember – by Dr. Lisa Genova

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    Memory is often viewed as one thing—either you have a good memory, or you don’t. At best, a lot of people have a vague idea of selective memory. But, the reality is much more complex—and much more interesting.

    Dr. Genova lays out clearly and simply the various different kinds of memory, how they work, and how they fail. Some of these kinds of memory operate on completely different principles than others, and/or in different parts of the brain. And, it’s not just “a memory for faces” or a “memory for names”, nor even “short term vs long term”. There’s working memory, explicit and implicit memory, semantic memory, episodic memory, muscle memory, and more.

    However, this is not just an interesting book—it’s also a useful one. Dr. Genova also looks at how we can guard against failing memory in later years, and how we can expand and grow the kinds of memory that are most important to us.

    The style of the book is very conversational, and not at all textbook-like. It’s certainly very accessible, and pleasant to read too.

    Bottom line: memory is a weird and wonderful thing, and this book shines a clear light on many aspects of it—including how to improve the various different kinds of memory.

    Click here to check out Remember (we recommend to do it now before you forget!

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  • Carbonated Water: For Weight Loss, Satiety, Or Just Gas?

    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.

    There are two main mechanisms of action by which sparkling water is considered to help satiety and/or weight loss; they are:

    1. It “fills us up” such that we feel fuller sooner, and thus eat less, and thus (all other things being equal) perhaps lose weight
    2. The carbon dioxide is absorbed into the bloodstream, where (as a matter of chemistry) it improves glucose metabolism, thus lowering blood sugars and indirectly leading (potentially) to weight loss, but even if not, lowered blood sugars are good for most people most of the time, right?

    However, there are just a few problems:

    Full of gas?

    Many people self-report enjoying sparkling water as a way to feel fuller while fasting (or even while eating). However, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, so, here be data… Ish:

    ❝In order to determine whether such satiating effects occur through oral carbonic stimulation alone, we conducted modified sham-feeding (SF) tests (carbonated water ingestion (CW), water ingestion (W), carbonated water sham-feeding (CW-SF), and water sham-feeding (W-SF)), employing an equivalent volume and standardized temperature of carbonated and plain water, in a randomized crossover design.

    Thirteen young women began fasting at 10 p.m. on the previous night and were loaded with each sample (15ºC, 250 mL) at 9 a.m. on separate days. Electrogastrography (EGG) recordings were obtained from 20 min before to 45 min after the loading to determine the power and frequency of the gastric myoelectrical activity. Appetite was assessed using visual analog scales. After ingestion, significantly increased fullness and decreased hunger ratings were observed in the CW group. After the load, transiently but significantly increased fullness as well as decreased hunger ratings were observed in the CW-SF group. The powers of normogastria (2-4 cpm) and tachygastria (4-9 cpm) showed significant increases in the CW and W groups, but not in the CW-SF and W-SF groups. The peak frequency of normogastria tended to shift toward a higher band in the CW group, whereas it shifted toward a lower band in the CW-SF group, indicating a different EGG rhythm.

    Our results suggest that CO2-induced oral stimulation is solely responsible for the feeling of satiety.❞

    ~ Dr. Maki Suzuki et al.

    Now, that’s self-reported, and a sample size of 13, so it’s not the most airtight science ever, but it is at least science. Here’s the paper, by the way:

    Oral Carbonation Attenuates Feeling of Hunger and Gastric Myoelectrical Activity in Young Women

    Here’s another small study with 8 people, which found that still and sparkling water had the exact same effect:

    Effect of carbonated water on gastric emptying and intragastric meal distribution

    However, drinking water (still or sparkling) with a meal will not have anywhere near the same effect for satiety as consuming food that has a high water-content.

    See also: Some Surprising Truths About Hunger And Satiety ← our main feature in which we examine the science of volumetrics, including a study that shows how water incorporated into a food (but not served with a food) decreases caloric intake.

    As an aside, one difference that carbonation can make is to increase ghrelin levels—that’s the hunger hormone (the satiety hormone is leptin, by the way). This one’s a rat study, but it seems reasonable that the same will be true of humans:

    Carbon dioxide in carbonated beverages induces ghrelin release and increased food consumption in male rats: implications on the onset of obesity

    …which is worth bearing in mind even if you yourself are not, in fact, a male rat.

    The glucose guzzler?

    This one has simply been the case of a study being misrepresented, for example here:

    Fizzy water might aid weight loss by providing a small boost to glucose uptake and metabolism

    The idea is that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the blood mean faster glucose metabolism, which is technically true. Now, often “technically true” is the best kind of true, but not here, because it’s simply not useful.

    In short, we produce so much carbon dioxide as part of our normal respiratory processes, that any carbon dioxide we might consume in a carbonated water is barely a blip in the graph.

    Oh, and that article we just linked? Even within the article, despite running with that headline, the actual scientists quoted are saying such things as:

    ❝While there is a hypothetical link between carbonated water and glucose metabolism, this has yet to be tested in well-designed human intervention studies❞

    ~ Professor Sumantra Ray

    Note: the word “hypothetical” means “one level lower than theoretical”. This is very far from being a conclusion.

    And the study itself? Wasn’t even about carbonated water, it was about kidney dialysis and how the carbon dioxide content can result in hypoglycemia:

    The mechanism of hypoglycemia caused by hemodialysis

    …which got referenced in this paper (not a study):

    Can carbonated water support weight loss?

    …and even that concluded:

    ❝CO2 in carbonated water may promote weight loss by enhancing glucose uptake and metabolism in red blood cells.

    However, the amount is so small that it is difficult to expect weight loss effects solely from the CO2 in carbonated water.

    Drinking carbonated water may also affect blood glucose measurements.❞

    Note: the word “may”, when used by a scientist and in the absence of any stronger claims, means “we haven’t ruled out the possibility”.

    What breaking news that is.

    Stop the press! No, really, stop it!

    So… What does work?

    There are various ways of going about actually hacking hunger (and they stack; i.e. you can use multiple methods and get cumulative results), and we wrote about them here:

    Hack Your Hunger

    Enjoy!

    Don’t Forget…

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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  • World Menopause Day Health News Round-Up

    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.

    In order to provide variety in this week’s round-up, not all of this is menopause-related, but it is all important:

    Menopause & CVD

    Untreated menopause is associated with higher incidence of heart disease, and higher mortality. People often forget about how much estrogen does for us (well, for those of us with a physiology running on estrogen, anyway; gentlemen, your testosterone is fine for you), and think it is “just” a sex hormone, but it’s a lot more.

    Read in full: Menopause transition linked to increased heart disease risk

    Related: What Menopause Does To The Heart

    Extraterrestrial medical technology

    The much lower gravity in Earth orbit has allowed for tissue engineering techniques that Earth’s normal gravity imposes limitations on. This is big news, because it means that rather than replacing a whole liver, tissue implants could be grafted, allowing the extant liver to repair itself (something livers are famously good at, but they need enough undamaged base material to work with).

    Read in full: How liver tissue from the International Space Station may transform tissue engineering

    Related: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

    One thing and then another

    As if endometriosis weren’t unpleasant enough in and of itself, the endothelial dysfunction inherent to it also raises cardiovascular disease risk. This is important, because while endometriosis has (like many maladies predominantly affecting women) generally been shrugged off by the medical world as an unhappy inconvenience but not life-threatening, now we know it comes with extra existential risks too:

    Read in full: Understanding cardiovascular risks in endometriosis patients

    Related: What You Need To Know About Endometriosis

    Push-button meditation

    Unlike mindfulness meditation, listening to music is a very passive experience, and thus requires less effort from the user. And yet, it has been associated with lower perceived pain levels, lower self-reported anxiety levels, less opioid use, and measurably lower heart-rate.

    Read in full: Listening to music may speed up recovery from surgery, research suggests

    Related: Nobody Likes Surgery, But Here’s How To Make It Much Less Bad

    Cholesterol in menopause: quality over quantity

    Much like previous research has shown that the quantity of LDL is not nearly so predictive of health outcomes in women as it is in men, this study into HDL and menopausal women shows that quantity of HDL does not matter nearly so much as the quality of it.

    Read in full: HDL quality, not quantity, contribute to the first sign of Alzheimer’s disease in women

    Related: Statins: His & Hers? ← consistent with the above, statins (to lower LDL cholesterol) generally help more for men and produce more adverse side effects for women. So again, a case of “the actual amount of cholesterol isn’t so important for women as for men”.

    Take care!

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  • Maximize Your Misery! (7 Great Methods)

    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.

    Let’s imagine that instead of being healthily fulfilled in life, you wanted to spend your days as miserable as possible. What should you do?

    Here are a few pointers:

    Stay still

    Avoid physical activity and/or outdoor exposure, to avoid any mood-lifting neurochemicals. In fact, remain indoors as much as possible, preferably in the same room.

    If you want to absolutely maximize your misery, make your bedroom the sole space for all activities that it’s possible to do there.

    Disrupt your sleep

    Keep an irregular sleep schedule by varying your bedtime and wake-up times frequently. Sleep in as much as possible, and make up for it by staying up late to ensure ongoing exhaustion.

    Maximize screentime

    Use digital entertainment as much as possible to distract you from meaningful activities and rest—as a bonus, this will also help you to avoid self-reflection.

    Begin and end your day with a device in hand.

    Fuel negative emotions

    If you’re going to focus on something, focus on problems you cannot control, to stoke the fires of anger and angst.

    A good way of doing this is by staying informed about distressing events, while avoiding meaningful actions to address them. Contribute only in token gestures, and then lament the lack of change.

    Follow your impulses

    Act on short-term desires without considering long-term consequences, while avoiding behaviors that you know might improve your mood or wellbeing.

    Trust that doing the same things that have not previously resulted in happiness, will continue to reliably deliver unhappiness.

    Set goals to miss

    It’s important that your goals should be vague, and overly ambitious in their scope and/or deliverability. Ideally you should also disregard any preparatory work that a person would normally do before embarking on such a project.

    Bonus tip: you can further sabotage any chances of progress, by waiting for motivation to strike before you take any action.

    Pursue happiness

    Focus on chasing happiness itself, instead of improving your situation or skills. Treat happiness as an end goal, instead of a by-product of worthwhile activities.

    Want to learn more?

    If you’d like to know many more ways to be miserable, we featured these 7 from this book of 40, which we haven’t reviewed yet, but probably will one of these days:

    How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use – by Dr. Randy Paterson

    Alternatively…

    If for some strange reason you’d rather not do those things, you might consider a previous article of ours:

    How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)

    Enjoy!

    Don’t Forget…

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