The Counterintuitive Dos and Don’ts of Nail Health
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
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
❝I take a vitamin supplement for strengthening my nails (particularly one of my big toes!) – but they are running out! What do you recommend for strengthening nails? What is/are the key ingredient(s)?❞
Vitamin-wise, biotin (vitamin B7) is an underrated and very important one. As a bonus, it’s really good for your hair too (hair and nails being made of fundamentally the same “stuff”. Because it has exceptionally low toxicity, it can be taken up to 10,000% of the NRV, so if shopping for supplements, a high biotin content is better than a low one.
A lot of products marketed as for “skin, hair, and nails” focus on vitamins A and E, which are good for the skin but aren’t so relevant for nails.
Nutritionally, getting plenty of protein (whatever form you normally take it is fine) is also important since keratin (as nails are made of) is a kind of protein.
Outside of nutritional factors, a few other considerations:
- Testosterone strengthens nails, and declining testosterone levels (as experienced by most men over the age of 45) can result in weaker nails. So for men over 45 especially, a diet that favors testosterone (think foods rich in magnesium and zinc) is good.
- Because estrogen doesn’t do for women’s nails what testosterone does for men’s nails, increasing our magnesium and zinc intake won’t help our nails (but it’s still good for other things, including energy levels in the day and good sleep at night, and most people are deficient in magnesium anyway)
- Those of us who enjoy painted nails would do well to let our nails go without polish sometimes, as it can dry them out. And, acrylic nails are truly ruinous to nail health, as are gel nails (the kind that use a UV lamp to harden them—which is also bad for the skin)
- When nails are brittle, it can be tempting to soak them to reduce their brittleness. However, this is actually counterproductive, as the water will leech nutrients from the nails, and by the time you’ve been out of the footbath (for example) for about an hour, your nails will bemore brittle than before you soaked them.
- Use a moisturizing lotion or nail-oil instead—bonus if it contains biotin, keratin, and/or other helpful nutrients.
- Keep yourself hydrated, too! Hydration that comes to your nails from the inside will deliver nutrients, rather than removing them.
About those supplements: we don’t sell them (or anything else) but for your convenience, here are some great ones (this writer takes pretty much the same, just a different brand because I’m in a different country):
Magnesium Gummies (600mg) & Biotin Gummies (10,000µg)
Enjoy!
❝I was wondering whether there were very simple, clear bullet points or instructions on things to be wary of in Yoga.❞
That’s quite a large topic, and not one that lends itself well to being conveyed in bullet points, but first we’ll share the article you sent us when sending this question:
Tips for Avoiding Yoga Injuries
…and next we’ll recommend the YouTube channel @livinleggings, whose videos we feature here from time to time. She (Liv) has a lot of good videos on problems/mistakes/injuries to avoid.
Here’s a great one to get you started:
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Rebalancing Dopamine (Without “Dopamine Fasting”)
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Rebalancing Dopamine (Without “Dopamine Fasting”)
This is Dr. Anna Lembke. She’s a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic—as well as running her own clinical practice, and serving on the board of an array of state and national addiction-focused organizations.
Today we’re going to look at her work on dopamine management…
Getting off the hedonic treadmill
For any unfamiliar with the term, the “hedonic treadmill” is what happens when we seek pleasure, enjoy the pleasure, the pleasure becomes normalized, and now we need to seek a stronger pleasure to get above our new baseline.
In other words, much like running on a reciprocal treadmill that just gets faster the faster we run.
What Dr. Lembke wants us to know here: pleasure invariably leads to pain
This is not because of some sort of extrinsic moral mandate, nor even in the Buddhist sense. Rather, it is biology.
Pleasure and pain are processed by the same part of the brain, and if we up one, the other will be upped accordingly, to try to keep a balance.
Consequently, if we recklessly seek “highs”, we’re going to hit “lows” soon enough. Whether that’s by drugs, sex, or just dopaminergic habits like social media overuse.
Dr. Lembke’s own poison of choice was trashy romance novels, by the way. But she soon found she needed more, and more, and the same level wasn’t “doing it” for her anymore.
So, should we just give up our pleasures, and do a “dopamine fast”?
Not so fast!
It depends on what they are. Dopamine fasting, per se, does not work. We wrote about this previously:
Short On Dopamine? Science Has The Answer
However, when it comes to our dopaminergic habits, a short period (say, a couple of weeks) of absence of that particular thing can help us re-find our balance, and also, find insight.
Lest that latter sound wishy-washy: this is about realizing how bad an overuse of some dopaminergic activity had become, the better to appreciate it responsibly, going forwards.
So in other words, if your poison is, as in Dr. Lembke’s case, trashy romance novels, you would abstain from them for a couple of weeks, while continuing to enjoy the other pleasures in life uninterrupted.
Substances that create a dependency are a special case
There’s often a popular differentiation between physical addictions (e.g. alcohol) and behavioral addictions (e.g. video games). And that’s fair; physiologically speaking, those may both involve dopamine responses, but are otherwise quite different.
However, there are some substances that are physical addictions that do not create a physical dependence (e.g. sugar), and there are substances that create a physical dependence without being addictive (e.g. many antidepressants)
See also: Addiction and physical dependence are not the same thing
In the case of anything that has created a physical dependence, Dr. Lembke does not recommend trying to go “cold turkey” on that without medical advice and supervision.
Going on the counterattack
Remember what we said about pleasure and pain being processed in the same part of the brain, and each rising to meet the other?
While this mean that seeking pleasure will bring us pain, the inverse is also true.
Don’t worry, she’s not advising us to take up masochism (unless that’s your thing!). But there are very safe healthy ways that we can tip the scales towards pain, ultimately leading to greater happiness.
Cold showers are an example she cites as particularly meritorious.
As a quick aside, we wrote about the other health benefits of these, too:
A Cold Shower A Day Keeps The Doctor Away?
Further reading
Want to know more? You might like her book:
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
Enjoy!
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Afterwork – by Joel Malick and Alex Lippert
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Regular 10almonds readers may remember that one of the key unifying factors of Blue Zones supercentenarians is the importance of having purpose, sometimes called ikigai (borrowing the Japanese term, as a nod to the Okinawan Blue Zone).
The authors are financial advisors by profession, but don’t let that fool you; this book is not about retirement financial planning, but rather, simply addressing a problem that was often presented to them while helping people plan their retirements:
A lot of people find themselves adrift without purpose at several points in life. Often, these are: 1) early twenties, 2) some point in the midlife, and/or 3) retirement. This book addresses the third of those life points.
The authors advise cultivating 10 key disciplines; we’ll not keep them a mystery; they are:
- Purpose
- Calendar
- Movement
- Journaling
- Faith
- Connection
- Learning
- Awareness
- Generosity
- Awe
…which each get a chapter in this book.
A note on the chapter about faith: the authors are Christians, and that does influence their perspective here, but if Christianity’s not your thing, then don’t worry: the rest also stands on its own feet without that.
The general “flavor” of the book overall is in essence, embracing a new period of enjoying what is in effect the strongest, most potentially impactful version of you you’ve ever been, as well as avoiding the traps of retirement “sugar rush” and “retirement drift”, to define, well, a more purposeful life—with what’s most meaningful to you.
The style of the book is self-help in layout, with occasional diagrams, flowcharts, and the like; sometimes we see well-sourced stats, but there’s no hard science here. In short, a simple and practical book.
Bottom line: if your retirement isn’t looking like what you imagined it to be, and/or you think it could be more fulfilling, then this book can help you find, claim, and live your ikigai.
Click here to check out Afterwork, and indeed live a future that’s worthy of dreams!
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In Defense of Food – by Michael Pollan
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Eat more like the French. Or the Italians. Or the Japanese. Or…
Somehow, whatever we eat is not good enough, and we should always be doing it differently!
Michael Pollan takes a more down-to-Earth approach.
He kicks off by questioning the wisdom of thinking of our food only in terms of nutritional profiles, and overthinking healthy-eating. He concludes, as many do, that a “common-sense, moderate” approach is needed.
And yet, most people who believe they are taking a “common-sense, moderate” approach to health are in fact over-fed yet under-nourished.
So, how to fix this?
He offers us a reframe: to think of food as a relationship, and health being a product of it:
- If we are constantly stressing about a relationship, it’s probably not good.
- On the other hand, if we are completely thoughtless about it, it’s probably not good either.
- But if we can outline some good, basic principles and celebrate it with a whole heart? It’s probably at the very least decent.
The style is very casual and readable throughout. His conclusions, by the way, can be summed up as “Eat real food, make it mostly plants, and make it not too much”.
However, to summarize it thusly undercuts a lot of the actual value of the book, which is the principles for discerning what is “real food” and what is “not too much”.
Bottom line: if you’re tired of complicated eating plans, this book can help produce something very simple, attainable, and really quite good.
Click here to check out In Defense of Food, for some good, hearty eating.
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Rethinking Diabetes – by Gary Taubes
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We’ve previously reviewed this author’s “The Case Against Sugar” and “Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It“. There’s an obvious theme, and this book caps it off nicely:
By looking at the history of diabetes treatment (types 1 and 2) in the past hundred years, and analysing the patterns over time, we can see how:
- diabetics have been misled a lot over time by healthcare providers
- we can learn from those mistakes going forwards
Happily, he does this without crystal-balling the future or expecting diet to fix, for example, a pancreas that can’t produce insulin. But what he does do is focus on the “can” items rather than the “can’t” items.
In the category of criticism, one of the strategies he argues for is basically the keto diet, which is indeed just fine for diabetes but often not great for the heart in the long-term (it depends on various factors, including genes). However, even if you choose not to implement that, there is plenty more to try out in this book.
Bottom line: whether you have diabetes, love someone who does, or just plain like to be on top of your glycemic health, this book is full of important insights and opportunities to improve things progressively along the way.
Click here to check out Rethinking Diabetes, and rethink diabetes!
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Horse Sedative Use Among Humans Spreads in Deadly Mixture of ‘Tranq’ and Fentanyl
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TREASURE ISLAND, Fla. — Andrew McClave Jr. loved to lift weights. The 6-foot-4-inch bartender resembled a bodybuilder and once posed for a photo flexing his muscles with former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan.
“He was extremely dedicated to it,” said his father, Andrew McClave Sr., “to the point where it was almost like he missed his medication if he didn’t go.”
But the hobby took its toll. According to a police report, a friend told the Treasure Island Police Department that McClave, 36, suffered from back problems and took unprescribed pills to reduce the pain.
In late 2022, the friend discovered McClave in bed. He had no pulse. A medical examiner determined he had a fatal amount of fentanyl, cocaine, and xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer used to sedate horses, in his system, an autopsy report said. Heart disease was listed as a contributing factor.
McClave is among more than 260 people across Florida who died in one year from accidental overdoses involving xylazine, according to a Tampa Bay Times analysis of medical examiner data from 2022, the first year state officials began tracking the substance. Numbers for 2023 haven’t been published.
The death toll reflects xylazine’s spread into the nation’s illicit drug supply. Federal regulators approved the tranquilizer for animals in the early 1970s and it’s used to sedate horses for procedures like oral exams and colic treatment, said Todd Holbrook, an equine medicine specialist at the University of Florida. Reports of people using xylazine emerged in Philadelphia, then the drug spread south and west.
What’s not clear is exactly what role the sedative plays in overdose deaths, because the Florida data shows no one fatally overdosed on xylazine alone. The painkiller fentanyl was partly to blame in all but two cases in which the veterinary drug was included as a cause of death, according to the Times analysis. Cocaine or alcohol played roles in the cases in which fentanyl was not involved.
Fentanyl is generally the “800-pound gorilla,” according to Lewis Nelson, chair of the emergency medicine department at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, and xylazine may increase the risk of overdose, though not substantially.
But xylazine appears to complicate the response to opioid overdoses when they do happen and makes it harder to save people. Xylazine can slow breathing to dangerous levels, according to federal health officials, and it doesn’t respond to the overdose reversal drug naloxone, often known by the brand name Narcan. Part of the problem is that many people may not know they are taking the horse tranquilizer when they use other drugs, so they aren’t aware of the additional risks.
Lawmakers in Tallahassee made xylazine a Schedule 1 drug like heroin or ecstasy in 2016, and several other states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia have taken action to classify it as a scheduled substance, too. But it’s not prohibited at the federal level. Legislation pending in Congress would criminalize illicit xylazine use nationwide.
The White House in April designated the combination of fentanyl and xylazine, often called “tranq dope,” as an emerging drug threat. A study of 20 states and Washington, D.C., found that overdose deaths attributed to both illicit fentanyl and xylazine exploded from January 2019 to June 2022, jumping from 12 a month to 188.
“We really need to continue to be proactive,” said Amanda Bonham-Lovett, program director of a syringe exchange in St. Petersburg, “and not wait until this is a bigger issue.”
‘A Good Business Model’
There are few definitive answers about why xylazine use has spread — and its impact on people who consume it.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in September said the tranquilizer is entering the country in several ways, including from China and in fentanyl brought across the southwestern border. The Florida attorney general’s office is prosecuting an Orange County drug trafficking case that involves xylazine from a New Jersey supplier.
Bonham-Lovett, who runs IDEA Exchange Pinellas, the county’s anonymous needle exchange, said some local residents who use drugs are not seeking out xylazine — and don’t know they’re consuming it.
One theory is that dealers are mixing xylazine into fentanyl because it’s cheap and also affects the brain, Nelson said.
“It’s conceivable that if you add a psychoactive agent to the fentanyl, you can put less fentanyl in and still get the same kick,” he said. “It’s a good business model.”
In Florida, men accounted for three-quarters of fatal overdoses involving xylazine, according to the Times analysis. Almost 80% of those who died were white. The median age was 42.
Counties on Florida’s eastern coast saw the highest death tolls. Duval County topped the list with 46 overdoses. Tampa Bay recorded 19 fatalities.
Cocaine was also a cause in more than 80 cases, including McClave’s, the Times found. The DEA in 2018 warned of cocaine laced with fentanyl in Florida.
In McClave’s case, Treasure Island police found what appeared to be marijuana and a small plastic bag with white residue in his room, according to a police report. His family still questions how he took the powerful drugs and is grappling with his death.
He was an avid fisherman, catching snook and grouper in the Gulf of Mexico, said his sister, Ashley McClave. He dreamed of being a charter boat captain.
“I feel like I’ve lost everything,” his sister said. “My son won’t be able to learn how to fish from his uncle.”
Mysterious Wounds
Another vexing challenge for health officials is the link between chronic xylazine use and open wounds.
The wounds are showing up across Tampa Bay, needle exchange leaders said. The telltale sign is blackened, crusty tissue, Bonham-Lovett said. Though the injuries may start small — the size of a dime — they can grow and “take over someone’s whole limb,” she said.
Even those who snort fentanyl, instead of injecting it, can develop them. The phenomenon is unexplained, Nelson said, and is not seen in animals.
IDEA Exchange Pinellas has recorded at least 10 cases since opening last February, Bonham-Lovett said, and has a successful treatment plan. Staffers wash the wounds with soap and water, then dress them.
One person required hospitalization partly due to xylazine’s effects, Bonham-Lovett said. A 31-year-old St. Petersburg woman, who asked not to be named due to concerns over her safety and the stigma of drug use, said she was admitted to St. Anthony’s Hospital in 2023. The woman, who said she uses fentanyl daily, had a years-long staph infection resistant to some antibiotics, and a wound recently spread across half her thigh.
The woman hadn’t heard of xylazine until IDEA Exchange Pinellas told her about the drug. She’s thankful she found out in time to get care.
“I probably would have lost my leg,” she said.
This article was produced in partnership with the Tampa Bay Times.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
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Never Too Late To Start Over: Finding Purpose At Any Age
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Dana Findwell’s late 50s were not an easy time, but upon now hitting 60 (this week, at time of writing), she’s enthusiastically throwing herself into the things that bring her purpose, and so can you.
Start where you are
Findwell was already no stranger to starting again, having been married and divorced twice, and having moved frequently, requiring constant “life resets”.
Nevertheless, she always had her work to fall back on; she was a graphic designer and art director for 30 years… Until burnout struck.
And when burnout struck, so did COVID, resulting in the loss of her job. Her job wasn’t the only thing she lost though, as her mother died around the same time. All in all, it was a lot, and not the fun kind of “a lot”.
Struggling to find a new career direction, she ended up starting a small business for herself, so that she could direct the pace; pressing forwards as and when she had the energy. This became her new “ikigai“, the main thing that brings a sense of purpose to her life, but getting one part of her life back into order brought her attention to the rest; she realized she’d neglected her health, so she joined a gym. And a weightlifting class. And a hip-hop class. And she took up the practice of Japanese drumming (for the unfamiliar, this can be a rather athletic ability; it’s not a matter of sitting at a drum kit).
And now? Her future is still not clear, but that’s ok, because she’s making it as she goes, and she’s doing it her way, trusting in her ability to handle what may come up, and doing the things now that future-her will be glad of having done (e.g. laying the groundwork of both financial security and good health).
Change can sometimes be triggered by adverse circumstances, but there’s always the opportunity to find something better. For more on all of this, enjoy:
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Take care!
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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