No, beetroot isn’t vegetable Viagra. But here’s what else it can do
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Beetroot has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Supply issues in recent months have seen a shortage of tinned beetroot on Australian supermarket shelves. At one point, a tin was reportedly selling on eBay for more than A$65.
But as supplies increase, we turn our attention to beetroot’s apparent health benefits.
Is beetroot really vegetable Viagra, as UK TV doctor Michael Mosley suggests? What about beetroot’s other apparent health benefits – from reducing your blood pressure to improving your daily workout? Here’s what the science says.
What’s so special about beetroot?
Beetroot – alongside foods such as berries, nuts and leafy greens – is a “superfood”. It contains above-average levels per gram of certain vitamins and minerals.
Beetroot is particularly rich in vitamin B and C, minerals, fibre and antioxidants.
Most cooking methods don’t significantly alter its antioxidant levels. Pressure cooking does, however, lower levels of carotenoid (a type of antioxidant) compared to raw beetroot.
Processing into capsules, powders, chips or juice may affect beetroot’s ability to act as an antioxidant. However, this can vary between products, including between different brands of beetroot juice.
Is beetroot really vegetable Viagra?
The Romans are said to have used beetroot and its juice as an aphrodisiac.
But there’s limited scientific evidence to say beetroot improves your sex life. This does not mean it doesn’t. Rather, the vast number of scientific studies looking at the effect of beetroot have not measured libido or other aspects of sexual health.
How could it work?
When we eat beetroot, chemical reactions involving bacteria and enzymes transform the nitrate in beetroot into nitrite, then to nitric oxide. Nitric oxide helps dilate (widen) blood vessels, potentially improving circulation.
The richest sources of dietary nitric oxide that have been tested in clinical studies are beetroot, rocket and spinach.
Nitric oxide is also thought to support testosterone in its role in controlling blood flow before and during sex in men.
Beetroot’s ability to improve blood flow can benefit the circulatory system of the heart and blood vessels. This may positively impact sexual function, theoretically in men and women.
Therefore, it is reasonable to suggest there could be a modest link between beetroot and preparedness for sex, but don’t expect it to transform your sex life.
What else could it do?
Beetroot has received increasing attention over recent years due to its antioxidant and anti-tumour effect in humans.
Clinical trials have not verified all beetroot’s active ingredients and their effects. However, beetroot may be a potentially helpful treatment for various health issues related to oxidative stress and inflammation, such as cancer and diabetes. The idea is that you can take beetroot supplements or eat extra beetroot alongside your regular medicines (rather than replace them).
There is evidence beetroot juice can help lower systolic blood pressure (the first number in your blood pressure reading) by 2.73-4.81 mmHg (millimetres of mercury, the standard unit of measuring blood pressure) in people with high blood pressure. Some researchers say this reduction is comparable to the effects seen with certain medications and dietary interventions.
Other research finds even people without high blood pressure (but at risk of it) could benefit.
Beetroot may also improve athletic performance. Some studies show small benefits for endurance athletes (who run, swim or cycle long distances). These studies looked at various forms of the food, such as beetroot juice as well as beetroot-based supplements.
How to get more beetroot in your diet
There is scientific evidence to support positive impacts of consuming beetroot in whole, juice and supplement forms. So even if you can’t get hold of tinned beetroot, there are plenty of other ways you can get more beetroot into your diet. You can try:
- raw beetroot – grate raw beetroot and add it to salads or coleslaw, or slice beetroot to use as a crunchy topping for sandwiches or wraps
- cooked beetroot – roast beetroot with olive oil, salt and pepper for a flavour packed side dish. Alternatively, steam beetroot and serve it as a standalone dish or mixed into other dishes
- beetroot juice – make fresh beetroot juice using a juicer. You can combine it with other fruits and vegetables for added flavour. You can also blend raw or cooked beetroot with water and strain to make a juice
- smoothies – add beetroot to your favourite smoothie. It pairs well with fruits such as berries, apples and oranges
- soups – use beetroot in soups for both flavour and colour. Borscht is a classic beetroot soup, but you can also experiment with other recipes
- pickled beetroot – make pickled beetroot at home, or buy it from the supermarket. This can be a tasty addition to salads or sandwiches
- beetroot hummus – blend cooked beetroot into your homemade hummus for a vibrant and nutritious dip. You can also buy beetroot hummus from the supermarket
- grilled beetroot – slice beetroot and grill it for a smoky flavour
- beetroot chips – slice raw beetroot thinly, toss the slices with olive oil and your favourite seasonings, then bake or dehydrate them to make crispy beetroot chips
- cakes and baked goods – add grated beetroot to muffins, cakes, or brownies for a moist and colourful twist.
Are there any downsides?
Compared to the large number of studies on the beneficial effects of beetroot, there is very little evidence of negative side effects.
If you eat large amounts of beetroot, your urine may turn red or purple (called beeturia). But this is generally harmless.
There have been reports in some countries of beetroot-based dietary supplements contaminated with harmful substances, yet we have not seen this reported in Australia.
What’s the take-home message?
Beetroot may give some modest boost to sex for men and women, likely by helping your circulation. But it’s unlikely to transform your sex life or act as vegetable Viagra. We know there are many contributing factors to sexual wellbeing. Diet is only one.
For individually tailored support talk to your GP or an accredited practising dietitian.
Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland and Emily Burch, Lecturer, Southern Cross University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Q&A with 10almonds Subscribers!
Q: Would love to hear more ideas about effective first thing in the morning time management to get a great start on your day.
A: There are a lot of schools of thought about what’s best in this regard! Maybe we’ll do a main feature sometime. But some things that are almost universally agreed upon are:
- Prepare your to-do list the night before
- Have some sort of buffer between waking up and getting to productivity.
- For me (hi, your writer here) it’s my first coffee of the day. It’s not even about the caffeine, it’s about the ritual of it, it’s a marker that separates my night from the day and tells my brain what gear to get into.
- Others may like to exercise first thing in the morning
- For still yet others, it could be a shower, cold or otherwise
- Some people like a tall glass of lemon water to rehydrate after sleeping!
- If you take drinkable morning supplements such as this pretty awesome nootropic stack, it’s a great time for that and an excellent way to get the brain-juices flowing!
- When you do get to productivity: eat the frog first! What this means is: if eating a frog is the hardest thing you’ll have to do all day, do that first. Basically, tackle the most intimidating task first. That way, you won’t spend your day stressed/anxious and/or subconsciously wasting time in order to procrastinate and avoid it.
- Counterpart to the above: a great idea is to also plan something to look forward to when your working day is done. It doesn’t matter much what it is, provided it’s rewarding to you, that makes you keen to finish your tasks to get to it.
Have a question you’d like to see answered here? Hit reply to this email, or use the feedback widget at the bottom! We always love to hear from you
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Get Past Executive Dysfunction
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In mathematics, there is a thing called the “travelling salesman problem”, and it is hard. Not just subjectively; it is classified in mathematical terms as an “NP-hard problem”, wherein NP stands for “nondeterministic polynomial”.
The problem is: a travelling salesman must visit a certain list of cities, order undetermined, by the shortest possible route that visits them all.
To work out what the shortest route is involves either very advanced mathematics, or else solving it by brute force, which means measuring every possible combination order (which number gets exponentially larger very quickly after the first few cities) and then selecting the shortest.
Why are we telling you this?
Executive dysfunction’s analysis paralysis
Executive dysfunction is the state of knowing you have things to do, wanting to do them, intending to do them, and then simply not doing them.
Colloquially, this can be called “analysis paralysis” and is considered a problem of planning and organizing, as much as it is a problem of initiating tasks.
Let’s give a simple example:
You wake up in the morning, and you need to go to the bathroom. But the bathroom will be cold, so you’ll want to get dressed first. However, it will be uncomfortable to get dressed while you still need to use the bathroom, so you contemplate doing that first. Those two items are already a closed loop now. You’re thirsty, so you want to have a drink, but the bathroom is calling to you. Sitting up, it’s colder than under the covers, so you think about getting dressed. Maybe you should have just a sip of water first. What else do you need to do today anyway? You grab your phone to check, drink untouched, clothes unselected, bathroom unvisited.
That was a simple example; now apply that to other parts of your day that have much more complex planning possible.
This is like the travelling salesman problem, except that now, some things are better if done before or after certain other things. Sometimes, possibly, they are outright required to be done before or after certain other things.
So you have four options:
- Solve the problem of your travelling-salesman-like tasklist using advanced mathematics (good luck if you don’t have advanced mathematics)
- Solve the problem by brute force, calculating all possible variations and selecting the shortest (good luck getting that done the same day)
- Go with a gut feeling and stick to it (people without executive dysfunction do this)
- Go towards the nearest item, notice another item on the way, go towards that, notice a different item on the way there, and another one, get stuck for a while choosing between those two, head towards one, notice another one, and so on until you’ve done a very long scenic curly route that has narrowly missed all of your targetted items (this is the executive dysfunction approach).
So instead, just pick one, do it, pick another one, do it, and so forth.
That may seem “easier said than done”, but there are tools available…
Task zero
We’ve mentioned this before in the little section at the top of our daily newsletter that we often use for tips.
One of the problems that leads to executive function is a shortage of “working memory”, like the RAM of a computer, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed with lists of things to do.
So instead, hold only two items in your mind:
- Task zero: the thing you are doing right now
- Task one: the thing you plan to do next
When you’ve completed task zero, move on to task one, renaming it task zero, and select a new task one.
With this approach, you will never:
- Think “what did I come into this room for?”
- Get distracted by alluring side-quests
Do not get corrupted by the cursed artefact
In fantasy, and occasionally science fiction, there is a trope: an item that people are drawn towards, but which corrupts them, changes their motivations and behaviors for the worse, as well as making them resistant to giving the item up.
An archetypal example of this would be the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings.
It’s easy to read/watch and think “well I would simply not be corrupted by the cursed artefact”.
And then pick up one’s phone to open the same three apps in a cycle for the next 40 minutes.
This is because technology that is designed to be addictive hijacks our dopamine processing, and takes advantage of executive dysfunction, while worsening it.
There are some ways to mitigate this:
Rebalancing Dopamine (Without “Dopamine Fasting”)
…but one way to avoid it entirely is to mentally narrate your choices. It’s a lot harder to make bad choices with an internal narrator going:
- “She picked up her phone absent-mindedly, certain that this time it really would be only a few seconds”
- “She picked up her phone for the eleventy-third time”
- “Despite her plan to put her shoes on, she headed instead for the kitchen”
This method also helps against other bad choices aside from those pertaining to executive dysfunction, too:
- “Abandoning her plan to eat healthily, she lingered in the confectionary aisle, scanning the shelves for sugary treats”
- “Monday morning will be the best time to start my new exercise regime”, she thought, for the 35th week so far this year
Get pharmaceutical or nutraceutical help
While it’s not for everyone, many people with executive dysfunction benefit from ADHD meds. However, they have their pros and cons (perhaps we’ll do a run-down one of these days).
There are also gentler options that can significantly ameliorate executive dysfunction, for example:
Bacopa Monnieri: A Well-Evidenced Cognitive Enhancer For Focus & More
Enjoy!
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Flossing Without Flossing?
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Flossing Without Flossing?
You almost certainly brush your teeth. You might use mouthwash. A lot of people floss for three weeks at a time, often in January.
There are a lot of options for oral hygiene; variations of the above, and many alternatives too. This is a big topic, so rather than try to squeeze it all in one, this will be a several-part series.
The first part was: Toothpastes & Mouthwashes: Which Help And Which Harm?
How important is flossing?
Interdental cleaning is indeed pretty important, even though it may not have the heart health benefits that have been widely advertised:
However! The health of our gums is very important in and of itself, especially as we get older:
Flossing Is Associated with Improved Oral Health in Older Adults
But! It helps to avoid periodontal (e.g. gum) disease, not dental caries:
Flossing for the management of periodontal diseases and dental caries in adults
And! Most certainly it can help avoid a stack of other diseases:
Interdental Cleaning Is Associated with Decreased Oral Disease Prevalence
…so in short, if you’d like to have happy healthy teeth and gums, flossing is an important adjunct, and/but not a one-stop panacea.
Is it better to floss before or after brushing?
As you prefer. A team of scientists led by Dr. Claudia Silva studied this, and found that there was “no statistical difference between brush-floss and floss-brush”:
Flossing is tedious. How do we floss without flossing?
This is (mostly) about water-flossing! Which does for old-style floss what sonic toothbrushes to for old-style manual toothbrushes.
If you’re unfamiliar, it means using a device that basically power-washes your teeth, but with a very narrow high-pressure jet of water.
Do they work? Yes:
As for how it stacks up against traditional flossing, Liang et al. found:
❝In our previous single-outcome analysis, we concluded that interdental brushes and water jet devices rank highest for reducing gingival inflammation while toothpick and flossing rank last.
In this multioutcome Bayesian network meta-analysis with equal weight on gingival inflammation and bleeding-on-probing, the surface under the cumulative ranking curve was 0.87 for water jet devices and 0.85 for interdental brushes.
Water jet devices and interdental brushes remained the two best devices across different sets of weightings for the gingival inflammation and bleeding-on-probing. ❞
~ Journal of Evidence-Based Dental Practice
You may be wondering how safe it is if you have had dental work done, and, it appears to be quite safe, for example:
BDJ | Water-jet flossing: effect on composites
Want to try water-flossing?
Here are some examples on Amazon:
- Waterpik Complete Care 9.0 ← example of a top-end water-flossing device
- Philips Sonicare Power Flosser 3000 ← top-tier not-Waterpik-brand device
- INSMART Cordless Water Dental Flosser ← very low price and still average 4.5 star reviews, so in our opinion, a fine first choice
Bonus: if you haven’t tried interdental brushes, here’s an example for that
Enjoy!
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Related Posts
Rise And (Really) Shine!
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.
Q&A with 10almonds Subscribers!
Q: Would love to hear more ideas about effective first thing in the morning time management to get a great start on your day.
A: There are a lot of schools of thought about what’s best in this regard! Maybe we’ll do a main feature sometime. But some things that are almost universally agreed upon are:
- Prepare your to-do list the night before
- Have some sort of buffer between waking up and getting to productivity.
- For me (hi, your writer here) it’s my first coffee of the day. It’s not even about the caffeine, it’s about the ritual of it, it’s a marker that separates my night from the day and tells my brain what gear to get into.
- Others may like to exercise first thing in the morning
- For still yet others, it could be a shower, cold or otherwise
- Some people like a tall glass of lemon water to rehydrate after sleeping!
- If you take drinkable morning supplements such as this pretty awesome nootropic stack, it’s a great time for that and an excellent way to get the brain-juices flowing!
- When you do get to productivity: eat the frog first! What this means is: if eating a frog is the hardest thing you’ll have to do all day, do that first. Basically, tackle the most intimidating task first. That way, you won’t spend your day stressed/anxious and/or subconsciously wasting time in order to procrastinate and avoid it.
- Counterpart to the above: a great idea is to also plan something to look forward to when your working day is done. It doesn’t matter much what it is, provided it’s rewarding to you, that makes you keen to finish your tasks to get to it.
Have a question you’d like to see answered here? Hit reply to this email, or use the feedback widget at the bottom! We always love to hear from you
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The Most Anti Aging Exercise
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We’ve referenced this (excellent) video before, but never actually put it under the spotlight in one of these features, so here we go!
Deep squats
It’s about deep squats, also called Slav squats, Asian squats, sitting squats, resting squats, or various other names. However, fear not; you don’t need to be Slavic or Asian to do it; you just need to practice.
As for why this is called “anti-aging”, by the way, it’s because being able to get up off the ground is one of the main tests of age-related mobility decline, and if you can deep-squat comfortably, then you can do that easily. And so long as you continue being able to deep-squat comfortably, you’ll continue to be able to get up off the ground easily too, because you have the strength in the right muscles, as well as the suppleness, comfort with range of motion, and balance (those stabilizing muscles are used constantly in a deep squat, whereas Western lifestyle sitting leaves those muscles very neglected and thus atrophied).
Epidemiological note: chairs, couches, and assorted modern conveniences reduce the need for squatting in daily life, leading to stiffness in joints, muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Many adults in developed countries struggle with deep squats due to lack of use, not aging. Which is a problem, because a lack of full range of motion in joints causes wear and tear, leading to chronic pain and degenerative joint diseases. People in countries where squatting is a common resting position have lower incidences of osteoarthritis, for example—contrary to what some might expect, squatting does not harm joints but rather protects them from arthritis and knee pain. Strengthening leg muscles through squatting can alleviate knee pain, whereas knee pain is often worsened by inactivity.
Notwithstanding the thumbnail, which is showing an interim position, one’s feet should be flat on the ground, by the way, and one’s butt should be nearby, just a few inches off the ground (in other words, the position that we see her in for most of this video).
Troubleshooting: if you’re accustomed to sitting in chairs a lot, then this may be uncomfortable at first. Zuzka advises us to go gently, and/but gradually increase our range of motion and (equally importantly) duration in the resting position.
You can use a wall or doorway to partially support you, at first, if you struggle with mobility or balance. Just try to gradually use it less, until you’re comfortable deep-squatting with no support.
Since this is not an intrinsically very exciting exercise, once you build up the duration for which you’re comfortable deep-squatting, it can be good to get in the habit of “sitting” this way (i.e. deep squatting, still butt-off-the-floor, but doing the job of sitting) while doing other things such as working (if you have an appropriate work set-up for that*), reading, or watching TV.
*this is probably easiest with a laptop placed on an object/surface of appropriate height, such as a coffee table or such. As a bonus, having your hands in front of you while working will also bring your center of gravity forwards a bit, making the position easier and more comfortable to maintain. This writer (hi, it’s me) prefers her standing desk for work in general, with a nice ergonomic keyboard and all that, but if using a laptop from time to time, then squatting is a very good option.
In terms of working up duration, if you can only manage seconds to start with, that’s fine. Just do a few more seconds each time, until it’s 30, 60, 120, and so on until it’s 5 minutes, 10, 15, and so on.
You can even start that habit-forming while you’re still in the “seconds at a time” stage! You can deep-squat just for some seconds while you:
- pick up something from the floor
- check on something in the oven
- get something out of the bottom of the fridge
…etc!
For more on all this, plus many visual demonstrations including interim exercises to get you there if it’s difficult for you at first, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Mobility For Now & For Later: Train For The Marathon That Is Your Life!
Take care!
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Protein vs Sarcopenia
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Protein vs Sarcopenia
This is Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. A medical doctor, she’s board-certified in family medicine, and has also engaged in research and clinical practice in the fields of geriatrics and nutritional sciences.
A quick note…
We’re going to be talking a bit about protein metabolism today, and it’s worth noting that Dr. Lyon personally is vehemently against vegetarianism/veganism, and considers red meat to be healthy.
Scientific consensus on the other hand, holds that vegetarianism and veganism are fine for most people if pursued in an informed and mindful fashion, that white meat and fish are also fine for most people, and red meat is simply not.
If you’d like a recap on the science of any of that:
- Protein: How Much Do We Need, Really?
- Plant vs Animal Protein: Diversity is Key
- Do We Need Animal Products to be Healthy?
Nevertheless, if we look at the science that she provides, the advice is sound when applied to protein in general and without an undue focus on red meat.
How much protein is enough?
In our article linked above, we gave 1–2g/kg/day
Dr. Lyons gives the more specific 1.6g/kg/day for adults older than 40 (this is where sarcopenia often begins!) and laments that many sources offer 0.8g/kg.
To be clear, that “per kilogram” means per kilogram of your bodyweight. For Americans, this means dividing lbs by 2.2 to get the kg figure.
Why so much protein?
Protein is needed to rebuild not just our muscles, but also our bones, joint tissues, and various other parts of us:
We Are Such Stuff As Fish Are Made Of
Additionally, our muscles themselves are important for far more than just moving us (and other things) around.
As Dr. Lyon explains: sarcopenia, the (usually age-related) loss of muscle mass, does more than just make us frail; it also messes up our metabolism, which in turn messes up… Everything else, really. Because everything depends on that.
This is because our muscles themselves use a lot of our energy, and/but also store energy as glycogen, so having less of them means:
- getting a slower metabolism
- the energy that can’t be stored in muscle tissue gets stored somewhere else (like the liver, and/or visceral fat)
So, while for example the correlation between maintaining strong muscles and avoiding non-alcoholic fatty liver disease may not be immediately obvious, it is clear when one follows the metabolic trail to its inevitable conclusion.
Same goes for avoiding diabetes, heart disease, and suchlike, though those things are a little more intuitive.
How can we get so much protein?
It can seem daunting at first to get so much protein if you’re not used to it, especially as protein is an appetite suppressant, so you’ll feel full sooner.
It can especially seem daunting to get so much protein if you’re trying to avoid too many carbs, and here’s where Dr. Lyon’s anti-vegetarianism does have a point: it’s harder to get lean protein without meat/fish.
That said, “harder” does not mean “impossible” and even she acknowledges that lentils are great for this.
If you’re not vegetarian or vegan, collagen supplementation is a good way to make up any shortfall, by the way.
And for everyone, there are protein supplements available if we want them (usually based on whey protein or soy protein)
Anything else we need to do?
Yes! Eating protein means nothing if you don’t do any resistance work to build and maintain muscle. This can take various forms, and Dr. Lyon recommends lifting weights and/or doing bodyweight resistance training (calisthenics, Pilates, etc).
Here are some previous articles of ours, consistent with the above:
- Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)
- Overdone It? How To Speed Up Recovery After Exercise
- How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
- Exercises To Do (And Ones To Avoid) If You Have Osteoporosis
Take care!
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