Non-Alcohol Mouthwash vs Alcohol Mouthwash – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing non-alcohol mouthwash to alcohol mouthwash, we picked the alcohol.
Why?
Note: this is a contingent choice and is applicable to most, but not all, people.
In short, there has been some concern about alcohol mouthwashes increasing cancer risk, but research has shown this is only the case if you already have an increased risk of oral cancer (for example if you smoke, and/or have had an oral cancer before).
For those for whom this is not the case (for example, if you don’t smoke, and/or have no such cancer history), then best science currently shows that alcohol mouthwash does not cause any increased risk.
What about non-alcohol mouthwashes? Well, they have a different problem; they usually use chlorine-based chemicals like chlorhexidine or cetylpyridinium chloride, which are (exactly as the label promises) exceptionally good at killing oral bacteria.
(They’d kill us too, at higher doses, hence: swill and spit)
Unfortunately, much like the rest of our body, our mouth is supposed to have bacteria there and bad things happen when it doesn’t. In the case of our oral microbiome, cleaning it with such powerful antibacterial agents can kill our “good” bacteria along with the bad, which lowers the pH of our saliva (that’s bad; it means it is more acidic), and thus indirectly erodes tooth enamel.
You can read more about the science of all of the above (with references), here:
Toothpastes & Mouthwashes: Which Help And Which Harm?
Summary:
For most people, alcohol mouthwashes are a good way to avoid the damage that can be done by chlorhexidine in non-alcohol mouthwashes.
Here are some examples, but there will be plenty in your local supermarket:
Non-Alcohol, by Colgate | Alcohol, by Listerine
If you have had oral cancer, or if you smoke, then you may want to seek a third alternative (and also, please, stop smoking if you can).
Or, really, most people could probably skip mouthwashes, if you’ve good oral care already by other means. See also:
Toothpastes & Mouthwashes: Which Help And Which Harm?
(yes, it’s the same link as before, but we’re now drawing your attention to the fact it has information about toothpastes too)
If you do want other options though, might want to check out:
Less Common Oral Hygiene Options ← miswak sticks are especially effective
Take care!
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Walnuts vs Brazil Nuts – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing walnuts to Brazil nuts, we picked the walnuts.
Why?
Talking macros first, they are about equal in protein, carbs, fats, and fiber; their composition is almost identical in this regard. However, looking a little more closely at the fats, Brazil nuts have more than 2x the saturated fat, while walnuts have nearly 2x the polyunsaturated fat. So, we’ll declare the macros category a moderate win for walnuts.
The category of vitamins is not balanced; walnuts have more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B5, B6, B9, C, and choline, while Brazil nuts have more of vitamins B1 and E. A clear and easy win for walnuts.
The category of minerals is interesting, because of one mineral in particular. First let’s mention: walnuts have more iron and manganese, while Brazil nuts have more calcium, copper, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and selenium. Taken at face value, this is a clear win for Brazil nuts. However…
About that selenium… Specifically, it’s more than 391x higher, and a cup of Brazil nuts would give nearly 10,000x the recommended daily amount of selenium. Now, selenium is an essential mineral (needed for thyroid hormone production, for example), and at the RDA it’s good for good health. Your hair will be luscious and shiny. However, go much above that, and selenium toxicity becomes a thing, you may get sick, and it can cause your (luscious and shiny) hair to fall out. For this reason, it’s recommended to eat no more than 3–4 Brazil nuts per day.
There is one last consideration, and this is oxalates; walnuts are moderately high in oxalates (>50mg/100g) while Brazil nuts are very high in oxalates (>500mg/100g). This won’t affect most people at all, but if you have pre-existing kidney problems (including a history of kidney stones), you might want to go easy on oxalate-containing foods.
For most people, however, walnuts are a very healthy choice, and outshine Brazil nuts in most ways.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
Take care!
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Escape Self-Sabotage
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Stop Making The Same Mistakes
It’s easy to think that a self-destructive cycle is easy to avoid if you have no special will to self-destruction. However, the cycle is sneaky.
It’s sneaky because it can be passive, and/or omissions rather than actions, procrastinations rather than obvious acts of impulse, and so forth.
So, they’re often things that specifically aren’t there to see.
How to catch them
How often do you think “I wish I had [done xyz]” or “I wish I had [done yxz] sooner”?
Now, how often have you thought that about the same thing more than once? For example, “I should have kept up my exercise”.
For things like this, habit-trackers are a great way to, well, keep track of habits. If for example you planned to do a 10-minute exercise session daily but you’ve been postponing it since you got distracted on January the 2nd, then it’ll highlight that. See also:
How To Really Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits
Speaking of habits, this goes for other forms of procrastination, too. For example, if you are always slow to get medical check-ups, or renew your prescriptions, or get ready for some regularly-occurring thing in your schedule, then set a reminder in your preferred way (phone app, calendar on the wall, whatever) and when the appointed time arrives (to book the check-up, renew the prescription, do your taxes, whatever), do it on the day you set your reminder for, as a personal rule for you that you keep to, barring extreme calamity.
By “extreme calamity” we mean less “running late today” and more “house burned down”.
Digital traps
Bad habits can be insidious in other ways too, like getting sucked into social media scrolling (it is literally designed to do that to you; you are not immune modern programming hijacking evolutionary dopamine responses).
Setting a screentime limit (you can specify “just these apps” if you like) will help with this. On most devices, this feature includes a sticky notification in the notification bar, that’ll remind you “27 out of 30 minutes remaining” or whatever you set it for. That’ll remind you to do what you went there to do, instead of getting caught in the endless scroll (and if you went there to just browse, to do so briefly).
Here’s how to set that:
Instructions for iOS devices | Instructions for Android devices
Oh, and on the topic of social media? If you find yourself getting caught up in unproductive arguments on the Internet, try the three-response rule:
- You reply; they reply (no progress made)
- You reply; they reply (still no progress made)
- You reply; they reply (still yet no progress made)
You reply just one more time: “I have a personal rule that if I’m arguing on the Internet and no progress has been made after three replies, I don’t reply further—I find this is helpful to avoid a lot of time lost to pointless arguing that isn’t going anywhere. Best wishes.”
(and then stick to it, no matter how they try to provoke you; best is to just not look until at least the next day)
When “swept up in love” gets to one of those little whirlpools…
The same works in personal relationships, by the way. If for example you are arguing with a loved one and not making progress, it can be good if you both have a pre-arranged agreement that either of you can, up to once on any given day, invoke a “time-out” (e.g. 30 minutes, but you agree the time between you when you first make this standing policy) during which you will both keep out of the other’s way, and come back with a more productive head on (remembering that things go best when it’s you both vs the problem, rather than vs each other).
See also:
Seriously Useful Communication Skills: Conflict Resolution
What if the self-sabotaging cycle is active and apparent?
Well, that is less sneaky, but certainly no less serious, and sometimes moreso. An obvious example is drinking too much; this is often cyclical in nature. We wrote about this one previously:
That article’s alcohol-specific, but the same advices go for other harmful activities, including other substance abuse (which in turn includes binge-eating), as well psychological addictions (such as gambling, for example).
Finally…
If your destructive cycle is more of a rut you’ve got stuck in, a common advice is to change something, anything, to get out of the rut.
That can be very bad advice! Because sometimes the change you go for is absolutely not the change that was needed, and is rather just cracking under pressure and doing something impulsive.
Here’s one way to actively get out of a slump:
Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety
Note: you do not have to be depressed or anxious to do this. But the point is, it’s a tool you can use even if you are depressed and/or anxious, so it’s a good thing to try for getting out of most kinds of slumps.
And really finally, here’s a resource for, well, the title speaks for itself:
When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
Take care!
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How To Recover Quickly From A Stomach Bug
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How To Recover Quickly From A Stomach Bug
Is it norovirus, or did you just eat something questionable? We’re not doctors, let alone your doctors, and certainly will not try to diagnose from afar. And as ever, if unsure and/or symptoms don’t go away or do get worse, seek professional medical advice.
That out of the way, we can give some very good general-purpose tips for this one…
Help your immune system to help you
So far as you can, you want a happy healthy immune system. For the most part, we’d recommend the following things:
Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!
…but you probably don’t want to be exercising with a stomach bug, so perhaps sit that one out. Exercise is the preventative; what you need right now is rest.
Hydrate—but watch out
Hydration is critical for recovery especially if you have diarrhea, but drinking too much water too quickly will just make things worse. Great options for getting good hydration more slowly are:
- Peppermint tea
- (peppermint also has digestion-settling properties)
- Ginger tea
- See also: Ginger Does A Lot More Than You Think
- Broths
- These will also help replenish your sodium and other nutrients, gently. Chicken soup for your stomach, and all that. A great plant-based option is sweetcorn soup.
- By broths, we mean clear(ish) water-based soups. This is definitely not the time for creamier soups.
❝Milk and dairy products should be avoided for 24 to 48 hours as they can make diarrhea worse.
Initial dietary choices when refeeding should begin with soups and broth.❞
Source: American College of Gastroenterology
Other things to avoid
Caffeine stimulates the digestion in a way that can make things worse.
Fat is more difficult to digest, and should also be avoided until feeling better.
To medicate or not to medicate?
Loperamide (also known by the brand name Imodium) is generally safe when used as directed.
Click here to see its uses, dosage, side effects, and contraindications
Antibiotics may be necessary for certain microbial infections, but should not be anyone’s first-choice treatment unless advised otherwise by your doctor/pharmacist.
Note that if your stomach bug is not something that requires antibiotics, then taking antibiotics can actually make it worse as the antibiotics wipe out your gut bacteria that were busy helping fight whatever’s going wrong in there:
- Facing a new challenge: the adverse effects of antibiotics on gut microbiota and host immunity
- Antibiotics as major disruptors of gut microbiota
- Microbiotoxicity: antibiotic usage and its unintended harm to the microbiome
A gentler helper
If you want to give your “good bacteria” a hand while giving pathogens a harder time of it, then a much safer home remedy is a little (seriously, do not over do it; we are talking 1–2 tablespoons, or around 20ml) apple cider vinegar, taken diluted in a glass of water.
❝Several studies indicate apple cider vinegar (ACV)’s usefulness in lowering postprandial glycemic response, specifically by slowing of gastric motility❞
(Slowing gastric motility is usually exactly what you want in the case of a stomach bug, and apple cider vinegar)
See also:
- Antimicrobial activity of apple cider vinegar against Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Candida albicans
- Antibacterial apple cider vinegar eradicates methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus and resistant Escherichia coli
Take care!
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- Peppermint tea
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Scarcity Brain – by Michael Easter
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After a brief overview of theevolutionary psychology underpinnings of the scarcity brain, the author grounds the rest of this book firmly in the present. He explains how the scarcity loop hooks us and why we crave more, and what factors can increase or lessen its hold over us.
As for what things we are wired to consider “potentially scarce any time now” no matter how saturated we are in them, he looks at an array of categories, each with their nuances. From the obvious such as “food” and “stuff“, to understandable “information” and “happiness“, to abstractions like “influence“, he goes to many sources—experts of various kinds from around the world—to explore how we can know “how much is enough”, and—which can be harder—act accordingly.
The key, he argues, is not in simply wanting less, but in understanding why we crave more in the first place, get rid of our worst habits, and use what we already have, better.
Bottom line: if you feel a gnawing sense of needing more “to be on the safe side”, this book can help you to be a little more strategic (and at the same time, less stressed!) about that.
Click here to check out Scarcity Brain, and manage yours more mindfully!
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In Praise of Slowness – by Carl Honoré
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This isn’t just about “taking the time to smell the roses” although yes, that too. Rather, it’s mostly about looking at what drives us to speed everything up in the first place, and correcting where appropriate.
If your ancestors had time to eat fruit and lie in the sun, then why, with all of modern technology now available, are you harangued 16+ hours a day by the pressures of universally synchronized timepieces?
Honoré places a lot of the blame squarely on the industrial revolution; whereas previously our work would be limited by craftsmen who take a year to complete something, or the pace of animals in a field, now humans had to keep up with the very machines that were supposed to serve us—and it’s only got worse from there.
This book takes a tour of many areas affected by this artificial “need for speed”, and how it harms not just our work-life balance, but also our eating habits, the medical attention we get, and even our love lives.
The prescription is deceptively simple, “slow down”. But Honoré dedicates the final three chapters of the book to the “how” of this, when of course there’s a lot the outside world will not accommodate—but where we can slow down, there’s good to be gained.
Bottom line: if you’ve ever felt that you could get all of your life into order if you could just pause the outside world for a week or two, this is the book for you.
Click here to check out In Praise of Slowness, and make time for what matters most!
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The Autoimmune Cure – by Dr. Sara Gottfried
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We’ve featured Dr. Gottfried before, as well as another of her books (“Younger”), and this one’s a little different, and on the one hand very specific, while on the other hand affecting a lot of people.
You may be thinking, upon reading the subtitle, “this sounds like Dr. Gabor Maté’s ideas” (per: “When The Body Says No”), and 1) you’d be right, and 2) Dr. Gottfried does credit him in the introduction and refers back to his work periodically later.
What she adds to this, and what makes this book a worthwhile read in addition to Dr. Maté’s, is looking clinically at the interactions of the immune system and nervous system, but also the endocrine system (Dr. Gottfried’s specialty) and the gut.
Another thing she adds is more of a focus on what she writes about as “little-t trauma”, which is the kind of smaller, yet often cumulative, traumas that often eventually add up over time to present as C-PTSD.
While “stress increases inflammation” is not a novel idea, Dr. Gottfried takes it further, and looks at a wealth of clinical evidence to demonstrate the series of events that, if oversimplified, seem unbelievable, such as “you had a bad relationship and now you have lupus”—showing evidence for each step in the snowballing process.
The style is a bit more clinical than most pop-science, but still written to be accessible to laypersons. This means that for most of us, it might not be the quickest read, but it will be an informative and enlightening one.
In terms of practical use (and living up to its subtitle promise of “cure”), this book does also cover all sorts of potential remedial approaches, from the obvious (diet, sleep, supplements, meditation, etc) to the less obvious (ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, etc), covering the evidence so far as well as the pros and cons.
Bottom line: if you have or suspect you may have an autoimmune problem, and/or would just like to nip the risk of such in the bud (especially bearing in mind that the same things cause neuroinflammation and thus, putatively, depression and dementia too), then this is one for you.
Click here to check out the Autoimmune Cure, and take care of your body and mind!
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