Nutrivore – by Dr. Sarah Ballantyne
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.
The core idea of this book is that foods can be assigned a numerical value according to their total nutritional value, and that this number can be used to guide a person’s diet such that we will eat, in aggregate, a diet that is more nutritious. So far, so simple.
What Dr. Ballantyne also does, besides explaining and illustrating this system (there are chapters explaining the calculation system, and appendices with values), is also going over what to consider important and what we can let slide, and what things we might need more of to address a wide assortment of potential health concerns. And yes, this is definitely a “positive diet” approach, i.e. it focuses on what to add in, not what to cut out.
The premise of the “positive diet” approach is simple, by the way: if we get a full set of good nutrients, we will be satisfied and not crave unhealthy food.
She also offers a lot of helpful “rules of thumb”, and provides a variety of cheat-sheets and suchlike to make things as easy as possible.
There’s also a recipes section! Though, it’s not huge and it’s probably not necessary, but it’s just one more “she’s thinking of everything” element.
Bottom line: if you’d like a single-volume “Bible of” nutrition-made-easy, this is a very usable tome.
Click here to check out Nutrivore, and start filling up your diet!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
The Daily Stoic – by Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman
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.
What’s this, a philosophy book in a health and productivity newsletter? Well, look at it this way: Aristotle basically wrote the “How To Win Friends And Influence People” of his day, and Plato before him wrote a book about management.
In this (chiefly modern!) book, we see what the later Stoic philosophers had to say about getting the most out of life—which is also what we’re about, here at 10almonds!
We tend to use the word “stoic” in modern English to refer to a person who is resolute in the face of hardship. The traditional meaning does encompass that, but also means a lot more: a whole, rounded, philosophy of life.
Philosophy in general is not an easy thing into which to “dip one’s toe”. No matter where we try to start, it seems, it turns out there were a thousand other things we needed to read first!
This book really gets around that. The format is:
- There’s a theme for each month
- Each month has one lesson per day
- Each daily lesson starts with some words from a renowned stoic philosopher, and then provides commentary on such
- The commentary provides a jumping-off point and serves as a prompt to actually, genuinely, reflect and apply the ideas.
Unlike a lot of “a year of…” day-by-day books, this is not light reading, by the way, and you are getting a weighty tome for your money.
But, the page-length daily lessons are indeed digestible—which, again, is what we like at 10almonds!
Share This Post
What happens in my brain when I get a migraine? And what medications can I use to treat it?
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.
Migraine is many things, but one thing it’s not is “just a headache”.
“Migraine” comes from the Greek word “hemicrania”, referring to the common experience of migraine being predominantly one-sided.
Some people experience an “aura” preceding the headache phase – usually a visual or sensory experience that evolves over five to 60 minutes. Auras can also involve other domains such as language, smell and limb function.
Migraine is a disease with a huge personal and societal impact. Most people cannot function at their usual level during a migraine, and anticipation of the next attack can affect productivity, relationships and a person’s mental health.
What’s happening in my brain?
The biological basis of migraine is complex, and varies according to the phase of the migraine. Put simply:
The earliest phase is called the prodrome. This is associated with activation of a part of the brain called the hypothalamus which is thought to contribute to many symptoms such as nausea, changes in appetite and blurred vision.
Next is the aura phase, when a wave of neurochemical changes occur across the surface of the brain (the cortex) at a rate of 3–4 millimetres per minute. This explains how usually a person’s aura progresses over time. People often experience sensory disturbances such as flashes of light or tingling in their face or hands.
In the headache phase, the trigeminal nerve system is activated. This gives sensation to one side of the face, head and upper neck, leading to release of proteins such as CGRP (calcitonin gene-related peptide). This causes inflammation and dilation of blood vessels, which is the basis for the severe throbbing pain associated with the headache.
Finally, the postdromal phase occurs after the headache resolves and commonly involves changes in mood and energy.
What can you do about the acute attack?
A useful way to conceive of migraine treatment is to compare putting out campfires with bushfires. Medications are much more successful when applied at the earliest opportunity (the campfire). When the attack is fully evolved (into a bushfire), medications have a much more modest effect.
Aspirin
For people with mild migraine, non-specific anti-inflammatory medications such as high-dose aspirin, or standard dose non-steroidal medications (NSAIDS) can be very helpful. Their effectiveness is often enhanced with the use of an anti-nausea medication.
Triptans
For moderate to severe attacks, the mainstay of treatment is a class of medications called “triptans”. These act by reducing blood vessel dilation and reducing the release of inflammatory chemicals.
Triptans vary by their route of administration (tablets, wafers, injections, nasal sprays) and by their time to onset and duration of action.
The choice of a triptan depends on many factors including whether nausea and vomiting is prominent (consider a dissolving wafer or an injection) or patient tolerability (consider choosing one with a slower onset and offset of action).
As triptans constrict blood vessels, they should be used with caution (or not used) in patients with known heart disease or previous stroke.
Gepants
Some medications that block or modulate the release of CGRP, which are used for migraine prevention (which we’ll discuss in more detail below), also have evidence of benefit in treating the acute attack. This class of medication is known as the “gepants”.
Gepants come in the form of injectable proteins (monoclonal antibodies, used for migraine prevention) or as oral medication (for example, rimegepant) for the acute attack when a person has not responded adequately to previous trials of several triptans or is intolerant of them.
They do not cause blood vessel constriction and can be used in patients with heart disease or previous stroke.
Ditans
Another class of medication, the “ditans” (for example, lasmiditan) have been approved overseas for the acute treatment of migraine. Ditans work through changing a form of serotonin receptor involved in the brain chemical changes associated with the acute attack.
However, neither the gepants nor the ditans are available through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) for the acute attack, so users must pay out-of-pocket, at a cost of approximately A$300 for eight wafers.
What about preventing migraines?
The first step is to see if lifestyle changes can reduce migraine frequency. This can include improving sleep habits, routine meal schedules, regular exercise, limiting caffeine intake and avoiding triggers such as stress or alcohol.
Despite these efforts, many people continue to have frequent migraines that can’t be managed by acute therapies alone. The choice of when to start preventive treatment varies for each person and how inclined they are to taking regular medication. Those who suffer disabling symptoms or experience more than a few migraines a month benefit the most from starting preventives.
Almost all migraine preventives have existing roles in treating other medical conditions, and the physician would commonly recommend drugs that can also help manage any pre-existing conditions. First-line preventives include:
- tablets that lower blood pressure (candesartan, metoprolol, propranolol)
- antidepressants (amitriptyline, venlafaxine)
- anticonvulsants (sodium valproate, topiramate).
Some people have none of these other conditions and can safely start medications for migraine prophylaxis alone.
For all migraine preventives, a key principle is starting at a low dose and increasing gradually. This approach makes them more tolerable and it’s often several weeks or months until an effective dose (usually 2- to 3-times the starting dose) is reached.
It is rare for noticeable benefits to be seen immediately, but with time these drugs typically reduce migraine frequency by 50% or more.
‘Nothing works for me!’
In people who didn’t see any effect of (or couldn’t tolerate) first-line preventives, new medications have been available on the PBS since 2020. These medications block the action of CGRP.
The most common PBS-listed anti-CGRP medications are injectable proteins called monoclonal antibodies (for example, galcanezumab and fremanezumab), and are self-administered by monthly injections.
These drugs have quickly become a game-changer for those with intractable migraines. The convenience of these injectables contrast with botulinum toxin injections (also effective and PBS-listed for chronic migraine) which must be administered by a trained specialist.
Up to half of adolescents and one-third of young adults are needle-phobic. If this includes you, tablet-form CGRP antagonists for migraine prevention are hopefully not far away.
Data over the past five years suggest anti-CGRP medications are safe, effective and at least as well tolerated as traditional preventives.
Nonetheless, these are used only after a number of cheaper and more readily available first-line treatments (all which have decades of safety data) have failed, and this also a criterion for their use under the PBS.
Mark Slee, Associate Professor, Clinical Academic Neurologist, Flinders University and Anthony Khoo, Lecturer, Flinders University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Share This Post
Rethinking Diabetes – by Gary Taubes
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.
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!
Share This Post
Related Posts
Calisthenics for Beginners – by Matt Schifferle
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.
For those who are curious to take up calisthenics, for its famed benefit to many kinds of health, this is a great starter-book.
First, what kind of benefits can we expect? Lots, but most critically:
- Greater mobility (as a wide range of movements is practiced, some of them stretchy)
- Cardiovascular fitness (calisthenics can be performed as a form of High Intensity Impact Training, HIIT)
- Improved muscle-tone (because these are bodyweight strength-training exercises—have you seen a gymnast’s body?)
- Denser bones (strong muscles can’t be built on weak bones, so the body compensates by strengthening them)
A lot of the other benefits stem from those, ranging from reduced risk of stroke, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, etc, to improved mood, more energy, better sleep, and generally all things that come with a decent, rounded, exercise regime.
Schifferle explains not just the exercises, but also the principles, so that we understand what we’re doing and why. Understanding improves motivation, adherence, and—often—form. Exercise diagrams are clear, and have active muscle-groups highlighted and color-coded for extra clarity.
As well as explaining exercises individually, he includes three programs, increasing in intensity. He also offers adjustments to make exercises easier or more challenging, depending on the current condition of your body.
The book’s not without its limitations—it may be a little male-centric for some readers, for instance—but all in all, it’s a very strong introduction to calisthenics… Enough to get anyone up and running, so to speak!
Get started with “Calisthenics for Beginners” from Amazon today!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
Singledom & Healthy Longevity
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.
Statistically, those who live longest, do so in happy, fulfilling, committed relationships.
Note: happy, fulfilling, committed relationships. Less than that won’t do. Your insurance company might care about your marital status for its own sake, but your actual health doesn’t—it’s about the emotional safety and security that a good, healthy, happy, fulfilling relationship offers.
We wrote about this here:
Only One Kind Of Relationship Promotes Longevity This Much!
But that’s not the full story
For a start, while being in a happy fulfilling committed relationship statistically adds healthy life years, being in a relationship that falls short of those adjectives certainly does not. See also:
Relationships: When To Stick It Out & When To Call It Quits
But also, life satisfaction steadily improves with age, for single people (the results are more complicated for partnered people—probably because of the range of difference in quality of relationships). At least, this held true in this large (n=6,188) study of people aged 40–85 years:
❝With advancing age, partnership status became less predictive of loneliness and the satisfaction with being single increased. Among later-born cohorts, the association between partnership status and loneliness was less strong than among earlier-born cohorts. Later-born single people were more satisfied with being single than their earlier-born counterparts.❞
Note that this does mean that while life satisfaction indeed improves with age for single people, that’s a generalized trend, and the greatest life satisfaction within this set of singles comes hand-in-hand with being single by choice rather than by perceived obligation, i.e., those who are “single and not looking” will generally be the most content, and this contentedness will improve with age, but for those who are “single and looking”, in that case it’s the younger people who have it better, likely due to a greater sense of having plenty of time.
For that matter, gender plays a role; this large survey of singles found that (despite the popular old pop-up ads advising that “older women in your area are looking to date”), in reality older single women were the least likely to actively look for a partner:
See: A Profile Of Single Americans
…which also shows that about half of single Americans are “not looking”, and of those who are, about half are open to a serious relationship, though this is more common under the age of 40, while being over the age of 40 sees more people looking only for something casual.
Take-away from this section: being single only decreases life satisfaction if one doesn’t enjoy being single, and even then, and increases it if one does enjoy being single.
But that’s about life satisfaction, not longevity
We found no studies specifically into longevity of singledom, only the implications that may be drawn from the longevity of partnered people.
However, there is a lot of research that shows it’s not being single that kills, it’s being socially isolated. It’s a function of neurodegeneration from a lack of conversation, and it’s a function of what happens when someone slips in the shower and is found a week later. Things like that.
For example: Is Living Alone “Aging Alone”? Solitary Living, Network Types, and Well-Being
What if you are alone and don’t want to be?
We’ve not, at time of writing, written dating advice in our Psychology Sunday section, but this writer’s advice is:don’t even try.
That’s not nihilism or even cynicism, by the way; it’s actually a kind of optimism. The trick is just to let them come to you.
(sample size of one here, but this writer has never looked for a relationship in her life, they’ve always just found me, and now that I’m widowed and intend to remain single, I still get offers—and no, I’m not a supermodel, nor rich, nor anything like that)
Simply: instead of trying to find a partner, just work on expanding your social relationships in general (which is much easier, because the process is something you can control, whereas the outcome of trying to find a suitable partner is not), and if someone who’s right for you comes along, great! If not, then well, at least you have a flock of friends now, and who knows what new unexpected romance may lie around the corner.
As for how to do that,
How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
In Defense of Food – by Michael Pollan
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.
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.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails: