Oh, Honey
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The Bee’s Knees?
If you’d like to pre-empt that runny nose, some say that local honey is the answer. The rationale is that bees visiting the local sources of pollen and making honey will introduce the same allergens to you in a non allergy-inducing fashion (the honey). The result? Inoculation against the allergens in question.
But does it work?
Researching this, we found a lot of articles saying there was no science to back it up.
And then! We found one solitary study from 2013, and the title was promising:
But we don’t stop at titles; that’s not the kind of newsletter we are. We pride ourselves on giving good information!
And it turned out, upon reading the method and the results, that:
- Both the control and test groups also took loratadine for the first 4 weeks of the study
- The test group additionally took 1g/kg bodyweight of honey, daily—so for example if you’re 165lb (75kg), that’s about 4 tablespoons per day
- The control group took the equivalent amount of honey-flavored syrup
- Both groups showed equal improvements by week 4
- The test group only showed continued improvements (over the control group) by week 8
The researchers concluded from this:
❝Honey ingestion at a high dose improves the overall and individual symptoms of AR, and it could serve as a complementary therapy for AR.❞
We at 10almonds concluded from this:
❝That’s a lot of honey to eat every day for months!❞
We couldn’t base an article on one study from a decade ago, though! Fortunately, we found a veritable honeypot of more recent research, in the form of this systematic review:
Read: The Potential Use Of Honey As A Remedy For Allergic Diseases
…which examines 13 key studies and 43 scientific papers over the course of 21 years. That’s more like it! This was the jumping-off point we needed into more useful knowledge.
We’re not going to cite all those here—we’re a health and productivity newsletter, not an academic journal of pharmacology, but we did sift through them so that you don’t have to, and:
The researchers (of that review) concluded:
❝Although there is limited evidence, some studies showed remarkable improvements against certain types of allergic illnesses and support that honey is an effective anti-allergic agent.❞
Our (10almonds team) further observations included:
- The research review notes that a lot of studies did not confirm which phytochemical compounds specifically are responsible for causing allergic reactions and/or alleviating such (so: didn’t always control for what we’d like to know, i.e. the mechanism of action)
- Some studies showed results radically different from the rest. The reviewers put this down to differences that were not controlled-for between studies, for example:
- Some studies used very different methods to others. There may be an important difference between a human eating a tablespoon of honey, and a rat having aerosolized honey shot up its nose, for instance. We put more weight to human studies than rat studies!
- Some kinds of honey (such as manuka) contain higher quantities of gallic acid which itself can relieve allergies by chemically inhibiting the release of histamine. In other words, never mind pollen-based inoculations… it’s literally an antihistamine.
- Certain honeys (such as tualang, manuka and gelam) contain higher quantities of quercetin. What’s quercetin? It’s a plant flavonoid that a recent study has shown significantly relieves symptoms of seasonal allergies. So again, it works, just not for the reason people say!
In summary:
The “inoculation by local honey” thing specifically may indeed remain “based on traditional use only” for now.
But! Honey as a remedy for allergies, especially manuka honey, has a growing body of scientific evidence behind it.
Bottom line:
If you like honey, go for it (manuka seems best)! It may well relieve your symptoms.
If you don’t, off-the-shelf antihistamines remain a perfectly respectable option.
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How Are You, Really?
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.
How Are You, Really? The Free NHS Health Test
We took this surprisingly incisive 10-minute test from the UK’s famous National Health Service—the test is part of the “Better Health” programme, a free-to-all (yes, even those from/in other countries) initiative aimed at keeping people healthy enough to have less need of medical attention.
As one person who took the test wrote:
❝I didn’t expect that a government initiative would have me talking about how I need to keep myself going to be there for the people I love, let alone that a rapid-pace multiple-choice test would elicit these responses and give personalized replies in turn, but here we are❞
It goes beyond covering the usual bases, in that it also looks at what’s most important to you, and why, and what might keep you from doing the things you want/need to do for your health, AND how those obstacles can be overcome.
Pretty impressive for a 10-minute test!
Is Your Health Above Average Already? Take the Free 10-minute NHS test now!
How old are you, in your heart?
Poetic answers notwithstanding (this writer sometimes feels so old, and yet also much younger than she is), there’s a biological answer here, too.
Again free for the use of all*, here’s a heart age calculator.
*It is suitable for you if you are aged 30–95, and do not have a known complicating cardiovascular disease.
It will ask you your (UK) postcode; just leave that field blank if you’re not in the UK; it’ll be fine.
How Old Are You, In Your Heart? Take the Free 10-minute NHS test now!
(Neither test requires logging into anything, and they do not ask for your email address. The tests are right there on the page, and they give the answers right there on the page, immediately)
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What Most People Don’t Know About Blood Pressure
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Do you know the symptoms of high blood pressure?
Challenge yourself: take a moment to list them in your head / count them on your fingers, and then scroll down to see what you got right!
👇
This way
👇
Keep going
👇
All the way
👇
Nearly there
👇
Drumroll please
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The answer is…
No, you don’t know the symptoms of high blood pressure 😉
But don’t worry, nobody else does, either:
❝High blood pressure usually has no warning signs or symptoms, and many people do not know they have it.
Measuring your blood pressure is the only way to know whether you have high blood pressure.❞
Source: CDC | About High Blood Pressure
And, that’s a critical thing that most people don’t know about high blood pressure—in the sense of: most people don’t know that it has no symptoms.
Which is a problem, because it means that often the first people learn about it is when they sustain some vascular injury as a result (stroke, heart attack, kidney disease, etc).
And, about that kidney disease?
- Good news: the human body can function for a fair while on a kidney that’s been reduced to a fraction of its functionality
- Bad news: that’s very bad for you and simply means you now have a second serious problem of which you’re unaware
For more on this, check out: Are your Kidneys Ok? Detect Early To Protect Kidney Health (Here’s How)
And for what to do about it: Keeping Your Kidneys Healthy (Far More Than Just Hydration)
Most people also don’t know what high blood pressure is
Well, they know it conceptually, but not numerically—based on a US survey that found, in answer to a multiple choice question on the topic:
- 25% believed that anything under 140/90 was fine
- 18% considered 130/90 to be the threshold
- 16% thought it was 140/80
- 13% got it right, at 130/80
Read in full: Most Americans cannot identify what counts as high blood pressure
In the same survey, by the way, only 39% knew that high blood pressure has no symptoms.
However, that 130/80 threshold for high blood pressure doesn’t mean that 129/79 is fine.
120/79, for example counts as elevated blood pressure.
Rather than take up undue space here, we’ll mention that you should aim for under 120/80, and for the rest, we’ll just quickly link to…
Blood Pressure Readings Explained (With A Colorful Chart)
More details of specifics, at:
Hypotension | Normal | Elevated | Stage 1 | Stage 2 | Danger zone
And as for how to measure it yourself without getting it wrong, check out:
Wrong Arm Position = Wrong Measurement Of Blood Pressure (Here’s How To Get It Right)
How to lower it
We wrote a main feature on this before, because a lot of people focus on the wrong thing:
Hypertension: Factors Far More Relevant Than Salt
If you’re already taking care of those things, and want to really optimize your blood-pressure-lowering efforts, check out:
What is the best workout to lower your blood pressure? ← counterintuitively, it’s isometric exercises (i.e. exercises where you hold a position without moving, such as wall sits or abdominal planks)
And if you are perchance a postmenopausal woman, there may be an extra reason to enjoy mangos specifically:
Short-Term Cardiometabolic Response to Mango Intake in Postmenopausal Women
Enjoy!
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Creatine’s Brain Benefits Increase With Age
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.
Creatine is generally thought of as a body-building supplement, and for most young people, that’s all it is. But with extra years come extra advantages, and creatine starts to confer cognitive benefits. Dr. Brad Stanfield shares the science:
What the science says
Although 95% of creatine is stored in muscles, 5% is found in the brain, where it helps produce energy needed for brain processes (and that’s a lot of energy—about 20% of our body’s metabolic base rate is accounted for by our brain).
In this video, Dr. Stanfield shares studies showing creatine improving memory, especially in older adults—and also in vegetarians/vegans, since creatine is found in meat (just like in our own bodies, which are also made of meat) and not in plants. On the meta-analysis level, a systematic review concluded that creatine supplementation indeed improves memory, with stronger effects observed in older adults.
Dr. Stanfield also addresses the safety concerns about creatine, which, on balance, are not actually supported by the science (of course, always consult your own doctor to be sure, as your case could vary).
As for dosage, 5g/day is recommended. For more on all of this plus links to the studies cited, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Creatine: Very Different For Young & Old People
Take care!
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3 Health Things A Lot Of People Are Getting Wrong (Don’t Make These Mistakes)
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.
It’s time for our weekly health news roundup, and this week we’re putting the spotlight on…
Don’t Dabble In dubious diabetes Drugs
Diabetes drugs are in hot demand, both for actual diabetics and also for people who want to lose weight and/or generally improve their metabolic health. However, there are a lot of claims out there for products that simply do not work and/or are outright fakes, as well as claims for supplements that are known to have a real hypoglycemic effect (such as berberine) but the supplements in question are not regulated, so it can be hard to control for quality, to ensure you are really getting what it says on the label.
As for the prescription drugs specifically (such as metformin, or GLP-1 RAs): there are online black market and gray market pharmacies who offer to sell you prescription drugs either…
- no questions asked (black market), or
- basic questions asked (e.g. “are you diabetic?”), and a doctor with flexible morals will rubber-stamp the prescription on the basis of your answers (gray market).
The problem with these is that once again they may be fakes and there is practically no accountability (these sorts of online pharmacies come and go as quickly as street vendors). Furthermore, even if they are real, self-medicating in this fashion without the requisite expert knowledge can result in messing up dosages, which can cause all sorts of issues, not least of all, death.
Read in full: The dangers of fraudulent diabetes products and how to avoid them
Related: Metformin For Weight-Loss & More
There is no “just the flu”
It’s easy, and very socially normal, to dismiss flu—which has killed millions—as “just the flu”.
However, flu deaths have surpassed COVID deaths all so recently this year (you are mindful that COVID is still out and killing people, yes? Governments declaring the crisis over doesn’t make the virus pack up and retire), and because it’s peaking a little late (it had seemed to be peaking just after new year, which would be normal, but it’s enjoying a second larger surge now), people are letting their guard down more.
Thus, getting the current flu vaccination is good, if available (we know it’s not fun, but neither is being hospitalized by flu), and either way, taking care of all the usual disease-avoidance and immune-boosting strategies (see our “related” link for those).
Read in full: Report indicates this flu season is the worst in a decade
Related: Why Some People Get Sick More (And How To Not Be One Of Them)
The hospital washbasins that give you extra bugs
First they came for the hand-dryer machines, and we did not speak up because those things are so noisy.
But more seriously: just like hand-dryer machines are now fairly well-known to incubate and spread germs at impressive rates, washbasins have come under scrutiny because the process goes:
- Person A has germs on their hands, and washes them (yay)
- The germs are now in the washbasin (soap causes them to slide off, but doesn’t usually kill them)
- Person B has germs on their hands, and washes them
- The splashback from the water hitting the washbasin distributes person A’s germs onto person B
- Not just their hands, which would be less of a problem (they are getting washed right now, after all), but also their face, because yes, even with flow restrictors, the splashback produces respirable-sized bioaerosols that travel far and easily
In other words: it’s not just the visible/tangible splashback you need to be aware of, but also, that which you can’t see or feel, too.
Read in full: Researchers warn about germ splashback from washbasins
Related: The Truth About Handwashing
Take care!
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The Pain Reprocessing Therapy Workbook – by Vanessa Blackstone
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The author, a clinical consultant who trains practitioners in pain reprocessing therapy (PRT), lays out for us the basics of what we need to know to, as the subtitle promises, use the brain’s neuroplasticity to break the cycle of chronic pain.
She explains how when pain works correctly, it is a useful messenger saying “hey, something is wrong here”. It’s the body’s “check engine” light. However, in the case of chronic pain, it’s no longer helpful, which can be for one or more of several reasons, such as:
- The message is just plain wrong (nerves misfiring).
- There is an underlying problem, but it can’t be fixed, so further pain is not helpful.
- The pain is actually doing its job just fine, indicating a real, fixable problem, but the bad news is that your automatic response to that pain is an overcompensation that will now cause a different pain somewhere else, and so on.
PRT is a way to gently interrupt that process by changing how your brain, and thus your body, responds to pain signals. This means that for those three scenarios we just mentioned:
- We can now suffer less than previously.
- We can now note “ok, message received”, and dial down the continued pain signals.
- We can now note “ok, message received”, and tend to the thing without letting the pain cause our body to create a different problem somewhere else.
While all three are helpful, the latter item is the one that really lives up to the “break the cycle of chronic pain” promise, since referred pain (as it is called) is perhaps the most common source of enduring misery for people with many types of chronic pain, who started off with one source of pain, and then ended up with several more.
The style of the book is, as per the title, a workbook. It gives us explanations, and then exercises (mostly psychological exercises), giving us a roadmap to either a pain-free life or, at least, a life in which whatever pain remains is much more manageable, allowing us to go about our lives without everything being ten times as exhausting.
Bottom line: if you or a loved one has chronic pain, this book can help avoid a lot of needless suffering.
Click here to check out The Pain Reprocessing Therapy Workbook, and end the cycle of chronic pain!
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How To Walk Away From Alzheimer’s
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We have written before avoiding Alzheimer’s in many different ways, for example:
Alzheimer’s Causative Factors To Avoid
…and regular readers will also be aware of our dictum “what’s good for the heart, is good for the brain”, which is because the heart feeds the brain, with oxygen and nutrients, and also ultimately clears away detritus like beta-amyloid (associated with Alzheimer’s).
For much more detail on this, see: What’s Your Vascular Dementia Risk? ← includes actual numbers and a risk calculator tool and things like that
So, it’s no surprise of course that exercise is protective against dementia, and as per the above, typically the most important thing here is heart health, so getting regular cardiovascular exercise, such walking, running, or dancing is great. Cycling too. Things like that.
Beyond cardio
First, some background. A previous (2023) study concluded:
❝Among older adults, more time spent in sedentary behaviors was significantly associated with higher incidence of all-cause dementia. Future research is needed to determine whether the association between sedentary behavior and risk of dementia is causal.❞
Source: Sedentary Behavior and Incident Dementia Among Older Adults
We’re not going to go deeply into that paper, because our interest today is about the answer to that call of “future research is needed”, because a team of scientists have now delivered on that.
In terms of how recent this new research is, it was published today (at time of writing), in the Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
In it, Dr. Marissa Gogniat et al. examined the relationship between sedentary behavior and cognitive decline and neurodegeneration, in 404 adults aged 50+.
A note on “cognitive decline” and “neurodegeneration”: those two terms are often used interchangeably, because they are usually strongly associated with each other so if one goes up or down then so does the other, but technically:
- cognitive decline = a decline of cognitive abilities, as measured by cognitive performance tests
- neurodegeneration = physical degeneration of neural tissue, typically specifically in the brain, as measured by various physical markers of neurodegeneration (tests range from brain scans to blood markers to biopsies and more, but the point is that it’s all physical stuff)
While based on the one-line summary we gave (“examined the relationship between sedentary behavior and cognitive decline / neurodegeneration”), this can sound a bit like a “examined whether water is wet” study, but in fact it becomes interesting when physical exercise is controlled for, since they found:
❝Reducing your risk for Alzheimer’s disease is not just about working out once a day. Minimizing the time spent sitting, even if you do exercise daily, reduces the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease.❞
~ Dr. Marissa Gogniat
Too vague? Here’s the less vague version:
❝In cross-sectional models, greater sedentary time related to a smaller AD-neuroimaging signature (β = -0.0001, p = 0.01) and worse episodic memory (β = -0.001, p = 0.003). Associations differed by APOE-ε4 status. In longitudinal models, greater sedentary time related to faster hippocampal volume reductions (β = -0.1, p = 0.008) and declines in naming (β = -0.001, p = 0.03) and processing speed (β = -0.003, p = 0.02; β = 0.01, p = 0.01).❞
In other words:
- Those are very significant findings, statistically speaking; the causal association cannot be reasonably denied without some strong new evidence for why
- Greater sedentary behavior is related to neurodegeneration and worse cognition.
- Sedentary behavior is an independent* risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.
- Associations differed by APOE-ε4 carrier status in cross-sectional models.
*as in, the sedentary risk factor stands (so to speak) regardless of whether you exercise a lot
With regard to “Associations differed by APOE-ε4 carrier status in cross-sectional models.”, that’s a little complicated, as …
❝Interestingly, we only found a sedentary time x APOE-ε4 status interaction on occipital volume longitudinally (which did not survive correction for multiple comparisons) and no interactions on cognition. The significant effect on occipital lobe volume was driven by APOE-ε4 non-carriers, which does not align with our cross-sectional findings. APOE-ε4 carriers are thought to have accelerated gray matter volume loss, starting possibly in middle age. Therefore, while increased sedentary time may impact gray matter volume among APOE-ε4 carriers, this effect may be masked by the cumulative effect of APOE-ε4 on brain volume over the lifespan that is captured at baseline.❞
In other words: in all likelihood, having the APOE-ε4 mutation probably means it’s extra important for you to not be sedentary in your lifestyle, and (good news) being non-sedentary is probably disproportionately impactful for you in a positive way, but (bad news) the APOE-ε4 mutation causes such an increased risk already, that it’s difficult to 100% ascertain that statistically, without larger samples starting earlier in life.
You can read the paper in full here:
“What if have to spend a lot of time sitting down?”
A valid question, relevant for many.
For this, check out:
Stand Up For Your Health (Or Don’t) ← our main feature on this also includes more things you can do if you must sit, to make sitting less bad!
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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