Outsmart Your Pain – by Dr. Christiane Wolf
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Dr. Wolf is a physician turned mindfulness teacher. As such, and holding an MD as well as a PhD in psychosomatic medicine, she knows her stuff.
A lot of what she teaches is mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), but this book is much more specific than that. It doesn’t promise you won’t continue to experience pain—in all likelihood you will—but it does change the relationship with pain, and this greatly lessens the suffering and misery that comes with it.
For many, the most distressing thing about pain is not the sensation itself, but how crippling it can be—getting in the way of life, preventing enjoyment of other things, and making every day a constant ongoing exhausting battle… And every night, a “how much rest am I actually going to be able to get, and in what condition will I wake up, and how will I get through tomorrow?” stress-fest.
Dr. Wolf helps the reader to navigate through all these challenges and more; minimize the stress, maximize the moments of respite, and keep pain’s interference with life to a minimum. Each chapter addresses different psychological aspects of chronic pain management, and each comes with specific mindfulness meditations to explore the new ideas learned.
The style is personal and profound, while coming from a place of deep professional understanding as well as compassion.
Bottom line: if you’ve been looking for a life-ring to help you reclaim your life, this one could be it; we wholeheartedly recommend it.
Click here to check out Outsmart Your Pain, and recover the beauty and joy of life!
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Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It – by Gary Taubes
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We’ve previously reviewed Taubes’ “The Case Against Sugar“. What does this one bring differently?
Mostly, it’s a different focus. Unsurprisingly, Taubes’ underlying argument is the same: sugar is the biggest dietary health hazard we face. However, this book looks at it specifically through the lens of weight loss, or avoiding weight gain.
Taubes argues for low-carb in general; he doesn’t frame it specifically as the ketogenic diet here, but that is what he is advocating. However, he also acknowledges that not all carbs are created equal, and looks at several categories that are relatively better or worse for our insulin response, and thus, fat management.
If the book has a fault it’s that it does argue a bit too much for eating large quantities of meat, based on Weston Price’s outdated and poorly-conducted research. However, if one chooses to disregard that, the arguments for a low-carb diet for weight management remain strong.
Bottom line: if you’d like to cut some fat without eating less (or exercising more), this book offers a good, well-explained guide for doing so.
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Fruit, Fiber, & Leafy Greens… On A Low-FODMAP Diet!
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Fiber For FODMAP-Avoiders
First, let’s quickly cover: what are FODMAPs?
FODMAPs are fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols.
In plainer English: they’re carbohydrates that are resistant to digestion.
This is, for most people most of the time, a good thing, for example:
When Is A Fiber Not A Fiber? When It’s A Resistant Starch.
Not for everyone…
However, if you have inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS), including ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, or similar, then suddenly a lot of common dietary advice gets flipped on its head:
While digestion-resistant carbohydrates making it to the end parts of our digestive tract are good for our bacteria there, in the case of people with IBS or similar, it can be a bit too good for our bacteria there.
Which can mean gas (a natural by-product of bacterial respiration) accumulation, discomfort, water retention (as the pseudo-fiber draws water in and keeps it), and other related symptoms, causing discomfort, and potentially disease such as diarrhea.
Again: for most people this is not so (usually: quite the opposite; resistant starches improve things down there), but for those for whom it’s a thing, it’s a Big Bad Thing™.
Hold the veg? Hold your horses.
A common knee-jerk reaction is “I will avoid fruit and veg, then”.
Superficially, this can work, as many fruit & veg are high in FODMAPs (as are fermented dairy products, by the way).
However, a diet free from fruit and veg is not going to be healthy in any sustainable fashion.
There are, however, options for low-FODMAP fruit & veg, such as:
Fruits: bananas (if not overripe), kiwi, grapefruit, lemons, limes, melons, oranges, passionfruit, strawberries
Vegetables: alfalfa, bell peppers, bok choy, carrots, celery, cucumbers, eggplant, green beans, kale, lettuce, olives, parsnips, potatoes (and sweet potatoes, yams etc), radishes, spinach, squash, tomatoes*, turnips, zucchini
*our stance: botanically it’s a fruit, but culinarily it’s a vegetable.
For more on the science of this, check out:
Strategies for Producing Low FODMAPs Foodstuffs: Challenges and Perspectives ← table 2 is particularly informative when it comes to the above examples, and table 3 will advise about…
Bonus
Grains: oats, quinoa, rice, tapioca
…and wheat if the conditions in table 3 (linked above) are satisfied
(worth mentioning since grains also get a bad press when it comes to IBS, but that’s mostly because of wheat)
See also: Gluten: What’s The Truth?
Enjoy!
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The Hidden Risk of Stretching: Avoiding Hamstring Injuries in Yoga
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What is Yoga Butt
Have you ever experienced a mysterious pain while stretching, or perhaps during yoga? You might be dealing with “yoga butt,” a common—although rarely discussed—injury. In the below video, the Lovely Liv from Livinleggings shares her journey of discovering, and overcoming, “yoga butt”.
Dealing With Yoga Butt
Yoga butt, or proximal hamstring tendinopathy, occurs when the hamstrings are overstretched without adequate strengthening. Many yoga poses help stretch the hamstrings, but often don’t focus on strengthening said hamstrings; this imbalance is what can lead to damage over time.
To help prevent Yoga butt, it’s essential to balance stretching with strengthening. You can look into incorporating hamstring-strengthening exercises like Romanian deadlifts, hamstring curls, and modified yoga poses into your routine.
(If you’re new to strengthening exercises, we recommend reading Women’s Strength Training Anatomy Workouts or Strength Training for Seniors).
Watch the full video to learn more and hopefully protect yourself from long-term injuries:
Let us know your thoughts, and whether you have any other topics you’d like us to cover.
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Insomnia Decoded – by Dr. Audrey Porter
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We’ve written about sleep books before, so what makes this one different? Its major selling point is: most of the focus isn’t on the things that everyone already knows.
Yes, there’s a section on sleep hygiene and yes it’ll tell you to cut the caffeine and alcohol, but most of the advice here is beyond that.
Rather, it looks at finding out (if you don’t already know for sure) what is keeping you from healthy sleep, be it environmental, directly physical, or psychological, and breaking out of the stress-sleep cycle that often emerges from such.
The style is light and conversational, but includes plenty of science too; Dr. Porter knows her stuff.
Bottom line: if you feel like you know what you should be doing, but somehow life keeps conspiring to stop you from doing it, then this is the book that could help you break out that cycle.
Click here to check out Insomnia Decoded, and get regular healthy sleep!
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Under Pressure: A Guide To Controlling High Blood Pressure – by Dr. Frita Fisher
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Hypertension kills a lot of people, and does so with little warning—it can be asymptomatic before it gets severe enough to cause harm, and once it causes harm, well, one heart attack or stroke is already one too many.
Aimed more squarely at people in the 35–45 danger zone (young enough to not be getting regular blood pressure checks, old enough that it may have been building up for decades), this is a very good primer on blood pressure, factors affecting it, what goes wrong, what to do about it, and how to make a good strategy for managing it for life.
The style is easy-reading, making this short (91 pages) book a very quick read, but an informative one.
Bottom line: if you are already quite knowledgeable about blood pressure and blood pressure management, this one’s probably not for you. But if you’re in the category of “what do those numbers mean again?”, then this is a very handy book to have, to get you up to speed so that you can handle things as appropriate.
Click here to check out Under Pressure, and get/keep yours under control!
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Protein: How Much Do We Need, Really?
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Mythbusting Protein!
Yesterday, we asked you for your policy on protein consumption. The distribution of responses was as follows:
- A marginal majority (about 55%) voted for “Protein is very important, but we can eat too much of it”
- A large minority (about 35%) voted for “We need lots of protein; the more, the better!”
- A handful (about 4%) voted for “We should go as light on protein as possible”
- A handful (6%) voted for “If we don’t eat protein, our body will create it from other foods”
So, what does the science say?
If we don’t eat protein, our body will create it from other foods: True or False?
Contingently True on an absurd technicality, but for all practical purposes False.
Our body requires 20 amino acids (the building blocks of protein), 9 of which it can’t synthesize and absolutely must get from food. Normally, we get those amino acids from protein in our diet, and we can also supplement them by buying amino acid supplements.
Specifically, we require (per kg of bodyweight) a daily average of:
- Histidine: 10 mg
- Isoleucine: 20 mg
- Leucine: 39 mg
- Lysine: 30 mg
- Methionine: 10.4 mg
- Phenylalanine*: 25 mg
- Threonine: 15 mg
- Tryptophan: 4 mg
- Valine: 26 mg
*combined with the non-essential amino acid tyrosine
Source: Protein and Amino Acid Requirements In Human Nutrition: WHO Technical Report
However, to get the requisite amino acid amounts, without consuming actual protein, would require gargantuan amounts of supplementation (bearing in mind bioavailability will never be 100%, so you’ll always need to take more than it seems), using supplements that will have been made by breaking down proteins anyway.
So unless you live in a laboratory and have access to endless amounts of all of the required amino acids (you can’t miss even one; you will die), and are willing to do that for the sake of proving a point, then you do really need to eat protein.
Your body cannot, for example, simply break down sugar and use it to make the protein you need.
On another technical note… Do bear in mind that many foods that we don’t necessarily think of as being sources of protein, are sources of protein.
Grains and grain products, for example, all contain protein; we just don’t think of them as that because their macronutritional profile is heavily weighted towards carbohydrates.
For that matter, even celery contains protein. How much, you may ask? Almost none! But if something has DNA, it has protein. Which means all plants and animals (at least in their unrefined forms).
So again, to even try to live without protein would very much require living in a laboratory.
We can eat too much protein: True or False?
True. First on an easy technicality; anything in excess is toxic. Even water, or oxygen. But also, in practical terms, there is such a thing as too much protein. The bar is quite high, though:
❝Based on short-term nitrogen balance studies, the Recommended Dietary Allowance of protein for a healthy adult with minimal physical activity is currently 0.8 g protein per kg bodyweight per day❞
❝To meet the functional needs such as promoting skeletal-muscle protein accretion and physical strength, dietary intake of 1.0, 1.3, and 1.6 g protein per kg bodyweight per day is recommended for individuals with minimal, moderate, and intense physical activity, respectively❞
❝Long-term consumption of protein at 2 g per kg bodyweight per day is safe for healthy adults, and the tolerable upper limit is 3.5 g per kg bodyweight per day for well-adapted subjects❞
❝Chronic high protein intake (>2 g per kg bodyweight per day for adults) may result in digestive, renal, and vascular abnormalities and should be avoided❞
Source: Dietary protein intake and human health
To put this into perspective, if you weigh about 160lbs (about 72kg), this would mean eating more than 144g protein per day, which grabbing a calculator means about 560g of lean beef, or 20oz, or 1¼lb.
If you’re eating quarter-pounder burgers though, that’s not usually so lean, so you’d need to eat more than nine quarter-pounder burgers per day to get too much protein.
High protein intake damages the kidneys: True or False?
True if you have kidney damage already; False if you are healthy. See for example:
- Effects of dietary protein restriction on the progression of advanced renal disease in the modification of diet in renal disease study
- A high protein diet has no harmful effects: a one-year crossover study in healthy male athletes
High protein intake increases cancer risk: True or False?
True or False depending on the source of the protein, so functionally false:
- Eating protein from red meat sources has been associated with higher risk for many cancers
- Eating protein from other sources has been associated with lower risk for many cancers
Source: Red Meat Consumption and Mortality Results From 2 Prospective Cohort Studies
High protein intake increase risk of heart disease: True or False?
True or False depending on the source of the protein, so, functionally false:
- Eating protein from red meat sources has been associated with higher risk of heart disease
- Eating protein from other sources has been associated with lower risk of heart disease
Source: Major Dietary Protein Sources and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Women
In summary…
Getting a good amount of good quality protein is important to health.
One can get too much, but one would have to go to extremes to do so.
The source of protein matters:
- Red meat is associated with many health risks, but that’s not necessarily the protein’s fault.
- Getting plenty of protein from (ideally: unprocessed) sources such as poultry, fish, and/or plants, is critical to good health.
- Consuming “whole proteins” (that contain all 9 amino acids that we can’t synthesize) are best.
Learn more: Complete proteins vs. incomplete proteins (explanation and examples)
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