Passion Fruit vs Persimmon – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing passion fruit to persimmon, we picked the passion fruit.
Why?
You may be wondering: “what is this fruit passionate about?” and the answer is: delivering nutrients of many kinds!
Looking at the macros first, passion fruit has a little more protein and a lot more fiber, while persimmon has more carbs. This means that while persimmon’s glycemic index isn’t bad, passion fruit’s glycemic index is a lot lower.
In terms of vitamins, passion fruit has a lot more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B6, B9, E, K, and choline, while persimmon has more vitamin C. For the record passion fruit is also a good source of vitamin C, with a cup of passion fruit already giving a day’s daily dose of vitamin C, but persimmon gives twice that. Still, that’s a 8:1 win for passion fruit.
When it comes to minerals, passion fruit has more copper, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while persimmon has more calcium and iron, meaning a 6:2 win for passion fruit.
Adding up the three convincing individual victories shows a clear overall win for passion fruit.
Enjoy (passionately, even)!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Glycemic Index vs Glycemic Load vs Insulin Index
- Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
- Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
Take care!
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The Anti-Viral Gut – by Dr. Robynne Chutkan
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Some people get a virus and feel terrible for a few days; other people get the same virus and die. Then there are some who never even get it at all despite being in close proximity with the other two. So, what’s the difference?
Dr. Robynne Chutkan outlines the case for the difference not being in the virus, but in the people. And nor is it a matter of mysterious fate, but rather, a matter of the different levels of defenses (or lack thereof) that we each have.
The key, she explains, is in our microbiome, and the specific steps to make sure that ours is optimized and ready to protect us. The book goes beyond “eat prebiotics and probiotics”, though, and goes through other modifiable factors, based on data from this pandemic and the last one a hundred years ago. We also learn about the many different kinds of bacteria that live in our various body parts (internal and external), because as it turns out, our gut microbiome (however important; hence the title) isn’t the only relevant microbiome when it comes to whether or not a given disease will take hold or be eaten alive on the way in.
The style is very polished—Dr. Chutkan is an excellent educator who makes her points clearly and comprehensibly without skimping on scientific detail.
Bottom line: if you’d like your chances of surviving any given virus season to not be left to chance, then this is a must-read book.
Click here to check out The Anti-Viral Gut, and make your body a fortress!
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With all this bird flu around, how safe are eggs, chicken or milk?
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Enzo Palombo, Swinburne University of Technology
Recent outbreaks of bird flu – in US dairy herds, poultry farms in Australia and elsewhere, and isolated cases in humans – have raised the issue of food safety.
So can the virus transfer from infected farm animals to contaminate milk, meat or eggs? How likely is this?
And what do we need to think about to minimise our risk when shopping for or preparing food?
AS Foodstudio/Shutterstock How safe is milk?
Bird flu (or avian influenza) is a bird disease caused by specific types of influenza virus. But the virus can also infect cows. In the US, for instance, to date more than 80 dairy herds in at least nine states have been infected with the H5N1 version of the virus.
Investigations are under way to confirm how this happened. But we do know infected birds can shed the virus in their saliva, nasal secretions and faeces. So bird flu can potentially contaminate animal-derived food products during processing and manufacturing.
Indeed, fragments of bird flu genetic material (RNA) were found in cow’s milk from the dairy herds associated with infected US farmers.
However, the spread of bird flu among cattle, and possibly to humans, is likely to have been caused through contact with contaminated milking equipment, not the milk itself.
The test used to detect the virus in milk – which uses similar PCR technology to lab-based COVID tests – is also highly sensitive. This means it can detect very low levels of the bird flu RNA. But the test does not distinguish between live or inactivated virus, just that the RNA is present. So from this test alone, we cannot tell if the virus found in milk is infectious (and capable of infecting humans).
It’s best to stick with pasteurised milk. Amnixia/Shutterstock Does that mean milk is safe to drink and won’t transmit bird flu? Yes and no.
In Australia, where bird flu has not been reported in dairy cattle, the answer is yes. It is safe to drink milk and milk products made from Australian milk.
In the US, the answer depends on whether the milk is pasteurised. We know pasteurisation is a common and reliable method of destroying concerning microbes, including influenza virus. Like most viruses, influenza virus (including bird flu virus) is inactivated by heat.
Although there is little direct research on whether pasteurisation inactivates H5N1 in milk, we can extrapolate from what we know about heat inactivation of H5N1 in chicken and eggs.
So we can be confident there is no risk of bird flu transmission via pasteurised milk or milk products.
However, it’s another matter for unpasteurised or “raw” US milk or milk products. A recent study showed mice fed raw milk contaminated with bird flu developed signs of illness. So to be on the safe side, it would be advisable to avoid raw milk products.
How about chicken?
Bird flu has caused sporadic outbreaks in wild birds and domestic poultry worldwide, including in Australia. In recent weeks, there have been three reported outbreaks in Victorian poultry farms (two with H7N3 bird flu, one with H7N9). There has been one reported outbreak in Western Australia (H9N2).
The strains of bird flu identified in the Victorian and Western Australia outbreaks can cause human infection, although these are rare and typically result from close contact with infected live birds or contaminated environments.
Therefore, the chance of bird flu transmission in chicken meat is remote.
Nonetheless, it is timely to remind people to handle chicken meat with caution as many dangerous pathogens, such as Salmonella and Campylobacter, can be found on chicken carcasses.
Always handle chicken meat carefully when shopping, transporting it home and storing it in the kitchen. For instance, make sure no meat juices cross-contaminate other items, consider using a cool bag when transporting meat, and refrigerate or freeze the meat within two hours.
Avoid washing your chicken before cooking to prevent the spread of disease-causing microbes around the kitchen.
Finally, cook chicken thoroughly as viruses (including bird flu) cannot survive cooking temperatures.
Are eggs safe?
The recent Australian outbreaks have occurred in egg-laying or mixed poultry flocks, so concerns have been raised about bird flu transmission via contaminated chicken eggs.
Can flu viruses contaminate chicken eggs and potentially spread bird flu? It appears so. A report from 2007 said it was feasible for influenza viruses to enter through the eggshell. This is because influenza virus particles are smaller (100 nanometres) than the pores in eggshells (at least 200 nm).
So viruses could enter eggs and be protected from cleaning procedures designed to remove microbes from the egg surface.
Therefore, like the advice about milk and meat, cooking eggs is best.
The US Food and Drug Administration recommends cooking poultry, eggs and other animal products to the proper temperature and preventing cross-contamination between raw and cooked food.
In a nutshell
If you consume pasteurised milk products and thoroughly cook your chicken and eggs, there is nothing to worry about as bird flu is inactivated by heat.
The real fear is that the virus will evolve into highly pathogenic versions that can be transmitted from human to human.
That scenario is much more frightening than any potential spread though food.
Enzo Palombo, Professor of Microbiology, Swinburne University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The Five Key Traits Of Healthy Aging
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The Five Keys Of Aging Healthily
Image courtesy of Peter Prato. This is Dr. Daniel Levitin. He’s a neuroscientist, and his research focuses on aging, the brain, health, productivity, and creativity. Also music, and he himself is an accomplished musician also, but we’re not going to be focusing on that today.
We’re going to be looking at the traits that, according to science, promote healthy longevity in old age. In other words, the things that increase our healthspan, from the perspective of a cognitive scientist.
What does he say we should do?
Dr. Levitin offers us what he calls the “COACH” traits:
- Curiosity
- Openness
- Associations
- Conscientiousness
- Healthy practices
By “associations”, he means relationships. However, that would have made the acronym “CORCH”, and decisions had to be made.
Curiosity
Leonardo da Vinci had a list of seven traits he considered most important.
We’ll not go into those today (he is not our featured expert of the day!), but we will say that he agreed with Dr. Levitin on what goes at the top of the list: curiosity.
- Without curiosity, we will tend not to learn things, and learning things is key to keeping good cognitive function in old age
- Without curiosity, we will tend not to form hypotheses about how/why things are the way they are, so we will not exercise imagination, creativity, problem-solving, and other key functions of our brain
- Without curiosity, we will tend not to seek out new experiences, and consequently, our stimuli will be limited—and thus, so will our brains
Openness
Being curious about taking up ballroom dancing will do little for you, if you are not also open to actually trying it. But, openness is not just a tag-on to curiosity; it deserves its spot in its own right too.
Sometimes, ideas and opportunities come to us unbidden, and we have to be able to be open to those too. This doesn’t mean being naïve, but it does mean having at least a position of open-minded skepticism.
Basically, Dr. Levitin is asking us to be the opposite of the pejorative stereotype of “an old person stuck in their ways”.
Associations
People are complex, and so they bring complexities to our lives. Hopefully, positively stimulating ones. Without them to challenge us (again, hopefully in a positive way), we can get very stuck in a narrow field of experience.
And of course, having at least a few good friends has numerous benefits to health. There’s been a lot of research on this; 5 appears to be optimal.
- More than that, and the depth tends to tail off, and/or stresses ensue from juggling too many relationships
- Fewer than that, and we might be only a calendar clash away from loneliness
Friends provide social stimulation and mutual support; they’re good for our mental health and even our physiological immunity (counterintuitively, by means of shared germs).
And, a strong secure romantic relationship is something that has been found time and again to extend healthy life.
Note: by popular statistics, this benefit is conferred upon men partnered with women, men partnered with men, women partnered with women, but not women partnered with men.
There may be a causative factor that’s beyond the scope of this article which is about cognitive science, not feminism, but there could also be a mathematical explanation for this apparent odd-one-out:
Since women tend to live longer than men (who are also often older than their female partners), women who live the longest are often not in a relationship—precisely because they are widows. So these long-lived widows will tend to skew the stats, through no fault of their husbands.
On the flipside of this, for a woman to predecease her (statistically older and shorter-lived) husband will often require that she die quite early (perhaps due to accident or illness unrelated to age), which will again skew the stats to “women married to men die younger”, without anything nefarious going on.
Conscientiousness
People who score highly in the character trait “conscientiousness” will tend to live longer. The impact is so great, that a child’s scores will tend to dictate who dies in their 60s or their 80s, for example.
What does conscientiousness mean? It’s a broad character trait that’s scored in psychometric tests, so it can be things that have a direct impact on health, such as brushing one’s teeth, or things that are merely correlated, such as checking one’s work for typos (this writer does her best!).
In short, if you are the sort of person who attends to the paperwork for your taxes on time, you are probably also the sort of person who remembers to get your flu vaccination and cancer screening.
Healthy practices
This means “the usual things”, such as:
- Healthy diet (Mediterranean Diet consistently scores up top)
- Good exercise (especially the tendency to keep moving in general)
- Good sleep (7–9 hours, no compromises)
- Not drinking (or at least only very moderate consumption, but the only safe amount is zero)
- Not smoking (just don’t; there is no wiggle room on this one)
Want to learn more?
You can check out his book, which we reviewed all so recently, and you can also enjoy this video, in which he talks about matters concerning healthy aging from a neuroscientist’s perspective, ranging from heart health and neurodegeneration, to the myth of failing memory, to music and lifespan and more:
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Keeping Your Kidneys Healthy (Especially After 60)
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Keeping your kidneys happy: it’s more than just hydration!
Your kidneys are very busy organs. They filter waste products, balance hydration, pH, salt, and potassium. They also make some of our hormones, and are responsible for regulating red blood cell production too. They also handle vitamin D in a way our bodies would not work without, making them essential for calcium absorption and the health of our bones, and even muscular function.
So, how to keep them in good working order?
Yes, hydrate
This is obvious and may go without saying, but we try to not leave important things without saying. So yes, get plenty of water, spread out over the day (you can only usefully absorb so much at once!). If you feel thirsty, you’re probably already dehydrated, so have a little (hydrating!) drink.
Don’t smoke
It’s bad for everything, including your kidneys.
Look after your blood
Not just “try to keep it inside your body”, but also:
- Keep your blood sugar levels healthy (hyperglycemia can cause kidney damage)
- Keep your blood pressure healthy (hypertension can cause kidney damage)
Basically, your kidneys’ primary job of filtering blood will go much more smoothly if that blood is less problematic on the way in.
Watch your over-the-counter pill intake
A lot of PRN OTC NSAIDs (PRN = pro re nata, i.e. you take them as and when symptoms arise) (NSAIDs = Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs, such as ibuprofen for example) can cause kidney damage if taken regularly.
Many people take ibuprofen (for example) constantly for chronic pain, especially the kind cause by chronic inflammation, including many autoimmune diseases.
It is recommended to not take them for more than 10 days, nor more than 8 per day. Taking more than that, or taking them for longer, could damage your kidneys temporarily or permanently.
Read more: National Kidney Foundation: Advice About Pain Medicines
See also: Which Drugs Are Harmful To Your Kidneys?
Get a regular kidney function checkup if you’re in a high risk group
Who’s in a high risk group?
- If you’re over 60
- If you have diabetes
- If you have cardiovascular disease
- If you have high blood pressure
- If you believe, or know, you have existing kidney damage
The tests are very noninvasive, and will be a urine and/or blood test.
For more information, see:
Kidney Testing: Everything You Need to Know
Take care!
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The Truth About Vaccines
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The Truth About Vaccines
Yesterday we asked your views on vaccines, and we got an interesting spread of answers. Of those who responded to the poll, most were in favour of vaccines. We got quite a lot of comments this time too; we can’t feature them all, but we’ll include extracts from a few in our article today, as they raised interesting points!
Vaccines contain dangerous ingredients that will harm us more than the disease would: True or False?
False, contextually.
Many people are very understandably wary of things they know full well to be toxic, being injected into them.
One subscriber who voted for “Vaccines are poison, and/or are some manner of conspiracy ” wrote:
❝I think vaccines from 50–60 years ago are true vaccines and were safer than vaccines today. I have not had a vaccine for many, many years, and I never plan to have any kind of vaccine/shot again.❞
They didn’t say why they personally felt this way, but the notion that “things were simpler back in the day” is a common (and often correct!) observation regards health, especially when it comes to unwanted additives and ultraprocessing of food.
Things like aluminum or mercury in vaccines are much like sodium and chlorine in table salt. Sodium and chlorine are indeed both toxic to us. But in the form of sodium chloride, it’s a normal part of our diet, provided we don’t overdo it.
Additionally, the amount of unwanted metals (e.g. aluminum, mercury) in vaccines is orders of magnitude smaller than the amount in dietary sources—even if you’re a baby and your “dietary sources” are breast milk and/or formula milk.
In the case of formaldehyde (an inactivating agent), it’s also the dose that makes the poison (and the quantity in vaccines is truly miniscule).
This academic paper alone cites more sources than we could here without making today’s newsletter longer than it already is:
Vaccine Safety: Myths and Misinformation
I have a perfectly good immune system, it can handle the disease: True or False?
True! Contingently.
In fact, our immune system is so good at defending against disease, that the best thing we can do to protect ourselves is show our immune system a dead or deactivated version of a pathogen, so that when the real pathogen comes along, our immune system knows exactly what it is and what to do about it.
In other words, a vaccine.
One subscriber who voted for “Vaccines are important but in some cases the side effects can be worse ” wrote:
❝In some ways I’m vacd out. I got COVid a few months ago and had no symptoms except a cough. I have asthma and it didn’t trigger a lot of congestion. No issues. I am fully vaccinated but not sure I’ll get one in fall.❞
We’re glad this subscriber didn’t get too ill! A testimony to their robust immune system doing what it’s supposed to, after being shown a recent-ish edition of the pathogen, in deactivated form.
It’s very reasonable to start wondering: “surely I’m vaccinated enough by now”
And, hopefully, you are! But, as any given pathogen mutates over time, we eventually need to show our immune system what the new version looks like, or else it won’t recognize it.
See also: Why Experts Think You’ll Need a COVID-19 Booster Shot in the Future
So why don’t we need booster shots for everything? Often, it’s because a pathogen has stopped mutating at any meaningful rate. Polio is an example of this—no booster is needed for most people in most places.
Others, like flu, require annual boosters to keep up with the pathogens.
Herd immunity will keep us safe: True or False?
True! Ish.
But it doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it means. For example, in the UK, “herd immunity” was the strategy promoted by Prime Minister of the hour, Boris Johnson. But he misunderstood what it meant:
- What he thought it meant: everyone gets the disease, then everyone who doesn’t die is now immune
- What it actually means: if most people are immune to the disease (for example: due to having been vaccinated), it can’t easily get to the people who aren’t immune
One subscriber who voted for “Vaccines are critical for our health; vax to the max! ” wrote:
❝I had a chiropractor a few years ago, who explained to me that if the general public took vaccines, then she would not have to vaccinate her children and take a risk of having side effects❞
Obviously, we can’t speak for this subscriber’s chiropractor’s children, but this raises a good example: some people can’t safely have a given vaccine, due to underlying medical conditions—or perhaps it is not available to them, for example if they are under a certain age.
In such cases, herd immunity—other people around having been vaccinated and thus not passing on the disease—is what will keep them safe.
Here’s a useful guide from the US Dept of Health and Human Services:
How does community immunity (a.k.a. herd immunity) work?
And, for those who are more visually inclined, here’s a graphical representation of a mathematical model of how herd immunity works (you can run a simulation)!
Stay safe!
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The Gift Of Aging − by Dr. Elizabeth Eckstrom & Marcy Houle
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This is, as you may gather from the title, a book about getting the most out of growing older, and doing it well.
Not all of it is positive though; some of it really is about avoiding, mitigating, or coping with the negatives that tend to come with aging.
The book is full of many (38) small self-contained chapters, so it’s well-suited to reading bit-by-bit, if so inclined. Essentially, it’s a collection of essays by the two authors, arranged into categories:
- Caring for your mind
- Caring for your body
- Caring for yourself and your family
- Caring for your soul
The first two sections are mostly self-explanatory; the third is largely about estate-planning of various kinds. The fourth is highly subjective, and/but not particularly religious, by the way. It’s largely an add-on to the “caring for your mind” mental health section, but now more specifically dealing with heavy topics such as the emotional side of mortality (as opposed to the previous section’s practical considerations of same), loss, and grief.
The style is the very low end of pop-science; facts (probably true ones; nothing seemed very contentious objectively) are stated with no sources, and there is no medical jargon that’s anything more complicated than you might find on a leaflet in a doctor’s waiting room.
Bottom line: this is a very opinion-filled book, so it’s worth reading with that in mind (i.e. their opinions may differ wildly from yours in some cases), but it’s largely informed opinions, so worth at least considering even in those cases. If nothing else, this book is certainly thought-provoking.
Click here to check out The Gift Of Aging, and enjoy the gift of aging!
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