How To Rebuild Your Neurons’ Myelin Sheaths
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PS: We Love You
Phosphatidylserine, or “PS” for short, is a phospholipid found in the brain. In other words, a kind of fatty compound that is such stuff as our brains are made of.
In particular, it’s required for healthy nerve cell membranes and myelin (the protective sheath that neurons live in—basically, myelin sheaths do for neurons what telomere caps do for DNA).
For an overview that’s more comprehensive than we have room for here, check out:
Phosphatidylserine and the human brain
Many people take it as a supplement.
Does taking it as a supplement work?
This is a valid question, as a lot of supplements can’t be absorbed well, and/or can’t pass the blood-brain barrier. But, as the above-linked study notes:
❝Exogenous PS (300-800 mg/d) is absorbed efficiently in humans, crosses the blood-brain barrier, and safely slows, halts, or reverses biochemical alterations and structural deterioration in nerve cells. It supports human cognitive functions, including the formation of short-term memory, the consolidation of long-term memory, the ability to create new memories, the ability to retrieve memories, the ability to learn and recall information, the ability to focus attention and concentrate, the ability to reason and solve problems, language skills, and the ability to communicate. It also supports locomotor functions, especially rapid reactions and reflexes.❞
(“Exogenous” means “coming from outside of the body”, as opposed to “endogenous”, meaning “made inside the body”. Effectively, in this context “exogenous” means “taken as a supplement”.)
Why do people take it?
The health claims for phosphatidylserine fall into two main categories:
- Neuroprotection (helping your brain to avoid age-related decline in the long term)
- Cognitive enhancement (helping your brain work better in the short term)
What does the science say?
There’s a lot of science that’s been done on the neuroprotective properties of PS, and there are thousands of studies we could draw from here. The upshot is that regular phosphatidylserine supplementation (most often 300mg/day, but studies are also found for 100–500mg/day) is strongly associated with a reduction in cognitive decline over the course of 12 weeks (a common study duration). Here are a some spotlight studies showing this:
- Effects of phosphatidylserine in Alzheimer’s disease
- Double-blind cross-over study of phosphatidylserine vs. placebo in patients with early dementia of the Alzheimer type
- Effect of Phosphatidylserine on Cerebral Glucose Metabolism in Alzheimer’s Disease
- The effect of soybean-derived phosphatidylserine on cognitive performance in elderly with subjective memory complaints
Note: PS can be derived from various sources, with the two most common forms being bovine (i.e., from cow brains) or soy-derived.
There is no established difference in the efficacy of these.
There have been some concerns raised about the risk of CJD (the human form of BSE, as in “mad cow disease”) from consuming brain matter from cows, but studies have not found any evidence of this actually happening.
There is also some evidence that phosphatidyserine significantly boosts cognitive performance, even in young people with no extant cognitive decline, for example:
(as the title suggests, they did also test for its effect on mood and endocrine response, but found it made no difference to those, just the cognitive function—which enjoyed a boost before exercise, as well as after it, meaning that the boost wasn’t dependent on the exercise)
PS for cognitive enhancement in the young and healthy is not nearly so well-explored as its use as a later-life guard against age-related cognitive decline. However, just because the studies in younger people are dwarfed in number by the studies in older people, doesn’t detract from the validity of the studies in younger people.
Basically: its use in older people has been studied the most, but all available evidence points to it being beneficial to brain health at all ages.
Where can we get it?
We don’t sell it (or anything else), but for your convenience, here’s an example product on Amazon.
Enjoy!
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Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
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Capsaicin’s Hot Benefits
Capsaicin, the compound in hot peppers that makes them spicy, is a chemical irritant and a neurotoxin. However, humans being humans, we decided to eat them for fun.
In contrast to many other ways in which humans recreationally enjoy things that are objectively poisonous, consuming capsaicin (in moderation) is considered to have health benefits, such as aiding weight loss (by boosting metabolism) and reducing inflammation.
Let’s see what the science says…
First: is it safe?
Capsaicin is classified as “Generally Recognized As Safe”. That said, the same mechanism that causes them to boost metabolism, does increase blood pressure:
Mechanisms underlying the hypertensive response induced by capsaicin
If you are in good cardiovascular health, this increase should be slight and not pose any threat, unless for example you enter a chili-eating contest when not acclimated to such:
Capsaicin and arterial hypertensive crisis
As ever, if unsure, do check with your doctor first, especially if you are taking any blood pressure medications, or otherwise have known blood pressure issues.
Does it really boost metabolism?
It certainly does; it works by increasing oxygen consumption and raising body temperature, both of which mean more calories will be burned for the same amount of work:
Dietary capsaicin and its anti-obesity potency: from mechanism to clinical implications
This means, of course, that chili peppers enjoy the status of being functionally a “negative calorie” food, and a top-tier one at that:
Chili pepper as a body weight-loss food
Here’s a good quality study that showed a statistically significant* fat loss improvement over placebo:
*To put it in numbers, the benefit was:
- 5.91 percentage points lower body fat percentage than placebo
- 6.68 percentage points greater change in body fat mass than placebo
See also: Difference between percentages and percentage points
For those who prefer big reviews than single studies, we’ve got you covered:
Does it really reduce inflammation?
Counterintuitive as it may seem, yes. By means of reducing oxidative stress. Given that things that reduce oxidative stress tend to reduce inflammation, and in turn tend to reduce assorted disease risks (from diabetes to cancer to Alzheimer’s), this probably has more knock-on benefits too, but we don’t have room to explore all of those today.
Fresh peppers are best for this, but dried peppers (such as when purchased as a ground spice in the supermarket, or when purchased as a capsule-based supplement) still have a very respectable anti-inflammatory effect:
- Capsaicinoids, Polyphenols and Antioxidant Activities of Capsicum annuum: Comparative Study of the Effect of Ripening Stage and Cooking Methods
- A Review on the Effect of Drying on Antioxidant Potential of Fruits and Vegetables
How much should we take?
It’s recommended to start at a low dose and gradually increase it, but 2–6mg of capsaicin per day is the standard range used in studies.
If you’re getting this from peppers, then for example cayenne pepper (a good source of capsaicin) contains around 2.5mg of capsaicin per 1 gram of cayenne.
In the case of capsules, if for example you don’t like eating hot pepper, this will usually mean taking 2–6 capsules per day, depending on dosage.
Make sure to take it with plenty of water!
Where can we get it?
Fresh peppers or ground spice from your local grocery store is fine. Your local health food store probably sells the supplements, too.
If you’d like to buy it online, here is an example product on Amazon.
Note: options on Amazon were more limited than usual, so this product is not vegan, and probably not halal or kosher, as the capsule contains an unspecified gelatin.
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PTSD, But, Well…. Complex.
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PTSD is typically associated with military veterans, for example, or sexual assault survivors. There was a clear, indisputable, Bad Thing™ that was experienced, and it left a psychological scar. When something happens to remind us of that—say, there are fireworks, or somebody touches us a certain way—it’ll trigger an immediate strong response of some kind.
These days the word “triggered” has been popularly misappropriated to mean any adverse emotional reaction, often to something trivial.
But, not all trauma is so clear. If PTSD refers to the result of that one time you were smashed with a sledgehammer, C-PTSD (Complex PTSD) refers to the result of having been hit with a rolled-up newspaper every few days for fifteen years, say.
This might have been…
- childhood emotional neglect
- a parent with a hair-trigger temper
- bullying at school
- extended financial hardship as a young adult
- “just” being told or shown all too often that your best was never good enough
- the persistent threat (real or imagined) of doom of some kind
- the often-reinforced idea that you might lose everything at any moment
If you’re reading this list and thinking “that’s just life though”, you might be in the estimated 1 in 5 people with (often undiagnosed) C-PTSD.
How About You? Take The (5mins) Test Here
Now, we at 10almonds are not doctors or therapists and even if we were, we certainly wouldn’t try to diagnose from afar. But, even if there’s only a partial match, sometimes the same advice can help.
So what are the symptoms of C-PTSD?
- A feeling that nothing is safe; we might suddenly lose what we have gained
- The body keeps the score… And it shows. We may have trouble relaxing, an aversion to exercise for reasons that don’t really add up, or an aversion to being touched.
- Trouble sleeping, born of nagging sense that to sleep is to be vulnerable to attack, and/or lazy, and/or negligent of our duties
- Poor self-image, about our body and/or about ourself as a person.
- We’re often drawn to highly unavailable people—or we are the highly unavailable person to which our complementary C-PTSD sufferers are attracted.
- We are prone to feelings of rage. Whether we keep a calm lid on it or lose our temper, we know it’s there. We’re angry at the world and at ourselves.
- We are not quick to trust—we may go through the motions of showing trust, but we’re already half-expecting that trust to have been misplaced.
- “Hell is other people” has become such a rule of life that we may tend to cloister ourselves away from company.
- We may try to order our environment around us as a matter of safety, and be easily perturbed by sudden changes being imposed on us, even if ostensibly quite minor or harmless.
- In a bid to try to find safety, we may throw ourselves into work—whatever that is for us. It could be literally our job, or passion projects, or our family, or community, and in and of itself that’s great! But the motivation is more of an attempt to distract ourselves from The Horrors™.
“Alright, I scored more of those than I care to admit. What now?”
A lot of the answer lies in first acknowledging to yourself what happened, to make you feel the way you do now. If you, for example, have an abject hatred of Christmas, what were your childhood Christmases like? If you fear losing money that you’ve accumulated, what underpins that fear? It could be something that directly happened to you, but it also could just be repeated messages you received from your parents, for example.
It could even be that you had superficially an idyllic perfect childhood. Health, wealth, security, a loving family… and simply a chemical imbalance in your brain made it a special kind of Hell for you that nobody understood, and perhaps you didn’t either.
Unfortunately, a difficult task now lies ahead: giving love, understanding, compassion, and reassurance to the person for whom you may have the most contempt in the world: yourself.
If you’d like some help with that, here are some resources:
ComplexTrauma.org (a lot of very good free resources, with no need for interaction)
CPTSD Foundation (mostly paid courses and the like)
Some final words about healing…
- You are in fact amazing,
- You can do it, and
- You deserve it.
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The Dopamine Precursor And More
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What Is This Supplement “NALT”?
N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine (NALT) is a form of tyrosine, an amino acid that the body uses to build other things. What other things, you ask?
Well, like most amino acids, it can be used to make proteins. But most importantly and excitingly, the body uses it to make a collection of neurotransmitters—including dopamine and norepinephrine!
- Dopamine you’ll probably remember as “the reward chemical” or perhaps “the motivation molecule”
- Norepinephrine, also called noradrenaline, is what powers us up when we need a burst of energy.
Both of these things tend to get depleted under stressful conditions, and sometimes the body can need a bit of help replenishing them.
What does the science say?
This is Research Review Monday, after all, so let’s review some research! We’re going to dive into what we think is a very illustrative study:
A 2015 team of researchers wanted to know whether tyrosine (in the form of NALT) could be used as a cognitive enhancer to give a boost in adverse situations (times of stress, for example).
They noted:
❝The potential of using tyrosine supplementation to treat clinical disorders seems limited and its benefits are likely determined by the presence and extent of impaired neurotransmitter function and synthesis.❞
More on this later, but first, the positive that they also found:
❝In contrast, tyrosine does seem to effectively enhance cognitive performance, particularly in short-term stressful and/or cognitively demanding situations. We conclude that tyrosine is an effective enhancer of cognition, but only when neurotransmitter function is intact and dopamine and/or norepinephrine is temporarily depleted❞
That “but only”, is actually good too, by the way!
You do not want too much dopamine (that could cause addiction and/or psychosis) or too much norepinephrine (that could cause hypertension and/or heart attacks). You want just the right amount!
So it’s good that NALT says “hey, if you need some more, it’s here, if not, no worries, I’m not going to overload you with this”.
Read the study: Effect of tyrosine supplementation on clinical and healthy populations under stress or cognitive demands
About that limitation…
Remember they said that it seemed unlikely to help in treating clinical disorders with impaired neurotransmitter function and/or synthesis?
Imagine that you employ a chef in a restaurant, and they can’t keep up with the demand, and consequently some of the diners aren’t getting fed. Can you fix this by supplying the chef with more ingredients?
Well, yes, if and only if the problem is “the chef wasn’t given enough ingredients”. If the problem is that the oven (or the chef’s wrist) is broken, more ingredients aren’t going to help at all—something different is needed in those cases.
So it is with, for example, many cases of depression.
See for example: Tyrosine for depression: a double-blind trial
About blood pressure…
You may be wondering, “if NALT is a precursor of norepinephrine, a vasoconstrictor, will this increase my blood pressure adversely?”
Well, check with your doctor as your own situation may vary, but under normal circumstances, no. The effect of NALT is adaptogenic, meaning that it can help keep its relevant neurotransmitters at healthy levels—not too low or high.
See what we mean, for example in this study where it actually helped keep blood pressure down while improving cognitive performance under stress:
Effect of tyrosine on cognitive function and blood pressure under stress
Bottom line:
For most people, NALT is a safe and helpful way to help keep healthy levels of dopamine and norepinephrine during times of stress, giving cognitive benefits along the way.
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Being Mortal – by Dr. Atul Gawande
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Maybe you want to “live forever or die trying”, and that’s an understandable goal… But are you prepared for “or die trying” being the outcome?
This is not a cheerful book, if you’re anything like this reviewer, you will need a little towel or something to mop up the tears while you read. But it’s worth it.
Dying is one thing; fighting for life is even generally considered a noble endeavor. Suffering alone isn’t fun, losing independence can feel humiliating, and seeing someone who was always a tower of strength, now a frail shadow of their former self, reduced to begging for something that they’re “not allowed”, can be worse.
Do we want that for ourselves? For our loved ones? Can there be a happy medium between that, and the alternative to indeed “go gentle into that good night”?
Dr. Gawande, a surgeon well-acquainted with death and dying, thinks so. But it involves work on our part, and being prepared for hard decisions.
- What is most important to us, and what tradeoffs are we willing to make for it?
- What, even, is actually an option to us with the resources available?
- Can we make peace with a potentially bad lot? And… Should we?
- When is fighting important, and when is it self-destructive?
These (and others) are all difficult questions posed by Dr. Gawande, but critical ones.
We don’t usually quote other people’s reviews when reviewing books here, but let’s consider the following words from the end of a long review on Amazon:
❝If “dying as we lived” is some kind of standard for how we should go, then maybe alone and medicalized makes some sense right now after all.❞
Bottom line: we all deserve better than that. And if we don’t take the time to think about what’s most important, then time will take it from us. This very insightful book may not have all the answers, but it has the questions, and it can help a lot in exploring them and deciding what matters most to us in the end, really.
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Moringa Oleifera Against CVD, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s & Arsenic?
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The Healthiest Drumstick
Moringa oleifera is a tree, whose leaves and pods have medicinal properties (as well as simply being very high in nutrients). It’s also called the drumstick tree in English, but equally often it’s referred to simply as Moringa. It has enjoyed use in traditional medicine for thousands of years, and its many benefits have caught scientists’ attention more recently. For an overview before we begin, see:
Now, let’s break it down…
Anti-inflammatory
It is full of antioxidants, which we’ll come to shortly, and they have abundant anti-inflammatory effects. Research into these so far has mostly beennon-human animal studies or else in vitro, hence the guarded “potential” for now:
Potential anti-inflammatory phenolic glycosides from the medicinal plant Moringa oleifera fruits
Speaking of potential though, it has been found to also reduce neuroinflammation specifically, which is good, because not every anti-inflammatory agent does that:
Antioxidant
It was hard to find studies that talked about its antioxidant powers that didn’t also add “and this, and this, and this” because of all its knock-on benefits, for example:
❝The results indicate that this plant possesses antioxidant, hypolipidaemic and antiatherosclerotic activities and has therapeutic potential for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases.
These effects were at degrees comparable to those of simvastatin.❞
~ Dr. Pilaipark Chumark et al.
Likely a lot of its benefits in these regards come from the plant’s very high quercetin content, because quercetin does that too:
Quercetin reduces blood pressure in hypertensive subjects
For more about quercetin, you might like our previous main feature:
Fight Inflammation & Protect Your Brain, With Quercetin
Antidiabetic
It also has been found to lower fasting blood sugar levels by 13.5%:
Anti-arsenic?
We put a question mark there, because studies into this have only been done with non-human animals such as mice and rats so far, largely because there are not many human volunteers willing to sign up for arsenic poisoning (and no ethics board would pass it anyway).
However, as arsenic contamination in some foods (such as rice) is a big concern, this is very promising. Here are some example studies, with mice and rats respectively:
- Protective effects of Moringa oleifera Lam. leaves against arsenic-induced toxicity in mice
- Therapeutic effects of Moringa oleifera on arsenic-induced toxicity in rats
Is it safe?
A popular food product through parts of Africa and (especially) South & West Asia, it has a very good safety profile. Generally the only health-related criticism of it is that it contains some anti-nutrients (that hinder bioavailability of its nutrients), but the nutrients outweigh the antinutrients sufficiently to render this a trifling trivium.
In short: as ever, do check with your doctor/pharmacist to be sure, but in general terms, this is about as safe as most vegan whole foods; it just happens to also be something of a superfood, which puts it into the “nutraceutical” category. See also:
Review of the Safety and Efficacy of Moringa oleifera
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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The Sucralose News: Scaremongering Or Serious?
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What’s the news on sucralose?
These past days the press has been abuzz with frightening tales:
- This Common Artificial Sweetener Can Break Down DNA, Scientists Warn
- Sucralose Damages DNA, Linked to Leaky Gut
- Chemical found in common sweetener damages DNA
- Chemical found in widely used sweetener breaks up DNA
- Chemical from Splenda breaks up DNA
How true and/or serious is this?
Firstly, let’s manage expectations. Pineapple juice also breaks down DNA, but is not generally considered a health risk. So let’s keep that in mind, while we look into the science.
Is sucralose as scary as pineapple juice, or is it something actually dangerous?
The new study (that sparked off these headlines)
The much-referenced study is publicly available to read in full—here it is:
You may notice that this doesn’t have quite the snappy punchiness of some of the headlines, but let’s break this down, if you’ll pardon the turn of phrase:
- Toxicological: pertaining to whether or not it has toxic qualities
- Pharmacokinetic: the science of asking, of chemicals in bodies, “where did it come from; where did it go; what could it do there; what can we know?”
- Sucralose-6-acetate: an impurity that can be found in sucralose. For perspective, the study found that the sucralose in Splenda contained “up to” 0.67% sucralose-6-acetate.
- Sucralose: a modified form of sucrose, that makes it hundreds of times sweeter, and non-caloric because the body cannot break it down so it’s treated as a dietary fiber and just passes through
- In vitro: things are happening in petri dishes, not in animals (human or otherwise), which would be called “in vivo”
- Screening assays: “we set up a very closed-parameters chemical test, to see what happens when we add this to this” ⇽ oversimplification, but this is the basic format of a screening assay
Great, now we understand the title, but what about the study?
Researchers looked primarily at the effects of sucralose-6-acetate and sucralose (together and separately) on epithelial cells (these are very simple cells that are easy to study; conveniently, they are also most of what makes up our intestinal walls). For this, they used a fancy way of replicating human intestinal walls, that’s actually quite fascinating but beyond the scope of today’s newsletter. Suffice it to say: it’s quite good, and/but has its limitations too. They also looked at some in vivo rat studies.
What they found was…
Based on samples from the rat feces (somehow this didn’t make it into the headlines), it appears that sucralose may be acetylated in the intestines. What that means is that we, if we are like the rats (definitely not a given, but a reasonable hypothesis), might convert up to 10% of sucralose into sucralose-6-acetate inside us. Iff we do, the next part of the findings become more serious.
Based on the in vitro simulations, both sucralose and sucralose-6-acetate reduced intestinal barrier integrity at least a little, but sucralose-6-acetate was the kicker when it came to most of the effects—at least, so we (reasonably!) suppose.
Basically, there’s a lot of supposition going on here but the suppositions are reasonable. That’s how science works; there’s usually little we can know for sure from a single study; it’s when more studies roll in that we start to get a more complete picture.
What was sucralose-6-acetate found to do? It increased the expression of genes associated with inflammation, oxidative stress, and cancer (granted those three things generally go together). So that’s a “this probably has this end result” supposition.
More concretely, and which most of the headlines latched onto, it was found (in vitro) to induce cytogenic damage, specifically, of the clastogenic variety (produces DNA strand breaks—so this is different than pineapple’s bromelain and DNA-helicase’s relatively harmless unzipping of genes).
The dose makes the poison
So, how much is too much and is that 0.67% something to worry about?
- Remembering the rat study, it may be more like 10% once our intestines have done their thing. Iff we’re like rats.
- But, even if it’s only 0.67%, this will still be above the “threshold of toxicological concern for genotoxicity”, of 0.15µg/person/day.
- On the other hand, the fact that these were in vitro studies is a serious limitation.
- Sometimes something is very dangerous in vitro, because it’s being put directly onto cells, whereas in vivo we may have mechanisms for dealing with that.
We won’t know for sure until we get in vivo studies in human subjects, and that may not happen any time soon, if ever, depending on the technical limitations and ethical considerations that sometimes preclude doing certain studies in humans.
Bottom line:
- The headlines are written to be scary, but aren’t wrong; their claims are fundamentally true
- What that means for us as actual humans may not be the same, however; we don’t know yet
- For now, it is probably reasonable to avoid sucralose just in case
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