How To Leverage Placebo Effect For Yourself

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Placebo Effect: Making Things Work Since… Well, A Very Long Time Ago

The placebo effect is a well-known, well-evidenced factor that is very relevant when it comes to the testing and implementation of medical treatments:

NIH | National Center for Biotechnology Information | Placebo Effect

Some things that make placebo effect stronger include:

  • Larger pills instead of small ones: because there’s got to be more going on in there, right?
  • Thematically-colored pills: e.g. red for stimulant effects, blue for relaxing effects
  • Things that seem expensive: e.g. a well-made large heavy machine, over a cheap-looking flimsy plastic device. Similarly, medication from a small glass jar with a childproof lock, rather than popped out from a cheap blister-pack.
  • Things that seem rational: if there’s an explanation for how it works that you understand and find rational, or at least you believe you understand and find rational ← this works in advertising, too; if there’s a “because”, it lands better almost regardless of what follows the word “because”
  • Things delivered confidently by a professional: this is similar to the “argument from authority” fallacy (whereby a proposed authority will be more likely trusted, even if this is not their area of expertise at all, e.g. celebrity endorsements), but in the case of placebo trials, this often looks like a well-dressed middle-aged or older man with an expensive haircut calling for a young confident-looking aide in a lab coat to administer the medicine, and is received better than a slightly frazzled academic saying “and, uh, this one’s yours” while handing you a pill.
  • Things with ritual attached: this can be related to the above (the more pomp and circumstance is given to the administration of the treatment, the better), but it can also be as simple as an instruction on an at-home-trial medication saying “take 20 minutes before bed”. Because, if it weren’t important, they wouldn’t bother to specify that, right? So it must be important!

And now for a quick personality test

Did you see the above as a list of dastardly tricks to watch out for, or did you see the above as a list of things that can make your actual medication more effective?

It’s arguably both, of course, but the latter more optimistic view is a lot more useful than the former more pessimistic one.

Since placebo effect works at least somewhat even when you know about it, there is nothing to stop you from leveraging it for your own benefit when taking medication or doing health-related things.

Next time you take your meds or supplements or similar, pause for a moment for each one to remember what it is and what it will be doing for you. This is a lot like the principles (which are physiological as well as psychological) of mindful eating, by the way:

How To Get More Nutrition From The Same Food

Placebo makes some surprising things evidence-based

We’ve addressed placebo effect sometimes as part of an assessment of a given alternative therapy, often in our “Mythbusting Friday” edition of 10almonds.

  • In some cases, placebo is adjuvant to the therapy, i.e. it is one of multiple mechanisms of action (example: chiropractic or acupuncture)
  • In some cases, placebo is the only known mechanism of action (example: homeopathy)
  • In some cases, even placebo can’t help (example: ear candling)

One other fascinating and far-reaching (in a potentially good way) thing that placebo makes evidence-based is: prayer

…which is particularly interesting for something that is fundamentally faith-based, i.e. the opposite of evidence-based.

Now, we’re a health science publication, not a theological publication, so we’ll consider actual divine intervention to be beyond the scope of mechanisms of action we can examine, but there’s been a lot of research done into the extent to which prayer is beneficial as a therapy, what things it may be beneficial for, and what factors affect whether it helps:

Prayer and healing: A medical and scientific perspective on randomized controlled trials

👆 full paper here, and it is very worthwhile reading if you have time, whether or not you are religious personally

Placebo works best when there’s a clear possibility for psychosomatic effect

We’ve mentioned before, and we’ll mention again:

  • psychosomatic effect does not mean: “imagining it”
  • psychosomatic effect means: “your brain regulates almost everything else in your body, directly or indirectly, including your autonomic functions, and especially notably when it comes to illness, your immune responses”

So, a placebo might well heal your rash or even shrink a tumor, but it probably won’t regrow a missing limb, for instance.

And, this is important: it’s not about how credible/miraculous the outcome will be!

Rather, it is because we have existing pre-programmed internal bodily processes for healing rashes and shrinking tumors, that just need to be activated—whereas we don’t have existing pre-programmed internal bodily processes for regrowing a missing limb, so that’s not something our brain can just tell our body to do.

So for this reason, in terms of what placebo can and can’t do:

  • Get rid of cancer? Yes, sometimes—because the body has a process for doing that; enjoy your remission
  • Fix a broken nail? No—because the body has no process for doing that; you’ll just have to cut it and wait for it to grow again

With that in mind, what will you use the not-so-mystical powers of placebo for? What ever you go for… Enjoy, and take care!

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  • Trout vs Carp – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing trout to carp, we picked the trout.

    Why?

    Both have their strong points!

    In terms of macros, trout has slightly more protein and fat, and/but also has less cholesterol than carp. So, we pick the trout in the macros category.

    In the category of vitamins, trout has much more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B12, C, D, E, K, and choline, while carp has slightly more vitamin B9. In other words, an easy win for trout here.

    When it comes to minerals, however, trout has more potassium and selenium, while carp has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and zinc. A fair win for carp this time.

    You may be wondering about heavy metals: this will vary depending on location, as well as the age of the fish (younger fish have had less time to accumulate heavy metals than old ones, so if you’re visiting the fishmonger, choose the smaller ones) and the lives they have led (e.g. wild vs farmed), however, as a general rule of thumb, trout will generally have lower heavy metals levels than carp, all other things (e.g. location, age, etc) being equal.

    In short, enjoy either or both in moderation, but trout wins on 3/4 categories today.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Farmed Fish vs Wild Caught: Antibiotics, Mercury, & More

    Take care!

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  • As the U.S. Struggles With a Stillbirth Crisis, Australia Offers a Model for How to Do Better

    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.

    ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

    Series: Stillbirths:When Babies Die Before Taking Their First Breath

    The U.S. has not prioritized stillbirth prevention, and American parents are losing babies even as other countries make larger strides to reduce deaths late in pregnancy.

    The stillbirth of her daughter in 1999 cleaved Kristina Keneally’s life into a before and an after. It later became a catalyst for transforming how an entire country approaches stillbirths.

    In a world where preventing stillbirths is typically far down the list of health care priorities, Australia — where Keneally was elected as a senator — has emerged as a global leader in the effort to lower the number of babies that die before taking their first breaths. Stillbirth prevention is embedded in the nation’s health care system, supported by its doctors, midwives and nurses, and touted by its politicians.

    In 2017, funding from the Australian government established a groundbreaking center for research into stillbirths. The next year, its Senate established a committee on stillbirth research and education. By 2020, the country had adopted a national stillbirth plan, which combines the efforts of health care providers and researchers, bereaved families and advocacy groups, and lawmakers and government officials, all in the name of reducing stillbirths and supporting families. As part of that plan, researchers and advocates teamed up to launch a public awareness campaign. All told, the government has invested more than $40 million.

    Meanwhile, the United States, which has a far larger population, has no national stillbirth plan, no public awareness campaign and no government-funded stillbirth research center. Indeed, the U.S. has long lagged behind Australia and other wealthy countries in a crucial measure: how fast the stillbirth rate drops each year.

    According to the latest UNICEF report, the U.S. was worse than 151 countries in reducing its stillbirth rate between 2000 and 2021, cutting it by just 0.9%. That figure lands the U.S. in the company of South Sudan in Africa and doing slightly better than Turkmenistan in central Asia. During that period, Australia’s reduction rate was more than double that.

    Definitions of stillbirth vary by country, and though both Australia and the U.S. mark stillbirths as the death of a fetus at 20 weeks or more of pregnancy, to fairly compare countries globally, international standards call for the use of the World Health Organization definition that defines stillbirth as a loss after 28 weeks. That puts the U.S. stillbirth rate in 2021 at 2.7 per 1,000 total births, compared with 2.4 in Australia the same year.

    Every year in the United States, more than 20,000 pregnancies end in a stillbirth. Each day, roughly 60 babies are stillborn. Australia experiences six stillbirths a day.

    Over the past two years, ProPublica has revealed systemic failures at the federal and local levels, including not prioritizing research, awareness and data collection, conducting too few autopsies after stillbirths and doing little to combat stark racial disparities. And while efforts are starting to surface in the U.S. — including two stillbirth-prevention bills that are pending in Congress — they lack the scope and urgency seen in Australia.

    “If you ask which parts of the work in Australia can be done in or should be done in the U.S., the answer is all of it,” said Susannah Hopkins Leisher, a stillbirth parent, epidemiologist and assistant professor in the stillbirth research program at the University of Utah Health. “There’s no physical reason why we cannot do exactly what Australia has done.”

    Australia’s goal, which has been complicated by the pandemic, is to, by 2025, reduce the country’s rate of stillbirths after 28 weeks by 20% from its 2020 rate. The national plan laid out the target, and it is up to each jurisdiction to determine how to implement it based on their local needs.

    The most significant development came in 2019, when the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence — the headquarters for Australia’s stillbirth-prevention efforts — launched the core of its strategy, a checklist of five evidence-based priorities known as the Safer Baby Bundle. They include supporting pregnant patients to stop smoking; regular monitoring for signs that the fetus is not growing as expected, which is known as fetal growth restriction; explaining the importance of acting quickly if fetal movement changes or decreases; advising pregnant patients to go to sleep on their side after 28 weeks; and encouraging patients to talk to their doctors about when to deliver because in some cases that may be before their due date.

    Officials estimate that at least half of all births in the country are covered by maternity services that have adopted the bundle, which focuses on preventing stillbirths after 28 weeks.

    “These are babies whose lives you would expect to save because they would survive if they were born alive,” said Dr. David Ellwood, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Griffith University, director of maternal-fetal medicine at Gold Coast University Hospital and a co-director of the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence.

    Australia wasn’t always a leader in stillbirth prevention.

    In 2000, when the stillbirth rate in the U.S. was 3.3 per 1,000 total births, Australia’s was 3.7. A group of doctors, midwives and parents recognized the need to do more and began working on improving their data classification and collection to better understand the problem areas. By 2014, Australia published its first in-depth national report on stillbirth. Two years later, the medical journal The Lancet published the second report in a landmark series on stillbirths, and Australian researchers applied for the first grant from the government to create the stillbirth research center.

    But full federal buy-in remained elusive.

    As parent advocates, researchers, doctors and midwives worked to gain national support, they didn’t yet know they would find a champion in Keneally.

    Keneally’s improbable journey began when she was born in Nevada to an American father and Australian mother. She grew up in Ohio, graduating from the University of Dayton before meeting the man who would become her husband and moving to Australia.

    When she learned that her daughter, who she named Caroline, would be stillborn, she remembers thinking, “I’m smart. I’m educated. How did I let this happen? And why did nobody tell me this was a possible outcome?”

    A few years later, in 2003, Keneally decided to enter politics. She was elected to the lower house of state parliament in New South Wales, of which Sydney is the capital. In Australia, newly elected members are expected to give a “first speech.” She was able to get through just one sentence about Caroline before starting to tear up.

    As a legislator, Keneally didn’t think of tackling stillbirth as part of her job. There wasn’t any public discourse about preventing stillbirths or supporting families who’d had one. When Caroline was born still, all Keneally got was a book titled “When a Baby Dies.”

    In 2009, Keneally became New South Wales’ first woman premier, a role similar to that of an American governor. Another woman who had suffered her own stillbirth and was starting a stillbirth foundation learned of Keneally’s experience. She wrote to Keneally and asked the premier to be the foundation’s patron.

    What’s the point of being the first female premier, Keneally thought, if I can’t support this group?

    Like the U.S., Australia had previously launched an awareness campaign that contributed to a staggering reduction in sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. But there was no similar push for stillbirths.

    “If we can figure out ways to reduce SIDS,” Keneally said, “surely it’s not beyond us to figure out ways to reduce stillbirth.”

    She lost her seat after two years and took a break from politics, only to return six years later. In 2018, she was selected to serve as a senator at Australia’s federal level.

    Keneally saw this as her second chance to fight for stillbirth prevention. In the short period between her election and her inaugural speech, she had put everything in place for a Senate inquiry into stillbirth.

    In her address, Keneally declared stillbirth a national public health crisis. This time, she spoke at length about Caroline.

    “When it comes to stillbirth prevention,” she said, “there are things that we know that we’re not telling parents, and there are things we don’t know, but we could, if we changed how we collected data and how we funded research.”

    The day of her speech, March 27, 2018, she and her fellow senators established the Select Committee on Stillbirth Research and Education.

    Things moved quickly over the next nine months. Keneally and other lawmakers traveled the country holding hearings, listening to testimony from grieving parents and writing up their findings in a report released that December.

    “The culture of silence around stillbirth means that parents and families who experience it are less likely to be prepared to deal with the personal, social and financial consequences,” the report said. “This failure to regard stillbirth as a public health issue also has significant consequences for the level of funding available for research and education, and for public awareness of the social and economic costs to the community as a whole.”

    It would be easy to swap the U.S. for Australia in many places throughout the report. Women of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds experienced double the rate of stillbirth of other Australian women; Black women in America are more than twice as likely as white women to have a stillbirth. Both countries faced a lack of coordinated research and corresponding funding, low autopsy rates following a stillbirth and poor public awareness of the problem.

    The day after the report’s release, the Australian government announced that it would develop a national plan and pledged $7.2 million in funding for prevention. Nearly half was to go to education and awareness programs for women and their health care providers.

    In the following months, government officials rolled out the Safer Baby Bundle and pledged another $26 million to support parents’ mental health after a loss.

    Many in Australia see Keneally’s first speech as senator, in 2018, as the turning point for the country’s fight for stillbirth prevention. Her words forced the federal government to acknowledge the stillbirth crisis and launch the national action plan with bipartisan support.

    Australia’s assistant minister for health and aged care, Ged Kearney, cited Keneally’s speech in an email to ProPublica where she noted that Australia has become a world leader in stillbirth awareness, prevention and supporting families after a loss.

    “Kristina highlighted the power of women telling their story for positive change,” Kearney said, adding, “As a Labor Senator Kristina Keneally bravely shared her deeply personal story of her daughter Caroline who was stillborn in 1999. Like so many mothers, she helped pave the way for creating a more compassionate and inclusive society.”

    Keneally, who is now CEO of Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation, said the number of stillbirths a day in Australia spurred the movement for change.

    “Six babies a day,” Keneally said. “Once you hear that fact, you can’t unhear it.”

    Australia’s leading stillbirth experts watched closely as the country moved closer to a unified effort. This was the moment for which they had been waiting.

    “We had all the information needed, but that’s really what made it happen.” said Vicki Flenady, a perinatal epidemiologist, co-director of the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence based at the Mater Research Institute at the University of Queensland, and a lead author on The Lancet’s stillbirth series. “I don’t think there’s a person who could dispute that.”

    Flenady and her co-director Ellwood had spent more than two decades focused on stillbirths. After establishing the center in 2017, they were now able to expand their team. As part of their work with the International Stillbirth Alliance, they reached out to other countries with a track record of innovation and evidence-based research: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ireland. They modeled the Safer Baby Bundle after a similar one in the U.K., though they added some elements.

    In 2019, the state of Victoria, home to Melbourne, was the first to implement the Safer Baby Bundle. But 10 months into the program, the effort had to be paused for several months because of the pandemic, which forced other states to cancel their launches altogether.

    “COVID was a major disruption. We stopped and started,” Flenady said.

    Still, between 2019 and 2021, participating hospitals across Victoria were able to reduce their stillbirth rate by 21%. That improvement has yet to be seen at the national level.

    A number of areas are still working on implementing the bundle. Westmead Hospital, one of Australia’s largest hospitals, planned to wrap that phase up last month. Like many hospitals, Westmead prominently displays the bundle’s key messages in the colorful posters and flyers hanging in patient rooms and in the hallways. They include easy-to-understand slogans such as, “Big or small. Your baby’s growth matters,” and, “Sleep on your side when baby’s inside.”

    As patients at Westmead wait for their names to be called, a TV in the waiting room plays a video on stillbirth prevention, highlighting the importance of fetal movement. If a patient is concerned their baby’s movements have slowed down, they are instructed to come in to be seen within two hours. The patient’s chart gets a colorful sticker with a 16-point checklist of stillbirth risk factors.

    Susan Heath, a senior clinical midwife at Westmead, came up with the idea for the stickers. Her office is tucked inside the hospital’s maternity wing, down a maze of hallways. As she makes the familiar walk to her desk, with her faded hospital badge bouncing against her navy blue scrubs, it’s clear she is a woman on a mission. The bundle gives doctors and midwives structure and uniform guidance, she said, and takes stillbirth out of the shadows. She reminds her staff of how making the practices a routine part of their job has the power to change their patients’ lives.

    “You’re trying,” she said, “to help them prevent having the worst day of their life.”

    Christine Andrews, a senior researcher at the Stillbirth Centre who is leading an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness, said the national stillbirth rate beyond 28 weeks has continued to slowly improve.

    “It is going to take a while until we see the stillbirth rate across the whole entire country go down,” Andrews said. “We are anticipating that we’re going to start to see a shift in that rate soon.”

    As officials wait to receive and standardize the data from hospitals and states, they are encouraged by a number of indicators.

    For example, several states are reporting increases in the detection of babies that aren’t growing as they should, a major factor in many late-gestation stillbirths. Many also have seen an increase in the number of pregnant patients who stopped smoking. Health care providers also are more consistently offering post-stillbirth investigations, such as autopsies.

    In addition to the Safer Baby Bundle, the national plan also calls for raising awareness and reducing racial disparities. The improvements it recommends for bereavement care are already gaining global attention.

    To fulfill those directives, Australia has launched a “Still Six Lives” public awareness campaign, has implemented a national stillbirth clinical care standard and has spent two years developing a culturally inclusive version of the Safer Baby Bundle for First Nations, migrant and refugee communities. Those resources, which were recently released, incorporated cultural traditions and used terms like Stronger Bubba Born for the bundle and “sorry business babies,” which is how some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women refer to stillbirth. There are also audio versions for those who can’t or prefer not to read the information.

    In May, nearly 50 people from the state of Queensland met in a large hotel conference room. Midwives, doctors and nurses sat at round tables with government officials, hospital administrators and maternal and infant health advocates. Some even wore their bright blue Safer Baby T-shirts.

    One by one, they discussed their experiences implementing the Safer Baby Bundle. One midwifery group was able to get more than a third of its patients to stop smoking between their first visit and giving birth.

    Officials from a hospital in one of the fastest-growing areas in the state discussed how they carefully monitored for fetal growth restriction.

    And staff from another hospital, which serves many low-income and immigrant patients, described how 97% of pregnant patients who said their baby’s movements had decreased were seen for additional monitoring within two hours of voicing their concern.

    As the midwives, nurses and doctors ticked off the progress they were seeing, they also discussed the fear of unintended consequences: higher rates of premature births or increased admissions to neonatal intensive care units. But neither, they said, has materialized.

    “The bundle isn’t causing any harm and may be improving other outcomes, like reducing early-term birth,” Flenady said. “I think it really shows a lot of positive impact.”

    As far behind as the U.S. is in prioritizing stillbirth prevention, there is still hope.

    Dr. Bob Silver, who co-authored a study that estimated that nearly 1 in 4 stillbirths are potentially preventable, has looked to the international community as a model. Now, he and Leisher — the University of Utah epidemiologist and stillbirth parent — are working to create one of the first stillbirth research and prevention centers in the U.S. in partnership with stillbirth leaders from Australia and other countries. They hope to launch next year.

    “There’s no question that Australia has done a better job than we have,” said Silver, who is also chair of the University of Utah Health obstetrics and gynecology department. “Part of it is just highlighting it and paying attention to it.”

    It’s hard to know what parts of Australia’s strategy are making a difference — the bundle as a whole, just certain elements of it, the increased stillbirth awareness across the country, or some combination of those things. Not every component has been proven to decrease stillbirth.

    The lack of U.S. research on the issue has made some cautious to adopt the bundle, Silver said, but it is clear the U.S. can and should do more.

    There comes a point when an issue is so critical, Silver said, that people have to do the best they can with the information that they have. The U.S. has done that with other problems, such as maternal mortality, he said, though many of the tactics used to combat that problem have not been proven scientifically.

    “But we’ve decided this problem is so bad, we’re going to try the things that we think are most likely to be helpful,” Silver said.

    After more than 30 years of working on stillbirth prevention, Silver said the U.S. may be at a turning point. Parents’ voices are getting louder and starting to reach lawmakers. More doctors are affirming that stillbirths are not inevitable. And pressure is mounting on federal institutions to do more.

    Of the two stillbirth prevention bills in Congress, one already sailed through the Senate. The second bill, the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education for Autumn Act, includes features that also appeared in Australia’s plan, such as improving data, increasing awareness and providing support for autopsies.

    And after many years, the National Institutes of Health has turned its focus back to stillbirths. In March, it released a report with a series of recommendations to reduce the nation’s stillbirth rate that mirror ProPublica’s reporting about some of the causes of the crisis. Since then, it has launched additional groups to begin to tackle three critical angles: prevention, data and bereavement. Silver co-chairs the prevention group.

    In November, more than 100 doctors, parents and advocates gathered for a symposium in New York City to discuss everything from improving bereavement care in the U.S to tackling racial disparities in stillbirth. In 2022, after taking a page out of the U.K.’s book, the city’s Mount Sinai Hospital opened the first Rainbow Clinic in the U.S., which employs specific protocols to care for people who have had a stillbirth.

    But given the financial resources in the U.S. and the academic capacity at American universities and research institutions, Leisher and others said federal and state governments aren’t doing nearly enough.

    “The U.S. is not pulling its weight in relation either to our burden or to the resources that we have at our disposal,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of babies dying, and we’ve got a really bad imbalance of who those babies are as well. And yet we look at a country with a much smaller number of stillbirths who is leading the world.”

    “We can do more. Much more. We’re just not,” she added. “It’s unacceptable.”

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  • When You “Should” Be In Better Shape

    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 easy to think that we “should” be many things that we aren’t. However, it can be counterproductive to implementing real change:

    The problem with “should”

    The word “should” often sabotages changes in mindset and habit formation. Saying things like “I should be further along” typically leads to frustration, feelings of failure, and ultimately a lack of motivation to take action. Yes, in the first instance, “I should…” can be a motivator, but when your goals are not achieved by the second session, and the “I should…” is still there, the subconscious says “well, clearly this is not working”. Even though the conscious mind can easily see the fallacy in that dysfunctional line of thinking, the subconscious is easily swayed by such things, and in turn easily sways our actual behaviors.

    Also, even before that, if goals feel impossible, people often do nothing instead of making small, manageable changes.

    So, what should we do instead?

    Step 1: assess your current lifestyle and priorities. Your current results are a reflection of past habits and actions, including dieting practices, inconsistent workouts, and lack of planning. Instead of searching for a “perfect plan,” first acknowledge your current lifestyle and priorities. Then, identify which habits are beneficial, which ones hold you back, and what common excuses you make. By understanding where you are now, you can create a sustainable plan that fits your life rather than fighting against it.

    Step 2: define your future lifestyle. It’s not enough to just set goals—you need to define what the lifestyle associated with those goals looks like. Recognize that real change requires adjustments in habits and routines. Don’t stress over whether these changes feel overwhelming; simply identify what might be necessary. Writing things down (and then consulting them often, not just putting them away never to be seen again) makes them more tangible and helps create a roadmap for progress.

    Step 3: make one small change today. Rather than making vague or overwhelming changes, start with one small, realistic step that aligns with your goals. Building momentum through cumulatively beneficial small actions leads to longer-lasting motivation. Also, instead of focusing on what you need to cut out, look for positive habits to add, as this makes change easier. Track your progress visibly—like using a checklist—and commit to revisiting and adding new changes weekly.

    For more on all of this, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

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    Take care!

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  • Feel Better In 5 – by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

    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 featured Dr. Rangan Chatterjee before, and here’s a great book of his.

    The premise is a realistic twist on a classic, the classic being “such-and-such, in just 5 minutes per day!”

    In this case, Dr. Chatterjee offers many lifestyle interventions that each take just 5 minutes, with the idea that you implement 3 of them per day (your choice which and when), and thus gradually build up healthy habits. Of course, once things take as habits, you’ll start adding in more, and before you know it, half your lifestyle has changed for the better.

    Which, you may be thinking “my lifestyle’s not that bad”, but if you improve the health outcomes of, say, 20 areas of your life by just a few percent each, you know much better health that adds up to? We’ll give you a clue: it doesn’t add up, it compounds, because each improves the other too, for no part of the body works entirely in isolation.

    And Dr. Chatterjee does tackle the body systematically, by the way; interventions for the gut, heart, brain, and so on.

    As for what these interventions look like; it is very varied. One might be a physical exercise; another, a mental exercise; another, a “make this health 5-minute thing in the kitchen”, etc, etc.

    Bottom line: this is the most supremely easy of easy-ins to healthier living, whatever your starting point—because even if you’re doing half of these interventions, chances are you aren’t doing the other half, and the idea is to pick and choose how and when you adopt them in any case, just picking three 5-minute interventions each day with no restrictions. In short, a lot of value to had here when it comes to real changes to one’s serious measurable health.

    Click here to check out Feel Better In 5, and indeed feel better in 5!

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  • Acorns vs Chestnuts – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing acorns to chestnuts, we picked the acorns.

    Why?

    In terms of macros, chestnuts are mostly water, so it’s not surprising that acorns have a lot more carbs, fat, protein, and fiber. Thus, unless you have personal reasons for any of those to be a problem, acorns are the better choice, offering a lot more nutritional value.

    In the category of vitamins, acorns lead with a lot more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B5, B6, and B9, while chestnuts have more of vitamins B1 and C. However, that vitamin C is useless to us, because it is destroyed in the cooking process (by boiling or roasting), and both of these nuts can be harmful if consumed raw, so that cooking does need to be done. That leaves acorns with a 6:1 lead.

    When it comes to minerals, things are more even; acorns have more copper, magnesium, manganese, and zinc, while chestnuts have more calcium, iron, phosphorus, and potassium. Thus, a 4:4 tie (and yes, the margins of difference are approximately equal too).

    We mentioned “both of these nuts can be harmful if consumed raw”, so a note on that: it’s because, while both contain an assortment of beneficial phytochemicals, they also both contain tannins that, if consumed raw, chelate with iron, essentially taking it out of our diet and potentially creating an iron deficiency. Cooking tannins stops this from being an issue, and the same cooking process renders the tannins actively beneficial to the health, for their antioxidant powers.

    You may have heard that acorns are poisonous; that’s not strictly speaking true, except insofar as anything could be deemed poisonous in excess (including such things as water, and oxygen). Rather, it’s simply the above-described matter of the uncooked tannins and iron chelation. Even then, you’re unlikely to suffer ill effects unless you consume them raw in a fair quantity. While acorns have fallen from popular favor sufficient that one doesn’t see them in supermarkets, the fact is they’ve been enjoyed as an important traditional part of the diet by various indigenous peoples of N. America for centuries*, and provided they are cooked first, they are a good healthy food for most people.

    *(going so far as to cultivate natural oak savannah areas, by burning out young oaks to leave the old ones to flourish without competition, to maximize acorn production, and then store dried acorns in bulk sufficient to cover the next year or so in case of a bad harvest later—so these was not just an incidental food, but very important “our life may depend on this” food. Much like grain in many places—and yes, acorns can be ground into flour and used to make bread etc too)

    Do note: they are both still tree nuts though, so if you have a tree nut allergy, these ones aren’t for you.

    Otherwise, enjoy both; just cook them first!

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts

    Take care!

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  • The Medicinal Properties Of Bay Leaves

    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 humble bay leaf has more uses than just culinary!

    How about for hair growth?

    Popularly recommended on social media with the promise of long and glowing hair… Guess how many scientific studies back up this claim!

    If you guessed zero, you guessed correctly. At least, we were not able to find any. In fact, the only paper on the entirety of PubMed (a large online database of available scientific literature from most, if not all, reputable scientific journals) to return a hit for the search string “bay leaf hair growth” was this one:

    Suppression of Propionibacterium acnes-Induced Skin Inflammation by Laurus nobilis Extract and Its Major Constituent Eucalyptol

    You may notice that that has nothing to do with hair growth, and rather returned the hit because the acne bacteria are known to “proliferate within sebum-blocked skin hair follicles”.

    So let’s talk about that instead:

    Against acne & skin inflammation

    Well, for that, it works! The research that we mentioned above concluded that:

    ❝LNE significantly suppressed the expression of P. acnes-mediated proinflammatory cytokines, such as IL-1β, IL-6, and NLRP3. We also found that LNE inhibited the inflammatory transcription factor NF-κB in response to P. acnes. In addition, eucalyptol, which is the main constituent of LNE, consistently inhibited P. acnes-induced inflammatory signaling pathways. Moreover, LNE significantly ameliorated P. acnes-induced inflammation in a mouse model of acne. We suggest for the first time that LNE hold therapeutic value for the improvement of P. acnes-induced skin inflammation.❞

    LNE = Laurus nobilis extract, i.e. bay leaf extract

    Now, that’s all about acne-induced skin inflammation, but what about other kinds?

    Against inflammation in general

    Bay leaves have an abundance of antioxidant polyphenols, and what’s good against oxidation is good against inflammation. For example:

    Laurus nobilis leaf extract controls inflammation by suppressing NLRP3 inflammasome activation

    That anti-inflammatory action is more than skin-deep though, because…

    Against IBD / ulcerative colitis

    It’s good for the gut, too, for example in this study (with mice, but the bacteria affected are the same as we have), which found:

    ❝…bay leaves showed the best treatment effects on gut microbiota compositions; promoting the growth of Bifidobacteria and Lactobacillus in addition to producing high butyric acid levels. Meanwhile, the number of Clostridium and sulfate-reducing bacteria was significantly reduced. Conclusively, consuming bay leaves brought significant colon health benefits other than stimulating appetite for a better taste.❞

    Read in full: Anti‐inflammatory effects of bay laurel (Laurus nobilis L.) towards the gut microbiome in dextran sodium sulfate induced colitis animal models

    Note that all of those gut-related changes are beneficial to us, increasing things that are best increased, and reducing things that are best reduced.

    Against diabetes

    It’s good for the blood—and for the heart, but more on that later. First, about diabetes:

    ❝All three levels of bay leaves reduced serum glucose with significant decreases ranging from 21 to 26% after 30 d.

    Total cholesterol decreased, 20 to 24%, after 30 days with larger decreases in low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol of 32 to 40%. High density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol increased 29 and 20% in the groups receiving 1 and 2 g of bay leaves, respectively. Triglycerides also decreased 34 and 25% in groups consuming 1 and 2 g of bay leaves, respectively, after 30 d. There were no significant changes in the placebo group.

    In summary, this study demonstrates that consumption of bay leaves, 1 to 3 g/d for 30 days, decreases risk factors for diabetes and cardiovascular diseases and suggests that bay leaves may be beneficial for people with type 2 diabetes.❞

    Again, all those changes are good:

    Bay Leaves Improve Glucose and Lipid Profile of People with Type 2 Diabetes

    Good for the heart

    This one’s quite straight forward. Bay leaf tea is indeed good for the heart,

    Of course, even that latter is also good for the heart literally, just, indirectly, by reducing anxiety and stress, thus indirectly benefiting the heart itself.

    But even before that, it’s already very directly beneficial to cardiovascular health, per its significant improvements to the lipid profile.

    Anything else?

    So much else, but there’s only so much we can feature in one day, so if you’d like to learn more, we recommend this very comprehensive paper:

    Chromatography analysis, in light of vitro antioxidant, antidiabetic, antiobesity, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, anticancer, and three-dimensional cancer spheroids’ formation blocking activities of Laurus nobilis aromatic oil from Palestine

    …which discusses many benefits in considerable detail, including…

    ❝The LN leaves have various biological activities, such as antioxidant, wound healing, antibacterial, analgesic, and anti-inflammatory activities. However, oxidative stress, cancer, diabetes, microbial infections, and inflammatory diseases are closely linked. The objective of this research is to characterize Laurus nobilis (LN) aromatic oil (AO) and evaluate its antioxidant, antidiabetic, antiobesity, antimicrobial, and antimutagenic bioactivities.

    The plant AO showed potent antioxidant activity (IC50 = 2.2 ± 1.38) and has moderate anti-amylase (IC50 = 60.25 ± 1.25), anti-glucosidase (IC50 = 131.82 ± 0.1), and antilipase (IC50 = 83.17 ± 0.06) activities.

    Moreover, LNAO showed potent antimicrobial activity against Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumonia, Proteus vulgaris (MICs = 1.56 µg/mL), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) (MIC = 3.125 µg/mL) and Candida albicans (MIC = 0.195 µg/mL). The cytotoxicity results demonstrated that at a concentration of 1 mg/mL, LNAO has potent breast cancer (MCF-7), and hepatocellular carcinoma (Hep 3B) cancer cells inhibitory activities of 98% and 95%, respectively.

    Importantly, we are the first to show that LNAO significantly hinders hepatocellular carcinoma spheroids’ formation capacity in a 3D model.

    These results show that LNAO is a promising natural source with powerful antioxidant, antidiabetic, anticancer, and antimicrobial activities that could be exploited in the future to treat a variety of diseases.❞

    Want to try some?

    We don’t sell it, but you can buy leaves from your local supermarket and make bay leaf tea, or alternatively, if you prefer essential oil form, here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎

    Enjoy!

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