In Plain English…

It’s Q&A Time!

This is the bit whereby each week, we respond to subscriber questions/requests/etc

Have something you’d like to ask us, or ask us to look into? Hit reply to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom, and a Real Human™ will be glad to read it!

Q: Love to have someone research all the additives in our medicines, (risk of birth control and breast cancer) and what goes in all of our food and beverages. So much info out there, but there are so many variations, you never know who to believe.

That’s a great idea! There are a lot of medicines and food and beverages out there, so that’s quite a broad brief, but! We could well do a breakdown of very common additives, and demystify them, sorting them into good/bad/neutral, e.g:

• Ascorbic acid—Good! This is Vitamin C
• Acetic acid—Neutral! This is vinegar
• Acetylsalicylic acid—Good or Bad! This is aspirin (a painkiller and blood-thinning agent, can be good for you or can cause more problems than it solves, depending on your personal medical situation. If in doubt, check with your doctor)
• Acesulfame K—Generally Neutral! This is a sweetener that the body can’t metabolize, so it’s also not a source of potassium (despite containing potassium) and will generally do nothing. Unless you have an allergy to it, which is rare but is a thing.
• Sucralose—Neutral! This is technically a sugar (as is anything ending in -ose), but the body can’t metabolize it and processes it as a dietary fiber instead. We’d list it as good for that reason, but honestly, we doubt you’re eating enough sucralose to make a noticeable difference to your daily fiber intake.
• Sucrose—Bad! This is just plain sugar

Sometimes words that sound the same can ring alarm bells when they need not, for example there’s a big difference between:

• Potassium iodide (a good source of potassium and iodine)
• Potassium cyanide (the famous poison; 300mg will kill you; half that dose will probably kill you)
• Cyanocobalamine (Vitamin B12)

Let us know if there are particular additives (or particular medications) you’d like us to look at!

While for legal reasons we cannot give medical advice, talking about common contraindications (e.g., it’s generally advised to not take this with that, as one will stop the other from working, etc) is definitely something we could do.

For example! St. John’s Wort, very popular as a herbal mood-brightener, is on the list of contraindications for so many medications, including:

• Antidepressants
• Birth control pills
• Cyclosporine, which prevents the body from rejecting transplanted organs
• Some heart medications, including digoxin and ivabradine
• Some HIV drugs, including indinavir and nevirapine
• Some cancer medications, including irinotecan and imatinib
• Warfarin, an anticoagulant (blood thinner)
• Certain statins, including simvastatin

Q: As I am a retired nurse, I am always interested in new medical technology and new ways of diagnosing. I have recently heard of using the eyes to diagnose Alzheimer’s. When I did some research I didn’t find too much. I am thinking the information may be too new or I wasn’t on the right sites.

(this is in response to last week’s piece on lutein, eyes, and brain health)

We’d readily bet that the diagnostic criteria has to do with recording low levels of lutein in the eye (discernible by a visual examination of macular pigment optical density), and relying on the correlation between this and incidence of Alzheimer’s, but we’ve not seen it as a hard diagnostic tool as yet either—we’ll do some digging and let you know what we find! In the meantime, we note that the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (which may be of interest to you, if you’re not already subscribed) is onto this:

Read: Cognitive Function and Its Relationship with Macular Pigment Optical Density and Serum Concentrations of its Constituent Carotenoids

See also:

• Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (mixture of free and paid content)
• Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Reports (open access—all content is free)

Q: As to specific health topics, I would love to see someone address all these Instagram ads targeted to women that claim “You only need to ‘balance your hormones’ to lose weight, get ripped, etc.” What does this mean? Which hormones are they all talking about? They all seem to be selling a workout program and/or supplements or something similar, as they are ads, after all. Is there any science behind this stuff or is it mostly hot air, as I suspect?

Thank you for asking this, as your question prompted yesterday’s main feature, What Does “Balancing Your Hormones” Even Mean?

That’s a great suggestion also about addressing ads (and goes for health-related things in general, not just hormonal stuff) and examining their claims, what they mean, how they work (if they work!), and what’s “technically true but may be misleading* cause confusion”

*We don’t want companies to sue us, of course.

Only, we’re going to need your help for this one, subscribers!

See, here at 10almonds we practice what we preach. We limit screen time, we focus on our work when working, and simply put, we don’t see as many ads as our thousands of subscribers do. Also, ads tend to be targeted to the individual, and often vary from country to country, so chances are good that we’re not seeing the same ads that you’re seeing.

So, how about we pull together as a bit of a 10almonds community project?

• Step 1: add our email address to your contacts list, if you haven’t already
• Step 2: When you see an ad you’re curious about, select “share” (there is usually an option to share ads, but if not, feel free to screenshot or such)
• Step 3: Send the ad to us by email

We’ll do the rest! Whenever we have enough ads to review, we’ll do a special on the topic.

We will categorically not be able to do this without you, so please do join in—Many thanks in advance!