Plums vs Strawberries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing plums to strawberries, we picked the strawberries.
Why?
Both are great! Absolutely top-tier fruits. However, even within the top tier, there are distinctions:
In terms of of macros, plums have more carbs while strawberries have more fiber; we’ll take the extra fiber for the win here.
In the category of vitamins, plums have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, and K, while strawberries have more of vitamins B6, B9, C, E, and choline, thus scoring a marginal win for strawberries in this round.
When it comes to minerals, plums have (slightly) more copper, while strawberries have more calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc. One more win for strawberries.
In terms of phytochemicals, plums have a higher total mass of polyphenols, and so win this round, although strawberries scored well too.
Adding up the sections makes for an overall win for strawberries, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Top 8 Fruits That Prevent & Kill Cancer
Enjoy!
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Waist Size Worries: Age-Appropriate Solutions
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝My BMI is fine, but my waist is too big. What do I do about that? I am 5′ 5″ tall and 128 pounds and 72 years old.❞
It’s hard to say without knowing about your lifestyle (and hormones, for that matter)! But, extra weight around the middle in particular is often correlated with high levels of cortisol, so you might find this of benefit:
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The Medicinal Chef – by Dale Pinnock
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The philosophy here is very much like our own—to borrow from Hippocrates: “let food be thy medicine”. Obviously please do also let medicine be thy medicine if you need it, but the point is that food is a very good starting place for combatting a lot of disease.
To this end, instead of labelling the recipes with such things as “V”, “Ve”, “GF” and suchlike, it assumes we can tell those things from the ingredients lists, and instead labels things per what they are especially good for:
- S: skin
- J: joints & bones
- R: respiratory system
- I: immune system
- M: metabolic health
- N: nervous system and mental health
- H: heart and circulation
- D: digestive system
- U: reproductive & urinary systems
As for the recipes themselves… They’re a lot like the recipes we share here at 10almonds in their healthiness, skill level, and balance of easy-to-find ingredients with the occasional “order it online” items that punch above their weight. In fact, we’ll probably modify some of the recipes for sharing here.
Bottom line: if you’re looking for genuinely healthy recipes that are neither too basic nor too arcane, this book has about 80 of them.
Click here to check out The Medicinal Chef: Healthy Every Day, and be healthy every day!
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What Nobody Teaches You About Strengthening Your Knees
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Strengthening unhappy knees can seem difficult, because many obvious exercises like squats may hurt, and can feel like they are doing harm (and if your knees are bad enough, maybe they are; it depends on many factors). Here’s a way to improve things:
The muscle nobody talks about
Well, not nobody. But, it’s a muscle that’s rarely talked about; namely, the tibialis anterior.
It plays a key role in decelerating knee motion—in other words, the movement that hurts if you have bad knees. It’s essential for absorbing shock during activities like walking, climbing stairs, and stepping off curbs
So, of course, strengthening this muscle supports knee health.
The exercise this video recommends for strengthening it involves leaning against a wall with feet about a foot away (closer feet make it easier, further makes it harder). Note, this is a lean, not a “Roman chair”.
The exercise involves squeezing the quadriceps, lifting toes toward the nose, and engaging the tibialis anterior muscle. If you’re wondering what to do with your hands, they can be held out with palms open to work on posture, or hanging by the sides. Do this for about 1½–2 minutes.
For more on all this, plus a visual demonstration, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
When Bad Joints Stop You From Exercising (5 Things To Change)
Take care!
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What Your Mucus Says About Your Health
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It’s not a sexy topic (unless perhaps you have a fetish), but it is a useful topic to know about.
So, let’s get down to business with this much-maligned bodily fluid:
What is mucus? And why?
Sometimes, it can seem that mucus only exists to be an inconvenience, and to convey disease.
And… Actually, that’s mostly true.
While some kinds of mucus have other jobs beyond the scope of today’s article (did you know semen is mostly mucus? If not, now you do), the primary job of most of our mucus is to stop things (especially pathogens) going where they shouldn’t.
So, in essence, it really does exist to be an inconvenience—to pathogens. And to convey those pathogens to where they can be disposed of safely, either outside of the body, or to be an easy meal (what with being stuck in mucus, and thus at least moderately immobilized) for our various active immune cells. To make matters worse for the pathogens, there are (usually) enzymes in our mucus that have antimicrobial properties, too.
Some of mucus’s protective role can be in other ways too, such as by lining our stomach. You know, the stomach that contains the acid that can dissolve meat, despite us also being made of meat.
The slimiest rainbow
Ok, maybe not the slimiest rainbow—there’s probably a YouTube slime channel producing more colors. But, our noses are capable of dispensing astonishing quantities of mucus sometimes, and the color can vary widely, so here’s what we can know from that:
Clear
This is as it should be, in good health. If you’re getting lots of it but it’s clear, then it’s usually allergies, but watch out in case it changes color, heralding an infection. This “clear is how it looks when in ideal health”, by the way, is why when someone is sobbing in abject grief, any mucus that shows up to add to that picture will generally be clear.
White
As above, but now inflamed. Inflammation is usually something we don’t want, but in the case of a threat from a pathogen, we actually do want acute inflammation like this—the body is assembling its armies, of which, the most visible (when they appear in mass) are white blood cells. Because of their abundant presence at this stage, the mucus will also become thicker.
Yellow
As above, but the battle is now truly underway, and the yellow color comes from dead white blood cells. This does not, however, mean the battle is necessarily going badly—the body treats its white blood cells as very disposable fighters, and their deaths in large numbers are expected and normal when doing battle.
Green
As above, but neutrophils (a specific kind of white blood cell) have joined the party. They release an enzyme that colors the mucus green—and kills a lot of pathogens. Popular lore says that green mucus means a bacterial infection, but it’s not always so; these can be deployed against viruses too, depending on various factors beyond the scope of this article (but generally pertaining to severity). In any case, this too does not mean the battle is necessarily going badly, but it does express that your body is taking it very seriously—and you should, too.
Red
Nothing to do with infections, usually—it’s just a little blood (the red kind, this time). Usually it got into the mucus because the mucus membrane got damaged, usually due to some kind of physical trauma (e.g. very vigorous nose-blowing, poking things up the nose, etc) or sometimes if the air is very dry (then the mucus itself can dry out, and become stabby inside the nose; when more mucus is produced, it gets infused with blood from the injury).
Pink
As above, but combined with the “white” stage of infection response.
Orange
As above, but combined with the “yellow” stage of infection response.
Brown
As above, but the blood has oxidized—or, as a completely alterative possibility, it could mean you have been breathing a lot of pollutants. Smoke of various kinds (from fires, from smoking, etc) can cause this.
Black
There are various possible explanations here and all of them are bad. Get thee to a doctor. Superficial examples include:
- Fungal infection (you thought toxic black mold was bad when it was on the wall of the house, wait until it’s on the walls of your respiratory system)
- Blood, in abundance, oxidized (which begs the question of what caused that, but certainly: something wrong is not right)
- Pollutants again, but this time at absurd levels of exposure
That last one might sound very transient and self-correcting, but it’s not, and it comes with many increased short- and long-term health risks.
Want to know more?
Knowledge is power, so read up, and stay well:
- Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!
- The Cold Truth About Respiratory Infections
- Why Some People Get Sick More (And How To Not Be One Of Them)
Take care!
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AC: The Power of Appetite Correction – by Dr. Bert Herring
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“Appetite Correction” is an intriguing concept, and so it intrigued us sufficiently to read this book. So what’s it about?
It’s about modifying our response to hunger, and treating it as a messenger to whom we may say “thank you for your opinion” and then do as we already planned to do. And what is that?
Simply, this book is about intermittent fasting, specifically, 19:5 fasting, i.e., fast for 19 hours and eat during a 5hr window each day (the author proposes 5pm–10pm, but honestly, go with what works for you).
During the fasting period, drinking water, or consuming other non insulin-signalling things (e.g. black coffee, black tea, herbal tea, etc) is fine, but not so much as a bite of anything else (nor calorific drinks, e.g. with milk/cream or sugar in, and certainly not sodas, juices, etc).
During the eating period, the idea is to eat at will without restriction (even unhealthy things, if such is your desire) during those 5 hours, with the exception that one should start with something healthy. In other words, you can line up that take-out if you want, but eat a carrot first to break the fast. Or some nuts. Or whatever, but healthy.
The “appetite correction” part of it comes in with how, after a short adjustment period, you will get used to not suffering from hunger during the fasting period, and during the eating period, you will—paradoxically—be more able to practise moderation in your portions.
Most of the book is given over the dealing with psychological difficulties/objections, as well as some social objections, but he does also explain some of the science at hand too (i.e. how intermittent fasting works, on a physiological level). On which note…
The style is on the very light end of pop-science, and unusually, he doesn’t cite any sources for his claims at all. Now, no science that he claimed struck this reviewer as out of the ordinary, but it would have been nice to see a good few pages of bibliography at the back.
Bottom line: this is a super quick-and-easy read that makes a strong (albeit unsourced) case for intermittent fasting. It’s probably best for someone who would like the benefits and needs some persuading, but who is not very interested in delving into the science beyond being content to understand what is explained and put it into practice.
Click here to check out AC: The Power of Appetite Correction, and get yours where you want it!
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The Surprising Sugar Source In Your Toothpaste
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Oftentimes, headlines suggest that experts are either wrong about something or have been hiding something, when the reality is a little different, e.g:
- Scientists won’t tell you this! (…because it’s not true)
- Doctors hate this weight loss trick! (…because it is dangerous and the weight lost is not fat)
- Etc
Our headline today, however, is more a matter of “scientists have been saying one thing, and now it turns out that’s not entirely correct”.
If a chemical ends in -ose, it’s a sugar
Sometimes, that has obvious implications for our metabolism, as with glucose, fructose, or the disaccharide of those, sucrose.
You can read more about those, here: From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose Cs: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Sometimes, it’s a “sugar that doesn’t behave like a sugar”, such as sucralose, which is chemically a sugar, and is sweet, and has been considered to not get metabolized as a sugar, and instead pass through as fiber (though that may now be up for review, in light of what we will share today).
Sucralose does have other potential drawbacks, in any case: The Sucralose News: Scaremongering Or Serious?
And indeed, sweeteners in general have their problems just by virtue of being sweet to the taste: The Problem With Sweeteners
That goes for resistant starches, too
“Resistant” here means that they are resistant to digestion, and pass through as fiber.
“Starch”, however, means that indeed this is a chain of sugars. For example, guar gum, a commonly-used natural thickening agent, is in large part (the galactomannan part) chemically a polymer of d-galactose and d-mannose.
We wrote about it here: The Food Additive You Do Want
What, then, of cellulose, being another -ose chemical, and specifically, a polysaccharide of β(1→4) glucan-linked d-glucose units in a big chain?
Researchers (Dr. Deepesh Panwar et al.) found that cellulose-based thickeners (found in toothpaste, and many food products), previously believed to be indigestible, can be broken down by gut bacteria when enzymes are activated by adjacent natural dietary polysaccharides:
- Previous work: bacteria (Bacteroides and Segatella/Prevotella strains) could not grow on cellulose alone.
- New discovery: when “primed” with natural plant polysaccharides (cereal mixed-linkage β-glucan or dicot xyloglucan), certain strains could metabolize the cellulose.
In other words, previous in vitro lab work had carefully recreated gut conditions including a microbiome, but then added the cellulose alone as a testing agent, without adding anything else (because after all, they didn’t want anything to contaminate the results).
But the reality is, there’s never normally nothing else in our gut!
As for what triggers the breakdown of this “unbreakdownable” cellulose, it turns out that many natural fibers in fruits, vegetables and cereals prime the bacterial enzymes that then also act on the cellulose (including: artificial cellulose derivatives).
So, in other words: the cellulose-based thickener in your toothpaste and many food products is, if ingested, getting broken down as sugar after all, if you have a healthy gut, in any case.
You can read their paper in full, here: Artificial cellulose derivatives are metabolized by select human gut Bacteroidota upon priming with common plant β-glucans
What does this mean for my health?
Must you throw out your toothpaste, and start going through the condiment cupboard?
No, these things are fine, and this discovery doesn’t really change that.
And in particular, there is no threat to your teeth from cellulose-thickened toothpaste, nor from cellulose-based “sugar-free” gum, for that matter.
Technically yes, it may mean that something advertised as containing zero calories technically has a small calorie value, but just how much toothpaste/gum are you eating, really?
And even with that in mind, your teeth themselves remain, as we say, unaffected. After all, the oral microbiome is very different from that of your colon (well, it certainly should be, at least!), so those same strains are not there to digest it.
In fact, the β-glucan mentioned in the study? The kind that, if present in your gut, enables the bacteria to digest the cellulose?
We wrote about it here: The Best Kind Of Fiber For Overall Health? ← it’s β-glucan! Oats are a great source.
See also: What Do The Different Kinds Of Fiber Do? 30 Foods That Rank Highest
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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