Pomegranate vs Cherries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing pomegranate to cherries, we picked the pomegranate.
Why?
In terms of macros, pomegranate is slightly higher in carbs, and/but 4x higher in fiber. That’s already a good start for pomegranates. Lest we be accused of cherry-picking, though, we’ll mention that pomegranate is also slightly higher in protein and fat, for what it’s worth—which is not a lot. As with most fruits, the protein and fat numbers are low importance next to the carb:fiber ratio.
When it comes to vitamins, pomegranate has more of vitamins B1, B2, B5, B6, B9. E. K, and choline. On the other hand, cherries have more of vitamins A and B3. The two fruits are equal in vitamin C. This all makes for a clear win for pomegranate.
In the category of minerals, pomegranate boasts more copper, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. In contrast, cherries have slightly more calcium. Another win for pomegranate.
Both of these fruits have beneficial polyphenols, each with a slightly different profile, but neither pressingly better than the other.
In short: as ever with healthy foods, enjoy both—diversity is good! But if you’re going to pick on, we recommend the pomegranate.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Pomegranate Peel’s Potent Potential ← so don’t throw it away!
- Cherries’ Very Healthy Wealth Of Benefits!
Take care!
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Dealing With Back Acne
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
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 😎
❝Lately I’ve increasingly been getting zits on my back, I don’t think my shower habits have changed at all, is this just an age thing or is there something I can do about it?❞
Well, we cannot diagnose from afar, so definitely consider seeing a dermatologist if it persists and/or it’s more than a small nuisance to you, but…
Yes and no, with regard to age.
Rather, it’s not really about age, but (in most cases, anyway) hormonal fluctuations. That’s why teenagers often get it; it’s also why acne breakouts can occur during pregnancy, and it can happen again in perimenopause, menopause, or in the postmenopause climb-down, due to imbalanced hormones during the change, and while it’s less likely for men undergoing the andropause (the noticeable drop of testosterone levels after a certain age), it can absolutely occur if taking certain androgenic supplements, including simply taking testosterone (or conversely, if taking something to dial down antagonistic hormones). It can also happen if you’re taking something that throws out your free testosterone to DHT ratio.
As for what to do in this case? The usual process is: just wait it out. At some point your hormones will become stable again (nature loves equilibrium, and the body is mostly a self-righting system if given what it needs to do that), and your skin will return to normal. To be clear: the acne occurs because of the change, not necessarily the end place. So whatever hormone levels you have, be they medicated or otherwise, you just need to keep them stable now (assuming the levels are fine; if not, get them fine, and then keep them stable—speak to an endocrinologist for that) in order to come out the other side acne-free.
However, that’s “the usual process”, and obviously we cannot guarantee it’s not something else. It can also be caused by stress:
The Impact of Pyschological Stress on Acne ← teehee, a typo made it into the publication title
…in which case, of course, simply manage your stress (we know, often easier said than done, but the point is, that’s the remedy in this case).
See also: How To Reduce Chronic Stress
Diet is not the cause (or cure), but enjoying an anti-inflammatory diet will be beneficial, and consuming inflammatory things, exacerbatory:
Effects of Diet on Acne and Its Response to Treatment
Hygiene is also rarely to blame, but it can make a difference, so: do wash gently, wear clean clothes, and wash your bedsheets more often than you think necessary. And about that showering:
Body Scrubs: Benefits, Risks, and Guidance
Take care!
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Wheat Belly, Revised & Expanded Edition – by Dr. William Davis
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This review pertains to the 2019 edition of the book, not the 2011 original, which will not have had all of the same research.
We are told, by scientific consensus, to enjoy plenty of whole grains as part of our diet. So, what does cardiologist Dr. William Davis have against wheat?
Firstly, not all grains are interchangeable, and wheat—in particular, modern strains of wheat—cannot be described as the same as the wheat of times past.
While this book does touch on the gluten aspect (and Celiac disease), and notes that modern wheat has a much higher gluten content than older strains, most of this book is about other harms that wheat can do to us.
Dr. Davis explores and explains the metabolic implications of wheat’s unique properties on organs such as our pancreas, liver, heart, and brain.
The book does also have recipes and meal plans, though in this reviewer’s opinion they were a little superfluous. Wheat is not hard to cut out unless you are living in a food desert or are experiencing food poverty, in which case, those recipes and meal plans would also not help.
Bottom line: this book, filled with plenty of actual science, makes a strong case against wheat, and again, mostly for reasons other than its gluten content. You might want to cut yours down!
Click here to check out Wheat Belly, and see if skipping the wheat could be good for you!
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Cucumber Canapés-Crudités
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It’s time to party with these delicious snacks, which are great as an hors d’œuvre, amuse-bouche, or part of a buffet. And like all our offerings, they’re very healthy too—in this case, especially for the gut and heart!
You will need
- 1 cucumber, sliced
- 1 cup pitted Kalamata olives (or other black olives)
- 1 cup sun-dried tomatoes
- 2 oz feta cheese (or vegan equivalent, or pine nuts)
- 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 1 tbsp fresh basil, chopped
- 2 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Make the first topping by combining the olives, half the olive oil, and half the black pepper, into a food processor and blending until it is a coarse pâté.
2) Make the second topping by doing the same with the tomatoes, basil, feta cheese (or substitution), and the other half of the olive oil and black pepper, again until it is a coarse pâté.
3) Assemble the canapés-crudités by topping the cucumber slices alternately with the two toppings, and serve:
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
- Cucumber Extract Beats Glucosamine & Chondroitin… At 1/135th Of The Dose?! ← yes, you can get this benefit by eating cucumber
- Black Olives vs Green Olives – Which is Healthier? ← have a guess!
- Lycopene’s Benefits For The Gut, Heart, Brain, & More ← tomatoes are very rich in lycopene
- Herbs for Evidence-Based Health & Healing ←Basil features here
- Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
Take care!
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Severe Complications for Pregnant Veterans Nearly Doubled in the Last Decade, a GAO Report Finds
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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: Post-Roe America:Abortion Access Divides the Nation
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending nearly 50 years of federal protection for abortion, some states began enforcing strict abortion bans while others became new havens for the procedure. ProPublica is investigating how sweeping changes to reproductive health care access in America are affecting people, institutions and governments.
Over the past decade, the rate of veterans suffering severe pregnancy complications has risen dramatically, a new federal report found.
Veterans have raced to the hospital with dangerous infections, kidney failure, aneurysms or blood loss. They’ve required hysterectomies, breathing machines and blood transfusions to save their lives. Between 2011 and 2020, 13 veterans died after such complications.
The report found that among people getting health care benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs, the rate of severe complications nearly doubled during that time, from about 93 per 10,000 hospitalizations in 2011 to just over 184 per 10,000 hospitalizations in 2020. Black veterans had the highest rates.
The report, which was put together by the Government Accountability Office, also made recommendations for reducing the problem, which focus on conducting more routine screenings throughout pregnancy and in the postpartum period.
“It is imperative that the VA help ensure veterans have the healthiest pregnancy outcomes possible,” the report said, highlighting the increasing number of veterans using the agency’s maternity benefits as well as the troublesome complication rates faced by Black women.
The report’s findings are an unfortunate trend, said Alyssa Hundrup, director of health care at the GAO. The office analyzed data on 40,000 hospitalizations related to deliveries paid for by the VA. It captures a time period before 21 states banned or greatly restricted abortion and the military was thrust into a political battle over whether it would pay for active service members to travel for abortion care if a pregnancy was a risk to their health.
Hundrup, who led the review, said the analysis included hospital records from days after delivery to a year postpartum. The report was mandated after Congress passed a law in 2021 that aimed to address the maternal health crisis among veterans. The law led to a $15 million investment in maternity care coordination programs for veterans.
The report recommended that the VA analyze and collect more data on severe complications as well as data on the mental health, race and ethnicity of veterans who experience complications to understand the causes behind the increase and the reasons for the disparity. The report also states that oversight is needed to ensure screenings are being completed.
Studies show there’s a connection between mental health conditions and pregnancy-related complications, VA officials said.
The report recommended expanding the screening questions that providers ask patients at appointments to glean more information about their mental health, including anxiety and PTSD symptoms. It urged the VA to review the data more regularly.
“You don’t know what you don’t measure,” Hundrup said in an interview with ProPublica.
The VA health system, which historically served a male population, does not provide maternity care at its facilities. Instead, the agency has outsourced maternity care. But when patients were treated by those providers, the VA failed to track whether they were getting screened for other health issues and mental health problems.
Officials hope the improved data collection will help the VA study underlying issues that may lead to complications. For example, do higher rates of anxiety have a connection to rates of high blood pressure in pregnant people?
VA officials are working with a maternal health review committee to monitor the data as it is gathered. The agency recently conducted its first review of data going back five years about pregnancy-related complications, said Dr. Amanda Johnson, acting head of the VA’s Office of Women’s Health, who is overseeing the implementation of the report’s recommendations.
The VA has created a dashboard to monitor pregnant veterans’ health outcomes. The VA’s data analysis team will also examine the impact of veterans’ ages on complications and whether they differ for people who live in urban and rural areas.
VA officials will begin to review mental health screenings conducted by maternal care coordinators in March. The coordinators advocate for veterans, helping them between health care visits, whether their providers are inside or outside the VA.
Johnson said that reducing racial and ethnic disparities is a priority for the agency. In 2018, ProPublica published “Lost Mothers,” a series that shed light on the country’s maternal health crisis. Studies have shown that in the general population, Black women are three times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related complications. While deaths made up only a small portion of the bad outcomes for Black veterans cited in the report, VA care could not spare them from elevated rates of severe complications. Johnson said the maternal health crisis also persists within the VA.
“There is a disparity,” Johnson said. “We are not immune to that.”
Research shows pregnant people who have used the VA’s coverage have higher rates of trauma and mental conditions that can increase their risks of complications and bad outcomes.
This may be because many people who join the military enter it having already faced trauma, said Dr. Laura Miller, a psychiatrist and the medical director of reproductive mental health at the VA.
She said veterans with PTSD have higher rates of complications such as preeclampsia, a potentially fatal condition related to high blood pressure, gestational diabetes and postpartum depression. If untreated during pregnancy, depression also increases the likelihood of preterm birth and lingering problems for babies.
Hundrup said she hopes this proactive work will improve maternal health.
“We want these numbers trending in the other direction,” Hundrup said.
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Do Try This At Home: The 12-Week Brain Fitness Program
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12 Weeks To Measurably Boost Your Brain
This is Dr. Majid Fotuhi. From humble beginnings (being smuggled out of Iran in 1980 to avoid death in the war), he went on (after teaching himself English, French, and German, hedging his bets as he didn’t know for sure where life would lead him) to get his MD from Harvard Medical School and his PhD in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University. Since then, he’s had a decades-long illustrious career in neurology and neurophysiology.
What does he want us to know?
The Brain Fitness Program
This is not, by the way, something he’s selling. Rather, it was a landmark 12-week study in which 127 people aged 60–80, of which 63% female, all with a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment, underwent an interventional trial—in other words, a 12-week brain fitness course.
After it, 84% of the participants showed statistically significant improvements in cognitive function.
Not only that, but of those who underwent MRI testing before and after (not possible for everyone due to practical limitations), 71% showed either no further deterioration of the hippocampus, or actual growth above the baseline volume of the hippocampus (that’s good, and it means functionally the memory center of the brain has been rejuvenated).
You can read a little more about the study here:
As for what the program consisted of, and what Dr. Fotuhi thus recommends for everyone…
Cognitive stimulation
This is critical, so we’re going to spend most time on this one—the others we can give just a quick note and a pointer.
In the study this came in several forms and had the benefit of neurofeedback technology, but he says we can replicate most of the effects by simply doing something cognitively stimulating. Whatever challenges your brain is good, but for maximum effect, it should involve the language faculties of the brain, since these are what tend to get hit most by age-related cognitive decline, and are also what tends to have the biggest impact on life when lost.
If you lose your keys, that’s an inconvenience, but if you can’t communicate what is distressing you, or understand what someone is explaining to you, that’s many times worse—and that kind of thing is a common reality for many people with dementia.
To keep the lights brightly lit in that part of the brain: language-learning is good, at whatever level suits you personally. In other words: there’s a difference between entry-level Duolingo Spanish, and critically analysing Rumi’s poetry in the original Persian, so go with whatever is challenging and/but accessible for you—just like you wouldn’t go to the gym for the first time and try to deadlift 500lbs, but you also probably wouldn’t do curls with the same 1lb weights every day for 10 years.
In other words: progressive overloading is key, for the brain as well as for muscles. Start easy, but if you’re breezing through everything, it’s time to step it up.
If for some reason you’re really set against the idea of learning another language, though, check out:
Reading As A Cognitive Exercise ← there are specific tips here for ensuring your reading is (and remains) cognitively beneficial
Mediterranean diet
Shocking nobody, this is once again recommended. You might like to check out the brain-healthy “MIND” tweak to it, here:
Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet ← it’s the fourth one
Omega-3 supplementation
Nothing complicated here. The brain needs a healthy balance of these fatty acids to function properly, and most people have an incorrect balance (too little omega-3 for the omega-6 present):
What Omega-3 Fatty Acids Really Do For Us ← scroll to “against cognitive decline”
Increasing fitness
There’s a good rule of thumb: what’s healthy for your heart, is healthy for your brain. This is because, like every other organ in your body, the brain does not function well without good circulation bringing plenty of oxygen and nutrients, which means good cardiovascular health is necessary. The brain is extra sensitive to this because it’s a demanding organ in terms of how much stuff it needs delivering via blood, and also because of the (necessary; we’d die quickly and horribly without it) impediment of the blood-brain barrier, and the possibility of beta-amyloid plaques and similar woes (they will build up if circulation isn’t good).
How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk ← number two on the list here
Practising mindfulness medication
This is also straightforward, but not to be underestimated or skipped over:
No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness
Want to step it up? Check out:
Meditation Games That You’ll Actually Enjoy
Lastly…
Dr. Fotuhi wants us to consider looking after our brain the same way we look after our teeth. No, he doesn’t want us to brush our brain, but he does want us to take small measurable actions multiple times per day, every day.
You can’t just spend the day doing nothing but brushing your teeth for the entirety of January the 1st and then expect them to be healthy for the rest of the year; it doesn’t work like that—and it doesn’t work like that for the brain, either.
So, make the habits, and keep them going
Take care!
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Reduce Caffeine’s Impact on Kidneys
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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
❝Avid coffee drinker so very interested in the results Also question Is there something that you could take or eat that would prevent the caffeine from stimulating the kidneys? I tried to drink decaf from morning to night not a good result! Thanks❞
That is a good question! The simple answer is “no” (but keep reading, because all is not lost)
There’s no way (that we yet know of) to proof the kidneys against the stimulating effect of caffeine. This is especially relevant because part of caffeine’s stimulating effect is noradrenergic, and that “ren” in the middle there? It’s about the kidneys. This is just because the adrenal gland is situated next to them (actually, it’s pretty much sitting on top of them), hence the name, but it does mean that the kidneys are about the hardest thing in the body to have not effected by caffeine.
However! The effects of caffeine in general can be softened a little with l-theanine (found in tea, or it can be taken as a supplement). It doesn’t stop it from working, but it makes the curve of the effect a little gentler, and so it can reduce some unwanted side effects.
You can read more about l-theanine here:
Don’t Forget…
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