Protein Immune Support Salad

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.

How to get enough protein from a salad, without adding meat? Cashews and chickpeas have you more than covered! Along with the leafy greens and an impressive array of minor ingredients full of healthy phytochemicals, this one’s good for your muscles, bones, skin, immune health, and more.

You will need

  • 1½ cups raw cashews (if allergic, omit; the chickpeas and coconut will still carry the dish for protein and healthy fats)
  • 2 cans (2x 14oz) chickpeas, drained
  • 1½ lbs baby spinach leaves
  • 2 large onions, finely chopped
  • 3 oz goji berries
  • ½ bulb garlic, finely chopped
  • 2 tbsp dessicated coconut
  • 1 tbsp dried cumin
  • 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
  • 2 tsp chili flakes
  • 1 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
  • ½ tsp MSG, or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
  • Extra virgin olive oil, for cooking

Method

(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

1) Heat a little oil in a pan; add the onions and cook for about 3 minutes.

2) Add the garlic and cook for a further 2 minutes.

3) Add the spinach, and cook until it wilts.

4) Add the remaining ingredients except the coconut, and cook for another three minutes.

5) Heat another pan (dry); add the coconut and toast for 1–2 minutes, until lightly golden. Add it to the main pan.

6) Serve hot as a main, or an attention-grabbing side:

Enjoy!

Want to learn more?

For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

Take care!

Don’t Forget…

Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

Recommended

  • Healthy Tiramisu
  • Older Men’s Connections Often Wither When They’re on Their Own
    Retired, isolated, and struggling with identity, older men face unique emotional challenges after leaving the workforce and living alone, often unnoticed.

Learn to Age Gracefully

Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • The Power of Self-Care – by Dr. Sunil Kumar

    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.

    First, what this book is mostly not about: bubble baths and scented candles. We say “mostly”, because stress management is an important aspect given worthy treatment in this book, but there is more emphasis on evidence-based interventions and thus Dr. Kumar is readier to prescribe nature walks and meditation, than product-based pampering sessions.

    As is made clear in the subtitle “Transforming Heart Health with Lifestyle Medicine”, the focus is on heart health throughout, but as 10almonds readers know, “what’s good for your heart is good for your brain” is a truism that indeed holds true here too.

    Dr. Kumar also gives nutritional tweaks to optimize heart health, and includes a selection of heart-healthy recipes, too. And exercise? Yes, customizable exercise plans, even. And a plan for getting sleep into order if perchance it has got a bit out of hand (most people get less sleep than necessary for maintenance of good health), and he even delves into “social prescribing”, that is to say, making sure that one’s social connectedness does not get neglected—without letting it, conversely, take over too much of one’s life (done badly, social connectedness can be a big source of unmanaged stress).

    Perhaps the most value of this book comes from its 10-week self-care plan (again, with a focus on heart health), basically taking the reader by the hand for long enough that, after those 10 weeks, habits should be quite well-ingrained.

    A strong idea throughout is that the things we take up should be sustainable, because well, a heart is for life, not just for a weekend retreat.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to improve your heart health in a way that feels like self-care rather than an undue amount of work, then this is the book for you.

    Click here to check out The Power Of Self-Care, and transform your heart health with lifestyle medicine!

    Share This Post

  • We’re only using a fraction of health workers’ skills. This needs to change

    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.

    Roles of health professionals are still unfortunately often stuck in the past. That is, before the shift of education of nurses and other health professionals into universities in the 1980s. So many are still not working to their full scope of practice.

    There has been some expansion of roles in recent years – including pharmacists prescribing (under limited circumstances) and administering a wider range of vaccinations.

    But the recently released paper from an independent Commonwealth review on health workers’ “scope of practice” identifies the myriad of barriers preventing Australians from fully benefiting from health professionals’ skills.

    These include workforce design (who does what, where and how roles interact), legislation and regulation (which often differs according to jurisdiction), and how health workers are funded and paid.

    There is no simple quick fix for this type of reform. But we now have a sensible pathway to improve access to care, using all health professionals appropriately.

    A new vision for general practice

    I recently had a COVID booster. To do this, I logged onto my general practice’s website, answered the question about what I wanted, booked an appointment with the practice nurse that afternoon, got jabbed, was bulk-billed, sat down for a while, and then went home. Nothing remarkable at all about that.

    But that interaction required a host of facilitating factors. The Victorian government regulates whether nurses can provide vaccinations, and what additional training the nurse requires. The Commonwealth government has allowed the practice to be paid by Medicare for the nurse’s work. The venture capitalist practice owner has done the sums and decided allocating a room to a practice nurse is economically rational.

    The future of primary care is one involving more use of the range of health professionals, in addition to GPs.

    It would be good if my general practice also had a physiotherapist, who I could see if I had back pain without seeing the GP, but there is no Medicare rebate for this. This arrangement would need both health professionals to have access to my health record. There also needs to be trust and good communication between the two when the physio might think the GP needs to be alerted to any issues.

    This vision is one of integrated primary care, with health professionals working in a team. The nurse should be able to do more than vaccination and checking vital signs. Do I really need to see the GP every time I need a prescription renewed for my regular medication? This is the nub of the “scope of practice” issue.

    How about pharmacists?

    An integrated future is not the only future on the table. Pharmacy owners especially have argued that pharmacists should be able to practise independently of GPs, prescribing a limited range of medications and dispensing them.

    This will inevitably reduce continuity of care and potentially create risks if the GP is not aware of what other medications a patient is using.

    But a greater role for pharmacists has benefits for patients. It is often easier and cheaper for the patient to see a pharmacist, especially as bulk billing rates fall, and this is one of the reasons why independent pharmacist prescribing is gaining traction.

    Pharmacists explains something to a patient
    It’s often easier for a patient to see a pharmacist than a GP. PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock

    Every five years or so the government negotiates an agreement with the Pharmacy Guild, the organisation of pharmacy owners, about how much pharmacies will be paid for dispensing medications and other services. These agreements are called “Community Pharmacy Agreements”. Paying pharmacists independent prescribing may be part of the next agreement, the details of which are currently being negotiated.

    GPs don’t like competition from this new source, even though there will be plenty of work around for GPs into the foreseeable future. So their organisations highlight the risks of these changes, reopening centuries old turf wars dressed up as concerns about safety and risk.

    Who pays for all this?

    Funding is at the heart of disputes about scope of practice. As with many policy debates, there is merit on both sides.

    Clearly the government must increase its support for comprehensive general practice. Existing funding of fee-for-service medical benefits payments must be redesigned and supplemented by payments that allow practices to engage a range of other health professionals to create health-care teams.

    This should be the principal direction of primary care reform, and the final report of the scope of practice review should make that clear. It must focus on the overall goal of better primary care, rather than simply the aspirations of individual health professionals, and working to a professional’s full scope of practice in a team, not a professional silo.

    In parallel, governments – state and federal – must ensure all health professionals are used to their best of their abilities. It is a waste to have highly educated professionals not using their skills fully. New funding arrangements should facilitate better access to care from all appropriately qualified health professionals.

    In the case of prescribing, it is possible to reconcile the aspirations of pharmacists and the concerns of GPs. New arrangements could be that pharmacists can only renew medications if they have agreements with the GP and there is good communication between them. This may be easier in rural and suburban areas, where the pharmacists are better known to the GPs.

    The second issues paper points to the complexity of achieving scope of practice reforms. However, it also sets out a sensible path to improve access to care using all health professionals appropriately.

    Stephen Duckett, Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    Share This Post

  • Green Curry Salmon Burgers

    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.

    These lean and healthy burgers are as quick and easy to make as they are good for entertaining. The serving-bed has its nutritional secrets too! All in all, an especially heart-healthy and brain-healthy dish.

    You will need

    • 4 skinless salmon fillets, cubed (Vegetarian/Vegan? Consider this Plant-Based Salmon Recipe or, since they are getting blended, simply substitute 1½ cups cooked chickpeas instead with 1 tbsp tahini)
    • 2 cloves garlic, chopped
    • 2 tbsp thai green curry paste
    • juice of two limes, plus wedges to serve
    • 1 cup quinoa
    • ½ cup edamame beans, thawed if they were frozen
    • large bunch fresh cilantro (or parsley if you have the “soap “cilantro tastes like soap” gene), chopped
    • extra virgin olive oil, for frying
    • 1 tbsp chia seeds
    • 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
    • 2 tsp black pepper, coarse ground

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Put the salmon, garlic, curry paste, nutritional yeast, and half the lime juice into a food processor, and blend until smooth.

    2) Remove, divide into four parts, and shape into burger patty shapes. Put them in the fridge where they can firm up while we do the next bit.

    3) Cook the quinoa with the tablespoon of chia seeds added (which means boiling water and then letting it simmer for 10–15 minutes; when the quinoa is tender and unfurled a little, it’s done).

    4) Drain the quinoa with a sieve, and stir in the edamame beans, the rest of the lime juice, the cilantro, and the black pepper. Set aside.

    5) Using the olive oil, fry the salmon burgers for about 5 minutes on each side.

    6) Serve; we recommend putting the burgers atop the rest, and adding a dash of lime at the table.

    (it can also be served this way!)

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    Take care!

    Share This Post

Related Posts

  • Healthy Tiramisu
  • ‘Naked carbs’ and ‘net carbs’ – what are they and should you count them?

    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.

    According to social media, carbs come in various guises: naked carbs, net carbs, complex carbs and more.

    You might be wondering what these terms mean or if all carbs are really the same. If you are into “carb counting” or “cutting carbs”, it’s important to make informed decisions about what you eat.

    What are carbs?

    Carbohydrates, or “carbs” for short, are one of the main sources of energy we need for brain function, muscle movement, digestion and pretty much everything our bodies do.

    There are two classifications of carbs, simple and complex. Simple carbs have one or two sugar molecules, while complex carbs are three or more sugar molecules joined together. For example, table sugar is a simple carb, but starch in potatoes is a complex carb.

    All carbs need to be broken down into individual molecules by our digestive enzymes to be absorbed. Digestion of complex carbs is a much slower process than simple carbs, leading to a more gradual blood sugar increase.

    Fibre is also considered a complex carb, but it has a structure our body is not capable of digesting. This means we don’t absorb it, but it helps with the movement of our stool and prevents constipation. Our good gut bacteria also love fibre as they can digest it and use it for energy – important for a healthy gut.

    What about ‘naked carbs’?

    “Naked carbs” is a popular term usually used to refer to foods that are mostly simple carbs, without fibre or accompanying protein or fat. White bread, sugary drinks, jams, sweets, white rice, white flour, crackers and fruit juice are examples of these foods. Ultra-processed foods, where the grains are stripped of their outer layers (including fibre and most nutrients) leaving “refined carbs”, also fall into this category.

    One of the problems with naked carbs or refined carbs is they digest and absorb quickly, causing an immediate rise in blood sugar. This is followed by a rapid spike in insulin (a hormone that signals cells to remove sugar from blood) and then a drop in blood sugar. This can lead to hunger and cravings – a vicious cycle that only gets worse with eating more of the same foods.

    donut with sprinkles in close up
    Naked carbs can make blood sugars spike then crash.
    Pexels/Alexander Grey

    What about ‘net carbs’?

    This is another popular term tossed around in dieting discussions. Net carbs refer to the part of the carb food that we actually absorb.

    Again, fibre is not easily digestible. And some carb-rich foods contain sugar alcohols, such as sweeteners (like xylitol and sorbitol) that have limited absorption and little to no effect on blood sugar. Deducting the value of fibre and sugar alcohols from the total carbohydrate content of a food gives what’s considered its net carb value.

    For example, canned pear in juice has around 12.3g of “total carbohydrates” per 100g, including 1.7g carb + 1.7g fibre + 1.9g sugar alcohol. So its net carb is 12.3g – 1.7g – 1.9g = 8.7g. This means 8.7g of the 12.3g total carbs impacts blood sugar.

    The nutrition labels on packaged foods in Australia and New Zealand usually list fibre separately to carbohydrates, so the net carbs have already been calculated. This is not the case in other countries, where “total carbohydrates” are listed.

    Does it matter though?

    Whether or not you should care about net or naked carbs depends on your dietary preferences, health goals, food accessibility and overall nutritional needs. Generally speaking, we should try to limit our consumption of simple and refined carbs.

    The latest World Health Organization guidelines recommend our carbohydrate intake should ideally come primarily from whole grains, vegetables, fruits and pulses, which are rich in complex carbs and fibre. This can have significant health benefits (to regulate hunger, improve cholesterol or help with weight management) and reduce the risk of conditions such as heart disease, obesity and colon cancer.

    In moderation, naked carbs aren’t necessarily bad. But pairing them with fats, protein or fibre can slow down the digestion and absorption of sugar. This can help to stabilise blood sugar levels, prevent spikes and crashes and support personal weight management goals. If you’re managing diabetes or insulin resistance, paying attention to the composition of your meals, and the quality of your carbohydrate sources is essential.

    A ketogenic (high fat, low carb) diet typically restricts carb intake to between 20 and 50g each day. But this carb amount refers to net carbs – so it is possible to eat more carbs from high-fibre sources.

    salad with quinoa and vegetables
    Choose complex carbohydrates with lots of fibre.
    Shutterstock

    Some tips to try

    Some simple strategies can help you get the most out of your carb intake:

    • reduce your intake of naked carbs and foods high in sugar and white flour, such as white bread, table sugar, honey, lollies, maple syrup, jam, and fruit juice

    • opt for protein- and fibre-rich carbs. These include oats, sweet potatoes, nuts, avocados, beans, whole grains and broccoli

    • if you are eating naked carbs, dress them up with some protein, fat and fibre. For example, top white bread with a nut butter rather than jam

    • if you are trying to reduce the carb content in your diet, be wary of any symptoms of low blood glucose, including headaches, nausea, and dizziness

    • working with a health-care professional such as an accredited practising dietitian or your GP can help develop an individualised diet plan that meets your specific needs and goals.

    Correction: this article has been updated to indicate how carbohydrates are listed on food nutrition labels in Australia and New Zealand.The Conversation

    Saman Khalesi, Senior Lecturer and Discipline Lead in Nutrition, School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences, CQUniversity Australia; Anna Balzer, Lecturer, Medical Science School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences, CQUniversity Australia; Charlotte Gupta, Postdoctoral research fellow, CQUniversity Australia; Chris Irwin, Senior Lecturer in Nutrition and Dietetics, School of Health Sciences & Social Work, Griffith University, and Grace Vincent, Senior Lecturer, Appleton Institute, CQUniversity Australia

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Is alcohol good or bad for you? Yes.

    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.

    This article originally appeared in Harvard Public Health magazine.

    It’s hard to escape the message these days that every sip of wine, every swig of beer is bad for your health. The truth, however, is far more nuanced.

    We have been researching the health effects of alcohol for a combined 60 years. Our work, and that of others, has shown that even modest alcohol consumption likely raises the risk for certain diseases, such as breast and esophageal cancer. And heavy drinking is unequivocally harmful to health. But after countless studies, the data do not justify sweeping statements about the effects of moderate alcohol consumption on human health.

    Yet we continue to see reductive narratives, in the media and even in science journals, that alcohol in any amount is dangerous. Earlier this month, for instance, the media reported on a new study that found even small amounts of alcohol might be harmful. But the stories failed to give enough context or probe deeply enough to understand the study’s limitations—including that it cherry-picked subgroups of a larger study previously used by researchers, including one of us, who concluded that limited drinking in a recommended pattern correlated with lower mortality risk.

    “We need more high-quality evidence to assess the health impacts of moderate alcohol consumption. And we need the media to treat the subject with the nuance it requires. Newer studies are not necessarily better than older research.”

    Those who try to correct this simplistic view are disparaged as pawns of the industry, even when no financial conflicts of interest exist. Meanwhile, some authors of studies suggesting alcohol is unhealthy have received money from anti-alcohol organizations.

    We believe it’s worth trying, again, to set the record straight. We need more high-quality evidence to assess the health impacts of moderate alcohol consumption. And we need the media to treat the subject with the nuance it requires. Newer studies are not necessarily better than older research.

    It’s important to keep in mind that alcohol affects many body systems—not just the liver and the brain, as many people imagine. That means how alcohol affects health is not a single question but the sum of many individual questions: How does it affect the heart? The immune system? The gut? The bones?

    As an example, a highly cited study of one million women in the United Kingdom found that moderate alcohol consumption—calculated as no more than one drink a day for a woman—increased overall cancer rates. That was an important finding. But the increase was driven nearly entirely by breast cancer. The same study showed that greater alcohol consumption was associated with lower rates of thyroid cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and renal cell carcinoma. That doesn’t mean drinking a lot of alcohol is good for you—but it does suggest that the science around alcohol and health is complex.

    One major challenge in this field is the lack of large, long-term, high-quality studies. Moderate alcohol consumption has been studied in dozens of randomized controlled trials, but those trials have never tracked more than about 200 people for more than two years. Longer and larger experimental trials have been used to test full diets, like the Mediterranean diet, and are routinely conducted to test new pharmaceuticals (or new uses for existing medications), but they’ve never been done to analyze alcohol consumption. 

    Instead, much alcohol research is observational, meaning it follows large groups of drinkers and abstainers over time. But observational studies cannot prove cause-and-effect because moderate drinkers differ in many ways from non-drinkers and heavy drinkers—in diet, exercise, and smoking habits, for instance. Observational studies can still yield useful information, but they also require researchers to gather data about when and how the alcohol is consumed, since alcohol’s effect on health depends heavily on drinking patterns.  

    For example, in an analysis of over 300,000 drinkers in the U.K., one of us found that the same total amount of alcohol appeared to increase the chances of dying prematurely if consumed on fewer occasions during the week and outside of meals, but to decrease mortality if spaced out across the week and consumed with meals. Such nuance is rarely captured in broader conversations about alcohol research—or even in observational studies, as researchers don’t always ask about drinking patterns, focusing instead on total consumption. To get a clearer picture of the health effects of alcohol, researchers and journalists must be far more attuned to the nuances of this highly complex issue. 

    One way to improve our collective understanding of the issue is to look at both observational and experimental data together whenever possible. When the data from both types of studies point in the same direction, we can have more confidence in the conclusion. For example, randomized controlled trials show that alcohol consumption raises levels of sex steroid hormones in the blood. Observational trials suggest that alcohol consumption also raises the risk of specific subtypes of breast cancer that respond to these hormones. Together, that evidence is highly persuasive that alcohol increases the chances of breast cancer.    

    Similarly, in randomized trials, alcohol consumption lowers average blood sugar levels. In observational trials, it also appears to lower the risk of diabetes. Again, that evidence is persuasive in combination. 

    As these examples illustrate, drinking alcohol may raise the risk of some conditions but not others. What does that mean for individuals? Patients should work with their clinicians to understand their personal risks and make informed decisions about drinking. 

    Medicine and public health would benefit greatly if better data were available to offer more conclusive guidance about alcohol. But that would require a major investment. Large, long-term, gold-standard studies are expensive. To date, federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health have shown no interest in exclusively funding these studies on alcohol.

    Alcohol manufacturers have previously expressed some willingness to finance the studies—similar to the way pharmaceutical companies finance most drug testing—but that has often led to criticism. This happened to us, even though external experts found our proposal scientifically sound. In 2018, the National Institutes of Health ended our trial to study the health effects of alcohol. The NIH found that officials at one of its institutes had solicited funding from alcohol manufacturers, violating federal policy.

    It’s tempting to assume that because heavy alcohol consumption is very bad, lesser amounts must be at least a little bad. But the science isn’t there, in part because critics of the alcohol industry have deliberately engineered a state of ignorance. They have preemptively discredited any research, even indirectly, by the alcohol industry—even though medicine relies on industry financing to support the large, gold-standard studies that provide conclusive data about drugs and devices that hundreds of millions of Americans take or use daily.

    Scientific evidence about drinking alcohol goes back nearly 100 years—and includes plenty of variability in alcohol’s health effects. In the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, alcohol in moderation, and especially red wine, was touted as healthful. Now the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that contemporary narratives suggest every ounce of alcohol is dangerous. Until gold-standard experiments are performed, we won’t truly know. In the meantime, we must acknowledge the complexity of existing evidence—and take care not to reduce it to a single, misleading conclusion.

    This article first appeared on The Journalist’s Resource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Apples vs Oranges – Which is Healthier?

    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.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing apples to oranges, we picked the oranges.

    Why?

    In terms of macros, the two fruits are approximately equal (and indeed, on average, precisely equal in the most important metric, which is fiber). So, a tie here.

    In the category of vitamins, apples are higher in vitamin K, while oranges are higher in vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, and choline. An easy win for oranges this time.

    When it comes to minerals, apples have more iron and manganese, while oranges have more calcium, copper, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. Another easy win for oranges.

    So, adding up the sections, a clear win for oranges. But, by all means, enjoy either or both! Diversity is good.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose Cs: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails: