Puritans Pride Resveratrol vs Life Extension Resveratrol – Which is Healthier
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Our Verdict
When comparing Puritan’s Pride Resveratrol to Life Extension Resveratrol, we picked the Life Extension Resveratrol.
Why?
It contains not only more resveratrol per serving (250mg compared to Puritan’s Pride’s 100mg), but also contains other goodies too. Specifically, each capsule also contains:
- Quercetin (150mg)
- Grape & berry blend (85mg)
- Fisetin (10mg)
Whereas the Puritan’s Pride softgels? The other top ingredients are soybean oil and gelatin.
Want to check out the products for yourself? Here they are:
Puritan’s Pride Resveratrol | Life Extension Resveratrol
Want to know more about these supplements? Check out:
Resveratrol & Healthy Aging
Fight Inflammation & Protect Your Brain, With Quercetin
Berries & Other Polyphenol-rich Foods
Fisetin: The Anti-Aging Assassin
Enjoy!
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Fully Present – by Dr. Susan Smalley and Diana Winston
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“The Science and the Art of…” tends to be a bit of a fuzzy obfuscation, but in this case, it’s accurate, especially in this presentation. The authors are, indeed, a scientist and an artist—and both practitioners, meeting in the middle.
As such, we get the clinical insights of a researcher and professor of psychiatry, and the grounded-yet-spiritual insights of an erstwhile Buddhist nun.
While the book is pop psychology in essence, the format is much more that of a textbook than a self-help book. Will it be useful for helping yourself anyway, though? Yes, absolutely, if you apply the information contained within.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that a textbook format makes it dry, though—the writing is very compelling, and you’ll find yourself turning pages eagerly. There’s no time like the present, after all!
Bottom line: if you find the scientific evidence-base for the usefulness of mindfulness appealing, but find a lot of guides a little fluffy, this one is perfectly balanced—and very well written, too.
Click here to check out Fully Present, bring yourself into the moment, always!
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Rapid Rise in Syphilis Hits Native Americans Hardest
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From her base in Gallup, New Mexico, Melissa Wyaco supervises about two dozen public health nurses who crisscross the sprawling Navajo Nation searching for patients who have tested positive for or been exposed to a disease once nearly eradicated in the U.S.: syphilis.
Infection rates in this region of the Southwest — the 27,000-square-mile reservation encompasses parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah — are among the nation’s highest. And they’re far worse than anything Wyaco, who is from Zuni Pueblo (about 40 miles south of Gallup) and is the nurse consultant for the Navajo Area Indian Health Service, has seen in her 30-year nursing career.
Syphilis infections nationwide have climbed rapidly in recent years, reaching a 70-year high in 2022, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That rise comes amid a shortage of penicillin, the most effective treatment. Simultaneously, congenital syphilis — syphilis passed from a pregnant person to a baby — has similarly spun out of control. Untreated, congenital syphilis can cause bone deformities, severe anemia, jaundice, meningitis, and even death. In 2022, the CDC recorded 231 stillbirths and 51 infant deaths caused by syphilis, out of 3,761 congenital syphilis cases reported that year.
And while infections have risen across the U.S., no demographic has been hit harder than Native Americans. The CDC data released in January shows that the rate of congenital syphilis among American Indians and Alaska Natives was triple the rate for African Americans and nearly 12 times the rate for white babies in 2022.
“This is a disease we thought we were going to eradicate not that long ago, because we have a treatment that works really well,” said Meghan Curry O’Connell, a member of the Cherokee Nation and chief public health officer at the Great Plains Tribal Leaders’ Health Board, who is based in South Dakota.
Instead, the rate of congenital syphilis infections among Native Americans (644.7 cases per 100,000 people in 2022) is now comparable to the rate for the entire U.S. population in 1941 (651.1) — before doctors began using penicillin to cure syphilis. (The rate fell to 6.6 nationally in 1983.)
O’Connell said that’s why the Great Plains Tribal Leaders’ Health Board and tribal leaders from North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa have asked federal Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to declare a public health emergency in their states. A declaration would expand staffing, funding, and access to contact tracing data across their region.
“Syphilis is deadly to babies. It’s highly infectious, and it causes very severe outcomes,” O’Connell said. “We need to have people doing boots-on-the-ground work” right now.
In 2022, New Mexico reported the highest rate of congenital syphilis among states. Primary and secondary syphilis infections, which are not passed to infants, were highest in South Dakota, which had the second-highest rate of congenital syphilis in 2022. In 2021, the most recent year for which demographic data is available, South Dakota had the second-worst rate nationwide (after the District of Columbia) — and numbers were highest among the state’s large Native population.
In an October news release, the New Mexico Department of Health noted that the state had “reported a 660% increase in cases of congenital syphilis over the past five years.” A year earlier, in 2017, New Mexico reported only one case — but by 2020, that number had risen to 43, then to 76 in 2022.
Starting in 2020, the covid-19 pandemic made things worse. “Public health across the country got almost 95% diverted to doing covid care,” said Jonathan Iralu, the Indian Health Service chief clinical consultant for infectious diseases, who is based at the Gallup Indian Medical Center. “This was a really hard-hit area.”
At one point early in the pandemic, the Navajo Nation reported the highest covid rate in the U.S. Iralu suspects patients with syphilis symptoms may have avoided seeing a doctor for fear of catching covid. That said, he doesn’t think it’s fair to blame the pandemic for the high rates of syphilis, or the high rates of women passing infections to their babies during pregnancy, that continue four years later.
Native Americans are more likely to live in rural areas, far from hospital obstetric units, than any other racial or ethnic group. As a result, many do not receive prenatal care until later in pregnancy, if at all. That often means providers cannot test and treat patients for syphilis before delivery.
In New Mexico, 23% of patients did not receive prenatal care until the fifth month of pregnancy or later, or received fewer than half the appropriate number of visits for the infant’s gestational age in 2023 (the national average is less than 16%).
Inadequate prenatal care is especially risky for Native Americans, who have a greater chance than other ethnic groups of passing on a syphilis infection if they become pregnant. That’s because, among Native communities, syphilis infections are just as common in women as in men. In every other ethnic group, men are at least twice as likely to contract syphilis, largely because men who have sex with men are more susceptible to infection. O’Connell said it’s not clear why women in Native communities are disproportionately affected by syphilis.
“The Navajo Nation is a maternal health desert,” said Amanda Singer, a Diné (Navajo) doula and lactation counselor in Arizona who is also executive director of the Navajo Breastfeeding Coalition/Diné Doula Collective. On some parts of the reservation, patients have to drive more than 100 miles to reach obstetric services. “There’s a really high number of pregnant women who don’t get prenatal care throughout the whole pregnancy.”
She said that’s due not only to a lack of services but also to a mistrust of health care providers who don’t understand Native culture. Some also worry that providers might report patients who use illicit substances during their pregnancies to the police or child welfare. But it’s also because of a shrinking network of facilities: Two of the Navajo area’s labor and delivery wards have closed in the past decade. According to a recent report, more than half of U.S. rural hospitals no longer offer labor and delivery services.
Singer and the other doulas in her network believe New Mexico and Arizona could combat the syphilis epidemic by expanding access to prenatal care in rural Indigenous communities. Singer imagines a system in which midwives, doulas, and lactation counselors are able to travel to families and offer prenatal care “in their own home.”
O’Connell added that data-sharing arrangements between tribes and state, federal, and IHS offices vary widely across the country, but have posed an additional challenge to tackling the epidemic in some Native communities, including her own. Her Tribal Epidemiology Center is fighting to access South Dakota’s state data.
In the Navajo Nation and surrounding area, Iralu said, IHS infectious disease doctors meet with tribal officials every month, and he recommends that all IHS service areas have regular meetings of state, tribal, and IHS providers and public health nurses to ensure every pregnant person in those areas has been tested and treated.
IHS now recommends all patients be tested for syphilis yearly, and tests pregnant patients three times. It also expanded rapid and express testing and started offering DoxyPEP, an antibiotic that transgender women and men who have sex with men can take up to 72 hours after sex and that has been shown to reduce syphilis transmission by 87%. But perhaps the most significant change IHS has made is offering testing and treatment in the field.
Today, the public health nurses Wyaco supervises can test and treat patients for syphilis at home — something she couldn’t do when she was one of them just three years ago.
“Why not bring the penicillin to the patient instead of trying to drag the patient in to the penicillin?” said Iralu.
It’s not a tactic IHS uses for every patient, but it’s been effective in treating those who might pass an infection on to a partner or baby.
Iralu expects to see an expansion in street medicine in urban areas and van outreach in rural areas, in coming years, bringing more testing to communities — as well as an effort to put tests in patients’ hands through vending machines and the mail.
“This is a radical departure from our past,” he said. “But I think that’s the wave of the future.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
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Be Your Future Self Now – by Dr. Benjamin Hardy
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Affirmations in the mirror are great and all, but they can only get you so far! And if you’re a regular reader of our newsletter, you probably know about the power of small daily habits adding up and compounding over time. So what does this book offer, that’s different?
“Be Your Future Self Now” beelines the route “from here to there”, with a sound psychological approach. On which note…
The book’s subtitle mentions “the science of intentional transformation”, and while Dr. Hardy is a psychologist, he’s an organizational psychologist (which doesn’t really pertain to this topic). It’s not a science-heavy book, but it is heavy on psychological rationality.
Where Dr. Hardy does bring psychology to bear, it’s in large part that! He teaches us how to overcome our biases that cause us to stumble blindly into the future… rather than intentfully creating our own future to step into. For example:
Most people (regardless of age!) acknowledge what a different person they were 10 years ago… but assume they’ll be basically the same person 10 years from now as they are today, just with changed circumstances.
Radical acceptance of the inevitability of change is the first step to taking control of that change.
That’s just one example, but there are many, and this is a book review not a book summary!
In short: if you’d like to take much more conscious control of the direction your life will take, this is a book for you.
Click here to get your copy of “Be Your Future Self Now” from Amazon!
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Natural Alternatives for Depression Treatment
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Questions and Answers 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!
This newsletter has been growing a lot lately, and so have the questions/requests, and we love that! 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
Natural alternatives to medication for depression?
Great question! We did a mean feature a while back, but we definitely have much more to say! We’ll do another main feature soon, but in the meantime, here’s what we previously wrote:
See: The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need
^This covers not just the obvious, but also why the most common advice is not helpful, and practical tips to actually make manageable steps back to wellness, on days when “literally just survive the day” is one’s default goal.
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What does it mean to be immunocompromised?
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Our immune systems help us fight off disease, but certain health conditions and medications can weaken our immune systems. People whose immune systems don’t work as well as they should are considered immunocompromised.
Read on to learn more about how the immune system works, what causes people to be immunocompromised, and how we can protect ourselves and the immunocompromised people around us from illness.
What is the immune system?
The immune system is a network of cells, organs, and chemicals that helps our bodies fight off infections caused by invaders, such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites.
Some important parts of the immune system include:
- White blood cells, which attack and kill germs that don’t belong inside our bodies.
- Lymph nodes, which help our bodies filter out germs.
- Antibodies, which help our bodies recognize invaders.
- Cytokines, which tell our immune cells what to do.
What causes people to be immunocompromised?
Some health conditions and medications can prevent our immune systems from functioning optimally, which makes us more vulnerable to infection. Health conditions that compromise the immune system fall into two categories: primary immunodeficiency and secondary immunodeficiency.
Primary immunodeficiency
People with primary immunodeficiency are born with genetic mutations that prevent their immune systems from functioning as they should. There are hundreds of types of primary immunodeficiencies. Since these mutations affect the immune system to varying degrees, some people may experience symptoms and get diagnosed early in life, while others may not know they’re immunocompromised until adulthood.
Secondary immunodeficiency
Secondary immunodeficiency happens later in life due to an infection like HIV, which weakens the immune system over time, or certain types of cancer, which prevent the body from producing enough white blood cells to adequately fight off infection. Studies have also shown that getting infected with COVID-19 may cause immunodeficiency by reducing our production of “killer T-cells,” which help fight off infections.
Sometimes necessary treatments for certain medical conditions can also cause secondary immunodeficiency. For example, people with autoimmune disorders—which cause the immune system to become overactive and attack healthy cells—may need to take immunosuppressant drugs to manage their symptoms. However, the drugs can make them more vulnerable to infection.
People who receive organ transplants may also need to take immunosuppressant medications for life to prevent their body from rejecting the new organ. (Given the risk of infection, scientists continue to research alternative ways for the immune system to tolerate transplantation.)
Chemotherapy for cancer patients can also cause secondary immunodeficiency because it kills the immune system’s white blood cells as it’s trying to kill cancer cells.
What are the symptoms of a compromised immune system?
People who are immunocompromised may become sick more frequently than others or may experience more severe or longer-term symptoms than others who contract the same disease.
Other symptoms of a compromised immune system may include fatigue; digestive problems like cramping, nausea, and diarrhea; and slow wound healing.
How can I find out if I’m immunocompromised?
If you think you may be immunocompromised, talk to your health care provider about your medical history, your symptoms, and any medications you take. Blood tests can determine whether your immune system is producing adequate proteins and cells to fight off infection.
I’m immunocompromised—how can I protect myself from infection?
If you’re immunocompromised, take precautions to protect yourself from illness.
Wash your hands regularly, wear a well-fitting mask around others to protect against respiratory viruses, and ensure that you’re up to date on recommended vaccines.
Immunocompromised people may need more doses of vaccines than people who are not immunocompromised—including COVID-19 vaccines. Talk to your health care provider about which vaccines you need.
How can I protect the immunocompromised people around me?
You never know who may be immunocompromised. The best way to protect immunocompromised people around you is to avoid spreading illnesses.
If you know you’re sick, isolate whenever possible. Wear a well-fitting mask around others—especially if you know that you’re sick or that you’ve been exposed to germs. Make sure you’re up to date on recommended vaccines, and practice regular hand-washing.
If you’re planning to spend time with someone who is immunocompromised, ask them what steps you can take to keep them safe.
For more information, talk to your health care provider.
This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Raspberries vs Blackberries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing raspberries to blackberries, we picked the blackberries.
Why?
It was very close! Raspberries most certainly also have their merits. But blackberries do just a little bit better in a few categories:
In terms of macros, raspberries have a tiny bit more carbs and fiber, while blackberries have a even tinier bit more protein, and the two berries have an equal glycemic index. We’ll call this category a tie, or else the meanest of nominal wins for raspberry.
In the category of vitamins, raspberries have more of vitamins B1, B2, B5, B6, and choline, while blackberries have more of vitamins A, B3, B9, C, E, and K. This would be a very marginal win for blackberries, except that blackberries have more than 6x the vitamin A, a much larger margin than any of the other differences in vitamins (which were usually small differences), which gives blackberry a more convincing win here.
When it comes to minerals, things are closer: raspberries have more iron, magnesium, manganese, and phosphorus, while blackberries have more calcium, copper, potassium, selenium, and zinc. None of the differences are outstanding, so this is a simple marginal victory for blackberries.
It would be rude to look at berries without noting their polyphenols; we’re not list them all (or this article will get very long, because each has very many polyphenols with names like “pelargonidin 3-O-glucosyl-rutinoside” and so forth), but suffice it to say: raspberries are great for polyphenols and blackberries are even better for polyphenols.
That said… In the category of specific polyphenols we’ve written about before at 10almonds, it’s worth noting a high point of each berry, for the sake of fairness: raspberries have more quercetin (but blackberries have lots too) and blackberries have more ellagic acid (of which, raspberries have some, but not nearly as much). Anyway, just going off total polyphenol content, blackberries are the clear winner here.
Adding up the sections makes for an overall win for blackberries, but by all means, enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
21 Most Beneficial Polyphenols & What Foods Have Them
Enjoy!
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