Radical Remission – by Dr. Kelly Turner
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First, what this is not:an autobiographical account of the “I beat cancer and you can too” pep-talk style.
What it is: a very readable pop-science book based on the author’s own PhD research into radical remission.
She knew that a very small percentage of people experience spontaneous radical remission (or quasi-spontaneous, if the remission is attributed to lifestyle changes, and/or some alternative therapy), but a small percentage of people means a large number worldwide, so she travelled the world studying over 1,000 cases of people with late-stage cancer who had either not gone for conventional anticancer drugs, or had and then stopped, and lived to tell the tale.
While she doesn’t advocate for any particular alternative therapy, she does report on what things came to her attention. She does advocate for some lifestyle changes.
Perhaps the biggest value this book offers is in its promised “9 key factors that can make a real difference”, which are essentially her conclusions from her PhD dissertation.
There isn’t room to talk about them here in a way that wouldn’t be misleading/unhelpful for a paucity of space, so perhaps we’ll do a main feature one of these days.
Bottom line: if you have (or a loved one has) cancer, this is an incredibly sensible book to read. If you don’t, then it’s an interesting and thought-provoking book to read.
Click here to check out Radical Remission, and learn about the factors at hand!
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Bored of Lunch – by Nathan Anthony
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Cooking with a slow cooker is famously easy, but often we settle down on a few recipes and then don’t vary. This book brings a healthy dose of inspiration and variety.
The recipes themselves range from comfort food to fancy entertaining, pasta dishes to risottos, and even what the author categorizes as “fakeaways” (a play on the British English “takeaway”, cf. AmE “takeout”), so indulgent nights in have never been healthier!
For each recipe, you’ll see a nice simple clear layout of all you’d expect (ingredients, method, etc) plus calorie count, so that you can have a rough idea of how much food each meal is.
In terms of dietary restrictions you may have, there’s quite a variety here so it’ll be easy to find things for all needs, and in addition to that, optional substitutions are mostly quite straightforward too.
Bottom line: if you have a slow cooker but have been cooking only the same three things in it for the past ten years, this is the book to liven things up, while staying healthy!
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Cupping: How It Works (And How It Doesn’t)
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Good Health By The Cup?
In Tuesday’s newsletter, we asked you for your opinion of cupping (the medical practice), and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:
- About 40% said “It may help by improving circulation and stimulating the immune system”
- About 26% said “I have never heard of the medical practice of cupping before this”
- About 19% said “It is pseudoscience and/or placebo at best, but probably not harmful
- About 9% said “It is a good, evidence-based practice that removes toxins and stimulates health”
- About 6% said “It is a dangerous practice that often causes harm to people who need medical help”
So what does the science say?
First, a quick note for those unfamiliar with cupping: it is the practice of placing a warmed cup on the skin (open side of the cup against the skin). As the warm air inside cools, it reduces the interior air pressure, which means the cup is now (quite literally) a suction cup. This pulls the skin up into the cup a little. The end result is visually, and physiologically, the same process as what happens if someone places the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner against their skin. For that matter, there are alternative versions that simply use a pump-based suction system, instead of heated cups—but the heated cups are most traditional and seem to be most popular. See also:
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health | Cupping
It is a dangerous practice that often causes harm to people who need medical help: True or False?
False, for any practical purposes.
- Directly, it can (and usually does) cause minor superficial harm, much like many medical treatments, wherein the benefits are considered to outweigh the harm, justifying the treatment. In the case of cupping, the minor harm is usually a little bruising, but there are other risks; see the link we gave just above.
- Indirectly, it could cause harm by emboldening a person to neglect a more impactful treatment for their ailment.
But, there’s nothing for cupping akin to the “the most common cause of death is when someone gets a vertebral artery fatally severed” of chiropractic, for example.
It is a good, evidence-based practice that removes toxins and stimulates health: True or False?
True and False in different parts. This one’s on us; we included four claims in one short line. But let’s look at them individually:
- Is it good? Well, those who like it, like it. It legitimately has some mild health benefits, and its potential for harm is quite small. We’d call this a modest good, but good nonetheless.
- Is it evidence-based? Somewhat, albeit weakly; there are some papers supporting its modest health claims, although the research is mostly only published in journals of alternative medicine, and any we found were in journals that have been described by scientists as pseudoscientific.
- Does it remove toxins? Not directly, at least. There is also a version that involves making a small hole in the skin before applying the cup, the better to draw out the toxins (called “wet cupping”). This might seem a little medieval, but this is because it is from early medieval times (wet cupping’s first recorded use being in the early 7th century). However, the body’s response to being poked, pierced, sucked, etc is to produce antibodies, and they will do their best to remove toxins. So, indirectly, there’s an argument.
- Does it stimulate health? Yes! We’ll come to that shortly. But first…
It is pseudoscience and/or placebo at best, but probably not harmful: True or False?
True in that its traditionally-proposed mechanism of action is a pseudoscience and placebo almost certainly plays a strong part, and also in that it’s generally not harmful.
On it being a pseudoscience: we’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating; just because something’s proposed mechanism of action is pseudoscience, doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t work by some other mechanism of action. If you tell a small child that “eating the rainbow” will improve their health, and they believe this is some sort of magical rainbow power imbuing them with health, then the mechanism of action that they believe in is a pseudoscience, but eating a variety of colorful fruit and vegetables will still be healthy.
In the case of cupping, its proposed mechanism of action has to do withbalancing qi, yin and yang, etc (for which scientific evidence does not exist), in combination with acupuncture lore (for which some limited weak scientific evidence exists). On balancing qi, yin and yang etc, this is a lot like Europe’s historically popular humorism, which was based on the idea of balancing the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm). Needless to say, humorism was not only a pseudoscience, but also eventually actively disproved with the advent of germ theory and modern medicine. Cupping therapy is not more scientifically based than humorism.
On the placebo side of things, there probably is a little more to it than that; much like with acupuncture, a lot of it may be a combination of placebo and using counter-irritation, a nerve-tricking method to use pain to reduce pain (much like pressing with one’s nail next to an insect bite).
Here’s one of the few studies we found that’s in what looks, at a glance, to be a reputable journal:
Cupping therapy and chronic back pain: systematic review and meta-analysis
It may help by improving circulation and stimulating the immune system: True or False?
True! It will improve local circulation by forcing blood into the area, and stimulate the immune system by giving it a perceived threat to fight.
Again, this can be achieved by many other means; acupuncture (or just “dry needling”, which is similar but without the traditional lore), a cold shower, and/or exercise (and for that matter, sex—which combines exercise, physiological arousal, and usually also foreign bodies to respond to) are all options that can improve circulation and stimulate the immune system.
You can read more about using some of these sorts of tricks for improving health in very well-evidenced, robustly scientific ways here:
The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)
Take care!
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The Dangers Of Fires, Floods, & Having Your Hair Washed
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It’s a dangerous business, going out of your door… And this week’s news round-up looks at 5 reasons why that might be:
Superspreading like wildfire
Environmental health risks are a big topic these days, with our changing climate. As for wildfires? Some of the risks are obvious: burning to death or choking to death in the smoke—but even upon surviving the seemingly worst, more threats remain that themselves can still kill.
Those threats include that both burns and smoke inhalation can cause acute and chronic changes in the immune system. Specifically: changes for the worse. The mechanisms by which this happens depend on the nature of any burns received, and in the case of smoke, what exactly was in the smoke. Now, there is no kind of smoke that is healthy to inhale, but definitely some kinds are a lot worse than others, and let’s just say, people’s homes contain a lot of plastic.
Additionally, if you think someone coughing near you spreads germs, imagine how far germs can be spread by miles-high, miles-wide billowing hot air.
In short, there’s a lot going on and none of it is good, and we’ve barely had room to summarise here, so…
Read in full: Wildfires ignite infection risks by weakening the body’s immune defenses and spreading bugs in smoke
Related: What’s Lurking In Your Household Air?
A flood of diseases
*record scratch*
Environmental health risks are a big topic these days, with our changing climate. As for floods? Some of the risks are obvious: drowning to death or having your house washed away—but even upon surviving the seemingly worst, more threats remain that themselves can still kill.
Those threats include increases in deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases, and respiratory diseases in general. Simply, a place that has been waterlogged, even if it seems “safe” now, is not a healthy place to be, due to bacteria, viruses, fungi, and more. In fact, it even increases all-cause mortality, because being healthy in such a place is simply harder:
Read in full: Linked to higher mortality rates, large floods emerge as an urgent public health concern
Related: Dodging Dengue In The US
Don’t lose your head
Visiting the hairdresser is not something that most people consider a potential brush with death—your hairdresser is probably not Sweeney Todd, after all. However…
There is an issue specifically with getting your hair washed there. Backwash basins—the sink things into which one rests one’s head at a backwards tilt—create an awkward angle for the cervical vertebrae and a sudden reduction in blood flow to the brain can cause a stroke, with the risk being sufficiently notable as to have its own name in scientific literature: beauty parlor stroke syndrome (BPSS).
❝While research suggests BPSS is most likely to occur in women over 50—and previous history of narrowing or thinning of blood vessels and arthritis of the spinal column in the neck are particular risk factors—it could happen to anyone regardless of age or medical history.❞
Read in full: The hidden health risk of having your hair washed
Related: Your Stroke Survival Plan
The smartwatch wristbands that give you cancer
It’s about the PFAS content. The article doesn’t discuss cancer in detail, just mentioning the increased risk, but you can read about the link between the two in our article below.
Basically, if your smartwatch wristband is a) not silicone and b) waterproof anyway, especially if it’s stain-resistant (as most are designed to be, what with wearing it next to one’s skin all the time while exercising, and not being the sort of thing one throws in the wash), then chances are it has PFAS levels much higher than normally found in consumer goods or clothing.
You can read more about how to identify the risks, here:
Read in full: Smartwatch bands can contain high levels of toxic PFAS, study finds
Related: PFAS Exposure & Cancer: The Numbers Are High
The cows giving milk with a little extra
Bird flu (HPAI) is now not the only flu epidemic amongst cattle in the US, and not only that, but rather than “merely” colonizing the lungs and upper respiratory tracts, in this case the virus (IAV) is thriving in the mammary glands, meaning that yes, it gets dispensed into the milk, and so far scientists are simply scrambling to find better ways to vaccinate the cattle, in the hopes that the milk will not be so risky because yes, it is currently a “reservoir and transmission vector” for the virus.
There are, however, barriers to creating those vaccines:
Read in full: Unexpected viral reservoir: influenza A thrives in cattle mammary glands
Related: Cows’ Milk, Bird Flu, & You
Take care!
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How Nature Provides Us With A Surprisingly Powerful Painkiller
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It’s well-known (at least to regular 10almonds-readers) that seeing nature, ideally green leaves and blue sky, improves our mood by stimulating production of serotonin.
See also: Neurotransmitter Cheatsheet
But it does a lot more.
Reducing the actual signals of pain
Researchers at the University of Vienna have discovered that viewing nature scenes (even if just on video) alleviates physical pain—not just in self-reported subjective assessments, but also by a reduction of the neural activity that signals pain:
❝Pain is like a puzzle, made up of different pieces that are processed differently in the brain. Some pieces of the puzzle relate to our emotional response to pain, such as how unpleasant we find it. Other pieces correspond to the physical signals underlying the painful experience, such as its location in the body and its intensity.
Unlike placebos, which usually change our emotional response to pain, viewing nature changed how the brain processed early, raw sensory signals of pain.
Thus, the effect appears to be less influenced by participants’ expectations, and more by changes in the underlying pain signals❞
This was tested against, varyingly, viewing an urban environment or viewing an indoor environment, neither of which gave the same benefits.
The setup of the experiment is relevant, so…
Matching soundscape accompanied each visual stimulus. The three pain runs had a total duration of 9 min each, during which one environment was accompanied by 16 painful and 16 non-painful shocks. Neuroimaging was used for all parts, and participants were exposed to all environments:
- First, a cue indicating the intensity of the next shock (red = painful, yellow = not painful) was presented for 2000 milliseconds (ms).
- Second, a variable interval of 3500 ± 1500 ms was shown.
- Third, a cue indicating the intensity of the shock was presented for 1000 ms, accompanied by an electrical shock with a duration of 500 ms.
- Fourth, a variable interval of 3500 ± 1500 ms followed.
- Fifth, after each third trial, participants rated the shock’s intensity and unpleasantness at 6000 ms each.
- Sixth, each trial ended with an intertrial interval (ITI) presented for 2000 ms.
They found that as well as the self-assessment reports being as expected (nature scenes reduced subjective experience of pain),
❝In summary, the multivoxel and region of interest analyses converged in showing that pain responses when exposed to nature as compared to urban or indoor stimuli were associated with a decrease in neural processes related to lower-level nociception-related features (NPS, thalamus), as well as in regions of descending modulatory circuitry associated with attentional alterations of pain that also encode sensory-discriminative aspects (S2, pINS).❞
In other words—to the extent that pain can be quantified objectively by neural imaging—the pain was also objectively reduced, much like with a chemical painkiller.
You can read the paper in full, here:
Nature exposure induces analgesic effects by acting on nociception-related neural processing
How to benefit from this
Well, first there is the obvious, “view nature“.
However, note the timescales involved in the testing periods: 2000 milliseconds is two seconds, and that was the intertrial interval used—the equivalent of a washout phase in an interventional trial (but a drug/supplement/diet washout is usually a number of weeks).
The fact that the test periods were a matter of seconds, and the intertrial period was also literally two seconds, this means:
It works quickly, and the effect disappears quickly, too.
In other words: if you want pain relief from nature, the good news is you can get it immediately while viewing nature, and the bad news is that you have to keep viewing nature to continue enjoying the painkilling effect.
So that’s a limitation, but it’s still clearly a very worthy option for a little respite from chronic pain now and again, for example.
Want to learn more?
We’ve written quite a bit about pain management, including:
- Before You Reach For That Tylenol…
- How To Stop Pain Spreading
- How To Dial Down Your Pain
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
- Get The Right Help For Your Pain
- The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
- Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief (When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might)
Take care!
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Younger – by Dr. Sara Gottfried
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Does this do the things it says in the subtitle? In honestly, not really, no, but what it does do (if implemented) is modify your gene expression, slow aging, and extend healthspan. Which is all good stuff, even if it’s not the snappy SEO-oriented keywords in the subtitle.
A lot of the book pertains to turning certain genes (e.g. SIRT1, mTOR, VDR, APOE4, etc) on or off per what is sensible in each case, noting that while genes are relatively fixed (technically they can be changed, but the science is young and we can’t do much yet), gene expression is something we can control quite a bit. And while it may be unsettling to have the loaded gun that is the APOE4 gene being held against your head, at the end of the day there are things we can do that influence whether the trigger gets pulled, and when. Same goes for other undesirable genes, and also for the desirable ones that are useless if they never actually get expressed.
She offers (contained within the book, not as an upsell) a 7-week program that aims to set the reader up with good healthy habits to do just that and thus help keep age-related maladies at bay, and if we slip up, perhaps later in the year or so, we can always recommence the program.
The advice is also just good health advice, even without taking gene expression into account, because there are a stack of benefits to each of the things in her protocol.
The style is personable without being padded with fluff, accessible without dumbing down, and information-dense without being a challenging read. The formatting helps a lot also; a clear instructional layout is a lot better than a wall of text.
Bottom line: if you’d like to tweak your genes for healthy longevity, this book can help you do just that!
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Mediterranean Diet… In A Pill?
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Does It Come In A Pill?
For any as yet unfamiliar with the Mediterranean diet, you may be wondering what it involves, beyond a general expectation that it’s a diet popularly enjoyed in the Mediterranean. What image comes to mind?
We’re willing to bet that tomatoes feature (great source of lycopene, by the way, and if you’re not getting lycopene, you’re missing out), but what else?
- Salads, perhaps? Vegetables, olives? Olive oil, yea or nay?
- Bread? Pasta? Prosciutto, salami? Cheese?
- Pizza but only if it’s Romana style, not Chicago?
- Pan-seared liver, with some fava beans and a nice Chianti?
In fact, the Mediterranean diet is quite clear on all these questions, so to read about these and more (including a “this yes, that no” list), see:
What Is The Mediterranean Diet, And What Is It Good For?
So, how do we get that in a pill?
A plucky band of researchers, Dr. Chiara de Lucia et al. (quite a lot of “et al.”; nine listed authors on the study), wondered to what extent the benefits of the Mediterranean diet come from the fact that the Mediterranean diet is very rich in polyphenols, and set about testing that, by putting the same polyphenols in capsule form, and running a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover clinical intervention trial.
Now, polyphenols are not the only reason the Mediterranean diet is great; there are also other considerations, such as:
- a great macronutrient balance with lots of fiber, healthy fats, moderate carbs, and protein from select sources
- the absence or at least very low presence of a lot of harmful substances such as refined seed oils, added sugars, refined carbohydrates, and the like (“but pasta” yes pasta; in moderation and wholegrain and served with extra sources of fiber and healthy fats, all of which slow down the absorption of the carbs)
…but polyphenols are admittedly very important too; we wrote about some common aspects of them here:
Tasty Polyphenols: Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain
As for what Dr. de Lucia et al. put into the capsule, behold…
The ingredients:
- Apple Extract 10.0%
- Pomegranate Extract 10.0%
- Tomato Powder 2.5%
- Beet, Spray Dried 2.5%
- Olive Extract 7.5%
- Rosemary Extract 7.5%
- Green Coffee Bean Extract (CA) 7.5%
- Kale, Freeze Dried 2.5%
- Onion Extract 10.0%
- Ginger Extract 10.0%
- Grapefruit Extract 2.5%
- Carrot, Air Dried 2.5%
- Grape Skin Extract 17.5%
- Blueberry Extract 2.5%
- Currant, Freeze Dried 2.5%
- Elderberry, Freeze Dried 2.5%
And the relevant phytochemicals they contain:
- Quercetin
- Luteolin
- Catechins
- Punicalagins
- Phloretin
- Ellagic Acid
- Naringin
- Apigenin
- Isorhamnetin
- Chlorogenic Acids
- Rosmarinic Acid
- Anthocyanins
- Kaempferol
- Proanthocyanidins
- Myricetin
- Betanin
And what, you may wonder, did they find? Well, first let’s briefly summarise the setup of the study:
They took volunteers (n=30), average age 67, BMI >25, without serious health complaints, not taking other supplements, not vegetarian or vegan, not consuming >5 cups of coffee per day, and various other stipulations like that, to create a fairly homogenous study group who were expected to respond well to the intervention. In contrast, someone who takes antioxidant supplements, already eats many different color plants per day, and drinks 10 cups of coffee, probably already has a lot of antioxidant activity going on, and someone with a lower BMI will generally have lower resting levels of inflammatory markers, so it’s harder to see a change, proportionally.
About those inflammatory markers: that’s what they were testing, to see whether the intervention “worked”; essentially, did the levels of inflammatory markers go up or down (up is bad; down is good).
For more on inflammation, by the way, see:
How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation
…which also explains what it actually is, and some important nuances about it.
Back to the study…
They gave half the participants the supplement for a week and the other half placebo; had a week’s gap as a “washout”, then repeated it, switching the groups, taking blood samples before and after each stage.
What they found:
The group taking the supplement had lower inflammatory markers after a week of taking it, while the group taking the placebo had relatively higher inflammatory markers after a week of taking it; this trend was preserved across both groups (i.e., when they switched roles for the second half).
The results were very significant (p=0.01 or thereabouts), and yet at the same time, quite modest (i.e. the supplement made a very reliable, very small difference), probably because of the small dose (150mg) and small intervention period (1 week).
What the researchers concluded from this
The researchers concluded that this was a success; the study had been primarily to provide proof of principle, not to rock the world. Now they want the experiment to be repeated with larger sample sizes, greater heterogeneity, larger doses, and longer intervention periods.
This is all very reasonable and good science.
What we conclude from this
That ingredients list makes for a good shopping list!
Well, not the extracts they listed, necessarily, but rather those actual fruits, vegetables, etc.
If nine top scientists (anti-aging specialists, neurobiologists, pharmacologists, and at least one professor of applied statistics) came to the conclusion that to get the absolute most bang-for-buck possible, those are the plants to get the phytochemicals from, then we’re not going to ignore that.
So, take another list above and ask yourself: how many of those 16 foods do you eat regularly, and could you work the others in?
Want to make your Mediterranean diet even better?
While the Mediterranean diet is a top-tier catch-all, it can be tweaked for specific areas of health, for example giving it an extra focus on heart health, or brain health, or being anti-inflammatory, or being especially gut healthy:
Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean
Enjoy!
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