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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The Oxygen Advantage – by Patrick McKeown
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You probably know to breathe through your nose, and use your diaphragm. What else does this book have to offer?
A lot of the book is aimed at fixing specific problems, and optimizing what can be optimized—including with tips and tricks you may not have encountered before. Yet, the offerings are not bizarre either; we don’t need to learn to breathe through our ears while drinking a glass of water upside down or anything.
Rather, such simple things as improving one’s VO₂Max by occasionally holding one’s breath while walking briskly. But, he advises specifically, this should be done by pausing the breath halfway through the exhalation (a discussion of the ensuing physiological response is forthcoming).
Little things like that are woven throughout the book, whose style is mostly anecdotal rather than hard science, yet is consistent with broad scientific consensus in any case.
Bottom line: if you’ve any reason to think your breathing might be anything less than the best it could possibly be, this book is likely to help you to tweak it to be a little better.
Click here to check out The Oxygen Advantage, and get yours!
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Breathe; Don’t Vent (At Least In The Moment)
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Zen And The Art Of Breaking Things
We’ve talked before about identifying emotions and the importance of being able to express them:
Answering The Most Difficult Question: How Are You?
However, there can be a difference between “expressing how we feel” and “being possessed by how we feel and bulldozing everything in our path”
…which is, of course, primarily a problem in the case of anger—and by extension, emotions that are often contemporaneous with anger, such as jealousy, shame, fear, etc.
How much feeling is too much?
While this is in large part a subjective matter, clinically speaking the key question is generally: is it adversely affecting daily life to the point of being a problem?
For example, if you have to spend half an hour every day actively managing a certain emotion, that’s probably indicative of something unusual, but “unusual” is not inherently bad. If you’re managing it safely and in a way that doesn’t negatively affect the rest of your life, then that is generally considered fine, unless you feel otherwise about it.
A good example of this is complicated grief and/or prolonged grief.
But what about when it comes to anger? How much is ok?
When it comes to those around you, any amount of anger can seem like too much. Anger often makes us short-tempered even with people who are not the object of our anger, and it rarely brings out the best in us.
We can express our feelings in non-aggressive ways, for example:
and
Seriously Useful Communication Skills!
Sometimes, there’s another way though…
Breathe; don’t vent
That’s a great headline, but we can’t take the credit for it, because it came from:
Breathe, don’t vent: turning down the heat is key to managing anger
…in which it was found that, by all available metrics, the popular wisdom of “getting it off your chest” doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny, at least in the short term:
❝The work was inspired in part by the rising popularity of rage rooms that promote smashing things (such as glass, plates and electronics) to work through angry feelings.
I wanted to debunk the whole theory of expressing anger as a way of coping with it,” she said. “We wanted to show that reducing arousal, and actually the physiological aspect of it, is really important.❞
And indeed, he and his team did find that various arousal-increasing activities (such as hitting a punchbag, breaking things, doing vigorous exercise) did not help as much as arousal-decreasing activities, such as mindfulness-based relaxation techniques.
If you’d like to read the full paper, then so would we, but we couldn’t get full access to this one yet. However, the abstract includes representative statistics, so that’s worth a once-over:
Caveat!
Did you notice the small gap between their results and their conclusion?
In a lab or similar short-term observational setting, their recommendation is clearly correct.
However, if the source of your anger is something chronic and persistent, it could well be that calming down without addressing the actual cause is just “kicking the can down the road”, and will still have to actually be dealt with eventually.
So, while “here be science”, it’s not a mandate for necessarily suffering in silence. It’s more about being mindful about how we go about tackling our anger.
As for a primer on mindfulness, feel free to check out:
No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness
Take care!
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No Equipment Muscle Gain Routine for Ages 50+
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Sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass commonly associated with aging, can be a big problem as it leaves us vulnerable to injury (and also isn’t great for the metabolism—keeping adequate muscle mass ensures keeping the metabolism ticking over nicely). Will Harlow, over-50s specialist physiotherapist, is here to share a routine that works without weights:
Where it counts
There’s a fair amount of emphasis here on the lower body and core. That’s because in practical terms, this is what matters more for our health than having bulging biceps:
- First exercise: donkey calf raises to build strength in the calves using a chair.
- Second exercise: single-leg elevated lunge to work the quads and glutes, using a step or books for elevation.
- Third exercise: slow sit-to-stand for quads, glutes, and core strength, focusing on a slow descent.
- Fourth exercise: wall press-up to strengthen the chest, shoulders, and arms, with a variation using towels for increased resistance.
- Final exercise: shoulder raises using bottles or similar weights to target the shoulders and rotator cuffs.
Ok, so that last one was a slight cheat on his part as it does require grabbing a weight, but it’s not specialist equipment at least, and can just be something you grabbed at home. It’s also the least important of the five exercises, and can be skipped if necessary.
For more on all of these plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Take care!
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Cardiac Failure Explained – by Dr. Warrick Bishop
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The cover of this book makes it look like it’ll be a flashy semi-celebrity doctor keen to sell his personalized protocol, along with eleventy-three other books, but actually, what’s inside this one is very different:
We (hopefully) all know the basics of heart health, but this book takes it a lot further. Starting with the basics, then the things that it’s easy to feel like you should know but actually most people don’t, then into much more depth.
The format is much more like a university textbook than most pop-science books, and everything about the way it’s written is geared for maximum learning. The one thing it does keep in common with pop-science books as a genre is heavy use of anecdotes to illustrate points—but he’s just as likely to use tables, diagrams, callout boxes, emboldening of key points, recap sections, and so forth. And for the most part, this book is very information-dense.
Dr. Bishop also doesn’t just stick to what’s average, and talks a lot about aberrations from the norm, what they mean and what they do and yes, what to do about them.
On the one hand, it’s more information dense than the average reader can reasonably expect to need… On the other hand, isn’t it great to finish reading a book feeling like you just did a semester at medical school? No longer will you be baffled by what is going on in your (or perhaps a loved one’s) cardiac health.
Bottom line: if you’d like to know cardiac health inside out, this book is an excellent place to start.
Click here to check out Cardiac Failure Explained, and get to the heart of things!
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L-Theanine: What’s The Tea?
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L-Theanine: What’s The Tea?
We’ve touched previously on l-theanine, when this newsletter was new, and we had only a few hundred subscribers and the carefully organized format wasn’t yet what it is today.
So now it’s time to give this potent dietary compound / nutritional supplement the “Monday Research Review” treatment…
What is it?
L-theanine is an amino acid found in tea. The human body can’t produce it, and/but it’s not essential for humans. It does have a lot of benefits, though. See for example:
L-Theanine as a Functional Food Additive: Its Role in Disease Prevention and Health Promotion
How does it work?
L-theanine works by moderating and modulating the brain’s neurotransmitters.
This sounds fancy, but basically it means: it doesn’t actually add anything in the manner of a drug, but it changes how we use what we have naturally.
What does it do? Read on…
It increases mental focus
It has been believed that l-theanine requires the presence of caffeine to achieve this (i.e., it’s a combination-only effect). For example:
But as it turns out, when a group of researchers actually checked… This isn’t true, as Foxe et al. write:
❝We asked whether either compound alone, or both in combination, would affect performance of the task in terms of reduced error rates over time, and whether changes in alpha-band activity would show a relationship to such changes in performance. When treated with placebo, participants showed a rise in error rates, a pattern that is commonly observed with increasing time-on-task, whereas after caffeine and theanine ingestion, error rates were significantly reduced. The combined treatment did not confer any additional benefits over either compound alone, suggesting that the individual compounds may confer maximal benefits at the dosages employed❞
It promotes a calmly wakeful feeling of serenity
Those are not words typically found in biopharmaceutical literature, but they’re useful here to convey:
- L-theanine promotes relaxation without causing drowsiness
- L-theanine promotes mental alertness without being a stimulant
Here is where l-theanine really stands out from caffeine. If both substances promote mental focus, but one of them does it by making us “wired” and the other does it while simultaneously promoting calm, it makes the choice between them clearer!
Read more: L-theanine, a natural constituent in tea, and its effect on mental state
It relieves stress and anxiety
Building on from the above, but there’s more: l-theanine relieves stress and anxiety in people experiencing stressful situations, without any known harmful side effects… This is something that sets it apart from a lot of anxiolytic (antianxiety) drugs!
Here’s what a big systematic review of clinical trials had to say:
Theanine consumption, stress and anxiety in human clinical trials: A systematic review
L-theanine has other benefits too
We’ve talked about some of the most popular benefits of l-theanine, and we can’t make this newsletter too long, but research also suggests that it…
- Supports healthy weight management
- Reduces inflammation
- Supports immune health
- Helps fight cancer
- May extend lifespan ← this one’s a C. elegans study, but despite being a tiny worm, they actually function very similarly to humans on a cellular level; it’s why they’re used so much for anti-aging research
If you’re interested in this topic, we recommend also reading our previous article on l-theanine—pardon that we hadn’t really nailed down our style yet—but there’s a bunch of useful information about how l-theanine makes caffeine “better” in terms of benefits. We also talk dosage, and reference some other studies we didn’t have room to include today!
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Which Bell Peppers To Pick?
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Bell Peppers: A Spectrum Of Specialties
We were going to do this as part of our ongoing “This Or That?” challenge, but as there are four main types all with many different benefits, we thought this bunch of fruits deserved a main feature.
And yes, they’re botanically fruits, even if culinarily used as vegetables—much like tomatoes, famously!
They’re all the same (but also very much not)
A thing to know is that whether bell peppers be green, yellow, orange, or red, they’re all the same plant, Capiscum anuum. All that differs is how early or late they’re harvested.
Notwithstanding the “Capiscum” genus, they don’t contain capsaicin (as is found in hot peppers). Capsaicin’s a wonderful phytochemical:
Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
…but today we’re all about the bell peppers.
So, let’s see how they stack up!
💚 Green for lutein
Lutein is especially important for the eyes and [the rest of the] brain, to the point that there’s now an Alzheimer’s test that measures lutein concentration in the eye:
Green peppers have most of this important carotenoid, though the others all have some too. See also:
💛 Yellow for vitamin C
Yellow peppers are technically highest in vitamin C, but all of them contain far more than the daily dose per fruit already, so if there’s any color of pepper that’s nutritionally the most expendable, it’s yellow, since any other color pepper can take its place.
Watch out, though! Cooking destroys vitamin C, so if you want to get your Cs in, you’re going to want to do it raw.
🧡 Orange for zeaxanthin and cryptoxanthins
Similar in their benefits to lutein, these antioxidant carotenoids are found most generously in orange peppers (20x as much as in yellow, 10x as much as in red, and slightly more than in green).
❤️ Red for vitamins A & B6
Red peppers are richest by far in vitamin A, with one fruit giving the daily dose already. The others have about 10% of that, give or take.
Red peppers also have the most vitamin B6, though the others also have nearly as much.
❤️ Red for lycopene
We must do a main feature for lycopene sometime, as unlike a lot of antioxidant carotenoids, lycopene is found in comparatively very few foods (most famously it’s present in tomatoes).
Red is the only color of pepper to have lycopene.
10almonds tip: to get the most out of your lycopene, cook these ones!
Lycopene becomes 4x more bioavailable when cooked:
Lycopene in tomatoes: chemical and physical properties affected by food processing ← this paper is about tomatoes but lycopene is lycopene and this applies to the lycopene in red peppers, too
And the overall winner is…
You! Because you get to eat all four of them
Enjoy!
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