Radishes vs Carrots – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing radishes to carrots, we picked the carrots.
Why?
In terms of macros, carrots have more fiber and carbs; the two root vegetables both have comparable (low) glycemic indices, so we’re saying that the one with more fiber wins, and that’s carrots.
In the category of vitamins, radishes have more of vitamins B9 and C, while carrots have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, E, K, and choline. An easy win for carrots.
When it comes to minerals, radishes have more selenium, while carrots have more calcium, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and potassium. Another clear win for carrots.
In terms of polyphenols, radishes do have some, but carrots have more, and thus win this category too.
All in all, enjoy either or both, but carrots deliver the most nutrients by far!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
What Do The Different Kinds Of Fiber Do? 30 Foods That Rank Highest
Enjoy!
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Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain
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When Bitter Is Better
A good general rule of thumb for “does this food contain a lot of healthy polyphenols?” is:
“is this (edible) plant bitter/astringent/pungent”?
If it is, it’s probably rich in polyphenols:
Deciphering the role of bitter and astringent polyphenols in promoting well-being
…which is why it’s no surprise that black coffee and bitter chocolate score highly, as do hot peppers and even garlic.
See also: Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
Even fruits, generally considered something sweet to eat, often contain more polyphenols when they are bitter—many berries are great examples of this!
Read more: Goji Berries: Which Benefits Do They Really Have?
You can read more about the science of this here:
Sensory Nutrition and Bitterness and Astringency of Polyphenols
Important for multiple reasons (including heart and brain health)
Polyphenols have many benefits, and they’re most well known for their heart-healthy properties, but their antioxidant effect (and other mechanisms) also means these foods are generally neuroprotectants too:
The science of this is not all as obvious as you might think!
It is reasonable to expect “ok, this has antioxidant effect, so it will reduce oxidative damage to brain cells too”, and while that is true (and yes, polyphenols do cross the blood-brain barrier), they also help in other ways, including through the gut:
What if I don’t like bitter/astringent/pungent foods?
If you do not have a medical condition that proscribes them (do check with your doctor if unsure), the best advice is to simply eat them anyway, and your tastes will adapt.
It will also help if you avoid sweet foods (though this too is also a good general rule of thumb!), as this will move the balance of where your brain’s “set range” is for “good taste”.
Bonus tip: dark chocolate (80%+ cocoa if possible, 95% if you can get it) and chilli peppers go great with each other. Here’s an example of a chilli chocolate product on Amazon; it’s 70% cocoa (which is not bad, but could be better). You might be able to get a higher percentage locally, especially if you ask your local chocolatière, or make it yourself!
Enjoy!
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The Easiest Way To Slow Brain Aging By Up To 20%
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…and other items from this week’s health science news:
Help others, to help your brain
We’ll get straight to it: spending about 2–4 hours a week helping people outside your household is associated with a roughly 15%–20% slower rate of age-related cognitive decline over time.
Notably, both formal volunteering and informal helping show comparable cognitive benefits, so it doesn’t have to be anything fancy, it just has to be helping people.
What seems most important is not the amount of time itself so much as the consistency—moderate, sustained engagement delivers the strongest and most consistent benefits, while heavier time commitments are not required. This shows itself to be particularly true as time goes on, since benefits accumulate year after year when helping becomes a stable routine, whereas withdrawing from helping is linked to worse cognitive function.
You may be wondering about the science behind this, and it was quite a big study: the analysis followed 31,303 people aged 51 and older for up to two decades, and yes, the results still held after accounting for wealth, education, and physical and mental health, suggesting the association is not explained by these factors alone.
As for how this happens, the researchers hypothesize that helping supports brain health by reducing stress-related inflammation and strengthening social connections that provide cognitive and emotional support.
So, how about you? If your first thought wasn’t “Oh, like my [thing that you regularly do and have consistently done over time]”, then now’s a great time to get started!
Read in full: Helping others for a few hours a week may slow brain aging
Related: 9 Little Habits To Have A Better Day
Whooping cough on the rise again in the US
The news is not good on this one. Whooping cough cases rose sixfold in 2024, and remain high in 2025, with more than 26,600 US cases reported by December 2025, over 4x the total for all of 2023.
Some parts of the US are doing worse than others, with some states are seeing levels not recorded for decades, including Oregon exceeding its 1950 annual record and Kentucky reporting three infant deaths in 2025 after none since 2018.
Unfortunately, public awareness is not strong: 30% of US adults do not know that pertussis is the same as whooping cough, and 35% do not know that a preventive vaccine exists. On which note, the CDC recommends the DTaP vaccine for young children in a 5-dose series, and Tdap for preteens, adults, and pregnant women during weeks 27–36 of pregnancy.
Nor do most know what the symptoms are: while 77% recognize coughing fits as a symptom, fewer identify low-grade fever, vomiting after coughing, or a runny nose.
So, to set yourself ahead of the crowd…
Read in full: Whooping cough cases rise sharply across the United States
Related: Vaccine Mythbusting
Mitochondria and mental health
Researchers (Dr. Lydia Wu-Chung et al.) tested the hypothesis that psychological and social experiences—such as stress, isolation, and trauma—affect mental health by altering mitochondrial function in brain cells. the proposed mechanism is that mitochondria act as a bridge between psychosocial experiences and physiological brain changes, helping explain how stress “gets under the skin.”
What they found was that altered mitochondrial function is associated with anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. That’s a lot!
This is not too surprising, though, as the brain’s high energy demand makes it especially sensitive to mitochondrial inefficiency, which can impair neurotransmission, plasticity, mood regulation, and memory.
The relationship appears to be bidirectional also, as chronic stress can reduce mitochondrial efficiency over time, helping explain fatigue, cognitive difficulties, and mood disturbances seen in long-term stress.
Based on this research, she says that improving mitochondrial health may be a good option for many people to increase energy availability, reduce inflammation, and improve brain signaling.
As for how to do that? Endurance and aerobic exercise show the strongest and most consistent evidence for enhancing mitochondrial number and enzyme activity, while mindfulness programs and psychotherapy have shown changes in mitochondrial activity or number, but evidence for these latter associations is mixed and not always correlated with symptom improvement. So, exercise seems the main way to do it, for best results.
And in terms of things to avoid: social isolation can worsen mitochondrial function by reinforcing low energy, anxiety, and withdrawal, making recovery cycles harder to break.
So, maybe do that exercising with others, if you can!
Read in full: Mitochondria may be missing link between mental health and brain function
Related: 7 Ways To Boost Mitochondrial Health To Fight Disease
Take care!
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Want to sleep longer? Adding mini-bursts of exercise to your evening routine can help – new study
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Exercising before bed has long been discouraged as the body doesn’t have time to wind down before the lights go out.
But new research has found breaking up a quiet, sedentary evening of watching television with short bursts of resistance exercise can lead to longer periods of sleep.
Adults spend almost one third of the 24-hour day sleeping. But the quality and length of sleep can affect long-term health. Sleeping too little or waking often in the night is associated with an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes.
Physical activity during the day can help improve sleep. However, current recommendations discourage intense exercise before going to bed as it can increase a person’s heart rate and core temperature, which can ultimately disrupt sleep.
Nighttime habits
For many, the longest period of uninterrupted sitting happens at home in the evening. People also usually consume their largest meal during this time (or snack throughout the evening).
Insulin (the hormone that helps to remove sugar from the blood stream) tends to be at a lower level in the evening than in the morning.
Together these factors promote elevated blood sugar levels, which over the long term can be bad for a person’s health.
Our previous research found interrupting evening sitting every 30 minutes with three minutes of resistance exercise reduces the amount of sugar in the bloodstream after eating a meal.
But because sleep guidelines currently discourage exercising in the hours before going to sleep, we wanted to know if frequently performing these short bursts of light activity in the evening would affect sleep.
Activity breaks for better sleep
In our latest research, we asked 30 adults to complete two sessions based in a laboratory.
During one session the adults sat continuously for a four-hour period while watching streaming services. During the other session, they interrupted sitting by performing three minutes of body-weight resistance exercises (squats, calf raises and hip extensions) every 30 minutes.
After these sessions, participants went home to their normal life routines. Their sleep that evening was measured using a wrist monitor.
Our research found the quality of sleep (measured by how many times they woke in the night and the length of these awakenings) was the same after the two sessions. But the night after the participants did the exercise “activity breaks” they slept for almost 30 minutes longer.
Identifying the biological reasons for the extended sleep in our study requires further research.
But regardless of the reason, if activity breaks can extend sleep duration, then getting up and moving at regular intervals in the evening is likely to have clear health benefits.
Time to revisit guidelines
These results add to earlier work suggesting current sleep guidelines, which discourage evening exercise before bed, may need to be reviewed.
As the activity breaks were performed in a highly controlled laboratory environment, future research should explore how activity breaks performed in real life affect peoples sleep.
We selected simple, body-weight exercises to use in this study as they don’t require people to interrupt the show they may be watching, and don’t require a large space or equipment.
If people wanted to incorporate activity breaks in their own evening routines, they could probably get the same benefit from other types of exercise. For example, marching on the spot, walking up and down stairs, or even dancing in the living room.
The key is to frequently interrupt evening sitting time, with a little bit of whole-body movement at regular intervals.
In the long run, performing activity breaks may improve health by improving sleep and post-meal blood sugar levels. The most important thing is to get up frequently and move the body, in a way the works best for a person’s individual household.
Jennifer Gale, PhD candidate, Department of Human Nutrition, University of Otago and Meredith Peddie, Senior Lecturer, Department of Human Nutrition, University of Otago
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Grapes vs Raspberries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing grapes to raspberries, we picked the raspberries.
Why?
It wasn’t close:
In terms of macros, grapes have slightly more carbs while raspberries have nearly 7x the fiber and nearly 2x the protein; an easy first-round win for raspberries.
In the category of vitamins, grapes have more of vitamins A, B1, B6, and K, while raspberries have more of vitamins B3, B5, B7, B9, C, and E, winning this round too.
Looking at minerals next, grapes have a little more potassium, while while raspberries have a lot more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc, sweeping this category as well.
In other considerations, both are great for polyphenols, but raspberries have more, so that’s another point in their favor.
Adding up the sections makes for a very clear overall win for raspberries, but by all means do enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Can We Drink To Good Health? ← while there are polyphenols such as resveratrol in red wine that per se would boost heart health, there’s so little per glass that you may need 100–1000 glasses per day to get the dosage that provides benefits in mouse studies.
If you’re not a mouse, you might even need more than that!
To this end, many people prefer resveratrol supplementation ← link is to an example product on Amazon, but there are plenty more so feel free to shop around 😎
Enjoy!
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The Rise Of The Machines
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In this week’s health science news, several pieces of technology caught our eye. Let’s hope these things roll out widely!
When it comes to UTIs, antimicrobial resistance is taking the p—
This has implications far beyond UTIs—though UTIs can be a bit of a “canary in the coal mine” for antimicrobial resistance. The more people are using antibiotics (intentionally, or because they are in the food chain), the more killer bugs are proliferating instead of dying when we give them something to kill them. And yes: they do proliferate sometimes when given antibiotics, not because the antibiotics did anything directly good for them, but because they killed their (often friendly bacteria) competition. Thus making for a double-whammy of woe.
This development tackles that, by using AI modelling to crunch the numbers of a real-time data-driven personalized approach to give much more accurate treatment options, in a way that a human couldn’t (or at least, couldn’t at anything like the same speed, and most family physicians don’t have a mathematician locked in the back room to spend the night working on a patient’s data).
Read in full: AI can help tackle urinary tract infections and antimicrobial resistance
Related: AI: The Doctor That Never Tires?
When it comes to CPR and women, people are feint of heart
When CPR is needed, time is very much of the essence. And yet, bystanders are much less likely to give CPR to a woman than to a man. Not only that, but CPR-training is part of what leads to this reluctance when it comes to women: the mannequins used are very homogenous, being male (94%) and lean (99%). They’re also usually white (88%) even in countries where the populations are not, but that is less critical. After all, a racist person is less likely to give CPR to a person of color regardless of what color the training mannequin was.
However, the mannequins being male and lean is an issue, because it means people suddenly lack confidence when faced with breasts and/or abundant body fat. Both can prompt the bystander to wonder if some different technique is needed (it isn’t), and breasts can also prompt the bystander to fear doing something potentially “improper” (the proper course of action is: save a person’s life; do not get distracted by breasts).
Read in full: Women are less likely to receive CPR than men. Training on manikins with breasts could help ← there are also CPR instructions (and a video demonstration) there, for anyone who wants a refresher, if perhaps your last first-aid course was a while ago!
Related: Heart Attack: His & Hers (Be Prepared!)
When technology is a breath of fresh air
A woman with COPD and COVID has had her very damaged lungs replaced using a da Vinci X robot to perform a minimally-invasive surgery (which is quite a statement, when it comes to replacing someone’s lungs).
Not without human oversight though—surgeon Dr. Stephanie Chang was directing the transplant. Surgery is rarely fun for the person being operated on, but advances like this make things go a lot more smoothly, so this kind of progress is good to see.
Read in full: Woman receives world’s first robotic double-lung transplant
Related: Why Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Is More Likely Than You Think
Take care!
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12 Signs & Symptoms Of Heart Disease You Can Check Yourself
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Dr. Siobhan Deshauer shows us what to watch out for:
Signs & Symptoms
A heart attack doesn’t have to be the first you know about it!
She says 13 signs, but we only counted 12, unless we count each named presentation of aortic regurgitation and/or infective endocarditis separately, in which case, we’re now looking at 14–18, and in no reckoning were we able to make it add up to 13.
However, the information is more important than the numbers, so…
- Frank’s sign: a diagonal crease running across the earlobe that could be a sign of vascular aging
- Xanthelasma: flat yellowish patches near the corners near the corners of the eyelids
- Corneal arcus: a grayish-white circle around the iris (almost everyone will develop this as we get older, but if it shows up before the age of 45, that’s a red flag to make sure you get your lipid levels checked)
- Amyloidosis: waxy, translucent, firm bumps that you’ll likely see around the eyes, ears, neck and/or tongue
- Livido reticularis: a net-like pattern on the skin which is a sign of poor circulation
- Aortic regurgitation: this shows up as visible pulsations, with a number of named variations shown in the video
- Pitting edema: a visually distinct kind of swelling, usually found in the feet and ankles (test by pressing your fingertip firmly into a bony area of your lower leg, either your shin or your ankle, for about 5 to 15 seconds; if this leaves a visible indent on your skin, that’s pitting edema)
- Shortness of breath: this one’s self-explanatory, but it can be a matter of pulmonary edema, and should be checked out, especially if it gets worse when lying down
- Clubbing: not the nightclub kind, but rather, if you put the backs of your nails together, you should be able to see a triangle of light between them; if you can’t, that’s called digital clubbing, and is most often a sign of chronically low blood oxygen levels
- Infective endocarditis: while this itself is a matter of bacteria or fungi in your bloodstream getting stock on your heart valves, you can see signs of it when chunks break off and ride your bloodstream until they get lodged in the pads of your fingers and toes, forming painful raised pumps or painless flat red or purple lesions, of which a couple of variations are shown in the video
- Splinter hemorrhages: visible reddish brown streaks that look like wood splinters are actually tiny blood clots in the nail bed capillaries
- Irregular pulse (AFib): if you check your pulse and it has a noticeable lack in regularity, that’s a very common form of cardiac arrhythmia (alternatively, you might rely on your smartwatch to check this for you, as most are programmed to do these days)
For more on these plus visual illustrations where applicable, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
How To Survive A Heart Attack When You’re Alone
Take care!
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