Ready to Run – by Kelly Starrett

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If you’d like to get into running, and think that maybe the barriers are too great, this is the book for you.

Kelly Starrett approaches running less from an “eye of the tiger” motivational approach, and more from a physiotherapy angle.

The first couple of chapters of the book are explanatory of his philosophy, the key component of which being:

Routine maintenance on your personal running machine (i.e., your body) can be and should be performed by you.

The second (and largest) part of the book is given to his “12 Standards of Maintenance for Running“. These range from neutral feet and flat shoes, to ankle, knee, and hip mobilization exercises, to good squatting technique, and more.

After that, we have photographs and explanations of maintenance exercises that are functional for running.

The fourth and final part of the book is about dealing with injuries or medical issues that you might have.

And if you think you’re too old for it? In Starrett’s own words:

❝Problems are going to keep coming. Each one is a gift wanting to be opened—some new area of performance you didn’t know you had, or some new efficiency to be gained. The 90- to 95-year-old division of the Masters Track and Field Nationals awaits. A Lifelong commitment to solving each problem that creeps up is the ticket.

In short: this is the book that can get you back out doing what you perhaps thought you’d left behind you, and/or open a whole new chapter in your life.

Get your copy of Ready to Run from Amazon today!

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    In the berry battle, blackberries triumph with more fiber, vitamins, minerals, and equal antioxidants to blueberries. Enjoy both for a nutrient-packed diet!

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  • The China Study – by Dr. T Colin Campbell and Dr. Thomas M. Campbell

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    This is not the newest book we’ve reviewed (originally published 2005; this revised and expanded edition 2016), but it is a seminal one.

    You’ve probably heard it referenced, and maybe you’ve wondered what the fuss is about. Now you can know!

    The titular study itself was huge. We tend to think “oh there was one study” and look to discount it, but it literally looked at the population of China. That’s a large study.

    And because China is relatively ethnically homogenous, especially per region, it was easier to isolate what dietary factors made what differences to health. Of course, that did also create a limitation: follow-up studies would be needed to see if the results were the same for non-Chinese people. But even for the rest of us (this reviewer is not Chinese), it already pointed science in the right direction. And sure enough, smaller follow-up studies elsewhere found the same.

    But enough about the research; what about the book? This is a book review, not a research review, after all.

    The book itself is easy for a lay reader to understand. It explains how the study was conducted (no small feat), and how the data was examined. It also discusses the results, and the conclusions drawn from those results.

    In light of all this, it also offers simple actionable advices, on how to eat to avoid disease in general, and cancer in particular. In especially that latter case, one take-home conclusion was: get more of your protein from plants for a big reduction in cancer risk, for example.

    Bottom line: this book is an incredible blend of “comprehensive” and “readable” that we don’t often find in the same book! It contains not just a lot of science, but also an insight into how the science works, on a research level. And, of course, its results and conclusions have strong implications for all our lives.

    Click here to check out The China Study, to know more about it!

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  • Antioxidant Matcha Snack Bars

    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.

    The antioxidants in this come not just from the matcha, but also the cacao nibs and chocolate, as well as lots of nutrients from the hazelnuts and cashews. If you’re allergic to nuts, we’ll give you substitutions that will change the nutritional profile (and flavor), but still work perfectly well and be healthy too.

    You will need

    For the base:

    • ⅔ cup roasted hazelnuts (if allergic, substitute dessicated coconut)
    • ⅔ cup chopped dates

    For the main part:

    • 1 cup raw cashews (if allergic, substitute raw coconut, chopped)
    • ½ cup almond milk (or your preferred milk of any kind)
    • ½ cup cacao nibs
    • 2 tbsp lime juice
    • 1 tbsp matcha powder
    • 1 tbsp maple syrup (omit if you don’t care for sweetness)

    For the topping (optional):

    • 2oz dark chocolate, melted (and if you like, tempered—but this isn’t necessary; it’ll just make it glossier if you do)
    • Spare cacao nibs, chopped nuts, or anything else you might want on there

    Method

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

    1) Blend the base ingredients in a food processor until it has a coarse sticky texture, but isn’t yet a paste or dough.

    2) Line a cake pan with baking paper and spread the base mix on the base; press it down to compact it a little and ensure it is flat. If there’s room, put this in the freezer while you do the next bit. If not, the fridge will suffice.

    3) Blend the main part ingredients apart from the cacao nibs, until smooth. Stir in the cacao nibs with a spoon.

    4) Spread the main part evenly over the base, and allow everything you’ve built (in this recipe, not in life in general) to chill in the fridge for at least 4 hours.

    5) Cut it into blocks of the size and shape you want to eat them, and (if adding the optional topping) separate the blocks slightly from each other, before drizzling with the chocolate topping. Put it back in the fridge to cool this too; an hour should be sufficient.

    6) Serve!

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

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

    Take care!

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  • Brown Rice vs Wild Rice – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing brown rice to wild rice, we picked the wild.

    Why?

    It’s close! But there are important distinctions.

    First let’s clarify: despite the name and appearance, wild rice is botanically quite different from rice per se; it’s not the same species, it’s not even the same genus, though it is the same umbrella family. In other words, they’re about as closely related as humans and gorillas are to each other.

    In terms of macros, wild rice has considerably more protein and a little more fiber, for slightly lower carbs.

    Notably, however, wild rice’s carbs are a close-to-even mix of sucrose, fructose, and glucose, while brown rice’s carbs are 99% starch. Given the carb to fiber ratio, it’s worth noting that wild rice also has lower net carbs, and the lower glycemic index.

    In the category of vitamins, wild rice leads with more of vitamins A, B2, B9, E, K, and choline. In contrast, brown rice has more of vitamins B1, B3, and B5. So, a moderate win for wild rice.

    When it comes to minerals, brown rice finally gets a tally in its favor, even if only slightly: brown rice has more magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and selenium, while wild rice has more copper, potassium, and zinc. They’re equal in calcium and iron, by the way. Still, this category stands as a 4:3 win for brown rice.

    Adding up the categories makes a modest win for wild rice, and additionally, if we had to consider one of these things more important than the others, it’d be wild rice being higher in fiber and protein and lower in total carbs and net carbs.

    Still, enjoy either or both, per your preference!

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Take care!

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  • How Processed Is The Food You Buy, Really?

    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.

    Ultraprocessed foods are a) ubiquitous in industrialized nations b) generally not fabulous for the health. See for example:

    Abstaining from ultraprocessed food can also be difficult psychologically, because they are generally engineered specifically to trigger certain physiological responses, often with their combination of sweet and/or salty flavors with simple carbohydrates that will zip straight into one’s veins and feel immediately rewarding, even if there is a health price to pay later.

    And worse, being habituated to ultraprocessed food can make unprocessed or minimally-processed food seem less appealing:

    What causes food cravings? And what can we do about them?

    Fortunately, we can reverse this, and once we get habituated to unprocessed or minimally-processed food, the ultraprocessed will start to seem like not-food to us. You will wonder: how did I ever eat that crap?

    Now, one other thing to bear in mind:

    There is a scale of “badness”

    You might recall this article:

    Not all ultra-processed foods are bad for your health, whatever you might have heard

    For example, Reese’s confectionary and Huel nutrition powder are both ultra-processed, but one is definitely better than the other.

    See also: Are plant-based burgers really bad for your heart? Here’s what’s behind the scary headlines

    Some comparisons are obvious; others, not so much. So, how to tell the difference?

    The “True Food” Scale

    A large study analyzed ingredient lists, nutrition facts, and prices of over 50,000 food items from Target, Whole Foods, and Walmart. Using a rigorous statistical method, they assigned processing scores and compiled data into a giant database, with results published publicly.

    You can find the study here:

    Prevalence of processed foods in major US grocery stores

    That in and of itself doesn’t tell a lot that’s useful to the consumer, because the paper itself does not have all of the data from all 50,000 food items, just the aggregate results, trends, implications for public health, and suggestions for public health policy.

    However, what does tell a lot, is the public face of the database itself, which you can browse for free, and look up your regular shopping items, if you are wondering “are these textured soy pieces basically a step away from soy beans, or a frankenfood that will murder me in my sleep?”

    How it works: it examines each food, its listed ingredients, and what is known about the processedness of such ingredients. It also draws a distinction between ingredients and additives, rendering the entire process of the production of the food into an “ingredient tree”, showing what was added to what along the way. Minimally-processed foods will have barely an ingredient sapling, while ultraprocessed foods will have an ingredient tree whose branches can barely be counted, they are so numerous. It’s not just about the number of ingredients though; it’s about the processes that each underwent.

    How it represents this data: you can look at the food in the database, and it’ll tell you the ingredients and nutritional facts (which you probably knew already; it’s written on the packaging), and then show you how processed it is, and then ranking that against all other foods in the database of the same kind.

    So for example, if you are looking at a pizza (have you ever noticed how some are marketed with bright flashy colors, and others in natural tones to suggest minimal processing? This is marketing, not reliable information! Sometimes the product that looks healthier, isn’t!), then it’ll give it a score reflecting how it ranks compared to all other pizze in the database. This number is out of a hundred, and it reflects the percentile into which it falls.

    So for example, if the score your pizza gets is 47, then that means that if you looked at it next to 99 others, on average your pizza would would rank better than 46 of them and worse than 53 of them.

    In other words, the lower the score, the less processed it is on the whole.

    Here’s a side-by-side example of two cakes, one of which got a score of 3, and the other got a score of 61:

    Mini No Sugar Added Cheesecake vs EDWARDS Desserts Original Whipped Cheesecake

    And here is the main menu of the database, in which you can use the search function to look up the food you want to check, or else browse by category:

    The TrueFood Database: Search or Browse (it’s free!)

    Enjoy!

    Want to know more?

    You might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:

    Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food – by Dr. Chris van Tulleken

    Enjoy!

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  • Midwives Blame California Rules for Hampering Birth Centers Amid Maternity Care Crisis

    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.

    Jessie Mazar squeezed the grab handle in her husband’s pickup and groaned as contractions struck her during the 90-minute drive from her home in rural northeastern California to the closest hospital with a maternity unit.

    She could have reached Plumas District Hospital, in Quincy, in just seven minutes. But it no longer delivers babies.

    Local officials have a plan for a birth center in Quincy, where midwives could deliver babies with backup from on-call doctors and a standby perinatal unit at the hospital, but state health officials have yet to approve it.

    That left Mazar to brave the long, winding road — one sometimes blocked by snow, floods, or forest fires — to have her baby. Women across California are facing similar ordeals as hospitals increasingly close money-losing maternity units, especially in rural areas.

    Midwife-operated birth centers offer an alternative for women with low-risk pregnancies and can play a crucial role in filling the gap left by hospitals’ retreat from obstetrics, maternal health advocates say.

    Declining birth rates, staffing shortages, and financial pressures have led 56 California hospitals — about 1 in 6 — to shutter maternity units over the past dozen years.

    But midwives say California’s regulatory regime around birth centers is unnecessarily preventing new centers from opening and leading some existing facilities to close. Obtaining a license can take as long as four years.

    “All they’ve essentially done is made it more dangerous to have a baby,” said Sacramento midwife Bethany Sasaki. “People have to drive two hours now because a birth center can’t open, so it’s more dangerous. People are going to be having babies in cars on the side of the road.”

    Last month, state Assembly member Mia Bonta introduced legislation to streamline the regulatory process and fix what she calls “a broken system” for licensing birth centers.

    “We know that alternative birth centers lead to often better outcomes, lower-risk births, more opportunity for children to be born healthy, and also to lower maternal mortality and morbidity,” she said.

    The proposed bill would remove various bureaucratic requirements, though many details have yet to be finalized. Bonta introduced the bill in its current form as a jumping-off point for discussions about how to expedite licensing.

    “It’s a starting place,” said Sandra Poole, health policy advocate for the Western Center on Law & Poverty, a co-sponsor of the legislation.

    For now, birth centers struggle with a gantlet of rules, only some clearly connected to patient safety. Over the past decade, the number of licensed birth centers in California dropped from 12 to five, according to Bonta.

    Plumas County officials are trying to address one key issue: how far a birth center can be from a hospital with a round-the-clock obstetrics unit. State regulations say it can be no more than a 30-minute drive, a distance set when many more hospitals had maternity units.

    The first-of-its-kind “Plumas model” aims to take advantage of flexibility provisions in the law to address the obstacle in a way that could potentially be replicated elsewhere in the state.

    But the hospital’s application for a birth center and a perinatal unit has been “languishing” with the California Department of Public Health, which is “looking for cover from the legislature,” said Robert Moore, chief medical officer of Partnership HealthPlan of California, a Medi-Cal managed-care plan serving most of Northern California. Asked about the application, a CDPH spokesperson said only that it was under review.

    The goal should be for all women to be within an hour’s drive of a hospital with an obstetrics unit, Moore said. Data shows the complication rate goes up after an hour and even higher after two hours, he said, while the benefit is less compelling between 30 and 60 minutes.

    Numerous other regulations have made it difficult for birth centers to keep their doors open.

    Since August, birth centers in Sacramento and Monterey have had to stop operating because their heating ducts failed to meet licensing requirements. The facilities fall under the same state Department of Health Care Access and Information regulations as primary care clinics, though birth centers see healthy families, not sick ones, and don’t need hospital-grade ventilation, said midwife Caroline Cusenza.

    She had spent $50,000 remodeling the Monterey Birth & Wellness Center to include state-required items, such as nursing and hand-washing stations and a housekeeping closet. In the end, a requirement for galvanized steel heating vents, which would have required opening the ceiling at an unaffordable cost, prompted her heart-wrenching decision to close.

    “We’re turning women away in tears,” said Sasaki, who owned Midtown Birth Center in Sacramento. She bought the building for $760,000 and spent $250,000 remodeling it in a way she believed met all licensing requirements. But regulators would not license it unless the heating system was redone. Sasaki estimated it would have cost an additional $50,000 to bring it into compliance — too much to keep operating.

    She blamed her closure on “regulatory dysfunction.”

    Legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year could ease onerous building codes such as those governing Sasaki’s and Cusenza’s heating systems, said Poole, the health policy advocate.

    The state has taken two to four years to issue birth center licenses, according to a brief by the Osher Center for Integrative Health at the University of California-San Francisco. The state Department of Public Health “works tirelessly to ensure health facilities are able to be properly licensed and follow all applicable requirements within our authority before and during their operation,” spokesperson Mark Smith said.

    Bonta, an Oakland Democrat who chairs the Assembly’s health committee, said she would consider increasing the allowable drive time between a birth center and a hospital maternity unit as part of her new legislation.

    The state last updated birth center regulations more than a decade ago, before hospitals’ mass exodus from obstetrics. “The hurdle is the time and distance standards without compromising safety,” Poole said. “But where there’s nothing right now, we would say a birth center is certainly a better alternative to not having any maternal care.”

    Moore noted that midwife-led births in homes and birth centers are the mainstay of obstetric care in Europe, where the infant mortality rate is considerably lower than in the U.S. More than 98% of American babies are born in hospitals.

    Babies delivered by midwives are more likely to be born vaginally, less likely to require intensive care, and more likely to breastfeed, the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative has found. Midwife-led births also lead to fewer infant emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and neonatal deaths. And they cost far less: Birth centers generally charge one-quarter or less of the average cost of about $36,000 for a vaginal birth in a California hospital.

    If they catered only to private-pay clients, Cusenza and Sasaki could have continued operating without licenses. They must be licensed, however, to receive payments from Medi-Cal and some private insurance companies, which they needed to remain in business. Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid health insurance program, which covers low-income residents, paid for about 40% of the state’s births in 2022.

    Bonta has heard reports from midwives that the key to getting licensed is hunting down the right state health department advocate. “I don’t believe that we should be building resources based on the model of ‘Where’s Waldo?’ in finding a champion inside CDPH,” she said.

    Lori Link, director of midwifery at Plumas District Hospital, believes the Plumas model can turn what’s become a maternity desert into an oasis. Jessie Mazar, whose son was born in September without complications at a Truckee hospital, would welcome the opportunity to deliver her planned second child in Quincy.

    “That would be convenient,” she said. “We’re not holding our breath.”

    This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. 

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    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.

    This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • Decoding Hormone Balancing in Ads

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    It’s Q&A Time!

    This is the bit whereby each week, we respond to subscriber questions/requests/etc

    Have something you’d like to ask us, or ask us to look into? Hit reply to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom, and a Real Human™ will be glad to read it!

    Q: As to specific health topics, I would love to see someone address all these Instagram ads targeted to women that claim “You only need to ‘balance your hormones’ to lose weight, get ripped, etc.” What does this mean? Which hormones are they all talking about? They all seem to be selling a workout program and/or supplements or something similar, as they are ads, after all. Is there any science behind this stuff or is it mostly hot air, as I suspect?

    Thank you for asking this, as your question prompted yesterday’s main feature, What Does “Balancing Your Hormones” Even Mean?

    That’s a great suggestion also about addressing ads (and goes for health-related things in general, not just hormonal stuff) and examining their claims, what they mean, how they work (if they work!), and what’s “technically true but may be misleading* cause confusion”

    *We don’t want companies to sue us, of course.

    Only, we’re going to need your help for this one, subscribers!

    See, here at 10almonds we practice what we preach. We limit screen time, we focus on our work when working, and simply put, we don’t see as many ads as our thousands of subscribers do. Also, ads tend to be targeted to the individual, and often vary from country to country, so chances are good that we’re not seeing the same ads that you’re seeing.

    So, how about we pull together as a bit of a 10almonds community project?

    • Step 1: add our email address to your contacts list, if you haven’t already
    • Step 2: When you see an ad you’re curious about, select “share” (there is usually an option to share ads, but if not, feel free to screenshot or such)
    • Step 3: Send the ad to us by email

    We’ll do the rest! Whenever we have enough ads to review, we’ll do a special on the topic.

    We will categorically not be able to do this without you, so please do join in—Many thanks in advance!

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