Red Bell Peppers vs Tomatoes – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing red bell peppers to tomatoes, we picked the peppers.
Why?
In terms of macronutrients, these two fruits-that-get-used-as-vegetables are similar in most respects; they’re mostly water, negligible protein and fat, similar amounts of carbs, even a similar carb breakdown (mostly fructose and glucose). One thing that does set them apart is that peppers* have about 2x the fiber, which difference results in peppers having the lower Glycemic Index—though tomatoes are quite low in GI too.
*for brevity we’re just going to write “peppers”, but we are still talking about sweet red bell peppers throughout. This is important, as different color peppers have different nutrient profiles.
In the category of vitamins, peppers have much more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B9, C, and E. In contrast, tomatoes have more vitamin K. An easy win for peppers.
When it comes to minerals, the margins are narrower, but peppers have more iron, zinc, and selenium, while tomatoes have more calcium and copper. They’re approximately equal on other minerals they both contain, making this category a slight (3:2) win for peppers.
As for phytochemical benefits, both are good sources of lycopene (both better when cooked) and other carotenes (for example lutein), and both have an array of assorted flavonoids.
All in all, a win for peppers, but both are great!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Brain Food? The Eyes Have It!
- Bell Peppers: A Spectrum Of Specialties
- Lycopene’s Benefits For The Gut, Heart, Brain, & More
Take care!
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Lyme Disease At-A-Glance
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It’s Q&A Day 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!
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
❝Good info as always…was wondering if you have any recommendations for fighting Lyme disease naturally along wDr advice? Dr’s aren’t real keen on alternatives so always interested. Thanks❞
That depends on whether we’re looking at prevention or cure!
Prevention:
- Try not to get bitten by Lyme-disease-carrying ticks. Boots and long socks are your friends. As are long-gauntletted gloves for gardening.
- If you are in a high-risk area and/or engage in high-risk activities, check your body daily.
- This is because it usually takes 36–48 hours of being attached for a tick to cause an infection
- Obviously best if you can get a partner or close friend to help you with this, unless you have mastered some advanced pretzel positions of yoga.
- Contrary to many folk remedies, the safest way to remove a tick is with tweezers (carefully!).
- If you find and remove a tick, or otherwise suspect you have developed symptoms, go to your doctor immediately (not next week; today; time really counts for this).
Cure:
- No. Sorry. Regretfully, antibiotics are the only known effective treatment.
However! As with almost any kind of recovery, getting good rest, including good quality sleep, will hasten things. Also sensible is reducing stress if possible, and anything that could worsen inflammation.
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A Cold Shower A Day Keeps The Doctor Away?
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A Cold Shower A Day Keeps The Doctor Away?
This is Dutch extreme athlete Wim Hof, also known as “The Iceman”! He’s broken many world records mostly relating to the enduring the cold, for example:
- climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts
- running a half-marathon above the Arctic Circle barefoot
- standing in a container completely covered with ice cubes for more than 112 minutes
You might not want to do yoga in your pyjamas on an iceberg, but you might like…
- better circulatory health
- reduced risk of stroke
- a boosted immune system
- healthier skin
- more energy and alertness
…and things like that. Wim Hof’s method is not just about extreme athletic achievements; most of what he does, the stuff that can benefit the rest of us, is much more prosaic.
The Wim Hof Method
For Wim Hof, three things are key:
- Breathing (See: Wim Hof Method Breathing Exercises)
- Commitment (See: How to Increase Willpower)
- Cold therapy (See: Benefits of Cold Therapy)
Today, we’re going to be focusing on the last one there.
What are the benefits of Cold Therapy?
Once upon a time, we didn’t have central heating, electric blankets, thermal underwear, and hot showers. In fact, once upon a time, we didn’t have houses or clothes. We used to be a lot more used to the elements! And while it’s all well and good to enjoy modern comforts, it has left our bodies lacking practice.
Practice at what? Most notably: vasodilation and vasoconstriction, in response to temperature changes. Either:
- vasodilation, because part of our body needs more blood to keep it warm and nourished, or
- vasoconstriction, because part of our body needs less blood running through it to get cooled down.
Switching between the two gives the blood vessels practice at doing it, and improves vascular muscle tone. If your body doesn’t get that practice, your blood vessels will be sluggish at making the change. This can cause circulation problems, which in turn have a big impact in many other areas of health, including:
- cardiovascular disease
- stroke risk
- mood instability
- nerve damage in extremities
On the flipside, if the blood vessels do get regular practice at dilating and constricting, you might enjoy lower risk of those things, and instead:
- improved immune response
- healthier skin
- better quality sleep
- more energy and alertness
- improved sexual performance/responsiveness
So, how to get that, without getting extreme?
As today’s title suggests, “a cold shower a day” is a great practice.
You don’t have to jump straight in, especially if you think your circulation and vascular responses might be a bit sluggish in the first instance. In fact, Wim Hof recommends:
- Week 1: Thirty seconds of cold water at the end of a warm shower each morning
- Week 2: One minute of cold water at the end of a warm shower each morning
- Week 3: A minute and a half of cold water at the end of a warm shower each morning
- Week 4: Two minutes of cold water at the end of a warm shower each morning
How cold is cold?
The benefits of cold exposure begin at around 16ºC / 60ºF, so in most places, water from the cold water mains is sufficiently cold.
As your body becomes more used to making the quick-change on a vascular level, the cold water will seem less shocking to your system. In other words, on day 30 it won’t hit you like it did on day one.
At that point, you can either continue with your two-minutes daily cold shower, and reap the benefits, or if you’re curious to push it further, that’s where ice baths come in!
Can anyone do it, or are any conditions contraindicated?
As ever, we’re a health and productivity newsletter, not doctors, let alone your doctors. Nothing here is medical advice. However, Wim Hof himself says:
❝Listen to your body, and never force the practices. We advise against doing Wim Hof Method if you are dealing with any of the following:
- Epilepsy
- High blood pressure
- Coronary heart disease
- A history of serious healthy issues like heart failure or stroke
- Pregnancy*
- Childhood*❞
*There is simply not enough science regarding the effects of cold exposure on people who are pregnant, or children. Obviously, we don’t expect this to be remedied anytime soon, because the study insitutions’ ethics boards would (rightly!) hold up the study.
As for the other conditions, and just generally if unsure, consult a doctor.
As you can see, this does mean that a limitation of Cold Therapy is that it appears to be far better as a preventative, since it helps guard against the very conditions that could otherwise become contraindications.
We haven’t peppered today’s main feature with study papers, partly because Wim Hof’s own website has kindly collated a collection of them (with links and summaries!) onto one page:
Further reading: The Science Behind The Wim Hof Method
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War in Ukraine affected wellbeing worldwide, but people’s speed of recovery depended on their personality
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The war in Ukraine has had impacts around the world. Supply chains have been disrupted, the cost of living has soared and we’ve seen the fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II. All of these are in addition to the devastating humanitarian and economic impacts within Ukraine.
Our international team was conducting a global study on wellbeing in the lead up to and after the Russian invasion. This provided a unique opportunity to examine the psychological impact of the outbreak of war.
As we explain in a new study published in Nature Communications, we learned the toll on people’s wellbeing was evident across nations, not just in Ukraine. These effects appear to have been temporary – at least for the average person.
But people with certain psychological vulnerabilities struggled to recover from the shock of the war.
Tracking wellbeing during the outbreak of war
People who took part in our study completed a rigorous “experience-sampling” protocol. Specifically, we asked them to report their momentary wellbeing four times per day for a whole month.
Data collection began in October 2021 and continued throughout 2022. So we had been tracking wellbeing around the world during the weeks surrounding the outbreak of war in February 2022.
We also collected measures of personality, along with various sociodemographic variables (including age, gender, political views). This enabled us to assess whether different people responded differently to the crisis. We could also compare these effects across countries.
Our analyses focused primarily on 1,341 participants living in 17 European countries, excluding Ukraine itself (44,894 experience-sampling reports in total). We also expanded these analyses to capture the experiences of 1,735 people living in 43 countries around the world (54,851 experience-sampling reports) – including in Australia.
A global dip in wellbeing
On February 24 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a sharp decline in wellbeing around the world. There was no decline in the month leading up to the outbreak of war, suggesting the change in wellbeing was not already occurring for some other reason.
However, there was a gradual increase in wellbeing during the month after the Russian invasion, suggestive of a “return to baseline” effect. Such effects are commonly reported in psychological research: situations and events that impact our wellbeing often (though not always) do so temporarily.
Unsurprisingly, people in Europe experienced a sharper dip in wellbeing compared to people living elsewhere around the world. Presumably the war was much more salient for those closest to the conflict, compared to those living on an entirely different continent.
Interestingly, day-to-day fluctuations in wellbeing mirrored the salience of the war on social media as events unfolded. Specifically, wellbeing was lower on days when there were more tweets mentioning Ukraine on Twitter/X.
Our results indicate that, on average, it took around two months for people to return to their baseline levels of wellbeing after the invasion.
Different people, different recoveries
There are strong links between our wellbeing and our individual personalities.
However, the dip in wellbeing following the Russian invasion was fairly uniform across individuals. None of the individual factors assessed in our study, including personality and sociodemographic factors, predicted people’s response to the outbreak of war.
On the other hand, personality did play a role in how quickly people recovered. Individual differences in people’s recovery were linked to a personality trait called “stability”. Stability is a broad dimension of personality that combines low neuroticism with high agreeableness and conscientiousness (three traits from the Big Five personality framework).
Stability is so named because it reflects the stability of one’s overall psychological functioning. This can be illustrated by breaking stability down into its three components:
- low neuroticism describes emotional stability. People low in this trait experience less intense negative emotions such as anxiety, fear or anger, in response to negative events
- high agreeableness describes social stability. People high in this trait are generally more cooperative, kind, and motivated to maintain social harmony
- high conscientiousness describes motivational stability. People high in this trait show more effective patterns of goal-directed self-regulation.
So, our data show that people with less stable personalities fared worse in terms of recovering from the impact the war in Ukraine had on wellbeing.
In a supplementary analysis, we found the effect of stability was driven specifically by neuroticism and agreeableness. The fact that people higher in neuroticism recovered more slowly accords with a wealth of research linking this trait with coping difficulties and poor mental health.
These effects of personality on recovery were stronger than those of sociodemographic factors, such as age, gender or political views, which were not statistically significant.
Overall, our findings suggest that people with certain psychological vulnerabilities will often struggle to recover from the shock of global events such as the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
Luke Smillie, Professor in Personality Psychology, The University of Melbourne
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The End of Food Allergy – by Dr. Kari Nadeau & Sloan Barnett
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We don’t usually mention author credentials beyond their occupation/title. However, in this case it bears acknowledging at least the first line of the author bio:
❝Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD, is the director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University and is one of the world’s leading experts on food allergy❞
We mention this, because there’s a lot of quack medicine out there [in general, but especially] when it comes to things such as food allergies. So let’s be clear up front that Dr. Nadeau is actually a world-class professional at the top of her field.
This book is, by the way, about true allergies—not intolerances or sensitivities. It does touch on those latter two, but it’s not the main meat of the book.
In particular, most of the research cited is around peanut allergies, though the usual other common allergens are all discussed too.
The authors’ writing style is that of a science educator (Dr. Nadeau’s co-author, Sloan Barnett, is lawyer and health journalist). We get a clear explanation of the science from real-world to clinic and back again, and are left with a strong understanding, not just a conclusion.
The titular “End of Food Allergy” is a bold implicit claim; does the book deliver? Yes, actually.
The book lays out guidelines for safely avoiding food allergies developing in infants, and yes, really, how to reverse them in adults. But…
Big caveat:
The solution for reversing severe food allergies (e.g. “someone nearby touched a peanut three hours ago and now I’m in anaphylactic shock”), drug-assisted oral immunotherapy, takes 6–24 months of weekly several-hour-long clinic visits, relies on having a nearby clinic offering the service, and absolutely 100% cannot be done at home (on pain of probable death).
Bottom line: it’s by no means a magic bullet, but yes, it does deliver.
Click here to check out The End of Food Allergy to learn more!
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Muir Glen Organic vs First Field Original – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing Muir Glen Organic Ketchup to First Field Original Ketchup, we picked the First Field.
Why?
This one was a little unfair to you, as you can’t turn them around to read the ingredients here. But the point we want to share the most today is: you have to turn them around and read the ingredients! You absolutely cannot rely on appearances!
While the Muir Glen Organic may have a very “greenwashed” aesthetic going on and the word “organic” is more eye-catching than any other word on the label, it contains 4x as much sugar and 4x as much sodium.
Side-by-side, they have, per tablespoon:
First Field Original: 1g sugar, 60mg sodium
Muir Glen Organic: 4g sugar, 240mg sodiumBut what about the importance of being organic?
Well, we have one more surprise for you: the First Field ketchup is organic too, non-GMO, and contains no added concentrates either.
This isn’t an ad for First Field (by all means enjoy their products or don’t; we’re not invested), but it is a heartfelt plea to always check the backs of products and read the labels, because fronts of products can’t be relied upon at all.
I’m sure we all get caught out sometimes, but the less often, the better!
PS: we write this, of course, before seeing the results of your voting. Maybe it won’t be a “Muir Glen Organic” sweep in the polls. But either way, it’s a call to vigilance, and a “very good, carry on” to everyone who does this already
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Is “Extra Virgin” Worth It?
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
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
❝I was wondering, is the health difference important between extra virgin olive oil and regular?❞
Assuming that by “regular” you mean “virgin and still sold as a food product”, then there are health differences, but they’re not huge. Or at least: not nearly so big as the differences between those and other oils.
Virgin olive oil (sometimes simply sold as “olive oil”, with no claims of virginity) has been extracted by the same means as extra virgin olive oil, that is to say: purely mechanical.
The difference is that extra virgin olive oil comes from the first pressing*, so the free fatty acid content is slightly lower (later checked and validated and having to score under a 0.8% limit for “extra virgin” instead of 2% limit for a mere “virgin”).
*Fun fact: in Arabic, extra virgin is called “البكر الممتاز“, literally “the amazing first-born”, because of this feature!
It’s also slightly higher in mono-unsaturated fatty acids, which is a commensurately slight health improvement.
It’s very slightly lower in saturated fats, which is an especially slight health improvement, as the saturated fats in olive oil are amongst the healthiest saturated fats one can consume.
On which fats are which:
The truth about fats: the good, the bad, and the in-between
And our own previous discussion of saturated fats in particular:
Can Saturated Fats Be Healthy?
Probably the strongest extra health-benefit of extra virgin is that while that first pressing squeezes out oil with the lowest free fatty acid content, it squeezes out oil with the highest polyphenol content, along with other phytonutrients:
If you enjoy olive oil, then springing for extra virgin is worth it if that’s not financially onerous, both for health reasons and taste.
However, if mere “virgin” is what’s available, it’s no big deal to have that instead; it still has a very similar nutritional profile, and most of the same benefits.
Don’t settle for less than “virgin”, though.
While some virgin olive oils aren’t marked as such, if it says “refined” or “blended”, then skip it. These will have been extracted by chemical means and/or blended with completely different oils (e.g. canola, which has a very different nutritional profile), and sometimes with a dash of virgin or extra virgin, for the taste and/or so that they can claim in big writing on the label something like:
a blend of
EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL
and other oils…despite having only a tiny amount of extra virgin olive oil in it.
Different places have different regulations about what labels can claim.
The main countries that produce olives (and the EU, which contains and/or directly trades with those) have this set of rules:
International Olive Council: Designations and definitions of Olive Oils
…which must be abided by or marketers face heavy fines and sanctions.
In the US, the USDA has its own set of rules based on the above:
USDA | Olive Oil and Olive-Pomace Oil Grades and Standards
…which are voluntary (not protected by law), and marketers can pay to have their goods certified if they want.
So if you’re in the US, look for the USDA certification or it really could be:
- What the USDA calls “US virgin olive oil not fit for human consumption”, which in the IOC is called “lamp oil”*
- crude pomace-oil (oil made from the last bit of olive paste and then chemically treated)
- canola oil with a dash of olive oil
- anything yellow and oily, really
*This technically is virgin olive oil insofar as it was mechanically extracted, but with defects that prevent it from being sold as such, such as having a free fatty acid content above the cut-off, or just a bad taste/smell, or some sort of contamination.
See also: Potential Health Benefits of Olive Oil and Plant Polyphenols
(the above paper has a handy infographic if you scroll down just a little)
Where can I get some?
Your local supermarket, probably, but if you’d like to get some online, here’s an example product on Amazon for your convenience
Enjoy!
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