Red Cabbage vs White Cabbage – Which is Healthier?

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Our Verdict

When comparing red cabbage to white cabbage, we picked the red.

Why?

Perhaps you guessed this one, based on the “darker and/or more colorful foods are usually more nutritionally dense” dictum. That’s not always true, by the way, but it is a good rule of thumb and it is correct here. In the case of cabbages, each type is a nutritional powerhouse, but red does beat white:

In terms of macros, they’re quite comparable. They’re both >90% water with just enough other stuff (carbs, fiber, protein) to hold them together, and the “other stuff” in question is quite similarly proportioned in both cases. Within the carbs, even the sugar breakdown is similar. There are slight differences, but the differences are not only tiny, but also they balance out in any case.

When it comes to vitamins, as you might expect, the colorful red cabbage does better with more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, C, and choline, while white has more of vitamins B5, B9, E, and K. So, a 7:4 win for red.

In the category of minerals, it’s even more polarized; red cabbage has more calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. On the other hand, white contains a tiny amount more copper.

In short, both are great (red just makes white look bad by standing next to it, but honestly, white has lots of all those same things too, just not quite as much as red), and this writer will continue to use white when making her favorite shchi, but if you’re looking for the most nutritionally dense option, it’s red.

Want to learn more?

You might like to read:

Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain

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  • Fitness Walking and Bodyweight Exercises – by Frank S. Ring

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    A lot of exercise manuals assume that the reader has a “basic” body (nothing Olympian, but nothing damaged either). As we get older, increasingly few of us fall into the “but nothing damaged either” category!

    Here’s where Ring brings to bear his decades of experience as a coach and educator, and also his personal recovery from a serious back injury.

    The book covers direct, actionable exercise advice (with all manner of detail), and also offers mental health tips he’s learned along the way.

    Ring, like us, is a big fan of keeping things simple, so he focusses on “the core four” of bodyweight exercises:

    1. Pushups
    2. Squats
    3. Lunges
    4. Planks

    These four exercises get a whole chapter devoted to them, though! Because there are ways to make each exercise easier or harder, or have different benefits. For example, adjustments include:

    • Body angle
    • Points of contact
    • Speed
    • Pausing
    • Range of motion

    This, in effect, makes a few square meters of floor (and perhaps a chair or bench) your fully-equipped gym.

    As for walking? Ring enjoys and extols the health benefits, and/but also uses his walks a lot for assorted mental exercises, and recommends we try them too.

    A fine book for anyone who wants to gain and/or maintain good health, but doesn’t pressingly want to join a gym or start pumping iron!

    Pick up “Fitness Walking and Bodyweight Exercises: Supercharge Your Fitness, Build Body Strength, and Live Longer” on Amazon today!

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  • Healthy Mind In A Healthy Body

    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 8-minute piece of music “Weightless” by Marconi was created scientifically to lower the heart rate and relax the listener. How did they do it? You can read the British Academy of Sound Therapy’s explanation of the methodology here, but important results of the study were:

    • “Weightless” was able to induce greater relaxation levels than a massage (increase of 6%).
    • “Weightless” also induced an 11% increase in relaxation over all other relaxing music tracks in the study.
    • “Weightless” was also subjectively rated as more relaxing than any other music by all the participants.

    Try it for yourself!

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Isn’t that better? Whenever you’re ready, read on…

    Today we’re going to share a technique for dealing with difficult emotions. The technique is used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and it’s called RAIN:

    • Recognizing: ask yourself “what is it that I’m feeling?”, and put a name to it. It could be anger, despair, fear, frustration, anxiety, overwhelm etc.
    • Accepting: “OK, so, I’m feeling ________”. There’s no point in denying it, or being defensive about it, these things won’t help you. For now, just accept it.
    • Investigating: “Why am I feeling ________?” Maybe there is an obvious reason, maybe you need to dig for a reason—or dig deeper for the real reason. Most bad feelings are driven by some sort of fear or insecurity, so that can be a good avenue for examination. Important: your feelings may be rational or irrational. That’s fine. This is a time for investigating, not judging.
    • Non-Identification: not making whatever it is you’re feeling into a part of you. Once you get too attached to “I am jealous”, “I am angry”, “I am sad” etc, it can be difficult to manage something that has become a part of your personality; you’ll defend your jealousy, anger, sadness etc rather than tackle it.

    As a CBT tool, this is something you can do for yourself at any time. It won’t magically solve your problems, but it can stop you from spiralling into a state of crisis, and get you back on a more useful track.

    As a DBT tool, to give this its full strength, ideally now you will communicate what you’re feeling, to somebody you trust, perhaps a partner or friend, for instance.

    Humans are fundamentally social creatures, and we achieve our greatest strengths when we support each other—and that also means sometimes seeking and accepting support!

    Do you have a good technique you’d like to share? Reply to this email and let us know!

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  • What pathogen might spark the next pandemic? How scientists are preparing for ‘disease X’

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    Before the COVID pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) had made a list of priority infectious diseases. These were felt to pose a threat to international public health, but where research was still needed to improve their surveillance and diagnosis. In 2018, “disease X” was included, which signified that a pathogen previously not on our radar could cause a pandemic.

    While it’s one thing to acknowledge the limits to our knowledge of the microbial soup we live in, more recent attention has focused on how we might systematically approach future pandemic risks.

    Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously talked about “known knowns” (things we know we know), “known unknowns” (things we know we don’t know), and “unknown unknowns” (the things we don’t know we don’t know).

    Although this may have been controversial in its original context of weapons of mass destruction, it provides a way to think about how we might approach future pandemic threats.

    Anna Shvets/Pexels

    Influenza: a ‘known known’

    Influenza is largely a known entity; we essentially have a minor pandemic every winter with small changes in the virus each year. But more major changes can also occur, resulting in spread through populations with little pre-existing immunity. We saw this most recently in 2009 with the swine flu pandemic.

    However, there’s a lot we don’t understand about what drives influenza mutations, how these interact with population-level immunity, and how best to make predictions about transmission, severity and impact each year.

    The current H5N1 subtype of avian influenza (“bird flu”) has spread widely around the world. It has led to the deaths of many millions of birds and spread to several mammalian species including cows in the United States and marine mammals in South America.

    Human cases have been reported in people who have had close contact with infected animals, but fortunately there’s currently no sustained spread between people.

    While detecting influenza in animals is a huge task in a large country such as Australia, there are systems in place to detect and respond to bird flu in wildlife and production animals.

    Scientists in a lab.
    Scientists are continually monitoring a range of pathogens with pandemic potential. Edward Jenner/Pexels

    It’s inevitable there will be more influenza pandemics in the future. But it isn’t always the one we are worried about.

    Attention had been focused on avian influenza since 1997, when an outbreak in birds in Hong Kong caused severe disease in humans. But the subsequent pandemic in 2009 originated in pigs in central Mexico.

    Coronaviruses: an ‘unknown known’

    Although Rumsfeld didn’t talk about “unknown knowns”, coronaviruses would be appropriate for this category. We knew more about coronaviruses than most people might have thought before the COVID pandemic.

    We’d had experience with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) causing large outbreaks. Both are caused by viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID. While these might have faded from public consciousness before COVID, coronaviruses were listed in the 2015 WHO list of diseases with pandemic potential.

    Previous research into the earlier coronaviruses proved vital in allowing COVID vaccines to be developed rapidly. For example, the Oxford group’s initial work on a MERS vaccine was key to the development of AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine.

    Similarly, previous research into the structure of the spike protein – a protein on the surface of coronaviruses that allows it to attach to our cells – was helpful in developing mRNA vaccines for COVID.

    It would seem likely there will be further coronavirus pandemics in the future. And even if they don’t occur at the scale of COVID, the impacts can be significant. For example, when MERS spread to South Korea in 2015, it only caused 186 cases over two months, but the cost of controlling it was estimated at US$8 billion (A$11.6 billion).

    Coronavirus statistics on a screen.
    COVID could be regarded as an ‘unknown known’. Markus Spiske/Pexels

    The 25 viral families: an approach to ‘known unknowns’

    Attention has now turned to the known unknowns. There are about 120 viruses from 25 families that are known to cause human disease. Members of each viral family share common properties and our immune systems respond to them in similar ways.

    An example is the flavivirus family, of which the best-known members are yellow fever virus and dengue fever virus. This family also includes several other important viruses, such as Zika virus (which can cause birth defects when pregnant women are infected) and West Nile virus (which causes encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain).

    The WHO’s blueprint for epidemics aims to consider threats from different classes of viruses and bacteria. It looks at individual pathogens as examples from each category to expand our understanding systematically.

    The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has taken this a step further, preparing vaccines and therapies for a list of prototype pathogens from key virus families. The goal is to be able to adapt this knowledge to new vaccines and treatments if a pandemic were to arise from a closely related virus.

    Pathogen X, the ‘unknown unknown’

    There are also the unknown unknowns, or “disease X” – an unknown pathogen with the potential to trigger a severe global epidemic. To prepare for this, we need to adopt new forms of surveillance specifically looking at where new pathogens could emerge.

    In recent years, there’s been an increasing recognition that we need to take a broader view of health beyond only thinking about human health, but also animals and the environment. This concept is known as “One Health” and considers issues such as climate change, intensive agricultural practices, trade in exotic animals, increased human encroachment into wildlife habitats, changing international travel, and urbanisation.

    This has implications not only for where to look for new infectious diseases, but also how we can reduce the risk of “spillover” from animals to humans. This might include targeted testing of animals and people who work closely with animals. Currently, testing is mainly directed towards known viruses, but new technologies can look for as yet unknown viruses in patients with symptoms consistent with new infections.

    We live in a vast world of potential microbiological threats. While influenza and coronaviruses have a track record of causing past pandemics, a longer list of new pathogens could still cause outbreaks with significant consequences.

    Continued surveillance for new pathogens, improving our understanding of important virus families, and developing policies to reduce the risk of spillover will all be important for reducing the risk of future pandemics.

    This article is part of a series on the next pandemic.

    Allen Cheng, Professor of Infectious Diseases, Monash University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Beetroot vs Sweet Potato – Which is Healthier?
  • Cardiac Failure Explained – by Dr. Warrick Bishop

    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 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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  • You can now order all kinds of medical tests online. Our research shows this is (mostly) a bad idea

    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.

    Elena.Katkova/Shutterstock

    Many of us have done countless rapid antigen tests (RATs) over the course of the pandemic. Testing ourselves at home has become second nature.

    But there’s also a growing worldwide market in medical tests sold online directly to the public. These are “direct-to-consumer” tests, and you can access them without seeing a doctor.

    While this might sound convenient, the benefits to most consumers are questionable, as we discovered in a recent study.

    What are direct-to-consumer tests?

    Let’s start with what they’re not. We’re not talking about patients who are diagnosed with a condition, and use tests to monitor themselves (for example, finger-prick testing to monitor blood sugar levels for people with diabetes).

    We’re also not talking about home testing kits used for population screening, such as RATs for COVID, or the “poo tests” sent to people aged 50 and over for bowel cancer screening.

    Direct-to-consumer tests are products marketed to anyone who is willing to pay, without going through their GP. They can include hormone profiling tests, tests for thyroid disease and food sensitivity tests, among many others.

    Some direct-to-consumer tests allow you to complete the test at home, while self-collected lab tests give you the equipment to collect a sample, which you then send to a lab. You can now also buy pathology requests for a lab directly from a company without seeing a doctor.

    Hands preparing a RAT.
    We’ve all become accustomed to RATs during the pandemic.
    Ground Picture/Shutterstock

    What we did in our study

    We searched (via Google) for direct-to-consumer products advertised for sale online in Australia between June and December 2021. We then assessed whether each test was likely to provide benefits to those who use them based on scientific literature published about the tests, and any recommendations either for or against their use from professional medical organisations.

    We identified 103 types of tests and 484 individual products ranging in price from A$12.99 to A$1,947.

    We concluded only 11% of these tests were likely to benefit most consumers. These included tests for STIs, where social stigma can sometimes discourage people from testing at a clinic.

    A further 31% could possibly benefit a person, if they were at higher risk. For example, if a person had symptoms of thyroid disease, a test may benefit them. But the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners does not recommend testing for thyroid disease in people without symptoms because evidence showing benefits of identifying and treating people with early thyroid disease is lacking.

    Some 42% were commercial “health checks” such as hormone and nutritional status tests. Although these are legitimate tests – they may be ordered by a doctor in certain circumstances, or be used in research – they have limited usefulness for consumers.

    A test of your hormone or vitamin levels at a particular time can’t do much to help you improve your health, especially because test results change depending on the time of day, month or season you test.

    Most worryingly, 17% of the tests were outright “quackery” that wouldn’t be recommended by any mainstream health practitioner. For example, hair analysis for assessing food allergies is unproven and can lead to misdiagnosis and ineffective treatments.

    More than half of the tests we looked at didn’t state they offered a pre- or post-test consultation.

    A woman opening a box, which sits on her lap.
    Ordering medical tests online probably isn’t a good idea.
    fizkes/Shutterstock

    Products available may change outside the time frame of our study, and direct-to-consumer tests not promoted or directly purchasable online, such as those offered in pharmacies or by commercial health clinics, were not included.

    But in Australia, ours is the first and only study we know of mapping the scale and variety of direct-to-consumer tests sold online.

    Research from other countries has similarly found a lack of evidence to support the majority of direct-to-consumer tests.

    4 questions to ask before you buy a test online

    Many direct-to-consumer tests offer limited benefits, and could even lead to harms. Here are four questions you should ask yourself if you’re considering buying a medical test online.

    1. If I do this test, could I end up with extra medical appointments or treatments I don’t need?

    Doing a test yourself might seem harmless (it’s just information, after all), but unnecessary tests often find issues that would never have caused you problems.

    For example, someone taking a diabetes test may find moderately high blood sugar levels see them labelled as “pre-diabetic”. However, this diagnosis has been controversial, regarded by many as making patients out of healthy people, a large number of whom won’t go on to develop diabetes.

    2. Would my GP recommend this test?

    If you have worrying symptoms or risk factors, your GP can recommend the best tests for you. Tests your GP orders are more likely to be covered by Medicare, so will cost you a lot less than a direct-to-consumer test.

    3. Is this a good quality test?

    A good quality home self-testing kit should indicate high sensitivity (the proportion of true cases that will be accurately detected) and high specificity (the proportion of people who don’t have the disease who will be accurately ruled out). These figures should ideally be in the high 90s, and clearly printed on the product packaging.

    For tests analysed in a lab, check if the lab is accredited by the National Association of Testing Authorities. Avoid tests sent to overseas labs, where Australian regulators can’t control the quality, or the protection of your sample or personal health information.

    4. Do I really need this test?

    There are lots of reasons to want information from a test, like peace of mind, or just curiosity. But unless you have clear symptoms and risk factors, you’re probably testing yourself unnecessarily and wasting your money.

    Direct-to-consumer tests might seem like a good idea, but in most cases, you’d be better off letting sleeping dogs lie if you feel well, or going to your GP if you have concerns.The Conversation

    Patti Shih, Senior Lecturer, Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values, University of Wollongong; Fiona Stanaway, Associate Professor in Clinical Epidemiology, University of Sydney; Katy Bell, Associate Professor in Clinical Epidemiology, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney, and Stacy Carter, Professor and Director, Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values, University of Wollongong

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Staying Sane In A Hyper-Connected World

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    Staying Sane In A Hyper-Connected World

    There’s a war over there, a genocide in progress somewhere else, and another disease is ravaging the population of somewhere most Americans would struggle to point out on the map. Not only that, but that one politician is at it again, and sweeping wildfires are not doing climate change any favors.

    To borrow an expression from Gen-Z…

    “Oof”.

    A Very Modern Mental Health Menace

    For thousands of years, we have had wars and genocides and plagues and corrupt politicians and assorted major disasters. Dire circumstances are not new to us as a species. So what is new?

    As some reactionary said during the dot-com boom, “the Internet doesn’t make people stupid; it just makes their stupidity more accessible”.

    The same is true now of The Horrors™.

    The Internet doesn’t, by and large, make the world worse. But what it does do is make the bad things much, much more accessible.

    Understanding and empathy are not bad things, but watch out…

    • When soldiers came home from the First World War, those who hadn’t been there had no conception of the horrors that had been endured. That made it harder for the survivors to get support. That was bad.
    • Nowadays, while mass media covering horrors certainly doesn’t convey the half of it, even the half it does convey can be overwhelming. This is also bad.

    The insidious part is: while people are subjectively reporting good physical/mental health, the reports of the symptoms of poor physical/mental health from the same population do not agree:

    Stress in America 2023: A nation grappling with psychological impacts of collective trauma

    Should we just not watch the news?

    In principle that’s an option, but it’s difficult to avoid, unless you truly live under a rock, and also do not frequent any social media at all. And besides, isn’t it our duty as citizens of this world to stay informed? How else can we make informed choices?

    Staying informed, mindfully

    There are steps that can be taken to keep ourselves informed, while protecting our mental health:

    • Choose your sources wisely. Primary sources (e.g. tweets and videos from people who are there) will usually be most authentic, but also most traumatizing. Dispassionate broadsheets may gloss over or misrepresent things more (something that can be countered a bit by reading an opposing view from a publication you hate on principle), but will offer more of an emotional buffer.
    • Boundary your consumption of the news. Set a timer and avoid doomscrolling. Your phone (or other device) may help with this if you set a screentime limit per app where you consume that kind of media.
    • Take (again, boundaried) time to reflect. If you don’t, your brain will keep grinding at it “like a fork in the garbage disposal”. Talking about your feelings on the topic with a trusted person is great; journaling is also a top-tier more private option.
    • If you feel helpless, help. Taking even small actions to help in the face of suffering somewhere else (e.g. donating to relief funds, engaging in advocacy / hounding your government about it), can help alleviate feelings of anguish and helplessness. And of course, as a bonus, it actually helps in the real world too.
    • When you relax, relax fully. Even critical care doctors need downtime, nobody can be “always on” without burning out. So whatever distracts and relaxes you completely, make sure to make time for that too.

    Want to know more?

    That’s all we have room for today, but you might like to check out:

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    Take care!

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