Retinoids: Retinol vs Retinal vs Retinoic Acid vs..?
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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’m confused about retinol, retinal, retinoin, retinoids, etc, and of course every product claims to be the best, what’s the actual science on it?❞
Before we get into these skincare products, let’s first note that for most people, what’s best for the skin is good sleep and hydration, a plants-centric whole foods diet, and good stress management:
See for example: Of Brains And Breakouts: The Brain Skin Doctor
However, the world of potions and lotions can be an alluring one, and there is some merit there too. So, in a nutshell:
- Retinoids are the overall class of chemicals, and not a specific type
- Retinoic acid is the strongest form of this chemical and is prescription-controlled in most places
- “Retinoin” is probably tretinoin (all-trans retinoic acid) with the “t” having fallen off; we can only find it being used as a product name, not an actual substance
- Retinal, when it’s not an adjective referring to the retina (the part of the eye that receives refocussed light) and is instead a noun, is a less potent retinoid than the prescription-only kinds, but still stronger than retinol
- Retinol is a much less potent form, and is the most widely found in skincare products
- Retinoic acid is the strongest form of this chemical and is prescription-controlled in most places
All of them work the same way; it is only how serious they are about it that differs.
The mechanism of action is that they speed up the turnover (shedding cycle) of skin, so that cells are replaced sooner. As with any non-cancerous human tissue, this means that the tissue itself (in this case, your skin) will be biologically younger than if it had been replaced later.
The downside, of course, of this is that—while trying to make your skin healthier and more beautiful—the first thing that will happen is skin shedding. Depending on the retinoid type, dose, and the health of your skin to start with, this may mean anything from needing to exfoliate in the morning, to having to go to hospital with what looks like the world’s worst sunburn. For this reason, it is recommended to start with weaker products and lower doses, and work up carefully.
A note on doses: the recommended doses for these products are always truly tiny, like “use a pea-sized amount of this 0.05% serum on your face”. Take them seriously until you’re absolutely sure from experience that your skin can handle more.
Also, a tip: wear gloves when you apply any of the above products. This is because your fingers are also covered in skin, and if you don’t use gloves, then half the product that you intended for your face will be absorbed into your fingers instead. On the bright side, you’ll have beautifully rejuvenated fingertips, though.
You can learn more about the science of retinoids here, in our article about tretinoin, the usually prescription-only form of retinoic acid:
Tretinoin: Undo The Sun’s Damage To Your Skin
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product of retinal (stronger than retinol) on Amazon 😎
Take care!
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With all this bird flu around, how safe are eggs, chicken or milk?
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Enzo Palombo, Swinburne University of Technology
Recent outbreaks of bird flu – in US dairy herds, poultry farms in Australia and elsewhere, and isolated cases in humans – have raised the issue of food safety.
So can the virus transfer from infected farm animals to contaminate milk, meat or eggs? How likely is this?
And what do we need to think about to minimise our risk when shopping for or preparing food?
AS Foodstudio/Shutterstock How safe is milk?
Bird flu (or avian influenza) is a bird disease caused by specific types of influenza virus. But the virus can also infect cows. In the US, for instance, to date more than 80 dairy herds in at least nine states have been infected with the H5N1 version of the virus.
Investigations are under way to confirm how this happened. But we do know infected birds can shed the virus in their saliva, nasal secretions and faeces. So bird flu can potentially contaminate animal-derived food products during processing and manufacturing.
Indeed, fragments of bird flu genetic material (RNA) were found in cow’s milk from the dairy herds associated with infected US farmers.
However, the spread of bird flu among cattle, and possibly to humans, is likely to have been caused through contact with contaminated milking equipment, not the milk itself.
The test used to detect the virus in milk – which uses similar PCR technology to lab-based COVID tests – is also highly sensitive. This means it can detect very low levels of the bird flu RNA. But the test does not distinguish between live or inactivated virus, just that the RNA is present. So from this test alone, we cannot tell if the virus found in milk is infectious (and capable of infecting humans).
It’s best to stick with pasteurised milk. Amnixia/Shutterstock Does that mean milk is safe to drink and won’t transmit bird flu? Yes and no.
In Australia, where bird flu has not been reported in dairy cattle, the answer is yes. It is safe to drink milk and milk products made from Australian milk.
In the US, the answer depends on whether the milk is pasteurised. We know pasteurisation is a common and reliable method of destroying concerning microbes, including influenza virus. Like most viruses, influenza virus (including bird flu virus) is inactivated by heat.
Although there is little direct research on whether pasteurisation inactivates H5N1 in milk, we can extrapolate from what we know about heat inactivation of H5N1 in chicken and eggs.
So we can be confident there is no risk of bird flu transmission via pasteurised milk or milk products.
However, it’s another matter for unpasteurised or “raw” US milk or milk products. A recent study showed mice fed raw milk contaminated with bird flu developed signs of illness. So to be on the safe side, it would be advisable to avoid raw milk products.
How about chicken?
Bird flu has caused sporadic outbreaks in wild birds and domestic poultry worldwide, including in Australia. In recent weeks, there have been three reported outbreaks in Victorian poultry farms (two with H7N3 bird flu, one with H7N9). There has been one reported outbreak in Western Australia (H9N2).
The strains of bird flu identified in the Victorian and Western Australia outbreaks can cause human infection, although these are rare and typically result from close contact with infected live birds or contaminated environments.
Therefore, the chance of bird flu transmission in chicken meat is remote.
Nonetheless, it is timely to remind people to handle chicken meat with caution as many dangerous pathogens, such as Salmonella and Campylobacter, can be found on chicken carcasses.
Always handle chicken meat carefully when shopping, transporting it home and storing it in the kitchen. For instance, make sure no meat juices cross-contaminate other items, consider using a cool bag when transporting meat, and refrigerate or freeze the meat within two hours.
Avoid washing your chicken before cooking to prevent the spread of disease-causing microbes around the kitchen.
Finally, cook chicken thoroughly as viruses (including bird flu) cannot survive cooking temperatures.
Are eggs safe?
The recent Australian outbreaks have occurred in egg-laying or mixed poultry flocks, so concerns have been raised about bird flu transmission via contaminated chicken eggs.
Can flu viruses contaminate chicken eggs and potentially spread bird flu? It appears so. A report from 2007 said it was feasible for influenza viruses to enter through the eggshell. This is because influenza virus particles are smaller (100 nanometres) than the pores in eggshells (at least 200 nm).
So viruses could enter eggs and be protected from cleaning procedures designed to remove microbes from the egg surface.
Therefore, like the advice about milk and meat, cooking eggs is best.
The US Food and Drug Administration recommends cooking poultry, eggs and other animal products to the proper temperature and preventing cross-contamination between raw and cooked food.
In a nutshell
If you consume pasteurised milk products and thoroughly cook your chicken and eggs, there is nothing to worry about as bird flu is inactivated by heat.
The real fear is that the virus will evolve into highly pathogenic versions that can be transmitted from human to human.
That scenario is much more frightening than any potential spread though food.
Enzo Palombo, Professor of Microbiology, Swinburne University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Make Your Negativity Work For You
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What’s The Right Balance?
We’ve written before about positivity the pitfalls and perils of toxic positivity:
How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)
…as well as the benefits that can be found from selectively opting out of complaining:
A Bone To Pick… Up And Then Put Back Where We Found It
So… What place, if any, does negativity usefully have in our lives?
Carrot and Stick
We tend to think of “carrot and stick” motivation being extrinsic, i.e. there is some authority figure offering is reward and/or punishment, in response to our reactions.
In those cases when it really is extrinsic, the “stick” can still work for most people, by the way! At least in the short term.
Because in the long term, people are more likely to rebel against a “stick” that they consider unjust, and/or enter a state of learned helplessness, per “I’ll never be good enough to satisfy this person” and give up trying to please them.
But what about when you have your own carrot and stick? What about when it comes to, for example, your own management of your own healthy practices?
Here it becomes a little different—and more effective. We’ll get to that, but first, bear with us for a touch more about extrinsic motivation, because here be science:
We will generally be swayed more easily by negative feelings than positive ones.
For example, a study was conducted as part of a blood donation drive, and:
- Group A was told that their donation could save a life
- Group B was told that their donation could prevent a death
The negative wording given to group B boosted donations severalfold:
Read the paper: Life or Death Decisions: Framing the Call for Help
We have, by the way, noticed a similar trend—when it comes to subject lines in our newsletters. We continually change things up to see if trends change (and also to avoid becoming boring), but as a rule, the response we get from subscribers is typically greater when a subject line is phrased negatively, e.g. “how to avoid this bad thing” rather than “how to have this good thing”.
How we can all apply this as individuals?
When we want to make a health change (or keep up a healthy practice we already have)…
- it’s good to note the benefits of that change/practice!
- it’s even better to note the negative consequences of not doing it
For example, if you want to overcome an addiction, you will do better for your self-reminders to be about the bad consequences of using, more than the good consequences of abstinence.
See also: How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol
This goes even just for things like diet and exercise! Things like diet and exercise can seem much more low-stakes than substance abuse, but at the end of the day, they can add healthy years onto our lives, or take them off.
Because of this, it’s good to take time to remember, when you don’t feel like exercising or do feel like ordering that triple cheeseburger with fries, the bad outcomes that you are planning to avoid with good diet and exercise.
Imagine yourself going in for that quadruple bypass surgery, asking yourself whether the unhealthy lifestyle was worth it. Double down on the emotions; imagine your loved ones grieving your premature death.
Oof, that was hard-hitting
It was, but it’s effective—if you choose to do it. We’re not the boss of you! Either way, we’ll continue to send the same good health advice and tips and research and whatnot every day, with the same (usually!) cheery tone.
One last thing…
While it’s good to note the negative, in order to avoid the things that lead to it, it’s not so good to dwell on the negative.
So if you get caught in negative thought spirals or the like, it’s still good to get yourself out of those.
If you need a little help with that sometimes, check out these:
Take care!
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Escape Self-Sabotage
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Stop Making The Same Mistakes
It’s easy to think that a self-destructive cycle is easy to avoid if you have no special will to self-destruction. However, the cycle is sneaky.
It’s sneaky because it can be passive, and/or omissions rather than actions, procrastinations rather than obvious acts of impulse, and so forth.
So, they’re often things that specifically aren’t there to see.
How to catch them
How often do you think “I wish I had [done xyz]” or “I wish I had [done yxz] sooner”?
Now, how often have you thought that about the same thing more than once? For example, “I should have kept up my exercise”.
For things like this, habit-trackers are a great way to, well, keep track of habits. If for example you planned to do a 10-minute exercise session daily but you’ve been postponing it since you got distracted on January the 2nd, then it’ll highlight that. See also:
How To Really Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits
Speaking of habits, this goes for other forms of procrastination, too. For example, if you are always slow to get medical check-ups, or renew your prescriptions, or get ready for some regularly-occurring thing in your schedule, then set a reminder in your preferred way (phone app, calendar on the wall, whatever) and when the appointed time arrives (to book the check-up, renew the prescription, do your taxes, whatever), do it on the day you set your reminder for, as a personal rule for you that you keep to, barring extreme calamity.
By “extreme calamity” we mean less “running late today” and more “house burned down”.
Digital traps
Bad habits can be insidious in other ways too, like getting sucked into social media scrolling (it is literally designed to do that to you; you are not immune modern programming hijacking evolutionary dopamine responses).
Setting a screentime limit (you can specify “just these apps” if you like) will help with this. On most devices, this feature includes a sticky notification in the notification bar, that’ll remind you “27 out of 30 minutes remaining” or whatever you set it for. That’ll remind you to do what you went there to do, instead of getting caught in the endless scroll (and if you went there to just browse, to do so briefly).
Here’s how to set that:
Instructions for iOS devices | Instructions for Android devices
Oh, and on the topic of social media? If you find yourself getting caught up in unproductive arguments on the Internet, try the three-response rule:
- You reply; they reply (no progress made)
- You reply; they reply (still no progress made)
- You reply; they reply (still yet no progress made)
You reply just one more time: “I have a personal rule that if I’m arguing on the Internet and no progress has been made after three replies, I don’t reply further—I find this is helpful to avoid a lot of time lost to pointless arguing that isn’t going anywhere. Best wishes.”
(and then stick to it, no matter how they try to provoke you; best is to just not look until at least the next day)
When “swept up in love” gets to one of those little whirlpools…
The same works in personal relationships, by the way. If for example you are arguing with a loved one and not making progress, it can be good if you both have a pre-arranged agreement that either of you can, up to once on any given day, invoke a “time-out” (e.g. 30 minutes, but you agree the time between you when you first make this standing policy) during which you will both keep out of the other’s way, and come back with a more productive head on (remembering that things go best when it’s you both vs the problem, rather than vs each other).
See also:
Seriously Useful Communication Skills: Conflict Resolution
What if the self-sabotaging cycle is active and apparent?
Well, that is less sneaky, but certainly no less serious, and sometimes moreso. An obvious example is drinking too much; this is often cyclical in nature. We wrote about this one previously:
That article’s alcohol-specific, but the same advices go for other harmful activities, including other substance abuse (which in turn includes binge-eating), as well psychological addictions (such as gambling, for example).
Finally…
If your destructive cycle is more of a rut you’ve got stuck in, a common advice is to change something, anything, to get out of the rut.
That can be very bad advice! Because sometimes the change you go for is absolutely not the change that was needed, and is rather just cracking under pressure and doing something impulsive.
Here’s one way to actively get out of a slump:
Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety
Note: you do not have to be depressed or anxious to do this. But the point is, it’s a tool you can use even if you are depressed and/or anxious, so it’s a good thing to try for getting out of most kinds of slumps.
And really finally, here’s a resource for, well, the title speaks for itself:
When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
Take care!
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Statistical Models vs. Front-Line Workers: Who Knows Best How to Spend Opioid Settlement Cash?
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MOBILE, Ala. — In this Gulf Coast city, addiction medicine doctor Stephen Loyd announced at a January event what he called “a game-changer” for state and local governments spending billions of dollars in opioid settlement funds.
The money, which comes from companies accused of aggressively marketing and distributing prescription painkillers, is meant to tackle the addiction crisis.
But “how do you know that the money you’re spending is going to get you the result that you need?” asked Loyd, who was once hooked on prescription opioids himself and has become a nationally known figure since Michael Keaton played a character partially based on him in the Hulu series “Dopesick.”
Loyd provided an answer: Use statistical modeling and artificial intelligence to simulate the opioid crisis, predict which programs will save the most lives, and help local officials decide the best use of settlement dollars.
Loyd serves as the unpaid co-chair of the Helios Alliance, a group that hosted the event and is seeking $1.5 million to create such a simulation for Alabama.
The state is set to receive more than $500 million from opioid settlements over nearly two decades. It announced $8.5 million in grants to various community groups in early February.
Loyd’s audience that gray January morning included big players in Mobile, many of whom have known one another since their school days: the speaker pro tempore of Alabama’s legislature, representatives from the city and the local sheriff’s office, leaders from the nearby Poarch Band of Creek Indians, and dozens of addiction treatment providers and advocates for preventing youth addiction.
Many of them were excited by the proposal, saying this type of data and statistics-driven approach could reduce personal and political biases and ensure settlement dollars are directed efficiently over the next decade.
But some advocates and treatment providers say they don’t need a simulation to tell them where the needs are. They see it daily, when they try — and often fail — to get people medications, housing, and other basic services. They worry allocating $1.5 million for Helios prioritizes Big Tech promises for future success while shortchanging the urgent needs of people on the front lines today.
“Data does not save lives. Numbers on a computer do not save lives,” said Lisa Teggart, who is in recovery and runs two sober living homes in Mobile. “I’m a person in the trenches,” she said after attending the Helios event. “We don’t have a clean-needle program. We don’t have enough treatment. … And it’s like, when is the money going to get to them?”
The debate over whether to invest in technology or boots on the ground is likely to reverberate widely, as the Helios Alliance is in discussions to build similar models for other states, including West Virginia and Tennessee, where Loyd lives and leads the Opioid Abatement Council.
New Predictive Promise?
The Helios Alliance comprises nine nonprofit and for-profit organizations, with missions ranging from addiction treatment and mathematical modeling to artificial intelligence and marketing. As of mid-February, the alliance had received $750,000 to build its model for Alabama.
The largest chunk — $500,000 — came from the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, whose tribal council voted unanimously to spend most of its opioid settlement dollars to date on the Helios initiative. A state agency chipped in an additional $250,000. Ten Alabama cities and some private foundations are considering investing as well.
Stephen McNair, director of external affairs for Mobile, said the city has an obligation to use its settlement funds “in a way that is going to do the most good.” He hopes Helios will indicate how to do that, “instead of simply guessing.”
Rayford Etherton, a former attorney and consultant from Mobile who created the Helios Alliance, said he is confident his team can “predict the likely success or failure of programs before a dollar is spent.”
The Helios website features a similarly bold tagline: “Going Beyond Results to Predict Them.”
To do this, the alliance uses system dynamics, a mathematical modeling technique developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s. The Helios model takes in local and national data about addiction services and the drug supply. Then it simulates the effects different policies or spending decisions can have on overdose deaths and addiction rates. New data can be added regularly and new simulations run anytime. The alliance uses that information to produce reports and recommendations.
Etherton said it can help officials compare the impact of various approaches and identify unintended consequences. For example, would it save more lives to invest in housing or treatment? Will increasing police seizures of fentanyl decrease the number of people using it or will people switch to different substances?
And yet, Etherton cautioned, the model is “not a crystal ball.” Data is often incomplete, and the real world can throw curveballs.
Another limitation is that while Helios can suggest general strategies that might be most fruitful, it typically can’t predict, for instance, which of two rehab centers will be more effective. That decision would ultimately come down to individuals in charge of awarding contracts.
Mathematical Models vs. On-the-Ground Experts
To some people, what Helios is proposing sounds similar to a cheaper approach that 39 states — including Alabama — already have in place: opioid settlement councils that provide insights on how to best use the money. These are groups of people with expertise ranging from addiction medicine and law enforcement to social services and personal experience using drugs.
Even in places without formal councils, treatment providers and recovery advocates say they can perform a similar function. Half a dozen advocates in Mobile told KFF Health News the city’s top need is low-cost housing for people who want to stop using drugs.
“I wonder how much the results” from the Helios model “are going to look like what people on the ground doing this work have been saying for years,” said Chance Shaw, director of prevention for AIDS Alabama South and a person in recovery from opioid use disorder.
But Loyd, the co-chair of the Helios board, sees the simulation platform as augmenting the work of opioid settlement councils, like the one he leads in Tennessee.
Members of his council have been trying to decide how much money to invest in prevention efforts versus treatment, “but we just kind of look at it, and we guessed,” he said — the way it’s been done for decades. “I want to know specifically where to put the money and what I can expect from outcomes.”
Jagpreet Chhatwal, an expert in mathematical modeling who directs the Institute for Technology Assessment at Massachusetts General Hospital, said models can reduce the risk of individual biases and blind spots shaping decisions.
If the inputs and assumptions used to build the model are transparent, there’s an opportunity to instill greater trust in the distribution of this money, said Chhatwal, who is not affiliated with Helios. Yet if the model is proprietary — as Helios’ marketing materials suggest its product will be — that could erode public trust, he said.
Etherton, of the Helios Alliance, told KFF Health News, “Everything we do will be available publicly for anyone who wants to look at it.”
Urgent Needs vs. Long-Term Goals
Helios’ pitch sounds simple: a small upfront cost to ensure sound future decision-making. “Spend 5% so you get the biggest impact with the other 95%,” Etherton said.
To some people working in treatment and recovery, however, the upfront cost represents not just dollars, but opportunities lost for immediate help, be it someone who couldn’t find an open bed or get a ride to the pharmacy.
“The urgency of being able to address those individual needs is vital,” said Pamela Sagness, executive director of the North Dakota Behavioral Health Division.
Her department recently awarded $7 million in opioid settlement funds to programs that provide mental health and addiction treatment, housing, and syringe service programs because that’s what residents have been demanding, she said. An additional $52 million in grant requests — including an application from the Helios Alliance — went unfunded.
Back in Mobile, advocates say they see the need for investment in direct services daily. More than 1,000 people visit the office of the nonprofit People Engaged in Recovery each month for recovery meetings, social events, and help connecting to social services. Yet the facility can’t afford to stock naloxone, a medication that can rapidly reverse overdoses.
At the two recovery homes that Mobile resident Teggart runs, people can live in a drug-free space at a low cost. She manages 18 beds but said there’s enough demand to fill 100.
Hannah Seale felt lucky to land one of those spots after leaving Mobile County jail last November.
“All I had with me was one bag of clothes and some laundry detergent and one pair of shoes,” Seale said.
Since arriving, she’s gotten her driver’s license, applied for food stamps, and attended intensive treatment. In late January, she was working two jobs and reconnecting with her 4- and 7-year-old daughters.
After 17 years of drug use, the recovery home “is the one that’s worked for me,” she said.
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.
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Two Things You Can Do To Improve Stroke Survival Chances
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Dr. Andrew’s Stroke Survival Guide
This is Dr. Nadine Andrew. She’s a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine at Monash University. She’s the Research Data Lead for the National Center of Healthy Aging. She is lead investigator on the NHMRC-funded PRECISE project… The most comprehensive stroke data linkage study to date! In short, she knows her stuff.
We’ve talked before about how sample size is important when it comes to scientific studies. It’s frustrating; sometimes we see what looks like a great study until we notice it has a sample size of 17 or something.
Dr. Andrew didn’t mess around in this regard, and the 12,386 participants in her Australian study of stroke patients provided a huge amount of data!
With a 95% confidence interval because of the huge dataset, she found that there was one factor that reduced mortality by 26%.
And the difference was…
Whether or not patients had a chronic disease management plan set up with their GP (General Practitioner, or “family doctor”, in US terms), after their initial stroke treatment.
45% of patients had this; the other 55% did not, so again the sample size was big for both groups.
Why this is important:
After a stroke, often a patient is discharged as early as it seems safe to do so, and there’s a common view that “it just takes time” and “now we wait”. After all, no medical technology we currently have can outright repair that damage—the body must repair itself! Medications—while critical*—can only support that and help avoid recurrence.
*How critical? VERY critical. Critical critical. Dr. Andrew found, some years previously, that greater levels of medication adherence (ie, taking the correct dose on time and not missing any) significantly improved survival outcomes. No surprise, right? But what may surprise is that this held true even for patients with near-perfect adherence. In other words: miss a dose at your peril. It’s that important.
But, as Dr. Andrew’s critical research shows, that’s no reason to simply prescribe ongoing meds and otherwise cut a patient loose… or, if you or a loved one are the patient, to allow yourself/them to be left without a doctor’s ongoing active support in the form of a chronic disease management plan.
What does a chronic disease management plan look like?
First, what it’s not:
- “Yes yes, I’m here if you need me, just make an appointment if something changes”
- “Let’s pencil in a check-up in three months”
- Etc
What it actually looks like:
It looks like a plan. A personal care plan, built around that person’s individual needs, risks, liabilities… and potential complications.
Because who amongst us, especially at the age where strokes are more likely, has an uncomplicated medical record? There will always be comorbidities and confounding factors, so a one-size-fits-all plan will not do.
Dr. Andrew’s work took place in Australia, so she had the Australian healthcare system in mind… We know many of our subscribers are from North America and other places. But read this, and you’ll see how this could go just as much for the US or Canada:
❝The evidence shows the importance of Medicare financially supporting primary care physicians to provide structured chronic disease management after a stroke.
We also provide a strong case for the ongoing provision of these plans within a universal healthcare system. Strategies to improve uptake at the GP level could include greater financial incentives and mandates, education for patients and healthcare professionals.❞
See her groundbreaking study for yourself here!
The Bottom Line:
If you or a loved one has a stroke, be prepared to make sure you get a chronic health management plan in place. Note that if it’s you who has the stroke, you might forget this or be unable to advocate for yourself. So, we recommend to discuss this with a partner or close friend sooner rather than later!
“But I’m quite young and healthy and a stroke is very unlikely for me”
Good for you! And the median age of Dr. Andrew’s gargantuan study was 70 years. But:
- do you have older relatives? Be aware for them, too.
- strokes can happen earlier in life too! You don’t want to be an interesting statistic.
Some stroke-related quick facts:
Stroke is the No. 5 cause of death and a leading cause of disability in the U.S.
Stroke can happen to anyone—any age, any time—and everyone needs to know the warning signs.
On average, 1.9 million brain cells die every minute that a stroke goes untreated.
Stroke is an EMERGENCY. Call 911 immediately.
Early treatment leads to higher survival rates and lower disability rates. Calling 911 lets first responders start treatment on someone experiencing stroke symptoms before arriving at the hospital.
Source: https://www.stroke.org/en/about-stroke
What are the warning signs for stroke?
Use the letters F.A.S.T. to spot a stroke and act quickly:
- F = Face Drooping—does one side of the face droop or is it numb? Ask the person to smile. Is the person’s smile uneven?
- A = Arm Weakness—is one arm weak or numb? Ask the person to raise both arms. Does one arm drift downward?
- S = Speech Difficulty—is speech slurred?
- T = Time to call 911
Source: https://www.stroke.org/en/about-stroke/stroke-symptoms
Last but not least, while we’re sharing resources:
Download the PDF Checklist: 8 Ways To Help Prevent a Second Stroke
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Dark Chocolate & Your Age
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It’s well-established that chocolate has some health-giving properties, mostly because of its very impressive polyphenol profile.
See for example:
- Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain ← this is because foods that are bitter, astringent, and/or pungent, tend to be rich in polyphenols, which as well as their strong antioxidant properties, also exhibit specifically cardioprotective and neuroprotective effects
- Sharp Tastes, Sharp Brain? ← this one’s about how the taste of flavonols (a category under the general umbrella of of flavonoids, which itself is under the general umbrella of polyphenols) itself helps, even before the compound itself is absorbed
- Are You Getting The Right Kinds Of Flavonoids? ← for more about what we just mentioned
So now for some of the latest science…
Come to the dark side; we have chocolate
First of all: why not milk chocolate, doesn’t that have polyphenols too?
And well yes, it does, but in much smaller quantities because the cocoa percentage is much, much lower.
- In the US, 10% cocoa is the norm for milk chocolate
- In Europe, 25% is the threshold that if it’s not met, you can’t legally call it chocolate
- Anywhere, 80–90% is a reasonable range for dark chocolate
So, to get the same polyphenol benefits, you might need to eat 8–9x as much chocolate, and as you can imagine, that might cause different problems.
See also: 10 “Healthy” Foods That Are Often Worse Than You Think ← since milk chocolate often has not just the plummeting cocoa percentage, but also, much more saturated fat and sugar (and that latter’s one to watch out for when choosing dark chocolate, too; some are very different from others!)
Most recently, a team of researchers (Dr. Jordana Bell et al.) did a study with 509 healthy women with an average age of 60, and tested six common cocoa-related chemicals, including caffeine and theobromine, to see whether any were linked to faster or slower biological aging.
A quick note before we continue, about that “biological aging”, we’ve written before about how biological age often gets talked about as a simplified number, but it’s more complex than that, as we can age in different ways at different rates, for example:
- Visual markers of aging (e.g. wrinkles, graying hair)
- Performative markers of aging (e.g. mobility tests)
- Internal functional markers of aging (e.g. tests for cognitive decline, eyesight, hearing, etc)
- Cellular markers of aging (e.g. telomere length)
- …and more, but we only have so much room here
For more on that (including what we can do about each of them to slow or in some cases reverse biological aging), see:
Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?
Now, back to the study: what Dr. Bell and her team mainly used as the key epigenetic clock was a DNA methylation model, and what they found was that theobromine stood out—women with higher levels of this chocolate-derived compound had biological-age scores that were about 1.5 years younger.
This association was incredibly statistically significant, p = 3.99e-6, which means the chance of getting these results by chance (i.e. coincidence) is so small that the scientists are putting letters into their numbers to express it. It’s the equivalent of about 1 in 250,627 odds.
You can find the paper in full here: Theobromine is Associated with Slower Epigenetic Ageing ← when you click, on the abstract is visible at first, but if you then click on PDF, you’ll get the rest.
This is a very strong extra benefit, which builds on the previous work we wrote about in Cocoa vs Biological Aging! ← which had to do with inflammatory aging biomarkers
Want to learn more?
You want like to read about…
The “Love Drug” ← this is about phenylethlyamine, a compound found in chocolate that works similarly the amphetamine (but with rather less potential for abuse/harm, for most people).
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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