Seven Things To Do For Good Lung Health!

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YouTube Channel Wellness Check is challenging us all to do the following things. They’re framing it as a 30-day challenge, but honestly, there’s nothing here that isn’t worth doing for life

Here’s the list:

  • Stop smoking (of course, smoking is bad for everything, but the lungs are one of its main areas of destruction)
  • Good posture (a scrunched up chest is not the lungs’ best operating conditions!)
  • Regular exercise (exercising your body in different ways exercises your lungs in different ways!)
  • Monitor air quality (some environments are much better/worse than others, but don’t underestimate household air quality threats either)
  • Avoid respiratory infections (shockingly, COVID is not great for your lungs, nor are the various other respiratory infections available)
  • Check your O2 saturation levels (pulse oximeters like this one are very cheap to buy and easy to use)
  • Prevent mucus and phlegm from accumulating (these things are there for reasons; the top reason is trapping pathogens, allergens, and general pollutants/dust etc; once those things are trapped, we don’t want that mucus there any more!)

Check out the video itself for more detail on each of these items:

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

Want to know more?

You might like our article about COPD:

Why Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Is More Likely Than You Think

Take care!

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Recommended

  • The Toe-Tapping Tip For Better Balance
  • Calm Your Mind with Food – by Dr. Uma Naidoo
    Harvard-trained psychiatrist-chef turns nutritious eating into mental peace with practical meal plans and recipes in “Calm Your Mind With Food.”

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  • Coca-Cola vs Diet Coke – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing Coca-Cola to Diet Coke, we picked the Diet Coke.

    Why?

    While the Diet Coke is bad, the Coca-Cola has mostly the same problems plus sugar.

    The sugar in a can of Coca-Cola is 39g high-fructose corn syrup (the worst kind of sugar yet known to humanity), and of course it’s being delivered in liquid form (the most bioavailable way to get, which in this case, is bad).

    To put those 39g into perspective, the daily recommended amount of sugar is 36g for men or 25g for women, according to the AHA.

    The sweetener in Diet Coke is aspartame, which has had a lot of health risk accusations made against it, most of which have not stood up to scrutiny, and the main risk it does have is “it mimics sugar too well” and it can increase cravings for sweetness, and therefore higher consumption of sugars in other products. For this reason, the World Health Organization has recommended to simply reduce sugar intake without looking to artificial sweeteners to help.

    Nevertheless, aspartame has been found safe (in moderate doses; the upper tolerance level would equate to more than 20 cans of diet coke per day) by food safety agencies ranging from the FDA to the EFSA, based on a large body of science.

    Other problems that Diet Coke has are present in Coca-Cola too, such as its acidic nature (bad for tooth enamel) and gassy nature (messes with leptin/ghrelin balance).

    Summary: the Diet Coke is relatively less unhealthy, but is still bad in numerous ways, and remains best avoided.

    Read more:

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  • Cannabis Myths vs Reality

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    Cannabis Myths vs Reality

    We asked you for your (health-related) opinion on cannabis use—specifically, the kind with psychoactive THC, not just CBD. We got the above-pictured, below-described, spread of responses:

    • A little over a third of you voted for “It’s a great way to relax, without most of the dangers of alcohol”.
    • A little under a third of you voted for “It may have some medical uses, but recreational use is best avoided”.
    • About a quarter of you voted for “The negative health effects outweigh the possible benefits”
    • Three of you voted for “It is the gateway to a life of drug-induced stupor and potentially worse”

    So, what does the science say?

    A quick legal note first: we’re a health science publication, and are writing from that perspective. We do not know your location, much less your local laws and regulations, and so cannot comment on such. Please check your own local laws and regulations in that regard.

    Cannabis use can cause serious health problems: True or False?

    True. Whether the risks outweigh the benefits is a personal and subjective matter (for example, a person using it to mitigate the pain of late stage cancer is probably unconcerned with many other potential risks), but what’s objectively true is that it can cause serious health problems.

    One subscriber who voted for “The negative health effects outweigh the possible benefits” wrote:

    ❝At a bare minimum, you are ingesting SMOKE into your lungs!! Everyone SEEMS TO BE against smoking cigarettes, but cannabis smoking is OK?? Lung cancer comes in many forms.❞

    Of course, that is assuming smoking cannabis, and not consuming it as an edible. But, what does the science say on smoking it, and lung cancer?

    There’s a lot less research about this when it comes to cannabis, compared to tobacco. But, there is some:

    ❝Results from our pooled analyses provide little evidence for an increased risk of lung cancer among habitual or long-term cannabis smokers, although the possibility of potential adverse effect for heavy consumption cannot be excluded.❞

    Read: Cannabis smoking and lung cancer risk: Pooled analysis in the International Lung Cancer Consortium

    Another study agreed there appears to be no association with lung cancer, but that there are other lung diseases to consider, such as bronchitis and COPD:

    ❝Smoking cannabis is associated with symptoms of chronic bronchitis, and there may be a modest association with the development of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Current evidence does not suggest an association with lung cancer.❞

    Read: Cannabis Use, Lung Cancer, and Related Issues

    Cannabis edibles are much safer than smoking cannabis: True or False?

    Broadly True, with an important caveat.

    One subscriber who selected “It may have some medical uses, but recreational use is best avoided”, wrote:

    ❝I’ve been taking cannabis gummies for fibromyalgia. I don’t know if they’re helping but they’re not doing any harm. You cannot overdose you don’t become addicted.❞

    Firstly, of course consuming edibles (rather than inhaling cannabis) eliminates the smoke-related risk factors we discussed above. However, other risks remain, including the much greater ease of accidentally overdosing.

    ❝Visits attributable to inhaled cannabis are more frequent than those attributable to edible cannabis, although the latter is associated with more acute psychiatric visits and more ED visits than expected.❞

    Note: that “more frequent” for inhaled cannabis, is because more people inhale it than eat it. If we adjust the numbers to control for how much less often people eat it, suddenly we see that the numbers of hospital admissions are disproportionately high for edibles, compared to inhaled cannabis.

    Or, as the study author put it:

    ❝There are more adverse drug events associated on a milligram per milligram basis of THC when it comes in form of edibles versus an inhaled cannabis. If 1,000 people smoked pot and 1,000 people at the same dose in an edible, then more people would have more adverse drug events from edible cannabis.❞

    See the numbers: Acute Illness Associated With Cannabis Use, by Route of Exposure

    Why does this happen?

    • It’s often because edibles take longer to take effect, so someone thinks “this isn’t very strong” and has more.
    • It’s also sometimes because someone errantly eats someone else’s edibles, not realising what they are.
    • It’s sometimes a combination of the above problems: a person who is now high, may simply forget and/or make a bad decision when it comes to eating more.

    On the other hand, that doesn’t mean inhaling it is necessarily safer. As well as the pulmonary issues we discussed previously, inhaling cannabis has a higher risk of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (and the resultant cyclic vomiting that’s difficult to treat).

    You can read about this fascinating condition that’s sometimes informally called “scromiting”, a portmanteau of screaming and vomiting:

    Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome

    You can’t get addicted to cannabis: True or False?

    False. However, it is fair to say that the likelihood of developing a substance abuse disorder is lower than for alcohol, and much lower than for nicotine.

    See: Prevalence of Marijuana Use Disorders in the United States Between 2001–2002 and 2012–2013

    If you prefer just the stats without the science, here’s the CDC’s rendering of that:

    Addiction (Marijuana or Cannabis Use Disorder)

    However, there is an interesting complicating factor, which is age. One is 4–7 times more likely to develop a substance abuse disorder, if one starts use as an adolescent, rather than later in life:

    See: Likelihood of developing an alcohol and cannabis use disorder during youth: Association with recent use and age

    Cannabis is the gateway to use of more dangerous drugs: True or False?

    False, generally speaking. Of course, for any population there will be some outliers, but there appears to be no meaningful causal relation between cannabis use and other substance use:

    Is marijuana really a gateway drug? A nationally representative test of the marijuana gateway hypothesis using a propensity score matching design

    Interestingly, the strongest association (where any existed at all) was between cannabis use and opioid use. However, rather than this being a matter of cannabis use being a gateway to opioid use, it seems more likely that this is a matter of people looking to both for the same purpose: pain relief.

    As a result, growing accessibility of cannabis may actually reduce opioid problems:

    Some final words…

    Cannabis is a complex drug with complex mechanisms and complex health considerations, and research is mostly quite young, due to its historic illegality seriously cramping science by reducing sample sizes to negligible. Simply put, there’s a lot we still don’t know.

    Also, we covered some important topics today, but there were others we didn’t have time to cover, such as the other potential psychological benefits—and risks. Likely we’ll revisit those another day.

    Lastly, while we’ve covered a bunch of risks today, those of you who said it has fewer and lesser risks than alcohol are quite right—the only reason we couldn’t focus on that more, is because to talk about all the risks of alcohol would make this feature many times longer!

    Meanwhile, whether you partake or not, stay safe and stay well.

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  • Spelt vs Bulgur – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing spelt to bulgur, we picked the spelt.

    Why?

    An argument could be made for bulgur, but we say spelt comes out on top. Speaking of “sorting the wheat from the chaff”, be aware: spelt is a hulled wheat product and bulgur is a cracked wheat product.

    Looking at macros first, it’s not surprising therefore that spelt has proportionally more carbs and bulgur has proportionally more fiber, resulting in a slightly lower glycemic index. That said, for the exact same reason, spelt is proportionally higher in protein. Still, fiber is usually the most health-relevant aspect in the macros category, so we’re going to call this a moderate win for bulgur.

    When it comes to micronutrients, however, spelt is doing a lot better:

    In the category of vitamins, spelt is higher in vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, and E (with the difference in E being 26x more!), while bulgur is higher only in vitamin B9 (and that, only slightly). A clear win for spelt here.

    Nor are the mineral contents less polarized; spelt has more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while bulgur is not higher in any minerals. Another easy win for spelt.

    Adding these up makes a win for spelt, but again we’d urge to not underestimate the importance of fiber. Enjoy both in moderation, unless you are avoiding wheat/gluten in which case don’t, and for almost everyone, mixed whole grains are always going to be best.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Take care!

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Related Posts

  • The Toe-Tapping Tip For Better Balance
  • The Energy Plan – by James Collins

    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.

    There’s a lot of conflicting advice out there about how we should maintain our energy levels, for example:

    • Eat fewer carbs!
    • Eat more carbs!
    • Eat slow-release carbs!
    • Eat quick-release carbs!
    • Practise intermittent fasting!
    • Graze constantly throughout the day!
    • Forget carbs and focus on fats!
    • Actually it’s all about B-vitamins!

    …and so on.

    What Collins does differently is something much less-often seen:

    Here, we’re advised on how to tailor our meals to our actual lifestyle, taking into account the day we actually have each day. For example:

    • What will our energy needs be for the day?
    • Will our needs be intense, or long, or both, or neither?
    • What kind of recovery have we had, or do we need, from previous activities?
    • Do we need to replace lost muscle glycogen, or are we looking to trim the fat?
    • Are we doing a power-up or just maintenance today?

    Rather than bidding us have a five-way spreadsheet and do advanced mathematics for every meal, though, Collins has done the hard work for us. The book explains the various principles in a casual format with a light conversational tone, and gives us general rules to follow.

    These rules cover what to do for different times of day… and also, at different points in our life (the metabolic needs of a 13-year-old, 33-year-old, and 83-year-old, are very different!). That latter’s particularly handy, as a lot of books assume an age bracket for the reader, and this one doesn’t.

    In short: a great book for anyone who wants to keep their energy levels up (throughout life’s ups and downs in activity) without piling on the pounds or starving oneself.

    Click here to check out The Energy Plan on Amazon and fuel your days better!

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  • Quick Healthy Recipe Ideas

    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.

    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

    “It was superb !! Just loved that healthy recipe !!! I would love to see one of those every day, if possible !! Keep up the fabulous work !!! ”

    We’re glad you enjoyed! We can’t promise a recipe every day, but here’s one just for you:

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  • In Crisis, She Went to an Illinois Facility. Two Years Later, She Still Isn’t Able to Leave.

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    Series: Culture of Cruelty:Inside Illinois’ Mental Health System

    State-run facilities in Illinois are supposed to care for people with mental and developmental disabilities. But patients have been subjected to abuse, neglect and staff misconduct for decades, despite calls for change.

    Kaleigh Rogers was in crisis when she checked into a state-run institution on Illinois’ northern border two years ago. Rogers, who has cerebral palsy, had a mental health breakdown during the pandemic and was acting aggressively toward herself and others.

    Before COVID-19, she had been living in a small group home; she had been taking college classes online and enjoyed going out with friends, volunteering and going to church. But when her aggression escalated, she needed more medical help than her community setting could provide.

    With few viable options for intervention, she moved into Kiley Developmental Center in Waukegan, a much larger facility. There, she says she has fewer freedoms and almost nothing to do, and was placed in a unit with six other residents, all of whom are unable to speak. Although the stay was meant to be short term, she’s been there for two years.

    The predicament facing Rogers and others like her is proof, advocates say, that the state is failing to live up to the promise it made in a 13-year-old federal consent decree to serve people in the community.

    Rogers, 26, said she has lost so much at Kiley: her privacy, her autonomy and her purpose. During dark times, she cries on the phone to her mom, who has reduced the frequency of her visits because it is so upsetting for Rogers when her mom has to leave.

    The 220-bed developmental center about an hour north of Chicago is one of seven in the state that have been plagued by allegations of abuse and other staff misconduct. The facilities have been the subject of a monthslong investigation by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica about the state’s failures to correct poor conditions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The news organizations uncovered instances of staff who had beaten, choked, thrown, dragged and humiliated residents inside the state-run facilities.

    Advocates hoped the state would become less reliant on large institutions like these when they filed a lawsuit in 2005, alleging that Illinois’ failure to adequately fund community living options ended up segregating people with intellectual and developmental disabilities from society by forcing them to live in institutions. The suit claimed Illinois was in direct violation of a 1999 U.S. Supreme Court decision in another case, which found that states had to serve people in the most integrated setting of their choosing.

    Negotiations resulted in a consent decree, a court-supervised improvement plan. The state agreed to find and fund community placements and services for individuals covered by the consent decree, thousands of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities across Illinois who have put their names on waiting lists to receive them.

    Now, the state has asked a judge to consider ending the consent decree, citing significant increases in the number of people receiving community-based services. In a court filing in December, Illinois argued that while its system is “not and never will be perfect,” it is “much more than legally adequate.”

    But advocates say the consent decree should not be considered fulfilled as long as people with disabilities continue to live without the services and choices that the state promised.

    Across the country, states have significantly downsized or closed their large-scale institutions for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities in favor of smaller, more integrated and more homelike settings.

    But in Illinois, a national outlier, such efforts have foundered. Efforts to close state-operated developmental centers have been met with strong opposition from labor unions, the communities where the centers are located, local politicians and some parents.

    U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman in Chicago is scheduled in late summer to decide whether the state has made enough progress in building up community supports to end the court’s oversight.

    For some individuals like Rogers, who are in crisis or have higher medical or behavioral challenges, the state itself acknowledges that it has struggled to serve them in community settings. Rogers said she’d like to send this message on behalf of those in state-operated developmental centers: “Please, please get us out once and for all.”

    “Living Inside a Box”

    Without a robust system of community-based resources and living arrangements to intervene during a crisis, state-operated developmental centers become a last resort for people with disabilities. But under the consent decree agreement, the state, Equip for Equality argues, is expected to offer sufficient alternative crisis supports to keep people who want them out of these institutions.

    In a written response to questions, Rachel Otwell, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Human Services, said the state has sought to expand the menu of services it offers people experiencing a crisis, in an effort to keep them from going into institutions. But Andrea Rizor, a lawyer with Equip for Equality, said, “They just don’t have enough to meet the demand.”

    For example, the state offers stabilization homes where people can live for 90 days while they receive more intensive support from staff serving the homes, including medication reviews and behavioral interventions. But there are only 32 placements available — only four of them for women — and the beds are always full, Rizor said.

    Too many people, she said, enter a state-run institution for short-term treatment and end up stuck there for years for various reasons, including shortcomings with the state’s discharge planning and concerns from providers who may assume those residents to be disruptive or difficult to serve without adequate resources.

    That’s what happened to Rogers. Interruptions to her routine and isolation during the pandemic sent her anxiety and aggressive behaviors into overdrive. The staff at her community group home in Machesney Park, unsure of what to do when she acted out, had called the police on several occasions.

    Doctors also tried to intervene, but the cocktail of medications she was prescribed turned her into a “zombie,” Rogers said. Stacey Rogers, her mom and legal guardian, said she didn’t know where else to turn for help. Kiley, she said, “was pretty much the last resort for us,” but she never intended for her daughter to be there for this long. She’s helped her daughter apply to dozens of group homes over the past year. A few put her on waitlists; most have turned her down.

    “Right now, all she’s doing is living inside a box,” Stacey Rogers said.

    Although Rogers gave the news organizations permission to ask about her situation, IDHS declined to comment, citing privacy restrictions. In general, the IDHS spokesperson said that timelines for leaving institutions are “specific to each individual” and their unique preferences, such as where they want to live and speciality services they may require in a group home.

    Equip for Equality points to people like Rogers to argue that the consent decree has not been sufficiently fulfilled. She’s one of several hundred in that predicament, the organization said.

    “If the state doesn’t have capacity to serve folks in the community, then the time is not right to terminate this consent decree, which requires community capacity,” Rizor said.

    Equip for Equality has said that ongoing safety issues in these facilities make it even more important that people covered by the consent decree not be placed in state-run institutions. In an October court brief, citing the news organizations’ reporting, Equip for Equality said that individuals with disabilities who were transferred from community to institutional care in crisis have “died, been raped, and been physically and mentally abused.”

    Over the summer, an independent court monitor assigned to provide expert opinions in the consent decree, in a memo to the court, asked a judge to bar the state from admitting those individuals into its institutions.

    In its December court filing, the state acknowledged that there are some safety concerns inside its state-run centers, “which the state is diligently working on,” as well as conditions inside privately operated facilities and group homes “that need to be addressed.” But it also argued that conditions inside its facilities are outside the scope of the consent decree. The lawsuit and consent decree specifically aimed to help people who wanted to move out of large private institutions, but plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that the consent decree prohibits the state from using state-run institutions as backup crisis centers.

    In arguing to end the consent decree, the state pointed to significant increases in the number of people served since it went into effect. There were about 13,500 people receiving home- and community-based services in 2011 compared with more than 23,000 in 2023, it told the court.

    The state also said it has significantly increased funding that is earmarked to pay front-line direct support professionals who assist individuals with daily living needs in the community, such as eating and grooming.

    In a statement to reporters, the human services department called these and other improvements to the system “extraordinary.”

    Lawyers for the state argued that those improvements are enough to end court oversight.

    “The systemic barriers that were in place in 2011 no longer exist,” the state’s court filing said.

    Among those who were able to find homes in the community is Stanley Ligas, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that led to the consent decree. When it was filed in 2005, he was living in a roughly 100-bed private facility but wanted to move into a community home closer to his sister. The state refused to fund his move.

    Today, the 56-year-old lives in Oswego with three roommates in a house they rent. All of them receive services to help their daily living needs through a nonprofit, and Ligas has held jobs in the community: He previously worked in a bowling alley and is now paid to make public appearances to advocate for others with disabilities. He lives near his sister, says he goes on family beach vacations and enjoys watching professional wrestling with friends. During an interview with reporters, Ligas hugged his caregiver and said he’s “very happy” and hopes others can receive the same opportunities he’s been given.

    While much of that progress has come only in recent years, under Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration, it has proven to be vulnerable to political and economic changes. After a prolonged budget stalemate, the court in 2017 found Illinois out of compliance with the Ligas consent decree.

    At the time, late and insufficient payments from the state had resulted in a staffing crisis inside community group homes, leading to escalating claims of abuse and neglect and failures to provide routine services that residents relied on, such as help getting to work, social engagements and medical appointments in the community. Advocates worry about what could happen under a different administration, or this one, if Illinois’ finances continue to decline as projected.

    “I acknowledge the commitments that this administration has made. However, because we had so far to come, we still have far to go,” said Kathy Carmody, chief executive of The Institute on Public Policy for People with Disabilities, which represents providers.

    While the wait for services is significantly shorter than it was when the consent decree went into effect in 2011, there are still more than 5,000 adults who have told the state they want community services but have yet to receive them, most of them in a family home. Most people spend about five years waiting to get the services they request. And Illinois continues to rank near the bottom in terms of the investment it makes in community-based services, according to a University of Kansas analysis of states’ spending on services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

    Advocates who believe the consent decree has not been fulfilled contend that Illinois’ continued reliance on congregate settings has tied up funds that could go into building up more community living options. Each year, Illinois spends about $347,000 per person to care for those in state-run institutions compared with roughly $91,000 per person spent to support those living in the community.

    For Rogers, the days inside Kiley are long, tedious and sometimes chaotic. It can be stressful, but Rogers told reporters that she uses soothing self-talk to calm herself when she feels sad or anxious.

    “I tell myself: ‘You are doing good. You are doing great. You have people outside of here that care about you and cherish you.’”

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

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