Should You Shower Daily?
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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 read an article that daily showering is “performative” and doesn’t really give any health benefits, what do you say?❞
We looked to find the article you might be referring to, and this seems to be about a BBC article that was then picked up, rehashed in fewer (but more sensational) words, and widely popularized by the New York Post (not the most scholarly of publications, but it seems to have “done numbers”).
Here’s the BBC article:
BBC | There’s no need to shower every day—here’s why
Looking for the science behind the “Experts say…” claims, none of the articles we found linked to any new research. One of them did link to some old (2005) research:
We also see (in the dearth of scholarly research to cite), a Harvard Health article being cited quite a bit, and this is more helpful and informative than the flashy news articles, without requiring to read through a lot of hard science.
To summarize, Harvard’s Dr. Shmerling says daily showering can:
- Cause/worsen dry skin
- Make skin more permeable to pathogens
- Upset our natural balance of bacteria that are supposed to be there
- Weaken our immune system
Read in full: Harvard Health | Showering daily—is it necessary?
But what if I like showering?
Well, don’t let us stop you. But you might consider using less in the way of shower products. We wrote about this previously, in answer to a different-but-related subscriber question:
10almonds | Body Scrubs: Benefits, Risks, and Guidance
PS…
Handwashing, though? Most people could reasonably do that more often:
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Smart Hearing – by Katherine Bouton
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The author’s hearing loss began in her 30s, and now she’s in her 70s with even less hearing, and/but much more experience. Having worked at the Hearing Loss Association of America for much of that time, she has a lot to share.
This book is a practical guide to adult-onset hearing loss, and aims to help the reader navigate not just the difficulties inherent to the condition, but also the complexities around it that are largely societal, administrative, financial, and so forth.
She advocates for early intervention where possible, and that most people in the early stages of hearing loss don’t realize what’s happening. They will tend to just blame the noisy environment, or the speaker, for example. And beyond just hearing tests, she recommends specifics that you might not have heard of, such as the speech-in-noise test.
With regard to technology, she covers the various options,and also ways to pay for them (because Medicare won’t)—which latter is specific to the US, so if you’re from somewhere else, then probably a) this advice won’t help, but b) you probably won’t need it, as most places have more comprehensive healthcare coverage.
The style is quite personal while remaining professional; she often uses her own story as an illustration, but covers experiences other than hers just as thoroughly, so that no major variant of hearing loss gets overlooked.
Bottom line: if you and/or a loved one aren’t hearing/understanding auditory things so well as you used to, this book can help guide you into a position of more practical empowerment, without the need for quite so much trial and error as you might otherwise find alone.
Click here to check out Smart Hearing, and live better with hearing loss!
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Calcium Supplements & Dementia Risk
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Do you remember the famous (deeply flawed, further misreported, debunked) Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study that misrepresented data about hormone replacement therapy (HRT), understating the benefits and overstating the risks, scaring a generation off HRT for no good reason?
If not, then here’s more detail about that: Cancer & HRT: What’s Safe?
With that in mind, guess what else WHI data has been (mis)used by third-parties to warn us against? If you guessed calcium supplementation, you guessed correctly:
❝Calcium supplements with or without vitamin D modestly increase the risk of cardiovascular events, especially myocardial infarction, a finding obscured in the WHI CaD Study by the widespread use of personal calcium supplements. A reassessment of the role of calcium supplements in osteoporosis management is warranted.❞
You may be thinking: today’s title said about dementia, and this paper is about cardiovascular events, so what’s the connection?
The connection is: stroke is a cardiovascular event, and vascular dementia is a very common kind of dementia.
For much more detail on this, see: What’s Your Vascular Dementia Risk? ← includes actual numbers and a risk calculator tool and things like that
However, there’s more, for example:
❝The present study demonstrates that the use of Ca-containing dietary supplements, even low-dose supplements, by older adults may be associated with greater lesion volumes.
Evaluation of randomised controlled trials is warranted to determine whether this relationship is a causal one.❞
Can you see how the press might take the first line and run with it, without addressing the second line?
See also: How Science News Outlets Can Lie To You (Yes, Even If They Cite Studies!)
We’ve also seen things like:
❝Calcium supplementation may increase the risk of developing dementia in elderly women with cerebrovascular disease.
Because our sample was relatively small and the study was observational, these findings need to be confirmed.❞
Source: Calcium supplementation and risk of dementia in women with cerebrovascular disease
Once again, a lot of news outlets will run with the first part without mentioning the latter parts.
And sometimes, it will be a case of “the title looks damning, even if the actual conclusion isn’t”, for example:
❝There was no association between treatment assignment and incident cognitive impairment.
Further studies are needed to investigate the effects of vitamin D and calcium separately, on men, in other age and ethnic groups, and with other doses.❞
Source: Calcium and Vitamin D Supplementation and Cognitive Impairment in the Women’s Health Initiative
…which will get shared around and seen by millions of people who don’t read beyond the title and think “oh, there is an association between calcium and vitamin D supplementation and cognitive impairment, the Women’s Health Initiative says so”, when in fact none of these things are what it is saying.
And that is how rumors run around the world while the truth hasn’t even tied its shoelaces yet.
And now for the truth
A long-term analysis of 1,460 women aged 70+ has found that daily calcium supplementation did not increase dementia risk over nearly 15 years of follow-up.
Specifically,
❝Mean baseline age was 75.1 ± 2.7 years. Dementia events were recorded in 269 women (18.4%), comprising 243 hospitalisations (16.6%) or 114 deaths (7.8%). No differences in the cumulative dementia-free survival rates were observed between groups in ITT and PP analyses.
Compared to placebo, calcium supplements did not increase risk of dementia-related events (unadjusted ITT hazard ratio [HR] 0.90, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.71–1.15), hospitalisations (HR 0.89, 95% CI 0.69–1.15) or deaths (HR 0.78, 95% CI 0.54–1.13). Similar results were observed in PP analyses.❞
As you can see, the range neatly straddles “1” in each case, meaning that on average, it neither increases nor decreases the risk. And with regard to the different analyses, what that means is that both before and after adjusting for lifestyle, dietary, and genetic factors, there continued to be no association whatsoever.
In terms of p-score (a measure of how statistically significant the results are, by expressing the probability that this could have been arrived at by chance),
❝There was no significant difference (p = 0.28) in AMS scores between the calcium (n = 569) and placebo (n = 579) groups at the end of the RCT; median (IQR): 10 (9–10) in both groups.❞
You can read the paper in full, here: Calcium supplementation and the risk of dementia in the Perth Longitudinal Study of Aging Women: a post-hoc analysis of a randomised clinical trial for fracture prevention
That was, by the way, at 1200mg/day. So, a very normal amount of calcium, and generally considered slightly above what most people need.
Want to learn more?
While it appears calcium supplementation is healthful for most people at normal levels, there are still safe limits, and connected health considerations to bear in mind at the same time:
Vit D + Calcium: Too Much Of A Good Thing? ← this also talks about safe and effective doses, and what goes wrong if you take too much
There is also a common issue that a lot of people get enough calcium and vitamin D, but then a lot of that calcium doesn’t make it past the arteries.
Thus, the calcium paradox: we want to get (usually: more) calcium, but we want it building our bones, not lining our arteries. How, then, to resolve this problem, and simultaneously fight the dual threats of calcium deficiency (osteoporosis) and calcium excess (atherosclerosis)?
The answer lies in vitamin K2, which assists the calcium in getting to where you need it, rather than having it accumulating where you don’t.
Learn more: Vitamin K2 And The Calcium Paradox
Take care!
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Is It Possible To Lose Weight Quickly?
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.
In Victorian England, weight-loss trends like the dangerous tapeworm diet were popular. While modern fad diets can seem less extreme, they often promise similarly fast results. However, these quick fixes can have similarly harmful consequences:
Not so fast
To illustrate the difference between gradual and extreme dieting, the video bids us consider two identical twins, Sam and Felix:
- Sam adopts a gradual approach, slowly reducing calorie intake and exercising regularly. This causes his body to burn glycogen stores before transitioning to fat as an energy source. Regular exercise helps Sam maintain muscle mass, which boosts his metabolism and supports sustained weight loss.
- Felix drastically cuts calories, forcing his body into starvation mode. He quickly depletes glycogen stores, loses muscle mass, and burns fewer calories, making long-term weight loss more difficult. Although Felix might initially lose water weight, this is temporary and unsustainable.
You cannot “just lose it quickly now, and then worry about healthiness once the weight’s gone”, because you will lose health much more quickly than you will lose fat, and that will sabotage, rather than help, your fat loss journey.Healthy weight loss requires gradual, balanced changes in diet and exercise tailored to individual needs. Extreme diets, whether through calorie restriction or things like elimination of carbs or fats, are unsustainable and shock the body. It’s important to prioritize long-term health over societal pressures for quick weight loss and focus on developing a sustainable, healthy lifestyle.
In short, the quickest way to lose weight and keep it off (without dying), is to lose it slowly.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
How To Lose Weight (Healthily)
Take care!
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Easily Digestible Vegetarian Protein Sources
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
❝What could be easily digestible plant sources of protein for a vegetarian. My son is a gym holic and always looking for ways to get his protein from lentils other than eggs. He says to reach his protein requirement for the day, the amount of lentils he has to eat is sometimes heavy on the gut. Would really appreciate if you throw some light on this ❞
Unless one has IBS or similar (or is otherwise unaccustomed to consuming healthy amounts of fiber), lentils shouldn’t be at all problematic for the digestion.
However, the digestive process can still be eased by (speaking specifically for lentils here) blending them (in the water they were cooked in). This thick tasty liquid can then be used as the base of a soup, for example.
Soy is an excellent source of complete protein too. Your son probably knows this because it’s in a lot of body-building supplements as soy protein isolate, but can also be enjoyed as textured soy protein (as in many plant-based meats), or even just soy beans (edamame). Tofu (also made from soy) is very versatile, and again can be blended to form the basis of a creamy sauce.
Mycoproteins (as found in “Quorn” brand products and other meat substitutes) also perform comparably to meat from animals:
Meatless Muscle Growth: Building Muscle Size and Strength on a Mycoprotein-Rich Vegan Diet
See also, for interest:
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Doctor Explains 20 Most Powerful Peptides
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“Peptides” as an umbrella term can be a little unhelpful without specifying what kind(s), much like saying “drugs” is rarely useful without specifying what kind(s).
Dr. Amy Froese explains 20 important ones:
Peptide power
Fun fact: the human brain is usually only capable of holding 7±2 pieces of information at a time; when it appears to be holding more pieces than that at once, then this is the brain doing what psychologists refer to by very technical name of “chunking”.
This is how, for example, a chess player may glance at a position and memorize it in a few seconds:
- while a non-player would see 64 squares to memorize each with 13 possibilities (which already sounds like a lot, but since it factors exponentially for each square, we end up with more than eight quattuordecillion positions, which is a mind-bogglingly large number indeed, and means that just for a single position, there are more than twice as many pieces of information to memorize as there are stars in the universe).
- the chess-player sees just an easily graspable handful of familiar patterns, e.g: “KIA against something like a Tarrasch defense setup with just a couple of deviations from a well-explored tabiya that I know”. That’s maybe 5 chunks of information, certainly not more than 9, and thus easy to remember.
In short: we can remember more things when we chunk many things together into fewer things.
Because of these considerations, rather than bombard you with a list of 20 peptides for you to forget instantly, we’ll chunk them into 7±1 easily memorable categories for you:
- Fat-loss peptides: semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retatrutide suppress appetite, improve insulin sensitivity, and drive significant weight loss; semaglutide is FDA-approved but often causes nausea and constipation, tirzepatide offers greater loss with fewer side effects but is more expensive, and retatrutide is a triple-agonist showing very high loss in studies but is not yet prescribable at time of writing (it’s 2025 now, which already sounds like a sci-fi year, yet here we are without flying cars or doors that go swish, so if you’re reading this in the future, we hope it’s nice there!). AOD-9604 is a HGH fragment with mixed evidence for fat loss, and tesamorelin is FDA-approved for HIV-associated lipodystrophy and effectively reduces visceral fat.
- Repair and recovery: BPC-157 is widely used for joint, tendon, and gut repair with strongly mixed user reports, and TB-500 is a systemic tissue-healing partner often combined with BPC-157.
- Immune-modulating peptides: KPV can support melanin production, reduce inflammation, improve immune function, offer neuroprotection, and help with intestinal inflammatory diseases, while thymosin-alpha-1 has been studied for enhancing immune response but often produces only subtle effects at best.
- Growth-hormone and IGF-1 enhancers: CJC-1295 and ipamorelin work synergistically to raise GH and IGF-1 for strength, muscle gain, endurance, and recovery; MOTS-C increases mitochondrial production and may improve energy, endurance, and longevity; IGF-1 LR3 is potent for muscle growth but carries substantial risks.
- Sleep and longevity aids: epitalon may lengthen telomeres and increase melatonin production, sometimes improving sleep and/but sometimes paradoxically causing overstimulation.
- Nootropics and mood modulators: selank is an anti-anxiety peptide with effects comparable to benzodiazepines for some people but with highly variable responses; semax provides stimulant-like focus but wears off quickly and may cause a loss-of-energy crash later.
- Skin and aesthetic peptides: GHK-copper improves skin and hair when used topically, but injected forms appear less effective; melanotan-II darkens the skin but may cause new or changing moles and is generally considered a terrible idea. Please don’t do that one.
- Fertility and hormone-support peptides: PT-141 works centrally to increase libido but can cause nausea and unusual genital sensation; the delightfully-named kisspeptin-10 stimulates GnRH, increasing LH and FSH to support testosterone production, ovulation, sperm production, and fertility (not usually all in the same person; its gonadotropin action means that it’ll stimulate whatever you’ve got to work with anatomically, e.g. testes/ovaries etc, and because of how these analogous organs are developed in utero, it’s nigh-impossible for even intersex people to be born with both), and is being researched for IVF applications.
For more on all of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
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Eat Move Sleep – by Tom Rath
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The subtitle of this book, “how small choices lead to big changes“, is very much the idea that a lot of what we do here at 10almonds is about.
And the title itself, “Eat Move Sleep”? Well, that’s 3/5 of The Usual Five Things™ that we promote here (the other two being: reduce or eliminate alcohol, and don’t smoke). So, naturally this book got our attention.
One of the key ideas that Rath presents is that every action we take leads to a net gain or loss in health. The question then is: what are the biggest point-swingers? In other words, what are the places in our life where the smallest changes can make the biggest difference?
Rath looks at what parts of diet make the biggest difference to our health, and the findings there alone probably make reading the book worthwhile.
When it comes to movement, he actually flips this! For Rath, it’s less about how much exercise you get, and more about minimizing how long we spend not moving… And especially, minimizing how long we spend sitting. So, lots of little tweaks for that.
In the category of sleep: a key idea is that quality is as important as quantity, and there’s an aspect of bringing together as a synergistic routine. To finish off a productive day with good rest, and power up ready for the next morning.
In short: tying these items together—and focusing on the smallest choices that lead to the biggest changes—makes for quite a manifesto that we could describe as “Atomic Habits, for health specifically”.
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