“Slugging” Skin Care Routine (Tips From A Dermatologist)

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Dermatologist Dr. Jenny Liu weighs in with advice!

Sometimes simplest is best

Slugging is a skincare trend involving applying petrolatum (e.g. Vaseline) as the final step to lock in hydration and repair the skin barrier. It’s particularly useful for dry, sensitive, or eczema-prone skin, and/or damaged skin barriers from overuse of actives or harsh conditions.

How it works: the waterproof layer reduces water loss (up to 99%) and facilitates repair the skin barrier. Thus, it indirectly hydrates the skin, supports natural exfoliation, and reduces fine lines. Best of all, it’s non-irritating, non-comedogenic, and safe for all skin types.

How to do it:

  1. Cleanse thoroughly to remove makeup and impurities.
  2. Apply a moisturizer or serum with humectants (e.g. glycerin, hyaluronic acid).
  3. Seal with petrolatum (e.g. Vaseline or similar).
  4. Skip areas with stronger active ingredients (e.g. retinoids) and active acne areas.
  5. Apply 30–60 minutes before bed to reduce product transfer.
  6. Use a gentle cleanser in the morning to remove residue.

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:

Castor Oil: All-Purpose Life-Changer, Or Snake Oil? ← skincare is one of the things it definitely does work well for, and can be used for slugging also.

Take care!

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  • 16/8 Intermittent Fasting For Beginners

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    Health Insider explains in super-simple fashion why and how to do Intermittent Fasting (IF), which is something that can sound complicated at first, but becomes very simple and easy once understood.

    What do we need to know?

    Intermittent fasting (IF) is a good, well-evidenced way to ease your body’s metabolic load, and
    give your organs a chance to recover from the strain of digestion and its effects. That’s not just your gastrointestinal organs! It’s your pancreas and liver too, amongst others—this is about glucose metabolism as much as it is about digestion.

    This, in turn, allows your body some downtime to do its favorite thing, which is: maintenance!

    This maintenance takes the form of enhanced cellular apoptosis and autophagy, helping to keep cells young and cancer-free.

    In other words, with well-practised intermittent fasting, we can reduce our risk of metabolic disease (including heart disease and diabetes) as well as cancer and neurodegeneration.

    You may be wondering: this sounds miraculous; what’s the catch? There are a couple:

    • While fasting from food, the body’s enhanced metabolism requires more water, so you’ll need to take extra care keep on top of your hydration (this is one reason why Ramadan fasting, while healthy for most people, is not as healthy as IF—because Ramadan fasting means abstaining from water, too).
    • If you are diabetic, and especially if you have Type 1 Diabetes, fasting may not be a safe option for you, since if you get a hypo in the middle of your fasting period, it’s obviously not a good idea to wait another many hours before fixing it.

    Extra note on that last one: it’s easy to think “can’t I just lower my bolus insulin instead of eating?” and while superficially yes that will raise your blood sugar levels, it’s because the sugar will be sticking around in your blood, and not actually getting released into the organs that need it. So while your blood glucose monitor may say you’re fine, you will be starving your organs and if you keep it up they may suffer serious damage.

    Disclaimer: our standard legal/medical disclaimer applies, and this is intended for educational purposes only; please do speak with your endocrinologist before changing anything you usually do with regard to your blood sugar maintenance.

    Ok, back onto the cheerier topic at hand:

    Aside from the above: for most people, IF is a remarkably healthful practice in very many ways.

    For more on the science, practicalities, and things to do/avoid, enjoy this short (4:53) video:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically

    Want to know more?

    Check out our previous main feature on this topic:

    Intermittent Fasting: Mythbusting Edition

    Enjoy!

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  • Science of Pilates – by Tracy Ward

    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.

    We’ve reviewed other books in this series, “Science of Yoga” and “Science of HIIT” (they’re great too; check them out!). What does this one add to the mix?

    Pilates is a top-tier “combination exercise” insofar as it checks a lot of boxes, e.g:

    • Strength—especially core strength, but also limbs
    • Mobility—range of motion and resultant reduction in injury risk
    • Stability—impossible without the above two things, but Pilates trains this too
    • Fitness—many dynamic Pilates exercises can be performed as cardio and/or HIIT.

    The author, a physiotherapist, explains (as the title promises!) the science of Pilates, with:

    • the beautifully clear diagrams we’ve come to expect of this series,
    • equally clear explanations, with a great balance of simplicity of terms and depth where necessary, and
    • plenty of citations for the claims made, linking to lots of the best up-to-date science.

    Bottom line: if you are in a position to make a little time for Pilates (if you don’t already), then there is nobody who would not benefit from reading this book.

    Click here to check out Science of Pilates, and keep your body well!

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  • Is Your Gut Leading You Into Osteoporosis?

    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.

    Bacterioides Vulgatus & Bone Health

    We’ve talked before about the importance of gut health:

    And we’ve shared quite some information and resources on osteoporosis:

    How the two are connected

    A recent study looked at Bacterioides vulgatus, a very common gut bacterium, and found that it suppresses the gut’s production of valeric acid, a short-chain fatty acid that enhances bone density:

    ❝For the study, researchers analyzed the gut bacteria of more than 500 peri- and post-menopausal women in China and further confirmed the link between B. vulgatus and a loss of bone density in a smaller cohort of non-Hispanic White women in the United States.❞

    Pop-sci source: Does gut bacteria cause osteoporosis?

    The study didn’t stop there, though. They proceeded to test, with a rodent model, the effect of giving them either:

    • more B. vulgatus, or
    • valeric acid supplements

    The results of this were as expected:

    • Those who were given more B. vulgatus got worse bone microstructure
    • Those who were given valeric acid supplements got stronger bones overall

    Study source: Gut microbiota impacts bone via Bacteroides vulgatus-valeric acid-related pathways

    Where can I get valeric acid?

    We couldn’t find a handy supplement for this, but it is in many foods, including avocados, blueberries, cocoa beans, and an assortment of birds.

    Click here to see a more extensive food list (you’ll need to scroll down a little)

    Bonus: if you happen to be on HRT in the form of Estradiol valerate (e.g: Progynova), then that “valerate” is an ester of valeric acid, that your body can metabolize and use as such.

    Enjoy!

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Related Posts

  • 21% Stronger Bones in a Year at 62? Yes, It’s Possible (No Calcium Supplements Needed!)
  • An Accessible New Development Against Alzheimer’s

    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.

    Dopamine vs Alzheimer’s

    One of the key hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the formation of hardened beta-amyloid plaques around neurons. The beta-amyloid peptides themselves are supposed to be in the brain, but the hardened pieces of them that form the plaques are not.

    While the full nature of the relationship between those plaques and Alzheimer’s disease is not known for sure (there are likely other factors involved, and “the amyloid hypothesis” is at this stage nominally just that, a hypothesis), one thing that has been observed is that increasing or reducing the plaques increases or reduces (respectively) Alzheimer’s symptoms such as memory loss.

    Neprilysin

    There is an enzyme, neprilysin, that can break down those plaques.

    Neprilysin is made naturally in the brain, and/but we cannot take it as a supplement or medication, because it’s too big to pass through the blood-brain barrier.

    A team of researchers led by Dr. Takaomi Saido genetically manipulated mice to produce more neprilysin, and those mice resultantly experienced fewer beta-amyloid plaques and better memory in their old age.

    However wonderful for the mice (and a great proof of principle) the above approach is not useful as a treatment for humans whose genomes weren’t modified at our conception in a lab.

    Since (as mentioned before) we also can’t take it as a medication/supplement, that leaves one remaining option: find a way to make our already-existing brains produce more of it.

    The team’s previous research allowed them to narrow this down to “there is probably a hormone made in the hypothalamus that modulates this”, so they began experimenting with making the mice produce more hormones there.

    The DREADD switch

    DREADDs, or Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs, were the next tool in the toolbox. The scientists attached these designer receptors to dopamine-producing neurons in the mice, so that they could be activated by the appropriate designer drugs—basically, allowing for a “make more dopamine” button, without having to literally wire up the brains with electrodes. The “button” gets triggered instead by a chemical trigger, the designer drug. You can read more about them here:

    DREADDs for Neuroscientists: A Primer

    The result was positive; when the mice made more dopamine, the result was that they also made more neprilysin. So far, the hypothesis is that the presence of dopamine upregulates the production of neprilysin. In other words, the increased neprilysin levels were caused by the increased dopamine levels (the alternatives would have been: they were both caused by the same thing—in this case that’d be the DREADD activation—or the increase was caused by something else entirely that hadn’t been controlled for).

    As to how the causal relationship was determined…

    “But I don’t have (or want) a DREADD switch in my head”

    Happily for us (and probably happily for the mice too, because dopamine causes feelings of happiness), the experiments continued.

    This time, instead of using the DREADD system, they tried simply supplementing the mouse food with l-dopa, a dopamine precursor. L-dopa is often used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, because the molecules are small enough to pass through the blood-brain barrier, and can be converted to full dopamine inside the brain itself. So, taking l-dopa normally raises dopamine levels.

    The results? The mice who were given l-dopa enjoyed:

    • higher dopamine levels
    • higher neprilysin levels
    • lower beta-amyloid plaque levels
    • better memory in tests

    The next step for the researchers is to investigate how exactly dopamine regulates neprilysin in the brain, but for now, the relationship between l-dopa consumption and the reduction of Alzheimer’s symptoms seems clear.

    You can read about the study here:

    The dopaminergic system promotes neprilysin-mediated degradation of amyloid-β in the brain

    Is there a catch?

    L-dopa has common side effects that are not pleasant; the list begins with nausea and vomiting, and continues with things that one might expect from having “too much of a good thing” when it comes to dopamine, such as dyskinesia (extra movements) and hallucinations.

    You can read about it more here at the Parkinson’s Foundation:

    Parkinson’s Foundation | Levodopa

    However! All is not lost. Rather than reaching for the heavy guns by taking l-dopa unnecessarily, there are other dopamine precursors that don’t have those side effects (and are consequently less restricted, to the point they can be purchased as supplements, or indeed, enjoyed where they occur naturally in some foods).

    Top of the list of such safe* and readily-available dopamine precursors is…

    N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine (NALT): The Dopamine Precursor & More

    If you’d like to try that, here’s an example product on Amazon… Or you could eat fish, white beans, tofu, natto, or pumpkin seeds 😉

    *Quick note on safety: “safe” is a relative term and may vary from person to person. Please speak with your own doctor to be sure, check with your pharmacist in case of any meds interactions, and be especially careful taking anything that increases dopamine levels if you have bipolar disorder or are otherwise prone to psychosis of any kind. For most people, this shouldn’t be an issue as our brains have a built-in mechanism for scrubbing excess dopamine and ensuring we don’t end up with too much, but for some people whose dopamine regulation is not so good in that regard, it can cause problems. So again, speak with your doctor to be sure, because we are not doctors, let alone your doctor.

    Lastly…

    If you’d like an entirely drug-free approach, that’s skipping even the “nutraceuticals”, you might enjoy:

    Short On Dopamine? Science Has The Answer

    Take care!

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  • What Happens Every Day When You Quit Sugar For 30 Days

    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.

    We all know that sugar isn’t exactly a health food, but it can be hard to quit. How long can cravings be expected to last, and when can we expect to see benefits? Today’s video covers the timeline in a realistic yet inspiring fashion:

    What to expect on…

    Day 1: expect cravings and withdrawal symptoms including headaches, fatigue, mood swings, and irritability—as well as tiredness, without the crutch of sugar.

    Days 2 & 3: more of the same, plus likely objections from the gut, since your Candida albicans content will not be enjoying being starved of its main food source.

    Days 4–7: reduction of the above symptoms, better energy levels, improved sleep, and likely the gut will be adapting or have adapted.

    Days 8–14: beginning of weight loss, clearer skin, improved complexion; taste buds adapt too, making foods taste sweeter. Continued improvement in energy and focus, as well.

    Days 15–21: more of the same improvements, plus the immune system will start getting stronger around now. But watch out, because there may still be some cravings from time to time.

    Days 22–30: all of the above positive things, few or no cravings now, and enhanced metabolic health as a whole.

    For more specificity on each of these stages, enjoy:

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

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    The Not-So-Sweet Science Of Sugar Addiction

    Take care!

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  • Curing Hiccups And Headaches At Home With Actual Science

    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.

    Quick fixes for bodily annoyances

    Do you ever find yourself desperately trying to cure hiccups, and advice on the Internet is like “breathe in through your ears while drinking vinegar upside-down through your nose”?

    If so, you’re not alone. So, today we’re going to look at some science-based approaches to dealing with common bodily annoyances.

    Hiccups

    Unfortunately, most popular advices simply don’t work, and the only near-guaranteed way to cure these is with anti-convulsive medications whose side-effects may be worse than the hiccups.

    However, before you head to the pharmacy, there is one breathing exercise that has a very simple scientific underpinning: 4:4 breathing. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s just:

    1. Breathe slowly in through your nose to a count of four
    2. Hold your breath for a count of four
    3. Breathe slowly out through your nose to a count of four
    4. Hold your breath for a count of four

    …and repeat. The slower the better. At first, your hiccups will interrupt this, but just “keep calm and carry on”.

    The reason this can work is that breathing is an autonomic function (e.g., it happens without us thinking about it) that, unlike most other autonomic functions, we can all control directly. By taking control of one, others will tend to fall into line with it.

    For example, it is normal that your heart rate will tend to slow or quicken as your breathing slows or quickens, respectively.

    Your hiccups? Autonomic function. Actually a very, very old evolutionary left-over trait, that’s only useful for protecting lungs while breathing underwater. In other words, it’s the bodily function thinks you’re a fish (or a tadpole-like amphibious creature) in the process of developing lungs. Unfortunately, because hiccuping doesn’t harm our chances of passing on our genes, it never got naturally de-selected so we still have it.

    Anyway, the bottom line is: take control of your breathing in the aspects you can directly control, and the aspects you can’t directly control will fall into line. You may need to give it some minutes, don’t give up too quickly.

    Headaches

    If you ever get a headache and you don’t have painkillers or perhaps they’re not helping or you have another reason for not wanting to take them, there’s “one quick trick” that can cure most headaches in seconds.

    First, the limitation: this will only cure headaches that have been caused by increased localized blood pressure in the forehead. However, that’s more than half of most common headaches.

    Next, how it works…

    We’re mentioning this first, because understanding how it works will give you more confidence in using it.

    Your body has a wonderful homeostatic system, which is the system by which your body maintains its “Goldilocks zones” of not too hot or cold, not to acidine or alkaline, not too hydrated or dehydrated, blood pressure not too high or too low, etc. Sometimes, however, it can get confused, and needs a nudge back to where it should be.

    One of the ways it maintains blood pressure is biofeedback from receptors in blood vessel walls, called baroreceptors. They are what it sounds like; they measure blood pressure internally.

    In certain places, there are clusters of baroreceptors in one place. And if we press on that one place, the body will think “Oh no! Super high blood pressure in this bit!” and reduce the blood pressure immediately.

    This is called the baroreflex, and that’s what you need to cure a hypertensive headache.

    So, what to do:

    With your thumb, carefully feel the upper inside corner of your eye socket. So, at the top, and about ¼ of the way out from the bridge of your nose. You should feel a groove. No, not like the Emperor’s New, but, an actual groove in your eye socket. That’s the supraorbital notch (or foramen), and it allows the supraorbital artery, veins, and nerve to run through.

    Press it firmly (you can do both sides at once, assuming you have two thumbs) for about three seconds, and then massage it gently. Repeat as necessary, but it shouldn’t take more than about three goes to have cured the headache.

    As a bonus, this is a great party trick for curing other people’s headaches, when the need arises!

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