Smart Sex – by Dr. Emily Morse

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First, what this isn’t: this isn’t a mere book of sex positions and party tricks, nor is it a book of Cosmo-style “drive your man wild by using hot sauce as lube” advice.

What it offers instead, is a refreshingly mature take on sex, free from the “teehee” titillations and blushes that many books of the genre go for.

Dr. Emily Morse outlines five pillars of sex:

  1. Embodiment
  2. Health
  3. Collaboration
  4. Self-knowledge
  5. Self-acceptance

…and talks about each of them in detail, and how we can bring them together. And, of course, how we or our partner(s) could accidentally sabotage ourselves or each other, and the conversations we can (and should!) have, to work past that.

She also, critically, and this is a big source of value in the book, looks at “pleasure thieves”: stress, trauma, and shame. The advice for overcoming these is not “don’t worry; be happy” but rather is actual practical steps one can take.

The style throughout is direct and unpatronizing. Since the advice within pertains to everyone who has and/or wants an active sex life, very little is divided by gender etc.

There is some attention given to anatomy and physiology, complete with clear diagrams. Honestly, most people could benefit from these, because most people’s knowledge of the relevant anatomy stopped with a very basic high school text book diagram that missed a lot out.

Bottom line: this book spends more time on what’s between your ears than what’s between your legs, and yet is very comprehensive in all areas. Everyone has something to gain from this one.

Click here to check out Smart Sex and stop missing out!

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  • Tartar Removal At Home & How To Prevent Tartar

    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.

    Three things to bear in mind:

    • Tartar is hardened plaque.
    • Plaque is an infected biofilm that expands the natural thin film on teeth.
    • Healthy biofilm resists plaque and tartar formation.

    Therefore, the recommended approach is a multistep program:

    The Complete Mouth Care System

    Dr. Phillips recommends to use these five products in this order twice daily:

    1. Zellie’s Mints & Gum: having 6–10 grams of xylitol daily will help to loosen plaque on teeth so that the following program is more effective. Xylitol protects from mouth acidity and help to remineralize teeth.
    2. CloSYS Prerinse: CloSYS will prepare your teeth for brushing. This pH neutral rinse ensures that brushing teeth does not occur in an acidic mouth and therefore easily damage teeth.
    3. Crest Cavity Protection Regular Paste: has an active ingredient of sodium fluoride at optimal concentration (not stannous fluoride). This paste has the proper abrasion and no glycerine.
    4. Listerine: is an effective rinse that targets the bacteria that cause plaque build up and gingivitis with three active ingredients: eucalyptus essential oil, menthol essential oil, and thymol essential oil. As such, unlike many mouthwashes, listerine does not harm the mouth’s diversity of good bacteria or the mouth’s production of nitric oxide.
    5. ACT Anticavity Rinse: ACT is a very dilute but extremely effective sodium fluoride solution. It helps prevent and reverse cavities, strengthen teeth, reduce sensitivity, and leaves your breath fresh.

    She advises us that by doing this twice-daily over 6 months, we can expect significant tartar reduction, and indeed, that dental appointments may reveal minimal or no need for tartar removal.

    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 our own three-part series:

    Take care!

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  • 10 Mistakes To Sabotage Your Ozempic Progress

    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.

    Ozempic has a good reputation for getting reliable results, but there are ways to mess it up:

    It’s not just inject-and-go

    We’ll not keep the 10 ways a secret; they are:

    1. Increasing the dose too quickly: avoid cranking doses up too high too quickly, to prevent severe nausea, appetite suppression, and muscle loss. It’s worth being aware that high doses without proper management can lead to metabolic health disasters.
    2. Pushing through side effects: severe nausea or vomiting means you probably have an unhelpfully high dose; consult your prescribing doctor—it’s easy to feel “more is better; I don’t want to have less!”, but there really is a sweet spot, and if you’re not in it, then adjustments are needed in order to find it.
    3. Eating nutritionally scant food: reducing the quantity of unhealthy food isn’t enough—please prioritize nutrient-rich foods instead. Remember, “it’s not the calories in your food; it’s the food in your calories”.
    4. Consuming fried food and refined carbs: their general metabolic woes aside, fried foods and ultra-refined carbs can exacerbate nausea and other side effects, so it really is best to skip them. The good news is that Ozempic will help overcome those cravings more easily.
    5. Neglecting muscle protection: especially women, especially middle-aged or older, are at higher risk of osteoporosis and should maintain muscle mass (strong muscles and strong bones go together, by necessity). So, eat protein and do resistance training!
    6. Assuming it’s a monotherapy: GLP-1 drugs work best as part of a holistic protocol, including proper nutrition, strength training, and hormone therapy if appropriate.
    7. Not addressing metabolic health first: GLP-1 drugs are less effective in people with poor baseline metabolic health, so there’s a bit of a catch-22 here, but it’s important to be aware of. Fortunately, Ozempic and adopting a healthy lifestyle will each make the other work better.
    8. Neglecting comprehensive treatment plans: in other words, going through the motions of a holistic protocol and then expecting Ozempic to do all the work.
    9. Upping doses to overcome plateaus: plateaus often signal other issues (e.g. lack of protein, no strength training), so do address these before increasing dosage.
    10. Lack of collaboration with doctors: the human body is complex, and what’s going on metabolically is complex too, so there’s a lot a layperson can easily miss. For that matter, there’s a lot that doctors can easily miss too, but more heads are better than one.

    For more on all of these, enjoy:

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    Want to learn more?

    You might also like:

    5 Ways To Naturally Boost The Ozempic Effect

    Take care!

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  • How to keep your teeth young

    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.

    How to keep your teeth young

    The association between aging and teeth is so well-established that it’s entered popular idiom, “too long in the tooth”, and when it comes to visual representations, false teeth are well-associated with old age.

    And yet, avoiding such outcomes does not get anywhere near so much attention as, say, avoiding wrinkles or hair loss.

    At 10almonds, we’ve covered general dental health before, in a three-part series:

    1. Toothpastes & Mouthwashes: Which Help And Which Harm?
    2. Flossing, Better (And Easier!)
    3. Less Common Oral Hygiene Options

    Today, we’re going to be looking specifically at keeping our teeth young. What if you have lost your teeth already? Well, gum health remains important, and it’s foundational for everyone, so…

    Look after your gums first and last

    Hollywood’s most “perfect” whites would be nothing without the gums holding them in place. So, set aside the cosmetic whitening products that often harm gums (anything containing bleach / hydrogen peroxide, is generally a bad idea), andinstead focus on your gums.

    As for avoiding gum disease (periodontitis)?

    ❝In conclusion, periodontitis might enhance the association of biological aging with all-cause mortality in middle-aged and older adults.

    Hence, maintaining and enhancing periodontal health is expected to become an intervention to slow aging and extend life span.❞

    Source: Does Periodontitis Affect the Association of Biological Aging with Mortality?

    Ways to look after gum health include the obvious “floss” and “brush often” and “use fluoride toothpaste”, along with other options we covered in our “Less Common Oral Hygiene Options” article above.

    Also important: don’t smoke. It is bad for everything, and this is no exception.

    We expect we probably don’t have many subscribers who smoke, but if you do, please consider making quitting a priority.

    See also: Smoking, Gum Disease, and Tooth Loss

    Consider supplementing with collagen

    Everyone’s all about the calcium and vitamin D for bones (and teeth), but a large part of the mass of both is actually collagen. And unlike calcium, which most people not living in a food desert get plenty of, or vitamin D, which is one of the most popular supplements around, collagen is something that gets depleted as we get older. We’ve written about its importance for bones:

    We Are Such Stuff As Fish Are Made Of—Collagen’s benefits are more than skin deep

    And as for its role in combatting gum disease and tooth loss:

    Nanoscale Dynamics of Streptococcal Adhesion to AGE-Modified Collagen

    By the way, that “AGE” there isn’t about chronological age; it’s about advanced glycation end-products. Those are also something you can and should avoid:

    Are You Eating AGEs?

    A different kind of “spit and polish”

    We imagine you have the “polishing” part in hand; that’s tooth-brushing, of course. But spit?

    Saliva is hugely important for our oral health, but it’s not something most of us think about a lot. For example, you might not have known (or might have known but not thought much about) that many common medications affect our saliva, including many blood pressure medications and antidepressants:

    Impact of ageing and drug consumption on oral health

    Because there are so many possibilities, this is the kind of thing to check with your pharmacist or doctor about. But as a rule, if you take a medication whose side-effects include “dry mouth”, this might be you.

    Here’s a really useful (academic) article that covers what drugs cause this, how to diagnose it, and what can be done about it:

    Hyposalivation in Elderly Patients

    If something’s difficult, find a way to make it easier

    Sometimes, as we get older, some things that used to be easy, aren’t. We can lose strength, coordination, manual dexterity, memory, attention, and more. Obviously, we try not to, and do what we can to keep ourselves in good health.

    But, if you do have some disability that makes for example brushing and/or flossing difficult to do consistently and/or well, consider talking to your doctor to see if there are assistive devices that can help, or some other kind of support that could allow you to do what you need to.

    See also: Improving oral hygiene for better cognitive health: Interrelationships of oral hygiene habits, oral health status, and cognitive function in older adults

    There’s never any shame in getting help if we need it.

    Take care!

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Related Posts

  • Triple Life Threat – by Donald R. Lyman
  • Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook – by Sarah Raven

    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.

    Note: the US Amazon site currently (incorrectly) lists the author as “Jonathan Buckley”. The Canadian, British, and Australian sites all list the author correctly as Sarah Raven, and some (correctly) credit Jonathan Buckley as the photographer she used.

    First, what it’s not: a gardening book. Beyond a few helpful tips, pointers, and “plant here, harvest here” instructions, this book assumes you are already capable of growing your own vegetables.

    She does assume you are in a temperate climate, so if you are not, this might not be the book for you. Although! The recipes are still great; it’s just you’d have to shop for the ingredients and they probably won’t be fresh local produce for the exact same reason that you didn’t grow them.

    If you are in a temperate climate though, this will take you through the year of seasonal produce (if you’re in a temperate climate but it’s in for example Australia, you’ll need to make a six-month adjustment for being in the S. Hemisphere), with many recipes to use not just one ingredient from your garden at a time, but a whole assortment, consistent with the season.

    About the recipes: they (which are 450 in number) are (as you might imagine) very plant-forward, but they’re generally not vegan and often not vegetarian. So, don’t expect that you’ll produce everything yourself—just most of the ingredients!

    Bottom line: if you like cooking, and are excited by the idea of growing your own food but are unsure how regularly you can integrate that, this book will keep you happily busy for a very long time.

    Click here to check out Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook, and level-up your home cooking!

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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  • Heal & Reenergize Your Brain With Optimized Sleep Cycles

    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.

    Sometimes 8 hours sleep can result in grogginess while 6 hours can result in waking up fresh as a daisy, so what gives? Dr. Tracey Marks explains, in this short video.

    Getting more than Zs in

    Sleep involves 90-minute cycles, usually in 4 stages:

    1. Stage 1: (drowsy state): brief muscle jerks; lasts a few minutes.
    2. Stage 2: (light sleep): sleep spindles for memory consolidation; 50% of total sleep.
    3. Stage 3 (deep sleep): tissue repair, immune support, brain toxin removal via the glymphatic system.
    4. Stage 4 (REM sleep): emotional processing, creativity, problem-solving, and dreaming.

    Some things can disrupt some or all of those. To give a few common examples:

    • Alcohol: impairs REM sleep.
    • Caffeine: hinders deep sleep even if consumed hours before bed.
    • Screentime: delays sleep onset due to blue light (but not by much); the greater problem is that it can also disrupt REM sleep due to mental stimulation.

    To optimize things, Dr. Marks recommends:

    • 90-minute rule: plan sleep to align with full cycles (e.g: 22:30 to 06:00 = 7½ hours, which is 5x 90-minute cycles).
    • Smart alarms: use sleep-tracking apps with built-in alarm, to wake you up during light sleep phases.
    • Strategic naps: keep naps to 20 minutes or a full 90-minute cycle.
    • Pink noise: improves deep sleep.
    • Meal timing: avoid eating within 3 hours of bedtime.
    • Natural light: get morning light exposure in the morning to strengthen circadian rhythm.

    For more on all of this, enjoy:

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    Calculate (And Enjoy) The Perfect Night’s Sleep

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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  • Demystifying Cholesterol

    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.

    All About Cholesterol

    When it comes to cholesterol, the most common lay understanding (especially under a certain age) is “it’s bad”.

    A more informed view (and more common after a certain age) is “LDL cholesterol is bad; HDL cholesterol is good”.

    A more nuanced view is “LDL cholesterol is established as significantly associated with (and almost certainly a causal factor of) atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and related mortality in men; in women it is less strongly associated and may or may not be a causal factor”

    You can read more about that here:

    Statins: His & Hers? ← we highly recommend reading this, especially if you are a woman and/or considering/taking statins. To be clear, we’re not saying “don’t take statins!”, because they might be the right medical choice for you and we’re not your doctors. But we are saying: here’s something to at least know about and consider.

    Beyond HDL & LDL

    There is also VLDL cholesterol, which as you might have guessed, stands for “very low-density lipoprotein”. It has a high, unhealthy triglyceride content, and it increases atherosclerotic plaque. In other words, it hardens your arteries more quickly.

    The term “hardening the arteries” is an insufficient descriptor of what’s happening though, because while yes it is hardening the arteries, it’s also narrowing them. Because minerals and detritus passing through in the blood (the latter sounds bad, but there is supposed to be detritus passing through in the blood; it’s got to get out of the body somehow, and it’s off to get filtered and excreted) get stuck in the cholesterol (which itself is a waxy substance, by the way) and before you know it, those minerals and other things have become a solid part of the interior of your artery wall, like a little plastering team came and slapped plaster on the inside of the walls, then when it hardened, slapped more plaster on, and so on. Macrophages (normally the body’s best interior clean-up team) can’t eat things much bigger than themselves, so that means they can’t tackle the build-up of plaque.

    Impact on the heart

    Narrower less flexible arteries means very poor circulation, which means that organs can start having problems, which obviously includes your heart itself as it is not only having to do a harder job to keep the blood circulating through the narrower blood vessels, but also, it is not immune to also being starved of oxygen and nutrients along with the rest of the body when the circulation isn’t good enough. It’s a catch 22.

    What if LDL is low and someone is getting heart disease anyway?

    That’s often a case of apolipoprotein B, and unlike lipoprotein A, which is bound to LDL so usually* isn’t a problem if LDL is in “safe” ranges, Apo-B can more often cause problems even when LDL is low. Neither of these are tested for in most standard cholesterol tests by the way, so you might have to ask for them.

    *Some people, around 1 in 20 people, have hereditary extra risk factors for this.

    What to do about it?

    Well, get those lipids tests! Including asking for the LpA and Apo-B tests, especially if you have a history of heart disease in your family, or otherwise know you have a genetic risk factor.

    With or without extra genetic risks, it’s good to get lipids tests done annually from 40 onwards (earlier, if you have extra risk factors).

    See also: Understanding your cholesterol numbers

    Wondering whether you have an increased genetic risk or not?

    Genetic Testing: Health Benefits & Methods ← we think this is worth doing; it’s a “one-off test tells many useful things”. Usually done from a saliva sample, but some companies arrange a blood draw instead. Cost is usually quite affordable; do shop around, though.

    Additionally, talk to your pharmacist to check whether any of your meds have contraindications or interactions you should be aware of in this regard. Pharmacists usually know contraindications/interactions stuff better than doctors, and/but unlike doctors, they don’t have social pressure on them to know everything, which means that if they’re not sure, instead of just guessing and reassuring you in a confident voice, they’ll actually check.

    Lastly, shocking nobody, all the usual lifestyle medicine advice applies here, especially get plenty of moderate exercise and eat a good diet, preferably mostly if not entirely plant-based, and go easy on the saturated fat.

    Note: while a vegan diet contains zero dietary cholesterol (because plants don’t make it), vegans can still get unhealthy blood lipid levels, because we are animals and—like most animals—our body is perfectly capable of making its own cholesterol (indeed, we do need some cholesterol to function), and it can make its own in the wrong balance, if for example we go too heavy on certain kinds of (yes, even some plant-based) saturated fat.

    Read more: Can Saturated Fats Be Healthy? ← see for example how palm oil and coconut oil are both plant-based, and both high in saturated fat, but palm oil’s is heart-unhealthy on balance, while coconut oil’s is heart-healthy on balance (in moderation).

    Want to know more about your personal risk?

    Try the American College of Cardiology’s ASCVD risk estimator (it’s free)

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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