Spirulina vs Nori – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing spirulina to nori, we picked the nori.
Why?
In the battle of the seaweeds, if spirulina is a superfood (and it is), then nori is a super-dooperfood. So today is one of those “a very nutritious food making another very nutritious food look bad by standing next to it” days. With that in mind…
In terms of macros, they’re close to identical. They’re both mostly water with protein, carbs, and fiber. Technically nori is higher in carbs, but we’re talking about 2.5g/100g difference.
In the category of vitamins, spirulina has more vitamin B1, while nori has a lot more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B5, B6, B9, C, E, K, and choline.
When it comes to minerals, it’s a little closer but still a clear win for nori; spirulina has more copper, iron, and magnesium, while nori has more calcium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc.
Want to try some nori? Here’s an example product on Amazon 😎
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
21% Stronger Bones in a Year at 62? Yes, It’s Possible (No Calcium Supplements Needed!) ← nori was an important part of the diet enjoyed here
Take care!
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Starfruit vs Soursop – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing starfruit to soursop, we picked the soursop.
Why?
First, by starfruit, we also mean carambola, which is a different name for the same fruit, and by soursop we also mean graviola/guyabano/guanábana, which are different namers for the same fruit. Now, as for their health qualities:
In terms of macros, the soursop has more carbs and fiber, the ratio of which also give it the lower glycemic index. So, a win for soursop here.
When it comes to vitamins, starfruit has more of vitamins A, B5, C, and E, while soursop has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B6, B7, B9, and K. Another win for soursop.
In the category of minerals, starfruit has slightly more copper, manganese, and zinc, while soursop has much more calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, and potassium. One more win for soursop!
Adding up the sections makes for a clear and overwhelming win for soursop, but let’s address to quick safety considerations while we’re here:
- Soursop extract has been claimed to be an effective cancer treatment. It isn’t. There is no evidence for this at all; just one unscrupulous company that spread the claims.
- Soursop contains annonacin, a neurotoxin. That sounds scary, but much like with apple seeds and cyanide, the quantities you’d have to consume to suffer ill effects are absurd. Remember how capsaicin (as found in hot peppers) is also a neurotoxin, too and has many health benefits. Humans have a long and happy tradition of enjoying things that are toxic at high doses, but in small doses are neutral or even beneficial. Pretty much all things we can consume (including oxygen, and water) are toxic at sufficient doses.
In short, both of these fruits are fine and good, neither will treat cancer, but both will help to keep you in good health. As for nutritional density, the soursop wins in every category.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Top 8 Fruits That Prevent & Kill Cancer ← soursop has no special cancer treatment properties, but actual evidence shows these fruits are beneficial (being good as a preventative, and also definitely a worthy adjunct to—but not a replacement for—mainstream anticancer therapies if you have cancer).
Take care!
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Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess – by Dr. Caroline Leaf
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First of all, what mental mess is this? Well, that depends on you, but common items include:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Stress
- Trauma
Dr. Caroline Leaf also includes the more nebulous item “toxic thoughts”, but this is mostly a catch-all term.
Given that it says “5 simple scientifically proven steps”, it would be fair if you are wondering:
“Is this going to be just basic CBT stuff?”
And… First, let’s not knock basic CBT stuff. It’s not a panacea, but it’s a great tool for a lot of things. However… Also, no, this book is not about just basic CBT stuff.
In fact, this book’s methods are presented in such a novel way that this reviewer was taken aback by how unlike it was to anything she’d read before.
And, it’s not that the components themselves are new—it’s just that they’re put together differently, in a much more organized comprehensive and systematic way, so that a lot less stuff falls through the cracks (a common problem with standalone psychological tools and techniques).
Bottom line: if you buy one mental health self-help book this year, we recommend that it be this one
Click here to check out Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, and take a load off your mind!
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The Brain at Rest – by Dr. Joseph Jebelli
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The author, a neuroscientist, having watched his parents’ health go from good to bad to worse on account of overwork, makes the case for rest.
Not just as a “necessarily evil” in the sense of “if you don’t schedule time for rest, your body will schedule it for you” (i.e. break down and thus force the issue), but also, because it is during periods of rest when our brain’s “default mode network” (DMN) takes the wheel, and without the DMN, there are a lot of important cognitive functions that will barely happen, if at all.
This is the reason why, for example, people perform better on cognitive tasks after a short rest, than people who had more time to solve the cognitive tasks, but not rest. In essence, rest is time that pays for itself in productivity.
How much rest? Dr. Jebelli presents evidence for there being measurable benefits from 5 minutes; more benefits from 20 minutes, more from an hour, more from 4 hours, 8 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours. And so on. In other words: the benefits are dose-dependent.
That said, it’s not just about productivity. Yes, getting adequate rest will ultimately result in better work, but there’s also a whole chapter devoted to avoiding what the Japanese call karoshi—death from overwork.
The style of the book is mostly explanatory, and in part instructional. It’s mostly very soft science, with hard science merely being pointed to in citations, so it’s very easy to understand. As for the instructional parts, Dr. Jebelli advises on how best to rest (not prescribing hobbies, so much as: there are different kinds of rest, and it’s important to get a good coverage of the different kinds), and how to enjoy the greatest benefits.
Bottom line: if you sometimes feel like you need a break, but at the same time feel like you “can’t, because…”, then this book will empower you to find a way (he advises about that, too).
Click here to check out The Brain at Rest, and rest your brain!
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The Path To Revenue – by Theresa Marcroft
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So many books about start-ups skip right over the elephant in the room: survivorship bias. Not so for Marcroft! This book contains the most comprehensive and unapologetic treatment of it we’ve seen.
Less “here’s what Steve Jobs did right and here’s what Chocolate-Teapots-For-Dogs-R-Us did wrong; don’t mess up that badly and you’ll be fine”… and more realism. Marcroft gives us a many-angled critical analytic approach. In it, she examines why many things can seem similar in both content and presentation… but can cause growth or failure (and how and why), based on more than anecdotes and luck.
The book is information-dense (taking a marketing-centric approach) and/but well-presented in a very readable format.
If we can find any criticism of the book, it’s less about what’s in it and more about what’s not in it. This can never be a “your start-up bible!” book because it’s not comprehensive. It doesn’t cover assembling your team, for example. Nor does it give a lot of attention to management, preferring to focus on strategy.
But no single book can be all things, and we highly recommend this one—the marketing advice alone is more than worth the cost of the book!
Take Your First Step Along The Path To Revenue By Checking It Out On Amazon!
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Is Marine Collagen Worth Taking?
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Questions and Answers 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!
This newsletter has been growing a lot lately, and so have the questions/requests, and we love that! 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 wanted to ask if you think marine collagen is decent to take. I’ve heard a lot of bad press about it
We don’t know what you’ve heard, but generally speaking it’s been found to be very beneficial to bones, joints, and skin! We wrote about it quite recently on a “Research Review Monday”:
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Get More Exercise Benefits (Without Exercising More Or Harder!)
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Everybody loves the benefits of exercise!
However, not everybody loves exercise itself. And even for those who do love exercise, we can’t always do as much as we’d like!
So, what’s this one all about it?
Variety really is the spice of life
Researchers (Dr. Qi Sun et al.) examined whether long-term engagement in individual physical activities and/or a greater variety of activities are associated with a 19% lower risk of death, independent of total activity volume.
111,467 people started the study, and 38,847 of them died before it was over.
It’s a little sad that experiments like this always have a large death toll, but let’s make sure it was worth it.
Added up together, this resulted in 2,431,381 person-years of data.
During the time that they had before the end, the participants recorded time spent in up to 11–13 different activities, with energy expenditure estimated using MET-hours* per week.
*Metabolic Equivalent of Task. This is a way of standardizing all exercises per how much energy is expended into them.
Notably, higher total physical activity was linked to a lower risk of death, but benefits plateaued at around 20 weekly MET-hours, suggesting that after that point, more is not necessarily better.
Some activities were better than others for health outcomes: most activities were associated with lower all-cause mortality, but the strongest associations were seen for walking, racquet sports, rowing, callisthenics, weight training, running, jogging, and stair climbing, while swimming—surprisingly—showed no clear association.
We may hypothesize that swimming didn’t score so well as it’s neither particularly strong resistance work, nor is it necessarily training movements that are used a lot in daily life, and thus keeping that mobility.
It can do!
- For example, front crawl and backstroke are excellent for shoulder mobility, but…
- if you’re spending your swimming time on breast stroke, that’s half a range of motion, and…
- if you’re just sculling, that’s nothing at all beyond some mild cardio work.
Here’s the good part, though: engaging in a broader mix of activities was associated with a 19% lower risk of death from all causes, even after adjusting for total activity volume.
You can read the paper in full, here: Physical activity types, variety, and mortality: results from two prospective cohort studies
How to benefit the most
Clearly, what’s necessary here is to enjoy a wider variety of physical activities. And as the above science shows, you don’t have to do a lot at once!
See also: How Useful Is “Exercise Snacking”, Really?
If you do want to do a lot at once, then we recommend considering High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), but carefully:
How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body) ← important, because the “high-intensity” part can cause problems for some people, if not undertaken attentively
Which can further be expanded to: HIIT, But Make It HIRT ← high-intensity resistance training, undertaken per HIIT principles
On which note, do see: Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older) ← for more on resistance training methods in general
If you like that idea but don’t like gyms and weights and such, then don’t worry, we’ve got you covered: Resistance Beyond Weights
And finally, if you don’t like exercise in general, then check out these: No-Exercise Exercise!
Enjoy!
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