Statin and Antidepressant Side Effects
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.
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
Side effects of statins, are they worth it? Depression, are antidepressants worth it?
About statins, that depends a lot on you, your circumstances, and—as it happens—your gender. We covered this in a main feature recently, but a short answer is: for most people, they may not be the best first choice, and could even make things worse. For some people, however, they really are just what’s needed.
- Factors that make them more likely better for you: being a man, or having atherosclerosis
- Factors that make them more likely worse for you: being a woman in general
Check out the main feature we did: Statins: His & Hers?
As for antidepressants? That depends a lot on you, your physiology, your depression, your circumstances, and more. We’ll definitely do a main feature on that sometime soon, as there’s a lot that most people don’t know!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
The Doctor’s Kitchen: Healthy High Protein – by Dr. Rupy Aujla
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 previously reviewed another recipe book by the same author, the original “The Doctor’s Kitchen”, and this time it’s more of the same but with a focus on, as the title says, high protein—delivered healthily.
Before the recipes, we get an overview of the science of protein metabolism, how much we need, and how we can get it from various foods. Because of the emphasis on health, meat isn’t high on the list—but the recipes aren’t all vegan, or even all vegetarian, although there is certainly a “plants-forward” focus throughout.
Dr. Aujla not being vegan himself is probably a limiting factor on the diversity of the vegan dishes, as he says “if you don’t like soy products or are allergic, you will certainly struggle to get enough protein”. Which is very simply not remotely true (this vegan reviewer gets most of her protein from beans, lentils, and nuts), but he seems to believe it, and for this reason we see a lot of tofu, tempeh, and so forth in the recipes.
His lack of diversity of experience with vegan cooking notwithstanding, the recipes he does present are very good, so it’s not a problem so much as a limitation, that’s all.
When he says “healthy high protein”, he not only means that the protein sources will be healthy, but also the rest of the meal too. And, a lot of people think of “healthy” as being “not unhealthy”, but Dr. Aujla cares a lot about positive health—adding in ingredients with many vital nutrients, ensuring that each dish is gut-healthy, anti-inflammatory, and so forth. All these things add up to “healthy”. In short, “healthy” is not merely the absence of unhealthy ingredients, but rather is a matter of vibrant inclusion of things that will actively uplift our health and fortify us against disease.
Bottom line: if you’d like to cook with plants more, want to get plenty of protein, and do not dislike soy or have an allergy, then this book will be a fine addition to your kitchen.
Click here to check out The Doctor’s Kitchen: Healthy High Protein, and expand your repertoire!
Share This Post
-
How The FDA Can Let Potentially Dangerous Chemicals Into Your Food
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.
If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you might have noticed the FDA being more than a bit beleaguered this year, for example:
After The Recent Wave Of Food Recalls…
So, it’s not the all-powerful regulatory titan it was once popularly considered, and its resources are getting thinner.
This is part of why we are seeing such stories as: Is Your Medication Made in a Contaminated Factory? The FDA Won’t Tell You.
So, what’s going on with food ingredients?
Hear no, see no, speak no…
The crux of this comes in two parts:
- Companies rely on the “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) labelling system, created in the 1950s, which allows ingredients considered obviously safe (such as salt or vinegar) to be used without formal FDA review.
- Manufacturers can declare their own ingredients safe without notifying the FDA, meaning regulators may never examine the scientific evidence behind some additives.
So in other words, there are a lot of cases where FDA didn’t find a problem with the ingredients because they simply didn’t look!
You may be wondering whether this is more of an issue for obscure brands, but as it turns out substances lacking FDA review appear in foods from brands sold at retailers such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.
So, how much of an issue is this?
It can vary wildly. For example, food products containing tara flour, previously treated as GRAS, were linked to more than 300 illnesses and 113 hospitalizations over the course of a year.
And there are a lot of mysteries, for example, a review of US regulatory records by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found 111 food substances used in common products that were never reviewed for safety by the FDA.
Of those, cross-referencing with the USDA FoodData Central database (that’s what we use for our “This or That” comparisons, by the way, we pull the numbers from that database), found that 49 of those 111 substances had not even been reported to regulators. That is to say, they went a level lower than liberally self-certifying as safe, and just went with a “what they don’t know can’t hurt them” approach, and just proceeded as if they weren’t putting them in their foods.
Sometimes, the ingredient itself is not the problem, ontologically. Rather, it’s what’s happened to it along the way!
For example the EWG report identified 22 plant extracts—themselves perfectly innocuous and even healthful things such as green tea, mushroom, cinnamon, cocoa, and aloe vera—whose extraction processes can alter their chemistry and can introduce solvents or toxins.
So it matters not just what the thing is, but also how it got to be there.
You can read about this from the EWG itself, here: Secret GRAS: How 100+ food chemicals bypassed government safety review
And for background context: Almost all new food chemicals greenlighted by industry, not the FDA ← this is from last year
Want to keep yourself safe?
Or for a much deeper dive into the broader topic of avoiding the toxins the industrial world is keen to throw our way, you might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:
Healthy Living in a Contaminated World – by Dr. Donald Hoernschemeyer
You might also consider this simpler, practical guide: Unprocess Your Life – by Rob Hobson
Take care!
Share This Post
-
How Not To Die – by Dr. Michael Greger
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 previously reviewed this book some years ago, but we’re revisiting it now because:
- It really is a book that should be in every healthspan-enjoyer’s collection
- Our book reviews back then were not as comprehensive as now (though we still generally try to fit into the “it takes about one minute to read this review” idea, sometimes we’ll spend a little extra time).
Dr. Greger (of “Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen” fame) outlines for us in cold hard facts and stats what’s most likely to be our cause of death. While this is not a cheery premise for a book, he then sets out to work back from there—what could have prevented those specific things?
Thus, while the book doesn’t confer immortality (the title is not “how to not die”, after all), it does teach us how not to die—i.e, from heart disease, lung diseases, brain diseases, digestive cancers, infections, diabetes, high blood pressure, liver disease, blood cancers, kidney disease, breast cancer, suicidal depression, prostate cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and even iatrogenic causes.
This it does with a lot of solid science, explained for the layperson, and/but without holding back when it comes to big words, and a lot of them, at that. If you want to add in daily exercises, just lifting the book could be a start; weighing in at 678 pages, it’s an information-dense tome that’s more likely to be sifted through than read cover-to-cover.
The style is thus dense science somewhat editorialized for lay readability, and well-evidenced with around 3,000 citations. That’s not a typo; there are 178 pages of bibliography at the back with about 15–20 scientific references per page.
In terms of practical use, he does also devote chapters to that, it’s not just all textbook. Indeed, he discusses the reasonings behind the items, portion sizes, and quantities of his “daily dozen” foods, so that the reader will understand how much bang-for-buck they deliver, and then it’ll seem a lot less like an arbitrary list, and more likely to be adopted and maintained.
Bottom line: if you care about not getting life-threatening illnesses (which at the end of the day, come to most people at some point), then this book is a must-read.
Share This Post
Related Posts
-
Superfood Baked Apples
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.
Superfoods, and super-tasty. This is a healthy twist on a classic; your blood sugars will thank you for choosing this tasty sweet delight. It’s also packed with nutrients!
You will need
- 2 large firm baking apples, cored but not peeled
- 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
- 3 tbsp goji berries, rehydrated (soak them in warm water for 10–15minutes and drain)
- 1 tbsp honey, or maple syrup, per your preference (this writer is also a fan of aged balsamic vinegar for its strong flavor and much milder sweetness. If you don’t like things to be too sweet, this is the option for you)
- 2 tsp ground sweet cinnamon
- 1 tsp ground ginger
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Preheat the oven to 180℃ / 350℉ / gas mark 4
2) Mix the chopped walnuts with the goji berries and the honey (or whatever you used instead of the honey) as well as the sweet cinnamon and the ginger.
3) Place the apples in shallow baking dish, and use the mixture you just made to stuff their holes.
4) Add 1/2 cup water to the dish, around the apples. Cover gently with foil, and bake until soft.
Tip: check them every 20 minutes; they may be done in 40 or it may take 60; in honesty it depends on your oven. If unsure, cook them for longer at a lower temperature.
5) Serve warm.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose C’s
- Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!
- Goji Berries: Which Benefits Do They Really Have?
- The Sugary Food That Lowers Blood Sugars
- Honey vs Maple Syrup – Which is Healthier?
- A Tale Of Two Cinnamons ← this is important, about why we chose the sweet cinnamon
- Ginger Does A Lot More Than You Think
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
How Much Does A Vegan Diet Affect Biological Aging?
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.
Slow Your Aging, One Meal At A Time
This one’s a straightforward one today, and the ““life hack” can be summed up:
Enjoy a vegan diet to enjoy younger biological age.
First, what is biological age?
Biological age is not one number, but a collection of numbers, as per different biomarkers of aging, including:
- Visual markers of aging (e.g. wrinkles, graying hair)
- Performative markers of aging (e.g. mobility tests)
- Internal functional markers of aging (e.g. tests for cognitive decline, eyesight, hearing, etc)
- Cellular markers of aging (e.g. telomere length)
We wrote more about this here:
Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?
A vegan diet may well impact multiple of those categories of aging, but today we’re highlighting a study (hot off the press; published only a few days ago!) that looks at its effect on that last category: cellular markers of aging.
There’s an interesting paradox here, because this category is:
- the most easily ignorable; because we all feel it if our knees are giving out or our skin is losing elasticity, but who notices if telomeres’ T/S ratio changed by 0.0407? ← the researchers, that’s who, as this difference is very significant
- the most far-reaching in its impact, because cellular aging in turn has an effect on all the other markers of aging
Second, how much difference does it make, and how do we know?
The study was an eight-week interventional identical twin study. This means several things, to start with:
- Eight weeks is a rather short period of time to accumulate cellular aging, let alone for an intervention to accumulate a significant difference in cellular aging—but it did. So, just imagine what difference it might make in a year or ten!
- Doing an interventional study with identical twin pairs already controlled for a lot of factors, that are usually confounding variables in population / cohort / longitudinal / observational studies.
Factors that weren’t controlled for by default by using identical twins, were controlled for in the experiment design. For example, twin pairs were rejected if one or more twin in a given pair already had medical conditions that could affect the outcome:
❝Inclusion criteria involved participants aged ≥18, part of a willing twin pair, with BMI <40, and LDL-C <190 mg/dL. Exclusions included uncontrolled hypertension, metabolic disease, diabetes, cancer, heart/renal/liver disease, pregnancy, lactation, and medication use affecting body weight or energy.
Eligibility was determined via online screening, followed by an orientation meeting and in-person clinic visit. Randomization occurred only after completing baseline visits, dietary recalls, and questionnaires for both twins❞
~ Dr. Varun Dwaraka et al. ← there’s a lot of “et al.” to this one; the paper had 16 collaborating authors!
As to the difference it made over the course of the 8 weeks…
❝Various measures of epigenetic age acceleration (PC GrimAge, PC PhenoAge, DunedinPACE) were assessed, along with system-specific effects (Inflammation, Heart, Hormone, Liver, and Metabolic).
Distinct responses were observed, with the vegan cohort exhibiting significant decreases in overall epigenetic age acceleration, aligning with anti-aging effects of plant-based diets. Diet-specific shifts were noted in the analysis of methylation surrogates, demonstrating the influence of diet on complex trait prediction through DNA methylation markers.❞
~ Ibid.
You can read the whole paper here (it goes into a lot more detail than we have room to here, and also gives infographics, charts, numbers, the works):
Were they just eating more healthily, though?
Well, arguably yes, as the results show, but to be clear:
The omnivorous diet compared to the vegan diet in this study was also controlled; both groups were given a healthy meal plan for their respective diet. So this wasn’t a case of “any omnivorous diet vs healthy vegan diet”, but rather “healthy omnivorous diet vs healthy vegan diet”.
Again, the paper itself has the full details—a short version is that it involved a healthy meal kit delivery service, followed by ongoing dietician involvement in an equal and carefully-controlled fashion.
So, aside from that one group had an omnivorous meal plan and the other vegan, both groups received the same level of “healthy eating” support, guidance, and oversight.
But isn’t [insert your preferred animal product here] healthy?
Quite possibly! For general health, general scientific consensus is that eating at least mostly plants is best, red meat is bad, poultry is neutral in moderation, fish is good in moderation, dairy is good in moderation if fermented, eggs are good in moderation if not fried.
This study looked at the various biomarkers of aging that we listed, and not every possible aspect of health—there’s more science yet to be done, and the researchers themselves are calling for it.
It also bears mentioning that for some (relatively few, but not insignificantly few) people, extant health conditions may make a vegan diet unhealthy or otherwise untenable. Do speak with your own doctor and/or dietician if unsure.
See also: Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy?
We would hypothesize, by the way, that the anti-aging benefits of a vegan diet are probably proportional to abstention from animal products—meaning that even if you simply have some “vegan days”, while still consuming animal products other days, you’ll still get benefit for the days you abstained. That’s just our hypothesis though.
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Lychees vs Strawberries – Which is Healthier?
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.
Our Verdict
When comparing lychees to strawberries, we picked the strawberries.
Why?
Strawberries enjoy modest to strong wins in each category:
In terms of macros, lychees have more carbs, while strawberries have more fiber, winning.
In the category of vitamins, lychees have more of vitamins B2, B3, B6, and C, while strawberries have more of vitamins A, B1, B7, B9, E, and K, winning this round too.
Looking at minerals, lychees have more copper, phosphorus, potassium, and selenium, while strawberries have more calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, and zinc, once gain winning.
In other considerations, strawberries have more polyphenols, which is one more win.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall in for strawberries, but do enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Are You Getting The Right Kinds Of Flavonoids?
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
