How a Friend’s Death Turned Colorado Teens Into Anti-Overdose Activists

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Gavinn McKinney loved Nike shoes, fireworks, and sushi. He was studying Potawatomi, one of the languages of his Native American heritage. He loved holding his niece and smelling her baby smell. On his 15th birthday, the Durango, Colorado, teen spent a cold December afternoon chopping wood to help neighbors who couldn’t afford to heat their homes.

McKinney almost made it to his 16th birthday. He died of fentanyl poisoning at a friend’s house in December 2021. His friends say it was the first time he tried hard drugs. The memorial service was so packed people had to stand outside the funeral home.

Now, his peers are trying to cement their friend’s legacy in state law. They recently testified to state lawmakers in support of a bill they helped write to ensure students can carry naloxone with them at all times without fear of discipline or confiscation. School districts tend to have strict medication policies. Without special permission, Colorado students can’t even carry their own emergency medications, such as an inhaler, and they are not allowed to share them with others.

“We realized we could actually make a change if we put our hearts to it,” said Niko Peterson, a senior at Animas High School in Durango and one of McKinney’s friends who helped write the bill. “Being proactive versus being reactive is going to be the best possible solution.”

Individual school districts or counties in California, Maryland, and elsewhere have rules expressly allowing high school students to carry naloxone. But Jon Woodruff, managing attorney at the Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association, said he wasn’t aware of any statewide law such as the one Colorado is considering. Woodruff’s Washington, D.C.-based organization researches and drafts legislation on substance use.

Naloxone is an opioid antagonist that can halt an overdose. Available over the counter as a nasal spray, it is considered the fire extinguisher of the opioid epidemic, for use in an emergency, but just one tool in a prevention strategy. (People often refer to it as “Narcan,” one of the more recognizable brand names, similar to how tissues, regardless of brand, are often called “Kleenex.”)

The Biden administration last year backed an ad campaign encouraging young people to carry the emergency medication.

Most states’ naloxone access laws protect do-gooders, including youth, from liability if they accidentally harm someone while administering naloxone. But without school policies explicitly allowing it, the students’ ability to bring naloxone to class falls into a gray area.

Ryan Christoff said that in September 2022 fellow staff at Centaurus High School in Lafayette, Colorado, where he worked and which one of his daughters attended at the time, confiscated naloxone from one of her classmates.

“She didn’t have anything on her other than the Narcan, and they took it away from her,” said Christoff, who had provided the confiscated Narcan to that student and many others after his daughter nearly died from fentanyl poisoning. “We should want every student to carry it.”

Boulder Valley School District spokesperson Randy Barber said the incident “was a one-off and we’ve done some work since to make sure nurses are aware.” The district now encourages everyone to consider carrying naloxone, he said.

Community’s Devastation Turns to Action

In Durango, McKinney’s death hit the community hard. McKinney’s friends and family said he didn’t do hard drugs. The substance he was hooked on was Tapatío hot sauce — he even brought some in his pocket to a Rockies game.

After McKinney died, people started getting tattoos of the phrase he was known for, which was emblazoned on his favorite sweatshirt: “Love is the cure.” Even a few of his teachers got them. But it was classmates, along with their friends at another high school in town, who turned his loss into a political movement.

“We’re making things happen on behalf of him,” Peterson said.

The mortality rate has spiked in recent years, with more than 1,500 other children and teens in the U.S. dying of fentanyl poisoning the same year as McKinney. Most youth who die of overdoses have no known history of taking opioids, and many of them likely thought they were taking prescription opioids like OxyContin or Percocet — not the fake prescription pills that increasingly carry a lethal dose of fentanyl.

“Most likely the largest group of teens that are dying are really teens that are experimenting, as opposed to teens that have a long-standing opioid use disorder,” said Joseph Friedman, a substance use researcher at UCLA who would like to see schools provide accurate drug education about counterfeit pills, such as with Stanford’s Safety First curriculum.

Allowing students to carry a low-risk, lifesaving drug with them is in many ways the minimum schools can do, he said.

“I would argue that what the schools should be doing is identifying high-risk teens and giving them the Narcan to take home with them and teaching them why it matters,” Friedman said.

Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, Friedman identified Colorado as a hot spot for high school-aged adolescent overdose deaths, with a mortality rate more than double that of the nation from 2020 to 2022.

“Increasingly, fentanyl is being sold in pill form, and it’s happening to the largest degree in the West,” said Friedman. “I think that the teen overdose crisis is a direct result of that.”

If Colorado lawmakers approve the bill, “I think that’s a really important step,” said Ju Nyeong Park, an assistant professor of medicine at Brown University, who leads a research group focused on how to prevent overdoses. “I hope that the Colorado Legislature does and that other states follow as well.”

Park said comprehensive programs to test drugs for dangerous contaminants, better access to evidence-based treatment for adolescents who develop a substance use disorder, and promotion of harm reduction tools are also important. “For example, there is a national hotline called Never Use Alone that anyone can call anonymously to be supervised remotely in case of an emergency,” she said.

Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands

Many Colorado school districts are training staff how to administer naloxone and are stocking it on school grounds through a program that allows them to acquire it from the state at little to no cost. But it was clear to Peterson and other area high schoolers that having naloxone at school isn’t enough, especially in rural places.

“The teachers who are trained to use Narcan will not be at the parties where the students will be using the drugs,” he said.

And it isn’t enough to expect teens to keep it at home.

“It’s not going to be helpful if it’s in somebody’s house 20 minutes outside of town. It’s going to be helpful if it’s in their backpack always,” said Zoe Ramsey, another of McKinney’s friends and a senior at Animas High School.

“We were informed it was against the rules to carry naloxone, and especially to distribute it,” said Ilias “Leo” Stritikus, who graduated from Durango High School last year.

But students in the area, and their school administrators, were uncertain: Could students get in trouble for carrying the opioid antagonist in their backpacks, or if they distributed it to friends? And could a school or district be held liable if something went wrong?

He, along with Ramsey and Peterson, helped form the group Students Against Overdose. Together, they convinced Animas, which is a charter school, and the surrounding school district, to change policies. Now, with parental permission, and after going through training on how to administer it, students may carry naloxone on school grounds.

Durango School District 9-R spokesperson Karla Sluis said at least 45 students have completed the training.

School districts in other parts of the nation have also determined it’s important to clarify students’ ability to carry naloxone.

“We want to be a part of saving lives,” said Smita Malhotra, chief medical director for Los Angeles Unified School District in California.

Los Angeles County had one of the nation’s highest adolescent overdose death tallies of any U.S. county: From 2020 to 2022, 111 teens ages 14 to 18 died. One of them was a 15-year-old who died in a school bathroom of fentanyl poisoning. Malhotra’s district has since updated its policy on naloxone to permit students to carry and administer it.

“All students can carry naloxone in our school campuses without facing any discipline,” Malhotra said. She said the district is also doubling down on peer support and hosting educational sessions for families and students.

Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland took a similar approach. School staff had to administer naloxone 18 times over the course of a school year, and five students died over the course of about one semester.

When the district held community forums on the issue, Patricia Kapunan, the district’s medical officer, said, “Students were very vocal about wanting access to naloxone. A student is very unlikely to carry something in their backpack which they think they might get in trouble for.”

So it, too, clarified its policy. While that was underway, local news reported that high school students found a teen passed out, with purple lips, in the bathroom of a McDonald’s down the street from their school, and used Narcan to revive them. It was during lunch on a school day.

“We can’t Narcan our way out of the opioid use crisis,” said Kapunan. “But it was critical to do it first. Just like knowing 911.”

Now, with the support of the district and county health department, students are training other students how to administer naloxone. Jackson Taylor, one of the student trainers, estimated they trained about 200 students over the course of three hours on a recent Saturday.

“It felt amazing, this footstep toward fixing the issue,” Taylor said.

Each trainee left with two doses of naloxone.

This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. 

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

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  • Carbonated Water: For Weight Loss, Satiety, Or Just Gas?

    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.

    There are two main mechanisms of action by which sparkling water is considered to help satiety and/or weight loss; they are:

    1. It “fills us up” such that we feel fuller sooner, and thus eat less, and thus (all other things being equal) perhaps lose weight
    2. The carbon dioxide is absorbed into the bloodstream, where (as a matter of chemistry) it improves glucose metabolism, thus lowering blood sugars and indirectly leading (potentially) to weight loss, but even if not, lowered blood sugars are good for most people most of the time, right?

    However, there are just a few problems:

    Full of gas?

    Many people self-report enjoying sparkling water as a way to feel fuller while fasting (or even while eating). However, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, so, here be data… Ish:

    ❝In order to determine whether such satiating effects occur through oral carbonic stimulation alone, we conducted modified sham-feeding (SF) tests (carbonated water ingestion (CW), water ingestion (W), carbonated water sham-feeding (CW-SF), and water sham-feeding (W-SF)), employing an equivalent volume and standardized temperature of carbonated and plain water, in a randomized crossover design.

    Thirteen young women began fasting at 10 p.m. on the previous night and were loaded with each sample (15ºC, 250 mL) at 9 a.m. on separate days. Electrogastrography (EGG) recordings were obtained from 20 min before to 45 min after the loading to determine the power and frequency of the gastric myoelectrical activity. Appetite was assessed using visual analog scales. After ingestion, significantly increased fullness and decreased hunger ratings were observed in the CW group. After the load, transiently but significantly increased fullness as well as decreased hunger ratings were observed in the CW-SF group. The powers of normogastria (2-4 cpm) and tachygastria (4-9 cpm) showed significant increases in the CW and W groups, but not in the CW-SF and W-SF groups. The peak frequency of normogastria tended to shift toward a higher band in the CW group, whereas it shifted toward a lower band in the CW-SF group, indicating a different EGG rhythm.

    Our results suggest that CO2-induced oral stimulation is solely responsible for the feeling of satiety.❞

    ~ Dr. Maki Suzuki et al.

    Now, that’s self-reported, and a sample size of 13, so it’s not the most airtight science ever, but it is at least science. Here’s the paper, by the way:

    Oral Carbonation Attenuates Feeling of Hunger and Gastric Myoelectrical Activity in Young Women

    Here’s another small study with 8 people, which found that still and sparkling water had the exact same effect:

    Effect of carbonated water on gastric emptying and intragastric meal distribution

    However, drinking water (still or sparkling) with a meal will not have anywhere near the same effect for satiety as consuming food that has a high water-content.

    See also: Some Surprising Truths About Hunger And Satiety ← our main feature in which we examine the science of volumetrics, including a study that shows how water incorporated into a food (but not served with a food) decreases caloric intake.

    As an aside, one difference that carbonation can make is to increase ghrelin levels—that’s the hunger hormone (the satiety hormone is leptin, by the way). This one’s a rat study, but it seems reasonable that the same will be true of humans:

    Carbon dioxide in carbonated beverages induces ghrelin release and increased food consumption in male rats: implications on the onset of obesity

    …which is worth bearing in mind even if you yourself are not, in fact, a male rat.

    The glucose guzzler?

    This one has simply been the case of a study being misrepresented, for example here:

    Fizzy water might aid weight loss by providing a small boost to glucose uptake and metabolism

    The idea is that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the blood mean faster glucose metabolism, which is technically true. Now, often “technically true” is the best kind of true, but not here, because it’s simply not useful.

    In short, we produce so much carbon dioxide as part of our normal respiratory processes, that any carbon dioxide we might consume in a carbonated water is barely a blip in the graph.

    Oh, and that article we just linked? Even within the article, despite running with that headline, the actual scientists quoted are saying such things as:

    ❝While there is a hypothetical link between carbonated water and glucose metabolism, this has yet to be tested in well-designed human intervention studies❞

    ~ Professor Sumantra Ray

    Note: the word “hypothetical” means “one level lower than theoretical”. This is very far from being a conclusion.

    And the study itself? Wasn’t even about carbonated water, it was about kidney dialysis and how the carbon dioxide content can result in hypoglycemia:

    The mechanism of hypoglycemia caused by hemodialysis

    …which got referenced in this paper (not a study):

    Can carbonated water support weight loss?

    …and even that concluded:

    ❝CO2 in carbonated water may promote weight loss by enhancing glucose uptake and metabolism in red blood cells.

    However, the amount is so small that it is difficult to expect weight loss effects solely from the CO2 in carbonated water.

    Drinking carbonated water may also affect blood glucose measurements.❞

    Note: the word “may”, when used by a scientist and in the absence of any stronger claims, means “we haven’t ruled out the possibility”.

    What breaking news that is.

    Stop the press! No, really, stop it!

    So… What does work?

    There are various ways of going about actually hacking hunger (and they stack; i.e. you can use multiple methods and get cumulative results), and we wrote about them here:

    Hack Your Hunger

    Enjoy!

    Share This Post

  • Why You Probably Need More Sleep

    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.

    Sleep: yes, you really do still need it!

    We asked you how much sleep you usually get, and got the above-pictured, below-described set of responses:

    • A little of a third of all respondents selected the option “< 7 hours”
    • However, because respondents also selected options such as < 6 hours, < 5 hours, and < 4 hours, so if we include those in the tally, the actual total percentage of respondents who reported getting under 7 hours, is actually more like 62%, or just under two thirds of all respondents.
    • Nine respondents, which was about 5% of the total, reported usually getting under 4 hours sleep
    • A little over quarter of respondents reported usually getting between 7 and 8 hours sleep
    • Fifteen respondents, which was a little under 10% of the total, reported usually getting between 8 and 9 hours of sleep
    • Three respondents, which was a little under 2% of the total, reported getting over 9 hours of sleep
    • In terms of the classic “you should get 7–9 hours sleep”, approximately a third of respondents reported getting this amount.

    You need to get 7–9 hours sleep: True or False?

    True! Unless you have a (rare!) mutated ADRB1 gene, which reduces that.

    The way to know whether you have this, without genomic testing to know for sure, is: do you regularly get under 6.5 hours sleep, and yet continue to go through life bright-eyed and bushy-tailed? If so, you probably have that gene. If you experience daytime fatigue, brain fog, and restlessness, you probably don’t.

    About that mutated ADRB1 gene:

    NIH | Gene identified in people who need little sleep

    Quality of sleep matters as much as duration, and a lot of studies use the “RU-Sated” framework, which assesses six key dimensions of sleep that have been consistently associated with better health outcomes. These are:

    • regularity / usual hours
    • satisfaction with sleep
    • alertness during waking hours
    • timing of sleep
    • efficiency of sleep
    • duration of sleep

    But, that doesn’t mean that you can skimp on the last one if the others are in order. In fact, getting a good 7 hours sleep can reduce your risk of getting a cold by three or four times (compared with six or fewer hours):

    Behaviorally Assessed Sleep and Susceptibility to the Common Cold

    ^This study was about the common cold, but you may be aware there are more serious respiratory viruses freely available, and you don’t want those, either.

    Napping is good for the health: True or False?

    True or False, depending on how you’re doing it!

    If you’re trying to do it to sleep less in total (per polyphasic sleep scheduling), then no, this will not work in any sustainable fashion and will be ruinous to the health. We did a Mythbusting Friday special on specifically this, a while back:

    Could Just Two Hours Sleep Per Day Be Enough?

    PS: you might remember Betteridge’s Law of Headlines

    If you’re doing it as a energy-boosting supplement to a reasonable night’s sleep, napping can indeed be beneficial to the health, and can give benefits such as:

    However! There is still a right and a wrong way to go about it, and we wrote about this previously, for a Saturday Life Hacks edition of 10almonds:

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    As we get older, we need less sleep: True or False

    False, with one small caveat.

    The small caveat: children and adolescents need 9–12 hours sleep because, uncredited as it goes, they are doing some seriously impressive bodybuilding, and that is exhausting to the body. So, an adult (with a normal lifestyle, who is not a bodybuilder) will tend to need less sleep than a child/adolescent.

    But, the statement “As we get older, we need less sleep” is generally taken to mean “People in the 65+ age bracket need less sleep than younger adults”, and this popular myth is based on anecdotal observational evidence: older people tend to sleep less (as our survey above shows! For any who aren’t aware, our readership is heavily weighted towards the 60+ demographic), and still continue functioning, after all.

    Just because we survive something with a degree of resilience doesn’t mean it’s good for us.

    In fact, there can be serious health risks from not getting enough sleep in later years, for example:

    Sleep deficiency promotes Alzheimer’s disease development and progression

    Want to get better sleep?

    What gets measured, gets done. Sleep tracking apps can be a really good tool for getting one’s sleep on a healthier track. We compared and contrasted some popular ones:

    The Head-To-Head Of Google and Apple’s Top Apps For Getting Your Head Down

    Take good care of yourself!

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  • Finding Peace at the End of Life – by Henry Fersko-Weiss

    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.

    This is not the most cheery book we’ve reviewed, but it is an important one. From its first chapter, with “a tale of two deaths”, one that went as well as can be reasonably expected, and the other one not so much, it presents a lot of choices.

    The book is not prescriptive in its advice regarding how to deal with these choices, but rather, investigative. It’s thought-provoking, and asks questions—tacitly and overtly.

    While the subtitle says “for families and caregivers”, it’s as much worth when it comes to managing one’s own mortality, too, by the way.

    As for the scope of the book, it covers everything from terminal diagnosis, through the last part of life, to the death itself, to all that goes on shortly afterwards.

    Stylewise, it’s… We’d call it “easy-reading” for style, but obviously the content is very heavy, so you might want to read it a bit at a time anyway, depending on how sensitive to such topics you are.

    Bottom line: this book is not exactly a fun read, but it’s a very worthwhile one, and a good way to avoid regrets later.

    Click here to check out Finding Peace at the End of Life, and prepare for that thing you probably can’t put off forever

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  • Do Try This At Home: The 12-Week Brain Fitness Program

    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.

    12 Weeks To Measurably Boost Your Brain

    This is Dr. Majid Fotuhi. From humble beginnings (being smuggled out of Iran in 1980 to avoid death in the war), he went on (after teaching himself English, French, and German, hedging his bets as he didn’t know for sure where life would lead him) to get his MD from Harvard Medical School and his PhD in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University. Since then, he’s had a decades-long illustrious career in neurology and neurophysiology.

    What does he want us to know?

    The Brain Fitness Program

    This is not, by the way, something he’s selling. Rather, it was a landmark 12-week study in which 127 people aged 60–80, of which 63% female, all with a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment, underwent an interventional trial—in other words, a 12-week brain fitness course.

    After it, 84% of the participants showed statistically significant improvements in cognitive function.

    Not only that, but of those who underwent MRI testing before and after (not possible for everyone due to practical limitations), 71% showed either no further deterioration of the hippocampus, or actual growth above the baseline volume of the hippocampus (that’s good, and it means functionally the memory center of the brain has been rejuvenated).

    You can read a little more about the study here:

    A Personalized 12-week “Brain Fitness Program” for Improving Cognitive Function and Increasing the Volume of Hippocampus in Elderly with Mild Cognitive Impairment

    As for what the program consisted of, and what Dr. Fotuhi thus recommends for everyone…

    Cognitive stimulation

    This is critical, so we’re going to spend most time on this one—the others we can give just a quick note and a pointer.

    In the study this came in several forms and had the benefit of neurofeedback technology, but he says we can replicate most of the effects by simply doing something cognitively stimulating. Whatever challenges your brain is good, but for maximum effect, it should involve the language faculties of the brain, since these are what tend to get hit most by age-related cognitive decline, and are also what tends to have the biggest impact on life when lost.

    If you lose your keys, that’s an inconvenience, but if you can’t communicate what is distressing you, or understand what someone is explaining to you, that’s many times worse—and that kind of thing is a common reality for many people with dementia.

    To keep the lights brightly lit in that part of the brain: language-learning is good, at whatever level suits you personally. In other words: there’s a difference between entry-level Duolingo Spanish, and critically analysing Rumi’s poetry in the original Persian, so go with whatever is challenging and/but accessible for you—just like you wouldn’t go to the gym for the first time and try to deadlift 500lbs, but you also probably wouldn’t do curls with the same 1lb weights every day for 10 years.

    In other words: progressive overloading is key, for the brain as well as for muscles. Start easy, but if you’re breezing through everything, it’s time to step it up.

    If for some reason you’re really set against the idea of learning another language, though, check out:

    Reading As A Cognitive Exercise ← there are specific tips here for ensuring your reading is (and remains) cognitively beneficial

    Mediterranean diet

    Shocking nobody, this is once again recommended. You might like to check out the brain-healthy “MIND” tweak to it, here:

    Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet ← it’s the fourth one

    Omega-3 supplementation

    Nothing complicated here. The brain needs a healthy balance of these fatty acids to function properly, and most people have an incorrect balance (too little omega-3 for the omega-6 present):

    What Omega-3 Fatty Acids Really Do For Us ← scroll to “against cognitive decline”

    Increasing fitness

    There’s a good rule of thumb: what’s healthy for your heart, is healthy for your brain. This is because, like every other organ in your body, the brain does not function well without good circulation bringing plenty of oxygen and nutrients, which means good cardiovascular health is necessary. The brain is extra sensitive to this because it’s a demanding organ in terms of how much stuff it needs delivering via blood, and also because of the (necessary; we’d die quickly and horribly without it) impediment of the blood-brain barrier, and the possibility of beta-amyloid plaques and similar woes (they will build up if circulation isn’t good).

    How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk ← number two on the list here

    Practising mindfulness medication

    This is also straightforward, but not to be underestimated or skipped over:

    No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

    Want to step it up? Check out:

    Meditation Games That You’ll Actually Enjoy

    Lastly…

    Dr. Fotuhi wants us to consider looking after our brain the same way we look after our teeth. No, he doesn’t want us to brush our brain, but he does want us to take small measurable actions multiple times per day, every day.

    You can’t just spend the day doing nothing but brushing your teeth for the entirety of January the 1st and then expect them to be healthy for the rest of the year; it doesn’t work like that—and it doesn’t work like that for the brain, either.

    So, make the habits, and keep them going

    Take care!

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  • Three Critical Kitchen Prescriptions

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    Three Critical Kitchen Prescriptions

    This is Dr. Saliha Mahmood-Ahmed. She’s a medical doctor—specifically, a gastroenterologist. She’s also a chef, and winner of the BBC’s MasterChef competition. So, from her gastroenterology day-job and her culinary calling, she has some expert insights to share on eating well!

    ❝Food and medicine are inextricably linked to one another, and it is an honour to be a doctor who specialises in digestive health and can both cook, and teach others to cook❞

    ~ Dr. Saliha Mahmood-Ahmed, after winning MasterChef and being asked if she’d quit medicine to be a full-time chef

    Dr. Mahmood-Ahmed’s 3 “Kitchen Prescriptions”

    They are:

    1. Cook, cook, cook
    2. Feed your gut bugs
    3. Do not diet

    Let’s take a look at each of those…

    Cook, cook, cook

    We’re the only species on Earth that cooks food. An easy knee-jerk response might be to think maybe we shouldn’t, then, but… We’ve been doing it for at least 30,000 years, which is about 1,500 generations, while a mere 100 generations is generally sufficient for small evolutionary changes. So, we’ve evolved this way now.

    More importantly in this context: we, ourselves, should cook our own food, at least per household.

    Not ready meals; we haven’t evolved for those (yet! Give it another few hundred generations maybe)

    Feed your gut bugs

    The friendly ones. Enjoy prebiotics, probiotics, and plenty of fiber—and then be mindful of what else you do or don’t eat. Feeding the friendly bacteria while starving the unfriendly ones may seem like a tricky task, but it actually can be quite easily understood and implemented. We did a main feature about this a few weeks ago:

    Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)

    Do not diet

    Dr. Mahmood-Ahmed is a strong critic of calorie-counting as a weight-loss strategy:

    Rather than focusing on the number of calories consumed, try focusing on introducing enough variety of food into your daily diet, and on fostering good microbial diversity within your gut.

    It’s a conceptual shift from restrictive weight loss, to prescriptive adding of things to one’s diet, with fostering diversity of microbiota as a top priority.

    This, too, she recommends be undertaken gently, though—making small, piecemeal, but sustainable improvements. Nobody can reasonably incorporate, say, 30 new fruits and vegetables into one’s diet in a week; it’s unrealistic, and more importantly, it’s unsustainable.

    Instead, consider just adding one new fruit or vegetable per shopping trip!

    Don’t Forget…

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  • Unleashing My Superpowers – by Dr. Patience Mpofu

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    Dr. Patience Mpofu is on a mission to provide women and girls with the inside-information, knowledge, resources, and strategies to break through the glass ceiling. She writes from her experience in STEM, but her lessons are applicable in any field.

    Her advices range from the internal (how to deal with imposter syndrome) to the external (how to overcome cultural biases); she also explains and illustrates the importance of both role models and mentors.

    While a lot of the book is half instruction manual, half memoir of her incredible life and career (to illustrate her points), and is well-worth reading—and/or perhaps worth gifting to a girl you know with ambitions in STEM?

    Grab a copy of Unleashing My Superpowers now!

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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