The Best Foods For Collagen Production

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Dr. Andrea Suarez gives us the low-down on collagen synthesis and maintenance. Collagen is the most abundant protein in our body, and it can be fairly described as “the stuff that holds us together”. It’s particularly important for joints and bones too, though many people’s focus on it is for the skin. Whatever your priorities, collagen levels are something it pays to be mindful of, as they usually drop quite sharply after a certain age. What certain age? Well, that depends a lot on you, and your diet and lifestyle. But it can start to decline from the age of 30 with often noticeable drop-offs in one’s mid-40s and again in one’s mid-60s.

Showing us what we’re made of

There’s a lot more to having good collagen levels than just how much collagen we consume (which for vegetarians/vegans, will be “none”, unless using the “except if for medical reasons” exemption, which is probably a little tenuous in the case of collagen but nevertheless it’s a possibility; this exemption is usually one that people use for, say, a nasal spray vaccine that contains gelatine, or a medicinal tablet that contains lactose, etc).

Rather, having good collagen levels is also a matter of what we eat that allows us to synthesize our own collagen (which includes: its ingredients, and various “helper” nutrients), as well as what dietary adjustments we make to avoid our extant collagen getting broken down, degraded, and generally lost.

Here’s what Dr. Suarez recommends:

Protein-rich foods (but watch out)

  • Protein is essential for collagen production.
  • Sources: fish, soy, lean meats (but not red meats, which—counterintuitively—degrade collagen), eggs, lentils.
  • Egg whites are high in lysine, vital for collagen synthesis.
  • Bone broth is a natural source of collagen.

Omega-3 fatty acids

  • Omega-3s are anti-inflammatory and protect skin collagen.
  • Sources: walnuts, chia seeds, flax seeds, fatty fish (e.g. mackerel, sardines).

Leafy greens

  • Leafy dark green vegetables (e.g. kale, spinach) are rich in vitamins C and B9.
  • Vitamin C is crucial for collagen synthesis and acts as an antioxidant.
  • Vitamin B9 supports skin cell division and DNA repair.

Red fruits & vegetables

  • Red fruits/vegetables (e.g. tomatoes, red bell peppers) contain lycopene, an antioxidant that protects collagen from UV damage (so, that aspect is mostly relevant for skin, but antioxidants are good things to have in all of the body in any case).

Orange-colored vegetables

  • Carrots and sweet potatoes are rich in vitamin A, which helps in collagen repair and synthesis.
  • Vitamin A is best from food, not supplements, to avoid potential toxicity.

Fruits rich in vitamin C

  • Citrus fruits, kiwi, and berries are loaded with vitamin C and antioxidants, essential for collagen synthesis and skin health.

Soy

  • Soy products (e.g. tofu, soybeans) contain isoflavones, which reduce inflammation and inhibit enzymes that degrade collagen.
  • Soy is associated with lower risks of chronic diseases.

Garlic

  • Garlic contains sulfur, taurine, and lipoic acid, important for collagen production and repair.

What to avoid:

  • Reduce foods high in advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which damage collagen and promote inflammation.
  • AGEs are found in fried, roasted, or grilled fatty proteinous foods (e.g. meat, including synthetic meat, and yes, including grass-fed nicely marketed meat—although processed meat such as bacon and sausages are even worse than steaks etc).
  • Switch to cooking methods like boiling or steaming to reduce AGE levels.
  • Processed foods, sugary pastries, and red meats contribute to collagen degradation.

General diet tips:

  • Incorporate more plant-based, antioxidant-rich foods.
  • Opt for slow cooking to reduce AGEs.
  • Since sustainability is key, choose foods you enjoy for a collagen-boosting diet that you won’t seem like a chore a month later.

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:

We Are Such Stuff As Fish Are Made Of ← our main feature research review about collagen

Take care!

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  • Healing Your Gut: Anastasia’s Journey and Tips
  • Tempeh vs Tofu – Which is Healthier?
    Tempeh trumps tofu with more protein, fiber, carbs, and similar fat and micronutrients. It’s the healthier choice—unless you’re counting calories.

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  • Is “Extra Virgin” Worth It?

    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.

    It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

    Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

    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 was wondering, is the health difference important between extra virgin olive oil and regular?❞

    Assuming that by “regular” you mean “virgin and still sold as a food product”, then there are health differences, but they’re not huge. Or at least: not nearly so big as the differences between those and other oils.

    Virgin olive oil (sometimes simply sold as “olive oil”, with no claims of virginity) has been extracted by the same means as extra virgin olive oil, that is to say: purely mechanical.

    The difference is that extra virgin olive oil comes from the first pressing*, so the free fatty acid content is slightly lower (later checked and validated and having to score under a 0.8% limit for “extra virgin” instead of 2% limit for a mere “virgin”).

    *Fun fact: in Arabic, extra virgin is called “البكر الممتاز“, literally “the amazing first-born”, because of this feature!

    It’s also slightly higher in mono-unsaturated fatty acids, which is a commensurately slight health improvement.

    It’s very slightly lower in saturated fats, which is an especially slight health improvement, as the saturated fats in olive oil are amongst the healthiest saturated fats one can consume.

    On which fats are which:

    The truth about fats: the good, the bad, and the in-between

    And our own previous discussion of saturated fats in particular:

    Can Saturated Fats Be Healthy?

    Probably the strongest extra health-benefit of extra virgin is that while that first pressing squeezes out oil with the lowest free fatty acid content, it squeezes out oil with the highest polyphenol content, along with other phytonutrients:

    Antioxidants in Extra Virgin Olive Oil and Table Olives: Connections between Agriculture and Processing for Health Choices

    If you enjoy olive oil, then springing for extra virgin is worth it if that’s not financially onerous, both for health reasons and taste.

    However, if mere “virgin” is what’s available, it’s no big deal to have that instead; it still has a very similar nutritional profile, and most of the same benefits.

    Don’t settle for less than “virgin”, though.

    While some virgin olive oils aren’t marked as such, if it says “refined” or “blended”, then skip it. These will have been extracted by chemical means and/or blended with completely different oils (e.g. canola, which has a very different nutritional profile), and sometimes with a dash of virgin or extra virgin, for the taste and/or so that they can claim in big writing on the label something like:

    a blend of
    EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL
    and other oils

    …despite having only a tiny amount of extra virgin olive oil in it.

    Different places have different regulations about what labels can claim.

    The main countries that produce olives (and the EU, which contains and/or directly trades with those) have this set of rules:

    International Olive Council: Designations and definitions of Olive Oils

    …which must be abided by or marketers face heavy fines and sanctions.

    In the US, the USDA has its own set of rules based on the above:

    USDA | Olive Oil and Olive-Pomace Oil Grades and Standards

    …which are voluntary (not protected by law), and marketers can pay to have their goods certified if they want.

    So if you’re in the US, look for the USDA certification or it really could be:

    • What the USDA calls “US virgin olive oil not fit for human consumption”, which in the IOC is called “lamp oil”*
    • crude pomace-oil (oil made from the last bit of olive paste and then chemically treated)
    • canola oil with a dash of olive oil
    • anything yellow and oily, really

    *This technically is virgin olive oil insofar as it was mechanically extracted, but with defects that prevent it from being sold as such, such as having a free fatty acid content above the cut-off, or just a bad taste/smell, or some sort of contamination.

    See also: Potential Health Benefits of Olive Oil and Plant Polyphenols

    (the above paper has a handy infographic if you scroll down just a little)

    Where can I get some?

    Your local supermarket, probably, but if you’d like to get some online, here’s an example product on Amazon for your convenience

    Enjoy!

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  • You May Have More Air Pollution In Your Home Than In The Street

    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.

    Certainly, gas stoves and heaters can cause indoor air pollution, with carbon monoxide (CO) being the main risk. Even if you have a CO alarm, the level at which it will go off is usually the “this will kill you tonight if you don’t do something about it soon” level, rather than the “this will slowly kill your brain cells but you’ll keep functioning otherwise, until one day you don’t” levels of CO.

    Still, do by all means have a CO alarm if you have anything in your house that can release CO!

    See also: Association Between Carbon Monoxide Intoxication and Incidence of Ischemic Stroke: A Retrospective Nested Case-Control Study in South Korea

    Fun fact about those stoves:

    ❝Just 1 kilogram of cooking fuel emits 10 quadrillion particles smaller than 3 nanometers, which matches or exceeds what’s emitted from cars with internal combustion engines.

    At that rate, you might be inhaling 10-100 times more of these sub-3 nanometer particles from cooking on a gas stove indoors than you would from car exhaust while standing on a busy street.❞

    ~ Ka‌yla Alb‌ert

    But today, we’re not here about that

    Rather, we are looking at some more innocent-seeming things, such as scented cleaning products and air fresheners. Notably, the biggest problem is often not even the cleaning chemicals themselves. Of course: please don’t breathe bleach fumes, etc.

    But that’s an obvious risk, and today we’re about the less obvious risks.

    So… What is the less obvious risk here?

    It’s the fragrances. The terpenes used to hold them react with ozone in the air, to create new nanoparticles. And, just like the nanoparticles from the stove, these can reach very high concentrations indoors, and suffice it to say, if you can smell the fragrance then you have the pollutants inside you.

    You can read about how badly different products score, here:

    Rapid Nucleation and Growth of Indoor Atmospheric Nanocluster Aerosol during the Use of Scented Volatile Chemical Products in Residential Buildings ← you’ll need to scroll down to the table with different cleaning products and air fresheners

    Further, the seemingly-harmless scented candle is, as it turns out, quite a menace too:

    ❝Full-scale emission experiments were conducted in the Purdue zEDGE Test House using a variety of scented candles (n = 5) and wax warmers/melts (n = 14) under different outdoor air exchange rates (AERs). Terpene concentrations were measured in real-time using a proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer (PTR-TOF-MS). PTR-TOF-MS measurements revealed that scented candle and wax warmer/melt products emit a variety of monoterpenes (C10H16) and oxygen-containing monoterpenoids (C10H14O, C10H16O, C10H18O, C10H20O), with peak concentrations in the range of 10−1 to 102 ppb. Monoterpene EFs were much greater for scented wax warmers/melts (C10H16 EFs ∼ 102 mg per g wax consumed) compared to scented candles (C10H16 EFs ∼ 10−1 to 100 mg per g wax consumed). Significant emissions of reactive terpenes from both products, along with nitrogen oxides (NO, NO2) from candles, depleted indoor ozone (O3) concentrations. Terpene iFs were similar between the two products (iFs ∼ 103 ppm) and increased with decreasing outdoor AER. Terpene iFs during concentration decay periods were similar to, or greater than, iFs during active emission periods for outdoor AERs ≤ 3.0 h−1.

    Overall, scented wax warmers/melts were found to release greater quantities of monoterpenes compared to other fragranced consumer products used in the home, including botanical disinfectants, hair care products, air fresheners, and scented sprays.❞

    ~ Dr. Emily Reidy et al.

    Read in full: Rapid Nucleation and Growth of Indoor Atmospheric Nanocluster Aerosol during the Use of Scented Volatile Chemical Products in Residential Buildings

    Put in fewer words: scented candles are bad, and wax melts (the kind with no flame, that one might easily expect to thus produce fewer emissions) are at least as bad if not worse, and both are even worse than cleaning products.

    Some of the same research team conducted further studies, because of this this, finding:

    ❝We performed field measurements in a residential test house to investigate atmospheric nanoparticle formation from scented wax melt use. We employed a high-resolution particle size magnifier-scanning mobility particle sizer (PSMPS) and a proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer (PTR-TOF-MS) for real-time monitoring of indoor atmospheric nanoparticle size distributions and terpene mixing ratios, respectively.

    Our findings reveal that terpenes released from scented wax melts react with indoor atmospheric ozone (O3) to initiate new particle formation (NPF) events, resulting in significant indoor atmospheric nanoparticle concentrations (>106 cm–3) comparable to those emitted by combustion-based scented candles, gas stoves, diesel engines, and natural gas engines.

    We show that scented wax melt-initiated NPF events can result in significant respiratory exposures, with nanoparticle respiratory tract deposited dose rates similar to those determined for combustion-based sources.

    Our results challenge the perception of scented wax melts as a safer alternative to combustion-based aromatherapy

    ~ Dr. Satya Patra et al.

    Read in full: Flame-Free Candles Are Not Pollution-Free: Scented Wax Melts as a Significant Source of Atmospheric Nanoparticles

    In short: you might want to ditch the fragranced products!

    Want to do more?

    Give your household hair a makeover with this multi-vector approach to deal with different risks:

    What’s Lurking In Your Household Air?

    For that matter, the air is a very important factor for the health of your lungs (and thus, for the health of everything that’s fed oxygen by your lungs), and there are more things we can do in that regard as well:

    Seven Things To Do For Good Lung Health!

    Take care!

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  • Which B Vitamins? It Makes A Difference

    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.

    Everyone knows “B vitamins are for energy!” and that is definitely a theme, but there’s a lot more to it than that, and in some cases, there are big mistakes that people make when it comes to supplementing their diet.

    First, let’s do a quick overview of what each of the B vitamins do, by number, and putting names to them:

    B1 (Thiamine)

    • Function: helps convert carbohydrates into energy, supports nerve function
    • Forms: thiamine hydrochloride, thiamine mononitrate, benfotiamine (fat-soluble form)
    • Example foods: lentils, sunflower seeds

    B2 (Riboflavin)

    • Function: supports energy production, skin health, and eye function, turns your pee fluorescent yellow (the latter is really only if you consume exciting amounts of it; this will usually occur from supplementation, not from normal diet)
    • Forms: riboflavin, riboflavin-5’-phosphate
    • Example foods: almonds, mushrooms

    B3 (Niacin)

    • Function: aids metabolism, supports skin, nerves, and cholesterol levels
    • Forms: niacin (nicotinic acid), niacinamide (nicotinamide), inositol hexanicotinate (flush-free niacin)
    • Example foods: whole grains, peanuts (literally the best nut for this)

    B5 (Pantothenic Acid)

    • Function: essential for fatty acid metabolism and hormone production
    • Forms: pantothenic acid, calcium pantothenate, panthenol (alcohol form!)
    • Example foods: it’s in pretty much everything (hence the name); it’s almost impossible to be deficient in this vitamin unless you are literally starving

    B6 (Pyridoxine)

    • Function: needed for red blood cell production, supports brain function, as well as specifically being a part of neurotransmitter production (including dopamine and serotonin, despite them being made in different places—the brain and the gut, respectively),
    • Forms: pyridoxine hydrochloride, pyridoxal-5’-phosphate (active form)
    • Example foods: bananas, potatoes

    B7 (Biotin)

    • Function: helps with fatty acid synthesis, skin, hair, and nail health
    • Forms: d-biotin, biotinylated compounds of various kinds
    • Example foods: fava beans, walnuts

    B9 (Folate/Folic Acid)

    • Function: crucial for DNA synthesis, cell division, and fetal development
    • Forms: folic acid, folinic acid, 5-methyltetrahydrofolate (5-MTHF, active form)
    • Example foods: chickpeas, spinach ← we only mentioned one leafy green here for fairness, but leafy greens in general are great sources of vitamin B9, hence the name, from the Latin “folium”, meaning leaf.

    B12 (Cobalamin)

    • Function: supports red blood cell formation, nerve function, and DNA synthesis
    • Forms: cyanocobalamin, methylcobalamin (active), hydroxocobalamin (active), adenosylcobalamin (active)
    • Example foods: nutritional yeast, nori

    You may be wondering: what about vitamins B4, B8, B10, and B11? Those are now vacant spots, that once contained things that are no longer considered vitamins.

    Three Critical Vitamin B Mistakes That May Be Sabotaging Your Health

    Some mistakes that people make include:

    Not supplementing when necessary

    This occurs most often after midlife, especially in women, and the most common deficiencies are B1, B9, and B12.

    See also: These Signs Often Mean These Nutrient Deficiencies (Do You Have Any?)

    While it’s tempting to think “if I have a good balanced diet, I won’t need…” but the fact is sometimes our diet isn’t as nutrient dense as we hope—often through no fault of our own! But many modern farming methods prioritize yield over nutritional value, and that can result in plants and animals that do not have the nutritional qualities they “should”.

    We wrote about this a while back, weighing up the “supplementation vs diet alone” dilemma:

    Does Our Diet Need A Little Help? ← this also has a very useful chart of which vitamins people usually get too little or too much of. Note however that the statement of marginally excessive folate is slightly misleading, as the data pool contains men and women aged 18–65, while B9 is mostly needed more by women, and especially around childbirth or menopause, so B9 is actually a very common deficiency, but here it’s being balanced out lots of men getting too much (because every multivitamin has it).

    Supplementing to excess

    Most B vitamins have a very high maximum tolerable dose, because (with the exception of where we marked otherwise) they are water-soluble, which means that if you take more than you need, you’ll just pee it out later. Hence the famous fluorescence, for example.

    However, the fat soluble form of vitamin B1 is harder to get in and harder to get out.

    As for the others, problems usually only occur if you take enough to cause toxicity, faster than you pee it out. In other words, go easy on those Berocca drinks!

    Nevertheless, there are other problems that can arise:

    Vitamin B6 is essential—but too much can be toxic. Here’s what to know to stay safe ← tl;dr: there are issues with it causing peripheral neuropathy at doses over 10mg (the safe dose is disputed, so we’re mentioning the lowest safe dose here, but you can read about the others in the article)

    Getting forms that don’t work so well

    Those different forms we listed? They are not all created equal! For example:

    • Folic acid is cheap; unfortunately, it’s not absorbed or used well
    • Cyanocobalamin is cheap; unfortunately, it’s not absorbed or used well

    Let us quote a recent book review of ours:

    ❝Rather, the most common forms of vitamins B9 and B12 provided in supplements are folic acid and cyanocobalamin, respectively, which as he demonstrates with extensive research to back up his claims, cannot be easily absorbed or used especially well.

    About those vitamers: a vitamer is simply a form of a vitamin—most vitamins we need can arrive in a variety of forms. In the case of vitamins B9 and B12, he advocates for ditching vitamers folic acid and cyanocobalamin, cheap as they are, and springing for bioactive vitamers L-methylfolate, methylcobalamin, and adenosylcobalamin.

    He also discusses (again, just as well-evidenced as the above things) why we might struggle to get enough from our diet after a certain age. For example, if trying to get these vitamins from meat, 50% of people over 50 cannot manufacture enough stomach acid to break down that protein to release the vitamins.

    And as for methyl-B12 vitamers, you might expect you can get those from meat, and technically you can, but they don’t occur in all animals, just in one kind of animal. Specifically, the kind that has the largest brain-to-body ratio. However, eating the meat of this animal can result in protein folding errors in general and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease in particular, so the author does not recommend eating humans, however nutritionally convenient that would be.

    All this means that supplementation after a certain age really can be a sensible way to do it—but do it wisely, and pick the right vitamers.❞

    You can read that review in full here: Your Vitamins are Obsolete: The Vitamer Revolution – by Dr. Sheldon Zablow

    Want to try those latter two?

    We don’t sell them, but here for your convenience are example products on Amazon:

    L-methylfolate (active form of vitamin B9)

    Methylcobalamin, adenosylcobalamin, & hydroxocobalamin (active forms of vitamin B12)

    Take care!

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  • Healing Your Gut: Anastasia’s Journey and Tips
  • The Power Foods Diet – by Dr. Neal Barnard

    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.

    First, what this is not: it’s not a cookbook. There are recipes, more than a hundred if we consider such things as “barbecue sauce” as a standalone recipe, and if we overlook such things as how “perfect hot oatmeal” is followed on the next page by a recipe for “perfect hot oatmeal with berries”.

    However, as we say, it’s not a cookbook; it’s first and foremost an educational text on the topic of nutrition.

    Here we will learn about good eating for general health, which foods are natural appetite-suppressants, which foods reduce our body’s absorption of sugars from foods (not merely slowing, but flushing them away so they cannot be absorbed at all), and which foods actually boost metabolism for a few hours after the meal.

    Dr. Barnard also talks about some foods that are more healthy, or less healthy, than popularly believed, and how to use all this information to craft a good, optimized, dietary plan for you.

    Bottom line: there’s a lot of good information here, and the recipes are simply a bonus.

    Click here to check out The Power Foods Diet, and optimize yours!

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  • How Useful Are Our Dreams

    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.

    What’s In A Dream?

    We were recently asked:

    ❝I have a question or a suggestion for coverage in your “Psychology Sunday”. Dreams: their relevance, meanings ( if any) interpretations? I just wondered what the modern psychological opinions are about dreams in general.❞

    ~ 10almonds subscriber

    There are two main schools of thought, and one main effort to reconcile those two. The third one hasn’t quite caught on so far as to be considered a “school of thought” yet though.

    The Top-Down Model (Psychoanalysts)

    Psychoanalysts broadly follow the theories of Freud, or at least evolved from there. Freud was demonstrably wrong about very many things. Most of his theories have been debunked and ditched—hence the charitable “or at least evolved from there” phrasing when it comes to modern psychoanalytic schools of thought. Perhaps another day, we’ll go into all the ways Freud went wrong. However, for today, one thing he wasn’t bad at…

    According to Freud, our dreams reveal our subconscious desires and fears, sometimes directly and sometimes dressed in metaphor.

    Examples of literal representations might be:

    • sex dreams (revealing our subconscious desires; perhaps consciously we had not thought about that person that way, or had not considered that sex act desirable)
    • getting killed and dying (revealing our subconscious fear of death, not something most people give a lot of conscious thought to most of the time)

    Examples of metaphorical representations might be:

    • dreams of childhood (revealing our subconscious desires to feel safe and nurtured, or perhaps something else depending on the nature of the dream; maybe a return to innocence, or a clean slate)
    • dreams of being pursued (revealing our subconscious fear of bad consequences of our actions/inactions, for example, responsibilities to which we have not attended, debts are a good example for many people; or social contact where the ball was left in our court and we dropped it, that kind of thing)

    One can read all kinds of guides to dream symbology, and learn such arcane lore as “if you dream of your teeth crumbling, you have financial worries”, but the truth is that “this thing means that other thing” symbolic equations are not only highly personal, but also incredibly culture-bound.

    For example:

    • To one person, bees could be a symbol of feeling plagued by uncountable small threats; to another, they could be a symbol of abundance, or of teamwork
    • One culture’s “crow as an omen of death” is another culture’s “crow as a symbol of wisdom”
      • For that matter, in some cultures, white means purity; in others, it means death.

    Even such classically Freudian things as dreaming of one’s mother and/or father (in whatever context) will be strongly informed by one’s own waking-world relationship (or lack thereof) with same. Even in Freud’s own psychoanalysis, the “mother” for the sake of such analysis was the person who nurtured, and the “father” was the person who drew the nurturer’s attention away, so they could be switched gender roles, or even different people entirely than one’s parents.

    The only real way to know what, if anything, your dreams are trying to tell you, is to ask yourself. You can do that…

    The idea with lucid dreaming is that since any dream character is a facet of your subconscious generated by your own mind, by talking to that character you can ask questions directly of your subconscious (the popular 2010 movie “Inception” was actually quite accurate in this regard, by the way).

    To read more about how to do this kind of self-therapy through lucid dreaming, you might want to check out this book we reviewed previously; it is the go-to book of lucid dreaming enthusiasts, and will honestly give you everything you need in one go:

    Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life – by Dr. Stephen LaBerge

    The Bottom-Up Model (Neuroscientists)

    This will take a lot less writing, because it’s practically a null hypothesis (i.e., the simplest default assumption before considering any additional evidence that might support or refute it; usually some variant of “nothing unusual going on here”).

    The Bottom-Up model holds that our brains run regular maintenance cycles during REM sleep (a biological equivalent of defragging a computer), and the brain interprets these pieces of information flying by and, because of the mind’s tendency to look for patterns, fills in the rest (much like how modern generative AI can “expand” a source image to create more of the same and fill in the blanks), resulting in the often narratively wacky, but ultimately random, vivid hallucinations that we call dreams.

    The Hybrid Model (per Cartwright, 2012)

    This is really just one woman’s vision, but it’s an incredibly compelling one, that takes the Bottom-Up model and asks “what if we did all that bio-stuff, and then our subconscious mind influenced the interpretation of the random patterns, to create dreams that are subjectively meaningful, and thus do indeed represent our subconscious?

    It’s best explained in her own words, though, so it’s time for another book recommendation (we’ve reviewed this one before, too):

    The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives – by Dr. Rosalind Cartwright

    Enjoy!

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  • The Checklist Manifesto – by Dr. Atul Gawande

    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.

    Dr. Gawande, himself a general surgeon, uses checklists a lot. He is, unequivocally, an expert in his field. He “shouldn’t” need a checklist to tell him to do such things as “Check you have the correct patient”. But checklists are there as a safety net. And, famously, “safety regulations are written in blood”, after all.

    And, who amongst us has never made such a “silly” error? From forgetting to turn the oven on, to forgetting to take the handbrake off, it takes only a momentary distraction to think we’ve done something we haven’t.

    You may be wondering: why a whole book on this? Is it just many examples of the usefulness of checklists? Because I’m already sold on that, so, what else am I going to get out of it?

    Dr. Gawande also explains in clear terms:

    • How to optimize “all necessary steps” with “as few steps as possible”
    • The important difference between read-do checklists and do-confirm checklists
    • To what extent we should try to account for the unexpected
    • How to improve compliance (i.e., making sure you actually use it, no matter how tempting it will be to go “yeah this is automatic for me now” and gloss over it)
    • The role of checklists in teams, and in passing on knowledge

    …and more.

    Bottom line: if you’ve ever tried to make tea without putting the tea-leaves in the pot, this is the book that will help you avoid making more costly mistakes—whatever your area of activity or interest.

    Click here to check out the Checklist Manifesto, and make fewer mistakes!

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