The Blue Zones Kitchen – by Dan Buettner

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We’ve previously reviewed Buettner’s other book, The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons For Living Longer From The People Who’ve Lived The Longest, and with this one, it’s now time to focus on the dietary aspect.

As the title and subtitle promises, we get 100 recipes, inspired by Blue Zone cuisines. The recipes themselves have been tweaked a little for maximum healthiness, eliminating some ingredients that do crop up in the Blue Zones but are exceptions to their higher average healthiness rather than the rule.

The recipes are arranged by geographic zone rather than by meal type, so it might take a full read-through before knowing where to find everything, but it makes it a very enjoyable “coffee-table book” to browse, as well as being practical in the kitchen. The ingredients are mostly easy to find globally, and most can be acquired at a large supermarket and/or health food store. In the case of substitutions, most are obvious, e.g. if you don’t have wild fennel where you are, use cultivated, for example.

In the category of criticism, it appears that Buettner is very unfamiliar with spices, and so has skipped them almost entirely. We at 10almonds could never skip them, and heartily recommend adding your own spices, for their health benefits and flavors. It may take a little experimentation to know what will work with what recipes, but if you’re accustomed to cooking with spices normally, it’s unlikely that you’ll err by going with your heart here.

Bottom line: we’d give this book a once-over for spice additions, but aside from that, it’s a fine book of cuisine-by-location cooking.

Click here to check out The Blue Zones Kitchen, and get cooking into your own three digits!

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  • Yes, adults can develop food allergies. Here are 4 types you need to know about

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    If you didn’t have food allergies as a child, is it possible to develop them as an adult? The short answer is yes. But the reasons why are much more complicated.

    Preschoolers are about four times more likely to have a food allergy than adults and are more likely to grow out of it as they get older.

    It’s hard to get accurate figures on adult food allergy prevalence. The Australian National Allergy Council reports one in 50 adults have food allergies. But a US survey suggested as many as one in ten adults were allergic to at least one food, with some developing allergies in adulthood.

    What is a food allergy

    Food allergies are immune reactions involving immunoglobulin E (IgE) – an antibody that’s central to triggering allergic responses. These are known as “IgE-mediated food allergies”.

    Food allergy symptoms that are not mediated by IgE are usually delayed reactions and called food intolerances or hypersensitivity.

    Food allergy symptoms can include hives, swelling, difficulty swallowing, vomiting, throat or chest tightening, trouble breathing, chest pain, rapid heart rate, dizziness, low blood pressure or anaphylaxis.

    Hives
    Symptoms include hives. wisely/Shutterstock

    IgE-mediated food allergies can be life threatening, so all adults need an action management plan developed in consultation with their medical team.

    Here are four IgE-mediated food allergies that can occur in adults – from relatively common ones to rare allergies you’ve probably never heard of.

    1. Single food allergies

    The most common IgE-mediated food allergies in adults in a US survey were to:

    • shellfish (2.9%)
    • cow’s milk (1.9%)
    • peanut (1.8%)
    • tree nuts (1.2%)
    • fin fish (0.9%) like barramundi, snapper, salmon, cod and perch.

    In these adults, about 45% reported reacting to multiple foods.

    This compares to most common childhood food allergies: cow’s milk, egg, peanut and soy.

    Overall, adult food allergy prevalence appears to be increasing. Compared to older surveys published in 2003 and 2004, peanut allergy prevalence has increased about three-fold (from 0.6%), while tree nuts and fin fish roughly doubled (from 0.5% each), with shellfish similar (2.5%).

    While new adult-onset food allergies are increasing, childhood-onset food allergies are also more likely to be retained into adulthood. Possible reasons for both include low vitamin D status, lack of immune system challenges due to being overly “clean”, heightened sensitisation due to allergen avoidance, and more frequent antibiotic use.

    Woman holds coffee and pastry
    Some adults develop allergies to cow’s milk, while others retain their allergy from childhood. Sarah Swinton/Unsplash

    2. Tick-meat allergy

    Tick-meat allergy, also called α-Gal syndrome or mammalian meat allergy, is an allergic reaction to galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or α-Gal for short.

    Australian immunologists first reported links between α-Gal syndrome and tick bites in 2009, with cases also reported in the United States, Japan, Europe and South Africa. The US Centers for Disease Control estimates about 450,000 Americans could be affected.

    The α-Gal contains a carbohydrate molecule that is bound to a protein molecule in mammals.

    The IgE-mediated allergy is triggered after repeated bites from ticks or chigger mites that have bitten those mammals. When tick saliva crosses into your body through the bite, antibodies to α-Gal are produced.

    When you subsequently eat foods that contain α-Gal, the allergy is triggered. These triggering foods include meat (lamb, beef, pork, rabbit, kangaroo), dairy products (yoghurt, cheese, ice-cream, cream), animal-origin gelatin added to gummy foods (jelly, lollies, marshmallow), prescription medications and over-the counter supplements containing gelatin (some antibiotics, vitamins and other supplements).

    Tick-meat allergy reactions can be hard to recognise because they’re usually delayed, and they can be severe and include anaphylaxis. Allergy organisations produce management guidelines, so always discuss management with your doctor.

    3. Fruit-pollen allergy

    Fruit-pollen allergy, called pollen food allergy syndrome, is an IgE-mediated allergic reaction.

    In susceptible adults, pollen in the air provokes the production of IgE antibodies to antigens in the pollen, but these antigens are similar to ones found in some fruits, vegetables and herbs. The problem is that eating those plants triggers an allergic reaction.

    The most allergenic tree pollens are from birch, cypress, Japanese cedar, latex, grass, and ragweed. Their pollen can cross-react with fruit and vegetables, including kiwi, banana, mango, avocado, grapes, celery, carrot and potato, and some herbs such as caraway, coriander, fennel, pepper and paprika.

    Fruit-pollen allergy is not common. Prevalence estimates are between 0.03% and 8% depending on the country, but it can be life-threatening. Reactions range from itching or tingling of lips, mouth, tongue and throat, called oral allergy syndrome, to mild hives, to anaphylaxis.

    4. Food-dependent, exercise-induced food allergy

    During heavy exercise, the stomach produces less acid than usual and gut permeability increases, meaning that small molecules in your gut are more likely to escape across the membrane into your blood. These include food molecules that trigger an IgE reaction.

    If the person already has IgE antibodies to the foods eaten before exercise, then the risk of triggering food allergy reactions is increased. This allergy is called food-dependent exercise-induced allergy, with symptoms ranging from hives and swelling, to difficulty breathing and anaphylaxis.

    Man stands on court
    This type of allergy is extremely rare. Ben O’Sullivan/Unsplash

    Common trigger foods include wheat, seafood, meat, poultry, egg, milk, nuts, grapes, celery and other foods, which could have been eaten many hours before exercising.

    To complicate things even further, allergic reactions can occur at lower levels of trigger-food exposure, and be more severe if the person is simultaneously taking non-steroidal inflammatory medications like aspirin, drinking alcohol or is sleep-deprived.

    Food-dependent exercise-induced allergy is extremely rare. Surveys have estimated prevalence as between one to 17 cases per 1,000 people worldwide with the highest prevalence between the teenage years to age 35. Those affected often have other allergic conditions such as hay fever, asthma, allergic conjunctivitis and dermatitis.

    Allergies are a growing burden

    The burden on physical health, psychological health and health costs due to food allergy is increasing. In the US, this financial burden was estimated as $24 billion per year.

    Adult food allergy needs to be taken seriously and those with severe symptoms should wear a medical information bracelet or chain and carry an adrenaline auto-injector pen. Concerningly, surveys suggest only about one in four adults with food allergy have an adrenaline pen.

    If you have an IgE-mediated food allergy, discuss your management plan with your doctor. You can also find more information at Allergy and Anaphylaxis Australia.

    Clare Collins, Laureate Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • What You Don’t Know Can Kill You

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    Knowledge Is Power!

    This is Dr. Simran Malhotra. She’s triple board-certified (in lifestyle medicine, internal medicine, and palliative care), and is also a health and wellness coach.

    What does she want us to know?

    Three things:

    Wellness starts with your mindset

    Dr. Malhotra shifted her priorities a lot during the initial and perhaps most chaotic phase of the COVID pandemic:

    ❝My husband, a critical care physician, was consumed in the trenches of caring for COVID patients in the ICU. I found myself knee-deep in virtual meetings with families whose loved ones were dying of severe COVID-related illnesses. Between the two of us, we saw more trauma, suffering, and death, than we could have imagined.

    The COVID-19 pandemic opened my eyes to how quickly life can change our plans and reinforced the importance of being mindful of each day. Harnessing the power to make informed decisions is important, but perhaps even more important is focusing on what is in our control and taking action, even if it is the tiniest step in the direction we want to go!❞

    ~ Dr. Simran Malhotra

    We can only make informed decisions if we have good information. That’s one of the reasons we try to share as much information as we can each day at 10almonds! But a lot will always depend on personalized information.

    There are one-off (and sometimes potentially life-saving) things like health genomics:

    The Real Benefit Of Genetic Testing

    …but also smaller things that are informative on an ongoing basis, such as keeping track of your weight, your blood pressure, your hormones, and other metrics. You can even get fancy:

    Track Your Blood Sugars For Better Personalized Health

    Lifestyle is medicine

    It’s often said that “food is medicine”. But also, movement is medicine. Sleep is medicine. In short, your lifestyle is the most powerful medicine that has ever existed.

    Lifestyle encompasses very many things, but fortunately, there’s an “80:20 rule” in play that simplifies it a lot because if you take care of the top few things, the rest will tend to look after themselves:

    These Top Few Things Make The Biggest Difference To Overall Health

    Gratitude is better than fear

    If we receive an unfavorable diagnosis (and let’s face it, most diagnoses are unfavorable), it might not seem like something to be grateful for.

    But it is, insofar as it allows us to then take action! The information itself is what gives us our best chance of staying safe. And if that’s not possible e.g. in the worst case scenario, a terminal diagnosis, (bearing in mind that one of Dr. Malhotra’s three board certifications is in palliative care, so she sees this a lot), it at least gives us the information that allows us to make the best use of whatever remains to us.

    See also: Managing Your Mortality

    Which is very important!

    …and/but possibly not the cheeriest note on which to end, so when you’ve read that, let’s finish today’s main feature on a happier kind of gratitude:

    How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)

    Want to hear more from Dr. Malhotra?

    Showing how serious she is about how our genes do not determine our destiny and knowledge is power, here she talks about her “previvor’s journey”, as she puts it, with regard to why she decided to have preventative cancer surgery in light of discovering her BRCA1 genetic mutation:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically

    Take care!

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  • The Science of Nutrition – by Rhiannon Lambert

    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.

    While there are a lot of conflicting dietary approaches out there, the science itself is actually fairly cohesive in most regards. This book does a lot of what we do here at 10almonds, and presents the science in a clear fashion without having any particular agenda to push.

    The author is a nutritionist (BSc, MSc, RNutr) and therefore provides an up-to-date evidence-based approach for eating.

    As a result, the only part of this book that brings it down in this reviewer’s opinion is the section on Intermittent Fasting. Being not strictly about nutrition, she has less expertise on that topic, and it shows.

    The information is largely presented in double-page spreads each answering a particular question. Because of this, and the fact there are colorful graphic representations of information too, we do recommend the print version over Kindle*.

    Bottom line: if you like the notion of real science being presented in a clear and simple fashion (we like to think our subscribers do!), then you’ll surely enjoy this book.

    Click here to check out the Science of Nutrition, and get a clear overview!

    *Writer’s note: I realize I’ve two days in a row recommended this (yesterday because there are checkboxes to check, worksheets to complete, etc), but it’s not a new trend; just how it happened to be with these two books. I love my Kindle dearly, but sometimes print has the edge for one reason or another!

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  • The CBT Workbook for Mental Health – by Dr. Simon Rego & Sarah Fader
  • The Coffee-Cortisol Connection, And Two Ways To Tweak It For Health

    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.

    Health opinions on coffee vary from “it’s an invigorating, healthful drink” to “it will leave you a shaking frazzled wreck”. So, what’s the truth and can we enjoy it healthily? Dr. Alan Mandell weighs in:

    Enjoy it, but watch out!

    Dr. Mandell is speaking only for caffeinated coffee in this video, and to this end, he’s conflating the health effects of coffee and caffeine. A statistically reasonable imprecision, since most people drink coffee with its natural caffeine in, but we’ll make some adjustment to his comments below, to disambiguate which statements are true for coffee generally, and which are true for caffeine:

    • Drinking coffee caffeine first thing in the morning may not be ideal due to dehydration from overnight water loss.
    • Coffee caffeine is a diuretic, which means an increase in urination, thus further dehydrating the body.
    • Coffee contains great antioxidants, which are of course beneficial for the health in general.
    • Cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, is generally at its peak in the morning. This is, in and of itself, good and correct—it’s how we wake up.
    • Coffee caffeine consumption raises cortisol levels even more, leading to increased alertness and physical readiness, but it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and in this case, problems can arise because…
    • Elevated cortisol from early coffee caffeine drinking can build tolerance, leading to the need for more coffee caffeine over time.
    • It’s better, therefore, to defer drinking coffee caffeine until later in the morning when cortisol levels naturally drop.
    • All of this means that drinking coffee caffeine first thing can disrupt the neuroendocrine system, leading to fatigue, depression, and general woe.
    • Hydrate first thing in the morning before consuming coffee caffeine to keep the body balanced and healthy.

    What you can see from this is that coffee and caffeine are not, in fact, interchangeable words, but the basic message is clear and correct: while a little spike of cortisol in the morning is good, natural, and even necessary, a big spike is none of those things, and caffeine can cause a big spike, and since for most people caffeine is easy to build tolerance to, there will indeed consistently be a need for more, worsening the problem.

    In terms of hydration, it’s good to have water (or better yet, herbal tea) on one’s nightstand to drink when one wakes up.

    If coffee is an important morning ritual for you, consider finding a good decaffeinated version for at least your first cup (this writer is partial to Lavazza’s “Dek Intenso”—which is not the same as their main decaf line, by the way, so do hold out for the “Dek Intenso” if you want to try my recommendation).

    Decaffeinated coffee is hydrating and will not cause a cortisol spike (unless for some reason you find coffee as a concept very stressful in which case, yes, the stressor will cause a stress response).

    Anyway, 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:

    Take care!

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  • Pumpkin Protein Crackers

    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.

    Ten of these (give or take what size you make them) will give you the 20g protein that most people’s body’s can use at a time. Five of these plus some of one of the dips we list at the bottom will also do it:

    You will need

    • 1 cup chickpea flour (also called gram flour or garbanzo bean flour)
    • 2 tbsp pumpkin seeds
    • 1 tbsp chia seeds
    • 1 tsp baking powder
    • ¼ tsp MSG or ½ tsp low-sodium salt
    • 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Preheat the oven to 350℉ / 180℃.

    2) Combine the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl, and mix thoroughly.

    3) Add the oil, and mix thoroughly.

    4) Add water, 1 tbsp at a time, mixing thoroughly until the mixture comes together and you have a dough ball. You’ll probably need 3–4 tbsp in total, but do add them one at a time.

    5) Roll out the dough as thinly and evenly as you can between two sheets of baking paper. Remove the top layer of the paper, and slice the dough into squares or triangles. You could use a cookie-cutter to make other shapes if you like, but then you’ll need to repeat the rolling to use up the offcuts. So we recommend squares or triangles at least for your first go.

    6) Bake them in the oven for 12–15 minutes or until golden and crispy. Enjoy immediately or keep in an airtight container.

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some things to go with what we have going on today:

    Take care!

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  • Winter Wellness & The Pills That Increase Your Alzheimer’s Risk

    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 week in health news…

    Do not go gentle into that good night

    As wildfires rage in California, snow is falling from Texas to Georgia, meaning that a lot of people are facing weather they’re not accustomed to, in houses that were not built for it. And that’s the lucky ones; there are many thousands of people who are homeless, of whom many will die.

    Hopefully all our readers are safe, but it pays to watch out for the signs of hypothermia as it is a condition that really sneaks up on people and, in the process, takes away their ability to notice the hypothermia. You and your loved ones are not immune to this, so it’s good to keep an eye on each other, looking out for:

    • Shivering, first ← when this stops, assuming it’s not because the temperature has risen, it is often a sign of hypothermia entering a later stage, in which the body is no longer responding appropriately to the cold
    • Slurred speech or mumbling
    • Slow, shallow breathing
    • A weak pulse
    • Clumsiness or lack of coordination
    • Drowsiness or very low energy
    • Confusion or memory loss
    • Loss of consciousness
    • In infants, bright red, cold skin

    How cold is too cold? It doesn’t even have to be sub-zero. According to the CDC, temperatures of 4℃ (40℉) can be low enough to cause hypothermia.

    Read in full: The warning signs to notice if someone has hypothermia

    Related: Cold Weather Health Risks

    Lethal lottery of pathogens

    In Minnesota, hospital emergency room waiting times have skyrocketed since yesterday (at time of writing), with 40% of Minnesota’s 1,763 flu-related hospitalizations this fall and winter occurring in the same week, according to yesterday’s report. To put it further into perspective, 17 out of 20 of this season’s flu outbreaks have occurred in the past two weeks.

    And that’s just the flu, without considering COVID, RSV, and Norovirus, which are also all running rampant in MN right now.

    The advice presently is:

    ❝Go to the ER if you are super-sick. If you are not super-sick, go to urgent care, go to your clinic, schedule a virtual appointment.❞

    And if you’re not in Minneapolis? These stats won’t apply, but definitely consider, before going to the hospital, whether you might leave sicker than you arrived, and plan accordingly, making use of telehealth where reasonably possible.

    Read in full: Minnesota ERs stressed by “quad-demic” of COVID, flu, RSV, norovirus

    Related: Move over, COVID and Flu! We Have “Hybrid Viruses” To Contend With Now

    Sleep, but at what cost?

    This was a study looking at the effects of sleeping pills on the brain, specifically zolpidem (most well-known by its brand name of Ambien).

    What they found is that while it does indeed effectively induce sleep, part of how it does that is suppressing norepinephrine oscillations (which might otherwise potentially wake you up, though in healthy people these oscillations and the micro-arousals that they cause shouldn’t disrupt sleep at all, and are just considered part of our normal sleep cycles), which oscillations are necessary to generate the pumping action required to move cerebrospinal fluid through the glymphatic system while asleep.

    This is a big problem, because the glymphatic system is almost entirely responsible for keeping the brain free from waste products such as beta-amyloids (whose build-up is associated with Alzheimer’s disease and is considered to be a significant part of Alzheimer’s pathogensesis) and alpha-synuclein (same but for Parkinson’s disease), amongst others:

    Read in full: Common sleeping pill may pave way for disorders like Alzheimer’s

    Related: How To Clean Your Brain (Glymphatic Health Primer)

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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