The Collagen Cure – by Dr. James DiNicolantonio

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Collagen is vital for, well, most of our bodies, really. Where me most tend to feel its deficiency is in our joints and skin, but it’s critical for bones and many other tissues too.

You may be wondering: why a 572-page book to say what surely must amount to “take collagen, duh”?

Dr. DiNicolantonio has a lot more of value to offer us than that. In this book, we learn about not just collagen synthesis and usage, different types of collagen, the metabolism of it in our diet (if we get it—vegans and vegetarians won’t). We also learn about the building blocks of collagen (vegans and vegetarians do get these, assuming a healthy balanced diet), with a special focus on glycine, the smallest amino acid which makes up about a third of the mass of collagen (a protein).

Not stopping there, we also learn about the interplay of other nutrients with our metabolism of glycine and, if applicable, collagen. Vitamin C and copper are star features, but there’s a lot more going on with other nutrients too, down to the level of “So take this 75 minutes before this but after that and/but definitely not with the other”, etc.

The style is incredibly clear and readable for something that’s also quite scientifically dense (over 1000 references and many diagrams).

Bottom line: if you’re serious about maintaining your body as you get older, and you’d like a book about collagen that’s a lot more helpful than “take collagen, duh”, then this is the book for you.

Click here to check out The Collagen Cure, and take care of yours!

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Recommended

  • Heart Smarter for Women – by Dr. Jennifer Mieres
  • Loving Life at 50+ – by Maria Sabando
    Sabando’s book merges humor and depth on aging, offers yoga and recipes, and is backed by a doctor’s insight. A casual, engaging read full of thought-provoking wisdom for any age.

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  • Blood-Sugar-Friendly Ice Pops

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    This generic food product has so many regional variant names that it’s difficult to get a universal name, but in N. America they’re also known by the genericized brand name of popsicles. Anyway, they’re usually very bad news for blood sugars, being merely frozen juice even if extra sugar wasn’t added. Today’s recipe, on the other hand, makes for a refreshing and nutrient-dense treat that won’t spike your blood glucose!

    You will need

    • 1 cup fresh blueberries
    • 1 can (12oz/400g) coconut milk
    • ½ cup yogurt with minimal additives
    • 1 tbsp honey (omit if you prefer less sweetness)
    • Juice of ¼ lime (increase if you prefer more sourness)

    Method

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

    1) Blend everything

    2) Pour into ice pop molds and freeze overnight

    3) Serve at your leisure:

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    Take care!

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  • Exercise, therapy and diet can all improve life during cancer treatment and boost survival. Here’s how

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    With so many high-profile people diagnosed with cancer we are confronted with the stark reality the disease can strike any of us at any time. There are also reports certain cancers are increasing among younger people in their 30s and 40s.

    On the positive side, medical treatments for cancer are advancing very rapidly. Survival rates are improving greatly and some cancers are now being managed more as long-term chronic diseases rather than illnesses that will rapidly claim a patient’s life.

    The mainstays of cancer treatment remain surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, immunotherapy, targeted therapy and hormone therapy. But there are other treatments and strategies – “adjunct” or supportive cancer care – that can have a powerful impact on a patient’s quality of life, survival and experience during cancer treatment.

    PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock

    Keep moving if you can

    Physical exercise is now recognised as a medicine. It can be tailored to the patient and their health issues to stimulate the body and build an internal environment where cancer is less likely to flourish. It does this in a number of ways.

    Exercise provides a strong stimulus to our immune system, increasing the number of cancer-fighting immune cells in our blood circulation and infusing these into the tumour tissue to identify and kill cancer cells.

    Our skeletal muscles (those attached to bone for movement) release signalling molecules called myokines. The larger the muscle mass, the more myokines are released – even when a person is at rest. However, during and immediately after bouts of exercise, a further surge of myokines is secreted into the bloodstream. Myokines attach to immune cells, stimulating them to be better “hunter-killers”. Myokines also signal directly to cancer cells slowing their growth and causing cell death.

    Exercise can also greatly reduce the side effects of cancer treatment such as fatigue, muscle and bone loss, and fat gain. And it reduces the risk of developing other chronic diseases such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Exercise can maintain or improve quality of life and mental health for patients with cancer.

    Emerging research evidence indicates exercise might increase the effectiveness of mainstream treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Exercise is certainly essential for preparing the patient for any surgery to increase cardio-respiratory fitness, reduce systemic inflammation, and increase muscle mass, strength and physical function, and then rehabilitating them after surgery.

    These mechanisms explain why cancer patients who are physically active have much better survival outcomes with the relative risk of death from cancer reduced by as much as 40–50%.

    Mental health helps

    The second “tool” which has a major role in cancer management is psycho-oncology. It involves the psychological, social, behavioural and emotional aspects of cancer for not only the patient but also their carers and family. The aim is to maintain or improve quality of life and mental health aspects such as emotional distress, anxiety, depression, sexual health, coping strategies, personal identity and relationships.

    Supporting quality of life and happiness is important on their own, but these barometers can also impact a patient’s physical health, response to exercise medicine, resilience to disease and to treatments.

    If a patient is highly distressed or anxious, their body can enter a flight or fight response. This creates an internal environment that is actually supportive of cancer progression through hormonal and inflammatory mechanisms. So it’s essential their mental health is supported.

    several people are lying on recliners with IV drips in arms to receive medicine.
    Chemotherapy can be stressful on the body and emotional reserves. Shutterstock

    Putting the good things in: diet

    A third therapy in the supportive cancer care toolbox is diet. A healthy diet can support the body to fight cancer and help it tolerate and recover from medical or surgical treatments.

    Inflammation provides a more fertile environment for cancer cells. If a patient is overweight with excessive fat tissue then a diet to reduce fat which is also anti-inflammatory can be very helpful. This generally means avoiding processed foods and eating predominantly fresh food, locally sourced and mostly plant based.

    two people sit in gym and eat high protein lunch
    Some cancer treatments cause muscle loss. Avoiding processed foods may help. Shutterstock

    Muscle loss is a side effect of all cancer treatments. Resistance training exercise can help but people may need protein supplements or diet changes to make sure they get enough protein to build muscle. Older age and cancer treatments may reduce both the intake of protein and compromise absorption so supplementation may be indicated.

    Depending on the cancer and treatment, some patients may require highly specialised diet therapy. Some cancers such as pancreatic, stomach, esophageal, and lung cancer can cause rapid and uncontrolled drops in body weight. This is called cachexia and needs careful management.

    Other cancers and treatments such as hormone therapy can cause rapid weight gain. This also needs careful monitoring and guidance so that, when a patient is clear of cancer, they are not left with higher risks of other health problems such as cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome (a cluster of conditions that boost your risk of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes).

    Working as a team

    These are three of the most powerful tools in the supportive care toolbox for people with cancer. None of them are “cures” for cancer, alone or together. But they can work in tandem with medical treatments to greatly improve outcomes for patients.

    If you or someone you care about has cancer, national and state cancer councils and cancer-specific organisations can provide support.

    For exercise medicine support it is best to consult with an accredited exercise physiologist, for diet therapy an accredited practising dietitian and mental health support with a registered psychologist. Some of these services are supported through Medicare on referral from a general practitioner.

    For free and confidential cancer support call the Cancer Council on 13 11 20.

    Rob Newton, Professor of Exercise Medicine, Edith Cowan University

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

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  • The Five Key Traits Of Healthy Aging

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    The Five Keys Of Aging Healthily

    Image courtesy of Peter Prato.

    This is Dr. Daniel Levitin. He’s a neuroscientist, and his research focuses on aging, the brain, health, productivity, and creativity. Also music, and he himself is an accomplished musician also, but we’re not going to be focusing on that today.

    We’re going to be looking at the traits that, according to science, promote healthy longevity in old age. In other words, the things that increase our healthspan, from the perspective of a cognitive scientist.

    What does he say we should do?

    Dr. Levitin offers us what he calls the “COACH” traits:

    1. Curiosity
    2. Openness
    3. Associations
    4. Conscientiousness
    5. Healthy practices

    By “associations”, he means relationships. However, that would have made the acronym “CORCH”, and decisions had to be made.

    Curiosity

    Leonardo da Vinci had a list of seven traits he considered most important.

    We’ll not go into those today (he is not our featured expert of the day!), but we will say that he agreed with Dr. Levitin on what goes at the top of the list: curiosity.

    • Without curiosity, we will tend not to learn things, and learning things is key to keeping good cognitive function in old age
    • Without curiosity, we will tend not to form hypotheses about how/why things are the way they are, so we will not exercise imagination, creativity, problem-solving, and other key functions of our brain
    • Without curiosity, we will tend not to seek out new experiences, and consequently, our stimuli will be limited—and thus, so will our brains

    Openness

    Being curious about taking up ballroom dancing will do little for you, if you are not also open to actually trying it. But, openness is not just a tag-on to curiosity; it deserves its spot in its own right too.

    Sometimes, ideas and opportunities come to us unbidden, and we have to be able to be open to those too. This doesn’t mean being naïve, but it does mean having at least a position of open-minded skepticism.

    Basically, Dr. Levitin is asking us to be the opposite of the pejorative stereotype of “an old person stuck in their ways”.

    Associations

    People are complex, and so they bring complexities to our lives. Hopefully, positively stimulating ones. Without them to challenge us (again, hopefully in a positive way), we can get very stuck in a narrow field of experience.

    And of course, having at least a few good friends has numerous benefits to health. There’s been a lot of research on this; 5 appears to be optimal.

    • More than that, and the depth tends to tail off, and/or stresses ensue from juggling too many relationships
    • Fewer than that, and we might be only a calendar clash away from loneliness

    Friends provide social stimulation and mutual support; they’re good for our mental health and even our physiological immunity (counterintuitively, by means of shared germs).

    And, a strong secure romantic relationship is something that has been found time and again to extend healthy life.

    Note: by popular statistics, this benefit is conferred upon men partnered with women, men partnered with men, women partnered with women, but not women partnered with men.

    There may be a causative factor that’s beyond the scope of this article which is about cognitive science, not feminism, but there could also be a mathematical explanation for this apparent odd-one-out:

    Since women tend to live longer than men (who are also often older than their female partners), women who live the longest are often not in a relationship—precisely because they are widows. So these long-lived widows will tend to skew the stats, through no fault of their husbands.

    On the flipside of this, for a woman to predecease her (statistically older and shorter-lived) husband will often require that she die quite early (perhaps due to accident or illness unrelated to age), which will again skew the stats to “women married to men die younger”, without anything nefarious going on.

    Conscientiousness

    People who score highly in the character trait “conscientiousness” will tend to live longer. The impact is so great, that a child’s scores will tend to dictate who dies in their 60s or their 80s, for example.

    What does conscientiousness mean? It’s a broad character trait that’s scored in psychometric tests, so it can be things that have a direct impact on health, such as brushing one’s teeth, or things that are merely correlated, such as checking one’s work for typos (this writer does her best!).

    In short, if you are the sort of person who attends to the paperwork for your taxes on time, you are probably also the sort of person who remembers to get your flu vaccination and cancer screening.

    Healthy practices

    This means “the usual things”, such as:

    Want to learn more?

    You can check out his book, which we reviewed all so recently, and you can also enjoy this video, in which he talks about matters concerning healthy aging from a neuroscientist’s perspective, ranging from heart health and neurodegeneration, to the myth of failing memory, to music and lifespan and more:

    !

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Related Posts

  • Heart Smarter for Women – by Dr. Jennifer Mieres
  • Mediterranean Diet… In A Pill?

    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.

    Does It Come In A Pill?

    For any as yet unfamiliar with the Mediterranean diet, you may be wondering what it involves, beyond a general expectation that it’s a diet popularly enjoyed in the Mediterranean. What image comes to mind?

    We’re willing to bet that tomatoes feature (great source of lycopene, by the way, and if you’re not getting lycopene, you’re missing out), but what else?

    • Salads, perhaps? Vegetables, olives? Olive oil, yea or nay?
    • Bread? Pasta? Prosciutto, salami? Cheese?
    • Pizza but only if it’s Romana style, not Chicago?
    • Pan-seared liver, with some fava beans and a nice Chianti?

    In fact, the Mediterranean diet is quite clear on all these questions, so to read about these and more (including a “this yes, that no” list), see:

    What Is The Mediterranean Diet, And What Is It Good For?

    So, how do we get that in a pill?

    A plucky band of researchers, Dr. Chiara de Lucia et al. (quite a lot of “et al.”; nine listed authors on the study), wondered to what extent the benefits of the Mediterranean diet come from the fact that the Mediterranean diet is very rich in polyphenols, and set about testing that, by putting the same polyphenols in capsule form, and running a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover clinical intervention trial.

    Now, polyphenols are not the only reason the Mediterranean diet is great; there are also other considerations, such as:

    • a great macronutrient balance with lots of fiber, healthy fats, moderate carbs, and protein from select sources
    • the absence or at least very low presence of a lot of harmful substances such as refined seed oils, added sugars, refined carbohydrates, and the like (“but pasta” yes pasta; in moderation and wholegrain and served with extra sources of fiber and healthy fats, all of which slow down the absorption of the carbs)

    …but polyphenols are admittedly very important too; we wrote about some common aspects of them here:

    Tasty Polyphenols: Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain

    As for what Dr. de Lucia et al. put into the capsule, behold…

    The ingredients:

    1. Apple Extract 10.0%
    2. Pomegranate Extract 10.0%
    3. Tomato Powder 2.5%
    4. Beet, Spray Dried 2.5%
    5. Olive Extract 7.5%
    6. Rosemary Extract 7.5%
    7. Green Coffee Bean Extract (CA) 7.5%
    8. Kale, Freeze Dried 2.5%
    9. Onion Extract 10.0%
    10. Ginger Extract 10.0%
    11. Grapefruit Extract 2.5%
    12. Carrot, Air Dried 2.5%
    13. Grape Skin Extract 17.5%
    14. Blueberry Extract 2.5%
    15. Currant, Freeze Dried 2.5%
    16. Elderberry, Freeze Dried 2.5%

    And the relevant phytochemicals they contain:

    • Quercetin
    • Luteolin
    • Catechins
    • Punicalagins
    • Phloretin
    • Ellagic Acid
    • Naringin
    • Apigenin
    • Isorhamnetin
    • Chlorogenic Acids
    • Rosmarinic Acid
    • Anthocyanins
    • Kaempferol
    • Proanthocyanidins
    • Myricetin
    • Betanin

    And what, you may wonder, did they find? Well, first let’s briefly summarise the setup of the study:

    They took volunteers (n=30), average age 67, BMI >25, without serious health complaints, not taking other supplements, not vegetarian or vegan, not consuming >5 cups of coffee per day, and various other stipulations like that, to create a fairly homogenous study group who were expected to respond well to the intervention. In contrast, someone who takes antioxidant supplements, already eats many different color plants per day, and drinks 10 cups of coffee, probably already has a lot of antioxidant activity going on, and someone with a lower BMI will generally have lower resting levels of inflammatory markers, so it’s harder to see a change, proportionally.

    About those inflammatory markers: that’s what they were testing, to see whether the intervention “worked”; essentially, did the levels of inflammatory markers go up or down (up is bad; down is good).

    For more on inflammation, by the way, see:

    How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation

    …which also explains what it actually is, and some important nuances about it.

    Back to the study…

    They gave half the participants the supplement for a week and the other half placebo; had a week’s gap as a “washout”, then repeated it, switching the groups, taking blood samples before and after each stage.

    What they found:

    The group taking the supplement had lower inflammatory markers after a week of taking it, while the group taking the placebo had relatively higher inflammatory markers after a week of taking it; this trend was preserved across both groups (i.e., when they switched roles for the second half).

    The results were very significant (p=0.01 or thereabouts), and yet at the same time, quite modest (i.e. the supplement made a very reliable, very small difference), probably because of the small dose (150mg) and small intervention period (1 week).

    What the researchers concluded from this

    The researchers concluded that this was a success; the study had been primarily to provide proof of principle, not to rock the world. Now they want the experiment to be repeated with larger sample sizes, greater heterogeneity, larger doses, and longer intervention periods.

    This is all very reasonable and good science.

    Read in full: A Randomised, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Cross-Over Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Biological Effects and Safety of a Polyphenol Supplement on Healthy Ageing

    What we conclude from this

    That ingredients list makes for a good shopping list!

    Well, not the extracts they listed, necessarily, but rather those actual fruits, vegetables, etc.

    If nine top scientists (anti-aging specialists, neurobiologists, pharmacologists, and at least one professor of applied statistics) came to the conclusion that to get the absolute most bang-for-buck possible, those are the plants to get the phytochemicals from, then we’re not going to ignore that.

    So, take another list above and ask yourself: how many of those 16 foods do you eat regularly, and could you work the others in?

    Want to make your Mediterranean diet even better?

    While the Mediterranean diet is a top-tier catch-all, it can be tweaked for specific areas of health, for example giving it an extra focus on heart health, or brain health, or being anti-inflammatory, or being especially gut healthy:

    Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean

    Enjoy!

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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  • Why We’re Called “10almonds”, And Other Questions

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    It’s Q&A Day 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!

    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

    ❝Avid coffee drinker so very interested in the results Also question Is there something that you could take or eat that would prevent the caffeine from stimulating the kidneys? I tried to drink decaf from morning to night not a good result! Thanks❞

    That is a good question! The simple answer is “no” (but keep reading, because all is not lost)

    There’s no way (that we yet know of) to proof the kidneys against the stimulating effect of caffeine. This is especially relevant because part of caffeine’s stimulating effect is noradrenergic, and that “ren” in the middle there? It’s about the kidneys. This is just because the adrenal gland is situated next to them (actually, it’s pretty much sitting on top of them), hence the name, but it does mean that the kidneys are about the hardest thing in the body to have not effected by caffeine.

    However! The effects of caffeine in general can be softened a little with l-theanine (found in tea, or it can be taken as a supplement). It doesn’t stop it from working, but it makes the curve of the effect a little gentler, and so it can reduce some unwanted side effects.

    You can read more about l-theanine here:

    L-Theanine: What’s The Tea?

    ❝How to jump start a inactive metabolism and keep it going? THANKYOU❞

    The good news is, if you’re alive, your metabolism is active (it never stops!). So, it may just need perking up a little.

    As for keeping it going, well, that’s what we’re here for! We’re all in favor of healthy longevity.

    We’ll do a main feature soon on what we can do to influence our metabolism in either direction, but to give some quick notes here:

    • A lot of our metabolism is influenced by genes and is unalterable (without modifying our genes, anyway)
    • Metabolism isn’t just one thing—it’s many. And sometimes, parts of our metabolism can be much quicker or slower than others.
    • When people talk about wanting a “faster metabolism”, they’re usually referring to fat-burning, and that’s just a small part of the picture, but we understand that it’s a focal point for many.

    There really is enough material for a whole main feature on metabolic tweaks, though, so watch this space!

    ❝Why the name “10 Almonds?” Is this recommended by the Doctor? A daily dosage? And, if so, why? Thanks! Please answer me…I truly want to know!❞

    Almonds are very nutritionally dense, and for example 20g of almonds (so, about 20 almonds) would give a 100% daily dose of zinc, amongst other nutrients.

    We also do like to think that we give our readers an easily digestible dose of condensed “nutrition” in the form of health information.

    However! That’s not actually the reason at all. It’s a reference to a viral Facebook hoax! There was a post going around that claimed:

    ❝HEADACHE REMEDY. Eat 10–12 almonds, the equivalent of two aspirins, next time you have a headache❞ ← not true!

    It made us think about how much health-related disinformation there was circulating online! So, calling ourselves 10almonds was a bit of a nod to that story, but also a reminder to ourselves:

    We must always publish information with good scientific evidence behind it!

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  • Buffed-Up Buffalo Cauliflower

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    This is a tasty snack that also more protein than you’d think, because of the garbanzo bean flour. It also has plenty of health-giving spices, as well as blood-sugar-balancing vinegar, no added sugar, and very little salt.

    You will need

    • 1 medium head of cauliflower, cut into florets
    • ½ cup garbanzo bean flour
    • ½ cup water
    • ⅓ cup hot sauce (we recommend a low-sugar kind; Nando’s hot sauce is good for this if available where you are, as it has no added sugar and its main ingredient by volume is vinegar, which is good for balancing blood sugars)
    • 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, plus more for the pan
    • 2 tsp garlic powder
    • 2 tsp nutritional yeast
    • 2 tsp black pepper, freshly ground
    • 1 tsp smoked paprika
    • ½ tsp MSG, or 1 tsp low sodium salt

    For the ranch sauce:

    • ½ cup raw sunflower seeds
    • ⅓ cup water
    • ⅓ cup milk (plant milk being healthiest if you choose one that’s unsweetened)
    • 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
    • 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
    • 1 tsp onion powder
    • 1 tsp dried thyme
    • 1 tsp dried oregano
    • 1 tsp dried dill
    • ½ tsp MSG, or 1 tsp low sodium salt

    Method

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

    1) Preheat the oven to 400℉/200℃.

    2) Blend the ranch sauce ingredients until smooth, and set aside.

    3) Mix the buffalo cauliflower ingredients except for the cauliflower, in a big bowl.

    4) Add the cauliflower to the big bowl, mixing well to coat evenly.

    5) Bake the buffalo cauliflower florets on a baking tray lined with baking paper, for about 25 minutes, turning gently if it seems they are at risk of cooking unevenly.

    6) Serve hot, with the sunflower ranch on the side!

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    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: