The Dangers Of Fires, Floods, & Having Your Hair Washed
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It’s a dangerous business, going out of your door… And this week’s news round-up looks at 5 reasons why that might be:
Superspreading like wildfire
Environmental health risks are a big topic these days, with our changing climate. As for wildfires? Some of the risks are obvious: burning to death or choking to death in the smoke—but even upon surviving the seemingly worst, more threats remain that themselves can still kill.
Those threats include that both burns and smoke inhalation can cause acute and chronic changes in the immune system. Specifically: changes for the worse. The mechanisms by which this happens depend on the nature of any burns received, and in the case of smoke, what exactly was in the smoke. Now, there is no kind of smoke that is healthy to inhale, but definitely some kinds are a lot worse than others, and let’s just say, people’s homes contain a lot of plastic.
Additionally, if you think someone coughing near you spreads germs, imagine how far germs can be spread by miles-high, miles-wide billowing hot air.
In short, there’s a lot going on and none of it is good, and we’ve barely had room to summarise here, so…
Read in full: Wildfires ignite infection risks by weakening the body’s immune defenses and spreading bugs in smoke
Related: What’s Lurking In Your Household Air?
A flood of diseases
*record scratch*
Environmental health risks are a big topic these days, with our changing climate. As for floods? Some of the risks are obvious: drowning to death or having your house washed away—but even upon surviving the seemingly worst, more threats remain that themselves can still kill.
Those threats include increases in deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases, and respiratory diseases in general. Simply, a place that has been waterlogged, even if it seems “safe” now, is not a healthy place to be, due to bacteria, viruses, fungi, and more. In fact, it even increases all-cause mortality, because being healthy in such a place is simply harder:
Read in full: Linked to higher mortality rates, large floods emerge as an urgent public health concern
Related: Dodging Dengue In The US
Don’t lose your head
Visiting the hairdresser is not something that most people consider a potential brush with death—your hairdresser is probably not Sweeney Todd, after all. However…
There is an issue specifically with getting your hair washed there. Backwash basins—the sink things into which one rests one’s head at a backwards tilt—create an awkward angle for the cervical vertebrae and a sudden reduction in blood flow to the brain can cause a stroke, with the risk being sufficiently notable as to have its own name in scientific literature: beauty parlor stroke syndrome (BPSS).
❝While research suggests BPSS is most likely to occur in women over 50—and previous history of narrowing or thinning of blood vessels and arthritis of the spinal column in the neck are particular risk factors—it could happen to anyone regardless of age or medical history.❞
Read in full: The hidden health risk of having your hair washed
Related: Your Stroke Survival Plan
The smartwatch wristbands that give you cancer
It’s about the PFAS content. The article doesn’t discuss cancer in detail, just mentioning the increased risk, but you can read about the link between the two in our article below.
Basically, if your smartwatch wristband is a) not silicone and b) waterproof anyway, especially if it’s stain-resistant (as most are designed to be, what with wearing it next to one’s skin all the time while exercising, and not being the sort of thing one throws in the wash), then chances are it has PFAS levels much higher than normally found in consumer goods or clothing.
You can read more about how to identify the risks, here:
Read in full: Smartwatch bands can contain high levels of toxic PFAS, study finds
Related: PFAS Exposure & Cancer: The Numbers Are High
The cows giving milk with a little extra
Bird flu (HPAI) is now not the only flu epidemic amongst cattle in the US, and not only that, but rather than “merely” colonizing the lungs and upper respiratory tracts, in this case the virus (IAV) is thriving in the mammary glands, meaning that yes, it gets dispensed into the milk, and so far scientists are simply scrambling to find better ways to vaccinate the cattle, in the hopes that the milk will not be so risky because yes, it is currently a “reservoir and transmission vector” for the virus.
There are, however, barriers to creating those vaccines:
Read in full: Unexpected viral reservoir: influenza A thrives in cattle mammary glands
Related: Cows’ Milk, Bird Flu, & You
Take care!
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Hashimoto’s Food Pharmacology – by Dr. Izabella Wentz
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The author is a doctor of pharmacology, and we’ve featured her before as an expert on Hashimoto’s, which she has. She has recommendations about specific blood tests and medications, but in this book she’s mainly focussing on what she calls the “three Rs” of managing hypothyroidism:
- Remove the causes and triggers of your hypothyroidism, so far as possible
- Repair the damage caused to your body, especially your gut
- Replace the thyroid hormones and related things in which your body has become deficient
To this end, she provides recipes that avoid processed meats and unfermented dairy, and include plenty of nutrient-dense whole foods specifically tailored to meet the nutritional needs of someone with hypothyroidism.
A nice bonus of the presentation of recipes (of which there are 125, if we include things like “mint tea” and “tomato sauce” and “hot lemon water” as recipes) is explaining the thyroid-supporting elements of each recipe.
A downside for some will be that if you are vegetarian/vegan, this book is very much not, and since many recipes are paleo-style meat dishes, substitutions will change the nutritional profile completely.
Bottom line: if you have hypothyroidism (especially if: Hashimoto’s) and like meat, this will be a great recipe book for you.
Click here to check out Hashimoto’s Food Pharmacology, and get cooking!
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Loss, Trauma, and Resilience – by Dr. Pauline Boss
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Most books about bereavement are focused on grieving healthily and then moving on healthily. And, while it may be said “everyone’s grief is on their own timescale”… society’s expectation is often quite fixed:
“Time will heal”, they say.
But what if it doesn’t? What happens when that’s not possible?
Ambiguous loss occurs when someone is on the one hand “gone”, but on the other hand, not necessarily.
This can be:
- Someone was lost in a way that didn’t leave a body to 100% confirm it
- (e.g. disaster, terrorism, war, murder, missing persons)
- Someone remains physically present but in some ways already “gone”
- (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease or other dementia, brain injury, coma)
These things stop us continuing as normal, and/but also stop us from moving on as normal.
When either kind of moving forward is made impossible, everything gets frozen in place. How does one deal with that?
Dr. Boss wrote this book for therapists, but its content is equally useful for anyone struggling with ambiguous loss—or who has a loved one who is, in turn, struggling with that.
The book looks at the impact of ambiguous loss on continuing life, and how to navigate that:
- How to be resilient, in the sense of when life tries to break you, to have ways to bend instead.
- How to live with the cognitive dissonance of a loved one who is a sort of “Schrödinger’s person”.
- How, and this is sometimes the biggest one, to manage ambiguous loss in a society that often pushes toward: “it’s been x period of time, come on, get over it now, back to normal”
Will this book heal your heart and resolve your grief? No, it won’t. But what it can do is give a roadmap for nonetheless thriving in life, while gently holding onto whatever we need to along the way.
Click here to check out “Ambiguous loss, Trauma, and Resilience” on Amazon—it can really help
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- Someone was lost in a way that didn’t leave a body to 100% confirm it
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No More Restrictions In This Diet Against Thyroid Disease?
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Thyroid disease, especially hypothyroidism (an underactive thyroid) is a common risk, especially from our 40s onwards.
Often this is approached from the perspective of “can we fix it with diet?”, and indeed, there are prevailing methods for at least managing the condition, for example:
But what if it could be simpler?
Positive dieting
We’ve talked about this concept sometimes before—putting the focus more on what we put into our diet than what we exclude from it. The idea is simple; most people find restrictive diets hard to follow, and if not well-managed, they can lead to nutrient deficiencies. In contrast, if we focus on ensuring we get good, nutritionally-dense, varied foods, plants-centric and minimally-processed, then generally speaking, it’s hard to go far wrong.
Researchers (Dr. Rosaria Maddalena Ruggeri et al.) did an extensive research review, and found that yes, diet clearly influences thyroid health, but not through extreme restrictions. In other words, overall dietary patterns matter more than single foods or the latest trend.
As for iodine specifically, yes iodine is essential for thyroid hormone production, but both too little and too much can disrupt function and increase risks like hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, or autoimmune thyroiditis.
For more on those two, see:
In other words: by trying to micromanage things to hit the sweet spot from the right direction (depending on whether the main threat is hypo- or hyperthyroidism), it’s very easy to overcorrect and swing the other way. The body, intuitive organism that it is, can then try to save you from your overcorrections, but itself can also overcorrect, putting you back where you started.
So, where should the focus be?
The team found that selenium, iron, and zinc support hormone production and enzyme activity, while vitamin D and B12 support immune function, and deficiencies in these are linked to higher risk of thyroid disorders.
However! Supplementation (especially selenium, vitamin B12, or vitamin D) doesn’t consistently help unless you’re actually deficient.
The good news: the Mediterranean diet is very consistently associated with lower inflammation, better thyroid markers, and fewer autoimmune antibodies.
The researchers also note that soy and cruciferous vegetables are generally safe in normal amounts if iodine intake is adequate, even though they’re often wrongly blamed for thyroid problems.
In short: a balanced, nutrient-dense diet—especially a Mediterranean pattern—is more effective and evidence-based for supporting thyroid health than restrictive or fad diets.
You can read the paper in full, here: The role of nutrition on thyroid health and disease: myths and facts
And if you want to get directly to enjoying a Mediterranean diet, we outlined it in a previous main feature, so here it is for your convenience:
The Mediterranean Diet: What Is It Good For? ← also covers which foods actually go into it, and which don’t 😎
Want to learn more?
You might like this book we reviewed a while back:
The Thyroid Connection – by Dr. Amy Meyers
Take care!
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Neuropsychologist Explains What She’s Got Out Of 6 Years Taking L-Theanine
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Inka Land, MSc neuropsychology, PgDip(c) Nutrition and Disease, talks about her use of l-theanine and the biochemistry behind it:
So, what’s the tea?
While she’s tested over 60 supplements, she regularly uses only a few. L-theanine made the cut, and has been a staple for over six years due to its noticeable effects on her brain, nervous system in general, and gut. Some notes from the video:
- L-theanine was discovered during university studies as a way to enhance focus and reduce stress. Initially, 50mg doses combined with coffee showed no effect, but increasing to 150mg, paired with 100mg of caffeine, produced significant nootropic benefits.
- L-theanine enhances sustained focus, enabling prolonged attention on repetitive tasks while avoiding distractions. It’s particularly effective for maintaining concentration during monotonous activities.
- L-theanine alleviates gut inflammation by boosting antioxidant activity and supporting glutamine metabolism. Combined with l-glutamine, it is more effective for reducing gut inflammation, and she mentions anecdotally that it seemed to help her personally recover quickly from food poisoning.
- Known for its calming effects, L-theanine reduces anxiety and regulates the nervous system. It is beneficial before stressful or crowded events and has anecdotal support for alleviating social anxiety specifically, though that’s not been formally tested in RCTs (yet). That said, since it has been tested against anxiety in the lab (usually combined with stress tests), it would be strange if it didn’t help alleviate social anxiety too, since what’s required for the nervous system is the same.
- Studies suggest 100–200mg twice daily, but she personally takes 250mg in the morning with coffee or 200–250mg PRN.
Want to try some? Here’s an example product on Amazon 😎
For more on all of this, enjoy (and kindly disregard that she clearly is holding a jar of curcumin in the thumbnail):
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
L-Theanine Against Stress, Anxiety, Inflammation, & More
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Mind Over Mood – by Dr. Dennis Greenberger & Dr. Christine Padesky
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Sometimes we’ve reviewed books about mental health, and said something to the effect of “however, no, it’s not just a book about CBT”. Well, this one is!
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a very useful tool—or rather, set of tools—for managing one’s own mental health. It’s not a cure-all and it has its limitations, but it’s also the industry gold standard for a reason (the reason is: it has a huge evidence-base for actually working).
Its strengths are: managing mood disturbances that are related to automatic negative thoughts/beliefs, by applying the tools to see through the illusions presented by depression, anxiety, anger, shame, etc.
This book is an introduction to CBT, guide to applying CBT in your life, and a workbook for then actually doing so. To this end, you’ll get the most out of the book if you do actually do the exercises.
The style is comprehensive, with a lot of lengthy examples that were a little lengthy for this reviewer’s personal preferences, but the result is arguably a deeper dive into the potential applications for CBT than we might have got if the examples had been a few lines each for simplicity.
Bottom line: if you’re comfortable that you already know how to use CBT to manage your moods, then you can skip this book. But if you’d like an “everything in one” explainer/guide/workbook, then this one is certainly worthy of consideration.
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Caffeine: Cognitive Enhancer Or Brain-Wrecker?
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The Two Sides Of Caffeine
We asked you for your health-related opinions on caffeine itself, not necessarily the coffee, tea, energy drinks, etc that might contain it.
We have, by the way previously written about the health effects of coffee and tea specifically:
As for our question about caffeine itself, though, we got the above-depicted, below-described, set of results:
- About 59% said “caffeine is a safe stimulant and cognitive enhancer”
- About 31% said “caffeine is a moderately safe recreational drug”
- About 8% said “caffeine’s addictive properties make it de facto bad”
- One (1) person said “caffeine will leave you a trembling exhausted wreck”
But what does the science say?
Caffeine is addictive: True or False?
True, though one will find occasional academics quibbling the definition. Most of the studies into the mechanisms of caffeine addiction have been conducted on rats, but human studies exist too and caffeine is generally considered addictive for humans, for example:
See also:
Notwithstanding its addictive status, caffeine is otherwise safe: True or False?
True-ish, for most people. Some people with heart conditions or a hypersensitivity to caffeine may find it is not safe for them at all, and for the rest of us, the dose makes the poison. For example:
❝Can too much caffeine kill you? Although quite rare, caffeine can be fatal in cases of overdose; such circumstances are generally not applicable to healthy individuals who typically consume caffeine via beverages such as tea or coffee.❞
this paper, by the way, also includes a good example of academics quibbling the definition of addiction!
Caffeine is a cognitive enhancer: True or False?
True, but only in the case of occasional use. If you are using it all the time, your physiology will normalize it and you will require caffeine in order to function at your normal level. To attain higher than that, once addicted to caffeine, would now require something else.
Read more: Caffeine: benefits and drawbacks for technical performance
Caffeine will leave you a trembling exhausted wreck: True or False?
True or False depending on usage:
- The famously moderate 3–5 cups per day will not, for most people, cause any such problems.
- Using/abusing it to make up for lost sleep (or some other source of fatigue, such as physical exhaustion from exertion), however, is much more likely to run into problems.
In the latter case, caffeine really is the “payday loan” of energy! It’ll give you an adrenal boost now (in return, you must suffer the adrenal dumping later, along with lost energy expended in the adrenaline surge), and also, the tiredness that you thought was gone, was just caffeine’s adenosine-blocking activities temporarily preventing you from being able to perceive the tiredness. So you’ll have to pay that back later, with interest, because of the extra time/exertion too.
Want to make caffeine a little more gentle on your system?
Taking l-theanine alongside caffeine can ameliorate some of caffeine’s less wonderful effects—and as a bonus, l-theanine has some nifty benefits of its own, too:
Enjoy!
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