The Food Additive That Helps Stop Weight Gain
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…and other items from this week’s health science news:
Interrupting the weight-gain process
Rather than reversing weight loss, a newly-approved compound called inulin propionate ester (IPE) is designed to help prevent the slow, long-term weight gain caused by small daily calorie surpluses.
Randomized controlled trials found that approximately 10g per day of IPE can regulate appetite and help prevent weight gain.
How it works: IPE delivers propionate directly to receptors in the colon, stimulating appetite-regulating hormones and enhancing the natural effects of gut bacterial fermentation, helping people feel fuller for longer, without the adverse side effects associated with GLP-1 drugs (with the tradeoff being that IPE isn’t intended for use for weight loss, just for avoiding putting weight on).
Longer-term studies suggested that IPE may also help preserve lean body mass, reduce liver fat, and improve aspects of immune and metabolic health, albeit research in those regards is still ongoing, to be sure.
Read in full: Special food additive that helps prevent weight gain is approved in the EU
Related: The Food Additive You Do Want
How sitting increases cancer risk
Or rather, it is strongly associated with such—causality is not outright proven, though the numbers are rather damning:
❝This study included 91,292 UK Biobank participants with valid accelerometer data. Participants were followed for a median of 12.38 years.
After adjusting for sociodemographic and lifestyle factors, each additional hour of prolonged SB was associated with a higher risk of overall cancer mortality (hazard ratio [HR] HR1hour 1.09; 95% confidence interval [CI] [1.06, 1.11]; p < 0.001).❞
Or to put that in words: each additional 1 hour of sitting was associated with a 9% increase in dying of cancer.
And for context, the participants were healthy at baseline (in studies like this, “healthy” means “no relevant disease diagnoses” and is not necessarily a comment on their fitness or such).
Read in full: Long sitting bouts linked to increased cancer risk
Related: Stand Up For Your Health (Or Don’t) ← this is about reducing the damage done by sitting, including if for whatever reason you have to spend a lot of time sitting, including if you physically cannot stand and/or cannot walk.
The non-gambling gambling for kids
“Blind boxes”, where children (or others) can buy a mystery product without knowing what exactly it is (for example Pokemon cards, Labubus, and Kinder Surprise) avoid being legally classified as gambling based on a technicality (because you’ll always get something for your money, it’s just that it could be a super-rare collector’s item or a super-common trifle you already have a near-worthless pile of), but hijack the same dopamine pathways as those involved in gambling (anticipation, uncertain rewards, losses that feel like they could have been wins and maybe next time will be it, short-term pleasure means going back for another hit soon).
There are ways to rein these tendencies in, including:
- Deciding rules (for example limits) in advance
- Waiting until away from the point of sale (e.g. back home from the store) to open it
- Managing disappointment by naming the feeling instead of rushing to try to compensate
- Watching out for blind boxes shifting from being an occasional frivolity to a constant preoccupation
- Redirecting that energy into healthier dopaminergic activities (e.g. creative projects, sports, time with friends, or collecting in ways where the outcome is more predictable)
Read in full: Blind boxes are a game of chance: How to keep kids from getting hooked
Related: The Dopamine Myth ← including a section on healthy dopaminergic activities that use the same neural pathways for good rather than for ill
Take care!
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Morning Routine To Feel Like You’re in Your 20s Again
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Spoiler: it’s not “sleep until midday and eat cold pizza” (for those for whom that was their routine in their student years).
Rather, it’s about getting the body to behave a certain way:
A good start, every day
Mobility coach Marina Sarenac makes the observation that stiffness in the morning makes your posture, energy, and overall movement feel older, whereas a short routine wakes up your muscles, improves circulation, and prepares your body for the day.
First, she advises to breathe correctly. Deep belly breathing calms your nervous system, lowers morning stress, and prepares your body for smoother movement. So, place one hand on your chest and one on your belly, keep your chest still, inhale through your nose, and let your belly rise (and repeat).
Then move onto some mobility drills. Here’s her advice on how to do that:
- Ankle mobility movements: move your ankles slowly through dorsiflexion, plantarflexion, and controlled circles to wake up your lower body and support healthier knees, hips, and posture.
- Alternating spinal twist: lying on your back with your knees bent, let your knees fall gently side to side so gravity loosens your lower back and releases your hips.
- Modified cobra with hip opener: lying on your stomach, place your hands under your shoulders and bring one leg out to the side at 90°; lift your chest gently to open your hips and reduce tension in your lower back.
- Thoracic rotation: in a kneeling position, place one hand on the floor and the other behind your head; rotate your upper body upwards to loosen your middle spine and help your posture and breathing.
- Neck mobility movements: with a tall spine and relaxed shoulders, move your neck gently through flexion, extension, rotations, and a light side stretch to ease any stress-related stiffness and reduce tension.
For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
10 Tips To Reduce Morning Pain & Stiffness With Arthritis
Take care!
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Quiet Your Mind And Get To Sleep – by Dr. Colleen Carney & Dr. Rachel Manber
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.
One of the biggest problems with disrupted sleep is how it relates to other conditions, especially chronic pain or mental health difficulties—each part of it makes the other part(s) worse.
How, then, to interrupt that cycle, and enjoy better sleep that allows one to improve the other things too? Of course, you can tackle all parts of it in any order, but this book deals with it from a “sleep first” angle, with the philosophy that you’ll then be well-rested and better able to take on the other things.
The authors use an approach based in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), which you’ve probably encountered elsewhere, but the difference here is that the authors don’t assume that all your problems can be just flowcharted away (which is otherwise a common weakness of CBT; attempts to note that the thing isn’t as bad as you automatically assumed will fail, if the thing really is that bad).
Instead, we see tools for improving sleep from the inside out, examining in detail how sleep works and what can go wrong with it, before then troubleshooting sleep-incompatible behaviors, optimizing our sleep system, and, as the title promises, quieting our mind. The authors give us tools for change to implement in all parts of this, including tools for changing our way of thinking about sleep, when often the stress of sleeplessness can, by painful irony, contribute to our sleeplessness.
It’s not all about head-stuff though; the authors do also cover peripheral matters including discussing quite an assortment of substances and medications that can help, harm, or both).
Lastly, the authors talk us through creating a plan, including working out in advance the possible challenges we may face (due to factors unforeseen by the authors, but known to us) and how we’ll overcome them or, if necessary, work around them.
The style is to-the-point self-help pop-science, without undue jargon, and/but with copious citations throughout, and an extensive bibliography, itself preceded by a generous set of resource-containing appendices.
Bottom line: if you struggle with sleep and that problem is comorbid with something else (e.g. chronic pain, stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD, etc—actually the authors cover far more conditions than we’ve had room to mention here) then this is an excellent book to tackle your sleep holistically with those things in mind.
Click here to check out Quiet Your Mind And Get To Sleep, and rest well!
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Eggplant vs Tomato – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing eggplant to tomato, we picked the eggplant.
Why?
Both have their merits! But…
In terms of macros, eggplant has nearly 3x the fiber, as well as slightly more carbs and protein, making it the most nutritionally dense option in the macros category.
In the category of vitamins, eggplant has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B9, and choline, while tomatoes have more of vitamins A, C, E, and K. So, very different vitamin coverage from each one, and/but by the numbers, eggplant wins.
When it comes to minerals, eggplant has more copper, magnesium, manganese, and selenium, while tomatoes have more calcium and iron. The margins of difference are very small in all cases, and they’re equal in phosphorus, potassium, and zinc. So this one’s very close, but by the numbers, eggplant scrapes a marginal victory.
Looking at phytochemicals, they’re about equal on polyphenols, though it’s worth mentioning that tomatoes are a famously good source of lycopene, which isn’t a polyphenol, but it is a very beneficial carotenoid, so we’ll say tomatoes get the win this round.
Adding up the sections, though, makes for an overall win for eggplant, but tomatoes are great too, and mostly in different ways than eggplant, which makes them extra good to enjoy together (salad, ratatouille, etc) for their very complementary health benefits!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Lycopene’s Benefits For The Gut, Heart, Brain, & More
Enjoy!
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Grapes vs Mango – Which is Healthier?
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.
Our Verdict
When comparing grapes to mango, we picked the mango.
Why?
In terms of macros, grapes have more carbs while mangos have more fiber and protein, winning.
In the category of vitamins, grapes have more of vitamins B1, B2, and K, while mangos have more of vitamins A, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, and E, winning easily again.
Looking at minerals, grapes have more calcium, iron, manganese, and potassium, while mangos have more copper, magnesium, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc, winning for a third time in a row.
In other considerations, grapes do have more polyphenols, so that is a point in their favor.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for mangos, but by all means do enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Can We Drink To Good Health? ← while there are polyphenols such as resveratrol in red wine that per se would boost heart health, there’s so little per glass that you may need 100–1000 glasses per day to get the dosage that provides benefits in mouse studies.
If you’re not a mouse, you might even need more than that!
To this end, many people prefer resveratrol supplementation ← link is to an example product on Amazon, but there are plenty more so feel free to shop around 😎
Enjoy!
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Why You Keep Overeating (It’s Not What Most People Think)
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Dr. Ruth Machin explains the factors that conspire to get us to eat too much:
À la carte
In menopause, diminishing estrogen increases hunger while muscle loss and lower activity decrease the body’s ability to metabolize the extra calories.
So, for many people, there are three things we can do about that already:
- Correct one’s estrogen levels with HRT
- Take care to maintain muscle mass
- Make sure to continue to be active
However, there are more factors at hand than just our own bodies, for example:
- Processed foods and eating speed: highly processed foods are eaten more quickly and can disrupt hunger hormones, leading to higher calorie intake even if they have similar nutritional profiles to less-processed versions.
- Portion size effect: larger portions lead to consistently higher intake without later compensation, so controlling portion sizes when serving is important. You’ve probably heard this tip before but: use smaller plates/bowls!
- Energy density considerations: high-calorie foods that aren’t filling are easy to overeat regardless of being homemade or processed, while low-calorie-dense foods like fruit, vegetables, beans, and lean protein help control intake.
- Liquid calories zip straight into places we don’t want them: drinks like sugary sodas, sweetened coffee, juice, and alcohol add calories without fullness, making them easy to overconsume and overlook.
- Food variety matters (this is both good and bad): greater variety on the table increases consumption by resetting taste satisfaction, but this can be used beneficially by increasing variety in fruits and vegetables!
As ever, slow and steady is the best approach, and gradually replacing processed foods with whole foods and aiming for “mostly whole-food” diet is more effective than strict elimination (that usually doesn’t last 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:
The Science of Hunger, And How To Sate It
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The Dopa-Bean
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Mucuna pruriens, also called the “magic velvet bean”, is an established herbal drug used for the management of male infertility, nervous disorders, and also as an aphrodisiac:
The Magic Velvet Bean of Mucuna pruriens
How it works is more interesting than that, though.
It’s about the dopamine
M. pruriens contains levodopa (L-dopa). That’s right, the same as the dopaminergic medication most often prescribed for Parkinson’s disease. Furthermore, it might even be better than synthetic L-dopa, because:
❝M. pruriens seed extract demonstrated acetylcholinesterase inhibitory activity, while synthetic L-dopa enhanced the activity of the enzyme. It can be concluded that the administration of M. pruriens seed might be effective in protecting the brain against neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.
M. pruriens seed extract containing L-dopa has shown less acetylcholinesterase activity stimulation compared with L-dopa, suggesting that the extract might have a superior benefit for use in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.❞
~ Dr. Narisa Kamkaen et al.
Indeed, it has been tested specifically in (human!) Parkinson’s disease patients, which RCT found:
❝The rapid onset of action and longer on time without concomitant increase in dyskinesias on mucuna seed powder formulation suggest that this natural source of l-dopa might possess advantages over conventional l-dopa preparations in the long term management of Parkinson’s disease❞
~ Dr. Regina Katzenschlager et al.
Read more: Mucuna pruriens in Parkinson’s disease: a double-blind clinical and pharmacological study
Beyond Parkinson’s disease
M. pruriens has also been tested and found beneficial in cases of disease other than Parkinson’s, thus:
Mucuna pruriens in Parkinson’s and in some other diseases: recent advancement and future prospective
…but the science is less well-established for things not generally considered related to dopamine, such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiometabolic disorders.
Note, however, that the science for it being neuroprotective is rather stronger.
Against depression
Depression can have many causes, and (especially on a neurological level) diverse presentations. As such, sometimes what works for one person’s depression won’t touch another person’s, because the disease and treatment are about completely different neurotransmitter dysregulations. So, if a person’s depression is due to a shortage of serotonin, for example, then perking up the dopamine won’t help much, and vice versa. See also:
Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!
When it comes to M. pruriens and antidepressant activity, then predictably it will be more likely to help if your depression is due to too little dopamine. Note that this means that even if your depression is dopamine-based, but the problem is with your dopamine receptors and not the actual levels of dopamine, then this may not help so much, depending on what else you have going on in there.
The science for M. pruriens and depression is young, and we only found non-human animal studies so far, for example:
In summary
It’s good against Parkinson’s in particular and is good against neurodegeneration in general.
It may be good against depression, depending on the kind of depression you have.
Is it safe?
That’s a great question! And the answer is: it depends. For most people, in moderation, it should be fine (but, see our usual legal/medical disclaimer). Definitely don’t take it if you have bipolar disorder or any kind of schizoid/psychotic disorder; it is likely to trigger a manic/psychotic episode if you do.
For more on this, we discussed it (pertaining to L-dopa in general, not M. pruriens specifically) at greater length here:
An Accessible New Development Against Alzheimer’s ← scroll down to the heading that reads “Is there a catch?”
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
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