The Immunostimulant Superfood – 

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First, what this book is not: a “detox cleanse” book of the kind that claims you can flush out the autism if you just eat enough celery.

What it rather is: an overview brain chemistry, gut microbiota, and the very many other bodily systems that interact with these “two brains”.

She also does some mythbusting of popular misconceptions (for example with regard to tryptophan), and explains with good science just what exactly such substances as gluten and casein can and can’t do.

The format is less of a textbook and more a multipart (i.e., chapter-by-chapter) lecture, in pop-science style though, making it very readable. There are a lot of practical advices too, and options to look up foods by effect, and what to eat for/against assorted mental states.

Bottom line: anyone who eats food is, effectively, drugging themselves in one fashion or another—so you might as well make a conscious choice about how to do so.

Click here to check out This Is Your Brain On Food, and choose what kind of day you have!

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    Tailor your meals to your lifestyle with The Energy Plan. No need for complicated calculations, just follow the general rules for sustained energy and weight management.

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  • Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook – by Sarah Raven

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    Note: the US Amazon site currently (incorrectly) lists the author as “Jonathan Buckley”. The Canadian, British, and Australian sites all list the author correctly as Sarah Raven, and some (correctly) credit Jonathan Buckley as the photographer she used.

    First, what it’s not: a gardening book. Beyond a few helpful tips, pointers, and “plant here, harvest here” instructions, this book assumes you are already capable of growing your own vegetables.

    She does assume you are in a temperate climate, so if you are not, this might not be the book for you. Although! The recipes are still great; it’s just you’d have to shop for the ingredients and they probably won’t be fresh local produce for the exact same reason that you didn’t grow them.

    If you are in a temperate climate though, this will take you through the year of seasonal produce (if you’re in a temperate climate but it’s in for example Australia, you’ll need to make a six-month adjustment for being in the S. Hemisphere), with many recipes to use not just one ingredient from your garden at a time, but a whole assortment, consistent with the season.

    About the recipes: they (which are 450 in number) are (as you might imagine) very plant-forward, but they’re generally not vegan and often not vegetarian. So, don’t expect that you’ll produce everything yourself—just most of the ingredients!

    Bottom line: if you like cooking, and are excited by the idea of growing your own food but are unsure how regularly you can integrate that, this book will keep you happily busy for a very long time.

    Click here to check out Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook, and level-up your home cooking!

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  • Monosodium Glutamate: Sinless Flavor-Enhancer Or Terrible Health 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.

    What’s The Deal With MSG?

    There are a lot of popular beliefs about MSG. Is there a grain of truth, or should we take them with a grain of salt? We’ll leap straight into myth-busting:

    MSG is high in salt

    True (technically) False (practically)

    • MSG is a salt (a monosodium salt of L-glutamic acid), but to call it “full of salt” in practical terms is like calling coffee “full of fruit”. (Coffee beans are botanically fruit)
    • It does contain sodium, though which is what the S stands for!
    • We talked previously about how MSG’s sodium content is much lower than that of (table) salt. Specifically, it’s about one third of that of sodium chloride (e.g. table salt).

    MSG triggers gluten sensitivity

    False!

    Or at least, because this kind of absolute negative is hard to prove in science, what we can say categorically is: it does not contain gluten. We understand that the similar name can cause that confusion. However:

    • Gluten is a protein, found in wheat (and thus wheat-based foods).
    • Glutamate is an amino acid, found in protein-rich foods.
    • If you’re thinking “but proteins are made from amino acids”, yes, they are, but the foundational amino acid of gluten is glutamine, not glutamate. Different bricks → different house!

    The body can’t process MSG correctly

    False!

    The body has glutamate receptors throughout the gut and nervous system.

    The body metabolizes glutamate from MSG just the same as from any other food that contains it naturally.

    Read: Update on food safety of monosodium l-glutamate (MSG) ← evidence-based safety review

    MSG causes “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”

    False!

    Racism causes that. It finds its origins in what was originally intended as a satirical joke, that the papers picked up and ran with, giving it that name in the 1960s. As to why it grew and persisted, that has more to do with US politics (the US has been often at odds with China for a long time) and xenophobia (people distrust immigrants, such as those who opened restaurants), including nationalistic rhetoric associating immigrants with diseases.

    Read: Xenophobia in America in the Age of Coronavirus and Beyond ← academic paper that gives quite a compact yet comprehensive overview

    Research science, meanwhile, has not found any such correlation, in more than 40 years of looking.

    PS: we realize this item in the list is very US-centric. Apologies to our non-US subscribers. We know that this belief isn’t so much of a thing outside the US—though it certainly can crop up elsewhere sometimes, too.

    Are there any health risks associated with MSG, then?

    Well, as noted, it does contain sodium, albeit much less than table salt. So… do go easy on it, all the same.

    Aside from that, the LD50 (a way of measuring toxicity) of MSG is 15.8g/kg, so if for example you weigh 150lb (68 kg), don’t eat 2.2lb (a kilogram) of MSG.

    There have been some studies on rats (or in one case, fruit flies) that found high doses of MSG could cause heart problems and/or promote obesity. However:

    • this has not been observed to be the case in humans
    • those doses were really high, ranging from 1g/kg to 8g/kg. So that’d be the equivalent of our 150lb person eating it by the cupful
    • it was injected (as a solution) into the rats, not ingested by them
    • so don’t let someone inject you with a cup of MSG!

    Read: A review of the alleged health hazards of monosodium glutamate

    Bottom line on MSG and health:

    Enjoy in moderation, but enjoy if you wish! MSG is just the salt form of the amino acid glutamate, which is found naturally in many foods, including shrimp, seaweed, and tomatoes.

    Scientists have spent more than 40 years trying to find health risks for MSG, and will probably keep trying (which is as science should be), but for now… Everything has either come up negative, or has been the result of injecting laboratory animals with megadoses.

    If you’d like to try it in your cooking as a low-sodium way to bring out the flavor of your dishes, you can order it online. Cheapest in bulk, but try it and see if you like it first!

    (I’ll be real with you… I have 5 kg in the pantry myself and use about half a teaspoon a day, cooking for two)

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  • Turkish Saffron Salad

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    Summer is upon us, and we need salad options. Coleslaw’s all well and good, until you’re the 4th person to bring it to the pot luck. Tzatziki’s great—and healthier than a standard coleslaw, being based in yogurt rather than mayonnaise as most Western coleslaws are (Eastern European coleslaws, for example, more often use a vinaigrette), but today our tastebuds are traveling to Turkey for this gut-healthy, phytochemical-rich, delicious dish.

    You will need

    • 12 oz carrots, cut into very thin batons (alternatively: use a peeler to peel it into super-thin strips)
    • 2 oz chopped nuts (pistachios are traditional, almonds are also used sometimes; many other nuts would work too e.g. walnuts, hazelnuts, etc; not peanuts though)
    • 2 cups kefir yogurt (if unavailable, substitute any 2 cups plain unsweetened yogurt; comparable plant yogurt is fine if you’re vegan; those healthy bacteria love plant yogurts as much as animal ones)
    • 1 bulb garlic, grated
    • 1 tsp chili flakes
    • 1 pinch saffron, ground, then soaked in 1 tbsp warm water for a few hours
    • 2 tbsp olive oil for cooking; ideally Extra Virgin, but at least Virgin

    Method

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

    1) Put the olive oil and carrots into a saucepan and heat gently, stirring. You want to soften the carrots just a little and absorb the olive oil, without actually fully cooking the carrots; this will probably only take 2–3 minutes at most. Take it off the heat and transfer it to a bowl to cool.

    When the mixture has cooled…

    2) Add the kefir yogurt, garlic, chili flakes, and saffron water into the carrots, mixing thoroughly.

    3) Add the chopped nuts as a garnish

    (after mixing thoroughly, you will probably see more of the yogurt mixture and less of the carrots; that’s fine and correct))

    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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Related Posts

  • The Oh She Glows Cookbook – by Angela Liddon
  • A new government inquiry will examine women’s pain and treatment. How and why is it different?

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    The Victorian government has announced an inquiry into women’s pain. Given women are disproportionately affected by pain, such a thorough investigation is long overdue.

    The inquiry, the first of its kind in Australia and the first we’re aware of internationally, is expected to take a year. It aims to improve care and services for Victorian girls and women experiencing pain in the future.

    The gender pain gap

    Globally, more women report chronic pain than men do. A survey of over 1,750 Victorian women found 40% are living with chronic pain.

    Approximately half of chronic pain conditions have a higher prevalence in women compared to men, including low back pain and osteoarthritis. And female-specific pain conditions, such as endometriosis, are much more common than male-specific pain conditions such as chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome.

    These statistics are seen across the lifespan, with higher rates of chronic pain being reported in females as young as two years old. This discrepancy increases with age, with 28% of Australian women aged over 85 experiencing chronic pain compared to 18% of men.

    It feels worse

    Women also experience pain differently to men. There is some evidence to suggest that when diagnosed with the same condition, women are more likely to report higher pain scores than men.

    Similarly, there is some evidence to suggest women are also more likely to report higher pain scores during experimental trials where the same painful pressure stimulus is applied to both women and men.

    Pain is also more burdensome for women. Depression is twice as prevalent in women with chronic pain than men with chronic pain. Women are also more likely to report more health care use and be hospitalised due to their pain than men.

    woman lies in bed in pain
    Women seem to feel pain more acutely and often feel ignored by doctors.
    Shutterstock

    Medical misogyny

    Women in pain are viewed and treated differently to men. Women are more likely to be told their pain is psychological and dismissed as not being real or “all in their head”.

    Hollywood actor Selma Blair recently shared her experience of having her symptoms repeatedly dismissed by doctors and put down to “menstrual issues”, before being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2018.

    It’s an experience familiar to many women in Australia, where medical misogyny still runs deep. Our research has repeatedly shown Australian women with pelvic pain are similarly dismissed, leading to lengthy diagnostic delays and serious impacts on their quality of life.

    Misogyny exists in research too

    Historically, misogyny has also run deep in medical research, including pain research. Women have been viewed as smaller bodied men with different reproductive functions. As a result, most pre-clinical pain research has used male rodents as the default research subject. Some researchers say the menstrual cycle in female rodents adds additional variability and therefore uncertainty to experiments. And while variability due to the menstrual cycle may be true, it may be no greater than male-specific sources of variability (such as within-cage aggression and dominance) that can also influence research findings.

    The exclusion of female subjects in pre-clinical studies has hindered our understanding of sex differences in pain and of response to treatment. Only recently have we begun to understand various genetic, neurochemical, and neuroimmune factors contribute to sex differences in pain prevalence and sensitivity. And sex differences exist in pain processing itself. For instance, in the spinal cord, male and female rodents process potentially painful stimuli through entirely different immune cells.

    These differences have relevance for how pain should be treated in women, yet many of the existing pharmacological treatments for pain, including opioids, are largely or solely based upon research completed on male rodents.

    When women seek care, their pain is also treated differently. Studies show women receive less pain medication after surgery compared to men. In fact, one study found while men were prescribed opioids after joint surgery, women were more likely to be prescribed antidepressants. In another study, women were more likely to receive sedatives for pain relief following surgery, while men were more likely to receive pain medication.

    So, women are disproportionately affected by pain in terms of how common it is and sensitivity, but also in how their pain is viewed, treated, and even researched. Women continue to be excluded, dismissed, and receive sub-optimal care, and the recently announced inquiry aims to improve this.

    What will the inquiry involve?

    Consumers, health-care professionals and health-care organisations will be invited to share their experiences of treatment services for women’s pain in Victoria as part of the year-long inquiry. These experiences will be used to describe the current service delivery system available to Victorian women with pain, and to plan more appropriate services to be delivered in the future.

    Inquiry submissions are now open until March 12 2024. If you are a Victorian woman living with pain, or provide care to Victorian women with pain, we encourage you to submit.

    The state has an excellent track record of improving women’s health in many areas, including heart, sexual, and reproductive health, but clearly, we have a way to go with women’s pain. We wait with bated breath to see the results of this much-needed investigation, and encourage other states and territories to take note of the findings.The Conversation

    Jane Chalmers, Senior Lecturer in Pain Sciences, University of South Australia and Amelia Mardon, PhD Candidate, University of South Australia

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

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  • Plant-Based Healthy Cream Cheese

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    Cream cheese is a delicious food, and having a plant-based diet isn’t a reason to miss out. Here we have a protein-forward nuts-based cream cheese that we’re sure you’ll love (unless you’re allergic to nuts, in which case, maybe skip this one).

    You will need

    • 1½ cups raw cashews, soaked in warm water and then drained
    • ½ cup water
    • ½ cup coconut cream
    • Juice of ½ lemon
    • 3 tbsp nutritional yeast
    • ½ tsp onion powder
    • ½ tsp garlic powder
    • ½ tsp black pepper
    • ½ tsp cayenne pepper
    • ¼ tsp MSG, or ½ tsp low-sodium salt
    • Optional: ⅓ cup fresh basil

    Method

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

    1) Blend all of the ingredients until creamy.

    2) Optional: leave on the countertop, covered, for 1–2 hours, if you want a more fermented (effectively: cheesy) taste.

    3) Refrigerate, ideally overnight, before serving. Serving on bagels is a classic, but you can also enjoy with the Healthy Homemade Flatbreads we made yesterday

    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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  • How To Engage Your Whole Brain

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    The Stroke Of Insight That Nobody Wants

    This is Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s a neuroanatomist, who, at the age of 37 (when she was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School), had what she refers to as her “stroke of insight”.

    That is to say, she had a massive stroke, and after a major brain surgery to remove a clot the size of a golf ball, she spent the next 8 years re-learning to do everything.

    Whereas previously she’d been busy mapping the brain to determine how cells communicate with each other, now she was busy mapping whether socks or shoes should go on first. Needless to say, she got an insight into neuroplasticity that few people would hope for.

    What does she want us to know?

    Dr. Taylor (now once again a successful scientist, lecturer, and author) advocates for “whole brain living”, which involves not taking parts of our brain for granted.

    About those parts…

    Dr. Taylor wants us to pay attention to all the parts regardless of size, ranging from the two hemispheres, all the way down to the billions of brain cells, and yet even further, to the “trillions of molecular geniuses”—because each brain cell is itself reliant on countless molecules of the many neurochemicals that make up our brain.

    For a quick refresher on some of the key players in that latter category, see our Neurotransmitter Cheatsheet 😎

    When it comes to the hemispheres, there has historically been a popular belief that these re divided into:

    • The right brain: emotional, imaginative, creative, fluid feeling
    • The left brain: intellectual, analytical, calculating, crystal thinking

    …which is not true, anatomically speaking, because there are cells on both sides doing their part of both of these broad categories of brain processes.

    However, Dr. Taylor found, while one hemisphere of her brain was much more damaged than the other, that nevertheless she could recover some functions more quickly than others, which, once she was able to resume her career, inspired her model of four distinct ways of cogitating that can be switched-between and played with or against each other:

    Meet The Four Characters Inside Your Brain

    Why this matters

    As she was re-learning everything, the way forward was not quick or easy, and she also didn’t know where she was going, because for obvious reasons, she couldn’t remember, much less plan.

    Looking backwards after her eventual full recovery, she noted a lot of things that she needed during that recovery, some of which she got and some of which she didn’t.

    Most notably for her, she needed the right kind of support that would allow all four of the above “characters” as she puts it, to thrive and grow. And, when we say “grow” here we mean that literally, because of growing new brain cells to replace the lost ones (as well as the simple ongoing process of slowly replacing brain cells).

    For more on growing new brain cells, by the way, see:

    How To Grow New Brain Cells (At Any Age)

    In order to achieve this in all of the required brain areas (i.e., and all of the required brain functions), she also wants us to know… drumroll please

    When to STFU

    Specifically, the ability to silence parts of our brain that while useful in general, aren’t necessarily being useful right now. Since it’s very difficult to actively achieve a negative when it comes to brain-stuff (don’t think of an elephant), this means scheduling time for other parts of our brain to be louder. And that includes:

    • scheduling time to feel (emotionally)
    • scheduling time to feel (gut feelings)
    • scheduling time to feel (kinesthetically)

    …amongst others.

    Note: those three are presented in that order, from least basic to most basic. And why? Because, clever beings that we are, we typically start from a position that’s not remotely basic, such as “overthinking”, for example. So, there’s a wind-down through thinking just the right amount, thinking through simpler concepts, feeling, noticing one’s feelings, noticing noticing one’s feelings, all the way down to what, kinesthetically, are we actually physically feeling.

    ❝It is interesting to note that although our limbic system fucntions throughout our lifetime, it does not mature. As a result, when our emotional “buttons” are pushed, we retain the ability to react to incoming stimulation as though we were a two-year-old, even when we are adults.❞

    ~ Dr. Jill Taylor

    Of course, sometimes the above is not useful, which is why the ability to switch between brain modes is a very important and useful skill to develop.

    And how do we do that? By practising. Which is something that it’s necessary to take up consciously, and pursue consistently. When children are at school, there are (hopefully, ideally) curricula set out to ensure they engage and train all parts of their brain. As adults, this does not tend to get the same amount of focus.

    “Children’s brains are still developing”—indeed, and so are adult brains:

    The Brain As A Work-In-Progress

    Dr. Taylor had the uncommon experience of having to, in many ways, neurologically speaking, redo childhood. And having had a second run at it, she developed an appreciation of the process that most of us didn’t necessarily get when doing childhood just the once.

    In other words: take the time to feel stuff; take the time to quiet down your chatty mind, take the time engage your senses, and take it seriously! Really notice, as though for the first time, what the texture of your carpet is like. Really notice, as though for the first time, what it feels like to swallow some water. Really notice, as though for the first time, what it feels like to experience joy—or sadness, or comfort, or anger, or peace. Exercise your imagination. Make some art (it doesn’t have to win awards; it just has to light up your brain!). Make music (again, it’s about wiring your brain in your body, not about outdoing Mozart in composition and/or performance). Make changes! Make your brain work in the ways it’s not in the habit of doing.

    If you need a little help switching off parts of your brain that are being too active, so that you can better exercise other parts of your brain that might otherwise have been neglected, you might want to try:

    The Off-Button For Your Brain

    Enjoy!

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