The Kitchen Prescription – by Saliha Mahmood Ahmed
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One of the biggest challenges facing anyone learning to cook more healthily, is keeping it tasty. What to cook when your biggest comfort foods all contain things you “should” avoid?
Happily for us, Dr. Ahmed is here with a focus on comfort food that’s good for your gut health. It’s incidentally equally good for the heart and good against diabetes… but Dr. Ahmed is a gastroenterologist, so that’s where she’s coming from with these.
There’s a wide range of 101 recipes here, including many tagged vegetarian, vegan, and/or gluten-free, as appropriate.
While this is not a vegetarian cookbook, Dr. Ahmed does consider the key components of a good diet to be, in order of quantity that should be consumed:
- Fruits and vegetables
- Whole grains
- Legumes
- Pulses
- Nuts and seeds
…and as such, the recipes are mostly plant-based.
The recipes are from all around the world, and/but the ingredients are mostly things that are almost universal. In the event that something might be hard-to-get, she suggests an appropriate substitution.
The recipes are straightforward and clear, as well as being beautifully illustrated.
All in all, a fine addition to anyone’s kitchen!
Get your copy of The Kitchen Prescription from Amazon today!
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Beat Food Addictions!
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When It’s More Than “Just” Cravings
This is Dr. Nicole Avena. She’s a research neuroscientist who also teaches at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, as well as at Princeton. She’s done a lot of groundbreaking research in the field of nutrition, diet, and addition, with a special focus on women’s health and sugar intake specifically.
What does she want us to know?
Firstly, that food addictions are real addictions.
We know it can sound silly, like the famous line from Mad Max:
❝Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you and you will resent its absence!❞
As an aside, it is actually possible to become addicted to water; if one drinks it excessively (we are talking gallons every day) it does change the structure of the brain (no surprise; the brain is not supposed to have that much water!) causing structural damage that then results in dependency, and headaches upon withdrawal. It’s called psychogenic polydipsia:
But back onto today’s more specific topic, and by a different mechanism of addiction…
Food addictions are dopaminergic addictions (as is cocaine)
If you are addicted to a certain food (often sugar, but other refined carbs such as potato products, and also especially refined flour products, are also potential addictive substances), then when you think about the food in question, your brain lights up with more dopamine than it should, and you are strongly motivated to seek and consume the substance in question.
Remember, dopamine functions by expectation, not by result. So until your brain’s dopamine-gremlin is sated, it will keep flooding you with motivational dopamine; that’s why the first bite tastes best, then you wolf down the rest before your brain can change its mind, and afterwards you may be left thinking/feeling “was that worth it?”.
Much like with other addictions (especially alcohol), shame and regret often feature strongly afterwards, even accompanied by notions of “never again”.
But, binge-eating is as difficult to escape as binge-drinking.
You can break free, but you will probably have to take it seriously
Dr. Avena recommends treating a food addiction like any other addiction, which means:
- Know why you want to quit (make a list of the reasons, and this will help you stay on track later!)
- Make a conscious decision to genuinely quit
- Learn about the nature of the specific addiction (know thy enemy!)
- Choose a strategy (e.g. wean off vs cold turkey, and decide what replacements, if any, you will use)
- Get support (especially from those around you, and/but the support of others facing, or who have successfully faced, the same challenge is very helpful too)
- Keep track of your success (build and maintain a streak!)
- Lean into how you will better enjoy life without addiction to the substance (it never really made you happy anyway, so enjoy your newfound freedom and good health!)
Want more from Dr. Avena?
You can check out her column at Psychology Today here:
Psychology Today | Food Junkie ← it has a lot of posts about sugar addiction in particular, and gives a lot of information and practical advice
You can also read her book, which could be a great help if you are thinking of quitting a sugar addiction:
Sugarless: A 7-Step Plan to Uncover Hidden Sugars, Curb Your Cravings, and Conquer Your Addiction
Enjoy!
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6 Kinds Of Drinks That Hasten Dementia
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Dr. William Li, most well-known for his diabetes expertise (remember that there are clear associations between diabetes and dementia), discusses drinks you might want to skip:
Here’s to your good health
The 6 kinds of drink are:
- Alcohol which is bad for pretty much everything and this is no exception. Can cause a deficiency of thiamine, brain-shrinking, neuroinflammation, oxidative stress, and resultant neuron damage.
- Soda / diet soda, the former of which is bad for the diabetes-dementia connection, and the latter of which is also usually (depends on the sweetener) harmful to the gut and thus the gut-brain connection.
- Fruit juices, especially if processed, as the high sugar and zero or nearly-zero fiber can lead to insulin resistance, affecting the brain’s energy processing. In particular, fruit juice drinks sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) can accumulated as fat in the brain (due to how the body processes fructose in the absence of fiber to slow it down), impacting cognition.
- Energy drinks, being basically the same as soda / diet soda, just now with added caffeine too.
- [Caffeinated] late-night coffee, can (shocking nobody) disrupt sleep, and chronic sleep deprivation contributes to the build-up of harmful brain plaques.
- Sports drinks, which (unless you’re super-sure about everything on the label; there are some good sports drinks out there) often contain HFCS in the US, along with various other additives that may not always be great for you. Also, the sodium content of electrolyte drinks are fine if you genuinely are actively sweating it out, but otherwise, can lead to high blood pressure, which is itself a dementia risk factor.
Better options include:
- decaffeinated coffee (or coffee enjoyed in the early afternoon)
- green tea
- turmeric-based drinks
Dr. Li mentions turmeric milk drinks, but unfermented dairy is generally inflammatory, so better to make it kefir (fermented milk drink) or plant-based. Or just have a turmeric tea; that works too.
Dr. Li also mentions berry smoothies, which are not nearly as bad as fruit juice, but still not as good as eating whole berries.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Take care!
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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:
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Take care!
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The Best Form Of Sugar During Exercise
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
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 😎
❝What is the best form of sugar for an energy kick during exercise? Both type of sugar eg glicoae fructose dextrose etc and medium, ie drink, gel, solids etc❞
Great question! Let’s be clear first that we’re going to answer this specifically for the context of during exercise.
Because, if you’re not actively exercising strenuously right at the time when you’re taking the various things we’re going to be talking about, the results will not be the same.
For scenarios that are anything less than “I am exercising right now and my muscles (not joints, or anything else) are feeling the burn”, then instead please see this:
Snacks & Hacks: Eating For Energy (In Ways That Actually Work)
Because, to answer your question, we’re going to be going 100% against the first piece of advice in that article, which was “Skip the quasi-injectables”, i.e., anything marketed as very quick release. Those things are useful for diabetics to have handy just in case of needing to urgently correct a hypo, but for most people most of the time, they’re not. See also:
Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
However…
When strenuously exercising in a way that is taxing our muscles, we do not have to worry about the usual problem of messing up our glucose metabolism by overloading our body with sugars faster than it can use it (thus: it has to hurriedly convert glucose and shove it anywhere it’ll fit to put it away, which is very bad for us), because right now, in the exercise scenario we’re describing, the body is already running its fastest metabolism and is grabbing glucose anywhere it can find it.
Which brings us to our first key: the best type of sugar for this purpose is glucose. Because:
- glucose: the body can use immediately and easily convert whatever’s spare to glycogen (a polysaccharide of glucose) for storage
- fructose: the body cannot use immediately and any conversion of fructose to glycogen has to happen in the liver, so if you take too much fructose (without anything to slow it down, such as the fiber in whole fruit), you’re not only not going to get usable energy (the sugar is just going to be there in your bloodstream, circulating, not getting used, because it doesn’t trigger insulin release and insulin is the gatekeeper that allows sugar to be used), but also, it’s going to tax the liver, which if done to excess, is how we get non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
- sucrose: is just a disaccharide of glucose and fructose, so it first gets broken down into those, and then its constituent parts get processed as above. Other disaccharides you’ll see mentioned sometimes are maltose and lactose, but again, they’re just an extra step removed from useful metabolism, so to save space, we’ll leave it at that for those today.
- dextrose: is just glucose, but when the labeller is feeling fancy. It’s technically informational because it specifies what isomer of glucose it is, but basically all glucose found in food is d-glucose, i.e. dextrose. Other isomers of glucose can be synthesized (very expensively) in laboratories or potentially found in obscure places (the universe is vast and weird), but in short: unless someone’s going to extreme lengths to get something else, all glucose we encounter is dextrose, and all (absolutely all) dextrose is glucose.
We’d like to show scientific papers contesting these head-to-head for empirical proof, but since the above is basic chemistry and physiology, all we could find is papers taking this for granted and stating in their initial premise that sports drinks, gels, bars usually contain glucose as their main sugar, potentially with some fructose and sucrose. Like this one:
A Comprehensive Study on Sports and Energy Drinks
As for how to take it, again this is the complete opposite of our usual health advice of “don’t drink your calories”, because in this case, for once…
(and again, we must emphasize: only while actively doing strenuous exercise that is making specifically your muscles burn, not your joints or anything else; if your joints are burning you need to rest and definitely don’t spike your blood sugars because that will worsen inflammation)
…just this once, we do want those sugars to be zipping straight into the blood. Which means: liquid is best for this purpose.
And when we say liquid: gel is the same as a drink, so far as the body is concerned, provided the body in question is adequately hydrated (i.e., you are also drinking water).
Here are a pair of studies (by the same team, with the same general methodology), testing things head-to-head, with endurance cyclists on 6-hour stationary cycle rides:
CHO Oxidation from a CHO Gel Compared with a Drink during Exercise
Meanwhile, liquid beat solid, but only significantly so from the 90-minute mark onwards, and even that significant difference was modest (i.e. it’s clinically significant, it’s a statistically reliable result and improbable as random happenstance, but the actual size of the difference was not huge):
Oxidation of Solid versus Liquid CHO Sources during Exercise
We would hypothesize that the reason that liquids only barely outperformed solids for this task is precisely because the solids in question were also designed for the task. When a company makes a fast-release energy bar, they don’t load it with fiber to slow it down. Which differentiates this greatly from, say, getting one’s sugars from whole fruit.
If the study had compared apples to apple juice, we hypothesize the results would have been very different. But alas, if that study has been done, we couldn’t find it.
Today has been all about what’s best during exercise, so let’s quickly finish with a note on what’s best before and after:
Before: What To Eat, Take, And Do Before A Workout
After: Overdone It? How To Speed Up Recovery After Exercise
Take care!
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Hungry? How To Beat Cravings
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The Science of Hunger, And How To Sate It
This is Dr. David Ludwig. That’s not a typo; he’s a doctor both ways—MD and PhD.
Henceforth we’ll just say “Dr. Ludwig”, though! He’s a professor in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center.
His research focuses on the effects of diet on hormones, metabolism, and body weight, and he’s one of the foremost experts when it comes to carbohydrates, glycemic load, and obesity.
Why are we putting on weight? What are we getting wrong?
Contrary to popular belief, Dr. Ludwig says, weight gain is not caused by a lack of exercise. In fact, people tend to overestimate how many calories are burned by exercise.
A spoonful of sugar may make the medicine go down, but it also contains 60 calories, and that’d take about 1,500 steps for the average person to burn off. Let’s put this another way:
If you walk 10,000 steps per day, that will burn off 400 calories. Still think you can exercise away that ice cream sundae or plate of fries?
Wait, this is interesting and all, but what does this have to do with hunger?
Why we get hungry
Two important things:
- All that exercise makes us hungry, because the more we exercise, the more the body speeds up our metabolism accordingly.
- Empty calories don’t just add weight themselves, they also make us hungrier
What are empty calories, and why do they make us hungrier?
Empty calories are calories that are relatively devoid of other nutrition. This especially means simple sugars (especially refined sugar), white flour and white flour products (quick-release starches), and processed seed oils (e.g. canola, sunflower, and friends).
They zip straight into our bloodstream, and our body sends out an army of insulin to deal with the blood sugar spike. And… that backfires.
Imagine a person whose house is a terrible mess, and they have a date coming over in half an hour.
They’re going to zoom around tidying, but they’re going to stuff things out of sight as quickly and easily as possible, rather than, say, sit down and Marie Kondo the place.
But superficially, they got the job done really quickly!
Insulin does similarly when overwhelmed by a blood sugar spike like that.
So, it stores everything as fat as quickly as possible, and whew, the pancreas needs a break now after all that exertion, and the blood is nice and free from blood sugars.
Wait, the blood is what now?
The body notices the low blood sugar levels, and it also knows you just stored fat so you must be preparing for starvation, and now the low blood sugar levels indicate starvation is upon us. Quick, we must find food if we want to survive! So it sends a hunger signal to make sure you don’t let the body starve.
You make a quick snack, and the cycle repeats.
Dr. Ludwig’s solution:
First, we need to break out of that cycle, and that includes calming down our insulin response (and thus rebuilding our insulin sensitivity, as our bodies will have become desensitized, after the equivalent of an air-raid siren every 40 minutes or so).
How to do that?
First, cut out the really bad things that we mentioned above.
Next: cut healthy carbs too—we’re talking unprocessed grains here, legumes as well, and also starchy vegetables (root vegetables etc). Don’t worry, this will be just for a short while.
The trick here is that we are resensitizing our bodies to insulin.
Keep this up for even just a week, and then gradually reintroduce the healthier carbs. Unprocessed grains are better than root vegetables, as are legumes.
You’re not going to reintroduce the sugars, white flour, canola oil, etc. You don’t have to be a puritan, and if you go to a restaurant you won’t undo all your work if you have a small portion of fries. But it’s not going to be a part of your general diet.
Other tips from Dr. Ludwig:
- Get plenty of high-quality protein—it’s good for you and suppresses your appetite
- Shop for success—make sure you keep your kitchen stocked with healthy easy snack food
- Nuts, cacao nibs, and healthy seeds will be your best friends and allies here
- Make things easy—buy pre-chopped vegetables, for example, so when you’re hungry, you don’t have to wait longer (and work more) to eat something healthy
- Do what you can to reduce stress, and also eat mindfully (that means paying attention to each mouthful, rather than wolfing something down while multitasking)
If you’d like to know more about Dr. Ludwig and his work, you can check out his website for coaching, recipes, meal plans, his blog, and other resources!
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Blood-Brain Barrier Breach Blamed For Brain-Fog
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Move Over, Leaky Gut. Now It’s A Leaky Brain.
…which is not a headline that promises good news, and indeed, the only good news about this currently is “now we know another thing that’s happening, and thus can work towards a treatment for it”.
Back in February (most popular media outlets did not rush to publish this, as it rather goes against the narrative of “remember when COVID was a thing?” as though the numbers haven’t risen since the state of emergency was declared over), a team of Irish researchers made a discovery:
❝For the first time, we have been able to show that leaky blood vessels in the human brain, in tandem with a hyperactive immune system may be the key drivers of brain fog associated with long covid❞
~ Dr. Matthew Campbell (one of the researchers)
Let’s break that down a little, borrowing some context from the paper itself:
- the leaky blood vessels are breaching the blood-brain-barrier
- that’s a big deal, because that barrier is our only filter between our brain and Things That Definitely Should Not Go In The Brain™
- a hyperactive immune system can also be described as chronic inflammation
- in this case, that includes chronic neuroinflammation which, yes, is also a major driver of dementia
You may be wondering what COVID has to do with this, and well:
- these blood-brain-barrier breaches were very significantly associated (in lay terms: correlated, but correlated is only really used as an absolute in write-ups) with either acute COVID infection, or Long Covid.
- checking this in vitro, exposure of brain endothelial cells to serum from patients with Long Covid induced the same expression of inflammatory markers.
How important is this?
As another researcher (not to mention: professor of neurology and head of the school of medicine at Trinity) put it:
❝The findings will now likely change the landscape of how we understand and treat post-viral neurological conditions.
It also confirms that the neurological symptoms of long covid are measurable with real and demonstrable metabolic and vascular changes in the brain.❞
~ Dr. Colin Doherty (see mini-bio above)
You can read a pop-science article about this here:
Irish researchers discover underlying cause of “brain fog” linked with long covid
…and you can read the paper in full here:
Want to stay safe?
Beyond the obvious “get protected when offered boosters/updates” (see also: The Truth About Vaccines), other good practices include the same things most people were doing when the pandemic was big news, especially avoiding enclosed densely-populated places, washing hands frequently, and looking after your immune system. For that latter, see also:
Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!
Take care!
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- the leaky blood vessels are breaching the blood-brain-barrier
