The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook for Beginners – by Jessica Aledo
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There are a lot of Mediterranean Diet books on the market, and not all of them actually stick to the Mediterranean Diet. There’s a common mistake of thinking “Well, this dish is from the Mediterranean region, so…”, but that doesn’t make, for example, bacon-laden carbonara part of the Mediterranean Diet!
Jessica Aledo does better, and sticks unwaveringly to the Mediterranean Diet principles.
First, she gives a broad introduction, covering:
- The Mediterranean Diet pyramid
- Foods to eat on the Mediterranean Diet
- Foods to avoid on the Mediterranean Diet
- Benefits of the Mediterranean Diet
Then, it’s straight into the recipes, of which there are 201 (as with many recipe books, the title is a little misleading about this).
They’re divided into sections, thus:
- Breakfasts
- Lunches
- Snacks
- Dinners
- Desserts
The recipes are clear and simple, one per double-page, with high quality color illustrations. They give ingredients/directions/nutrients. There’s no padding!
Helpfully, she does include a shopping list as an appendix, which is really useful!
Bottom line: if you’re looking to build your Mediterranean Diet repertoire, this book is an excellent choice.
Get your copy of The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook for Beginners from Amazon today!
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Body on Fire – by Dr. Monica Aggarwal and Dr. Jyothi Rao
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There are times when you do really need a doctor, not a dietician. But there are also times when a doctor will prescribe something for the symptom, leaving the underlying issue untouched. If only there were a way to have the best of both worlds!
That’s where Drs. Rao and Aggarwal come in. They’re both medical doctors… with a keen interest in nutrition and healthy lifestyle changes to make us less sick such that we have less need to go to the doctor at all.
Best of all, they understand—while some things are true for everyone—there’s not a one-size-fits all diet or exercise regime or even sleep setup.
So instead, they take us hand-in-hand (chapter by chapter!) through the various parts of our life (including our diet) that might need tweaking. Each of these changes, if taken up, promise a net improvement that becomes synergistic with the other changes. There’s a degree of biofeedback involved, and listening to your body, to be sure of what’s really best for you, not what merely should be best for you on paper.
The writing style is accessible while science-heavy. They don’t assume prior knowledge, and/but they sure deliver a lot. The book is more text than images, but there are plenty of medical diagrams, explanations, charts, and the like. You will feed like a medical student! And it’s very much worth studying.
Bottom line: highly recommendable even if you don’t have inflammation issues, and worth its weight in gold if you do.
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Chetna’s Healthy Indian – by Chetna Makan
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Indian food is wonderful—a subjective opinion perhaps, but a popular view, and one this reviewer certainly shares. And of course, cooking with plenty of vegetables and spices is a great way to get a lot of health benefits.
There are usually downsides though, such as that in a lot of Indian cookbooks, every second thing is deep-fried, and what’s not deep-fried contains an entire day or more’s saturated fat content in ghee, and a lot of sides have more than their fair share of sugar.
This book fixes all that, by offering 80 recipes that prioritize health without sacrificing flavor.
The recipes are, as the title suggests, vegetarian, though many are not vegan (yogurt and cheese featuring in many recipes). That said, even if you are vegan, it’s pretty easy to veganize those with the obvious plant-based substitutions. If you have soy yogurt and can whip up vegan paneer yourself (here’s our own recipe for that), you’re pretty much sorted.
The cookbook strikes a good balance of being neither complicated nor “did we really need a recipe for this?” basic, and delivers value in all of its recipes. The ingredients, often a worry for many Westerners, should be easily found if you have a well-stocked supermarket near you; there’s nothing obscure here.
Bottom line: if you’d like to cook more Indian food and want your food to be exciting without also making your blood pressure exciting, then this is an excellent book for keeping you well-nourished, body and soul.
Click here to check out Chetna’s Healthy Indian, and spice up your culinary repertoire!
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Polyphenol Paprika Pepper Penne
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This one’s easier to promptly prepare than it is to pronounce unprepared! Ok, enough alliteration: this dish is as full of flavor as it is full of antioxidants, and it’s great for digestive health and heart health too.
You will need
- 4 large red bell peppers, diced
- 2 red onions, roughly chopped
- 1 bulb garlic, finely chopped
- 2 cups cherry tomatoes, halved
- 10oz wholemeal penne pasta
- 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
- 1 tbsp smoked paprika
- 1 tbsp black pepper
- Extra virgin olive oil for drizzling
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Preheat the oven to 200℃ / 400℉ / Gas mark 6
2) Put the vegetables in a roasting tin; drizzle with oil, sprinkle with the seasonings (nooch, paprika, black pepper), stir well to mix and distribute the seasonings evenly, and roast for 20–25 minutes, stirring/turning occasionally. When the edges begin to caramelize, turn off the heat, but leave to keep warm.
3) Cook the penne al dente (this should take 7–8 minutes in boiling salted water). Rinse in cold water, then pass a kettle of hot water over them to reheat. This process removed starch and lowered the glycemic index, before reheating the pasta so that it’s hot to serve.
4) Place the roasted vegetables in a food processor and blitz for just a few seconds. You want to produce a very chunky sauce—but not just chunks or just sauce.
5) Combine the sauce and pasta to serve immediately.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Which Bell Peppers To Pick? A Spectrum Of Specialties ← note how red bell peppers are perfect for this, as their lycopene quadruples in bioavailability when cooked
- Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
- The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic
- What Matters Most For Your Heart? Eat More (Of This) For Lower Blood Pressure
Take care!
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The Cough Doctor
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The Cough Doctor
This is Dr. Peter Small, who worked in epidemiology since the beginning of HIV epidemic. He became a pioneer in the field of molecular epidemiology. As such, his work was a guiding beacon for the public health response to the resurgence of tuberculosis. He’s travelled the world spending years in various institutions studying all manner of respiratory illnesses…. These have ranged from tuberculosis to pneumonia to lung cancer and (back to epidemiology) Covid-19.
He’s now the Chief Medical Officer at…
Hyfe
Hyfe, a medical AI company, was founded in 2020. Its objective: to build acoustic tools for respiratory diagnostics and monitoring.
In other words: it records coughs and collects data about coughing.
❝It’s ironic how much people focus on counting steps while ignoring cough, which is far more consequential. Hyfe is a science-driven company with the technology to make cough count. Particularly now, with increased awareness of cough and the rapid growth of digital health driven by Covid-19, this technology can improve the lives of patients, the care provided by doctors, and the efficiency of health systems.❞
~ Dr. Peter Small, CMO, Hyfe
How does it do it?
Hyfe’s AI monitors the number of times a person coughs and the sound of the cough through any smartphone or other smart device.
This data collected over time provides increasingly more reliable information than a single visit to the doctor! By constantly listening and analyzing, it can detect patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.
How big is this “big data” effort?
Hyfe maintains the largest cough dataset in the world. This means it can compare the sound of a patient’s cough with more than 400 million cough-like sounds from 83 countries across all continents.
The human brain doesn’t handle big numbers well. So, just to illustrate: if the average cough is 1 second long, that means it’d take more than 12 years to listen to them all.
Hyfe, meanwhile, can:
- listen to many things simultaneously
- index them all against user and location,
- use its ever-growing neural net to detect and illustrate patterns.
It’s so attentive, that it can learn to distinguish between different people’s coughs in the same household.
❝Companies like Google Health see even basic information such as getting an accurate count of the number of times a person coughs a day as a useful resource, and part of a larger need to collect and chronicle more health information to refine the way doctors diagnose disease and manage treatments in the future.❞
What are the public health implications?
The most obvious application is to note when there’s a spike in coughing, and see how such spikes grow and spread (if they do), to inform of contagion risks.
Another is to cross-reference it with data about local environmental allergens. Knowing how things like pollution and even pollen affect individuals differently could be helpful in identifying (and managing) chronic conditions like asthma.
What are the private health implications?
❝It’s going to transform the whole clinical approach for this common and chronic symptom. Patients will come in, have the data on how much they are coughing, and the physician can suggest a treatment based on that information to see if it makes the coughs better❞
~ Dr. Peter Small
Dr. Small’s colleague Dr. Cai, speaking for Google Health on this project, sees even more utility for diagnostics:
❝When I was in medical school, never ever did they teach us that we could listen to somebody cough and identify whether that person has TB (tuberculosis), COPD, or a tumor. But I keep seeing more and more studies of people coughing into a microphone, and an algorithm can detect whether somebody has TB with 95% specificity and sensitivity, or if someone has pneumonia or an exacerbation of COPD❞
~ Dr. Lawrence Cai
And the privacy implications?
Perhaps you don’t quite fancy the idea of not being able to cough without Google knowing about it. Hyfe’s software is currently opt-in, but…
If you cough near someone else’s Hyfe app, their app will recognize you’re not the app’s user, and start building a profile for you. Of course, that won’t be linked to your name, email address, or other IDs, as it would if you were the app’s user.
Hyfe will ask to connect to your social media, to collect more information about you and your friends.
Whether you’d like to try this or perhaps you’re just curious to learn more about this fascinating project, you can check out:
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Delay Ageing – by Dr. Colin Rose
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Note: the title is spelled that way because it is British English. We generally write in US English here at 10almonds, but we’ll first quote directly from Dr. Rose as written:
❝I have written Delay Ageing because there is some very important recent University research on ageing and age related illness that deserves to be made accessible to a general audience.❞
What is this research? Well, there’s quite a lot over its 300-odd pages (exact number depends on the edition and whether we count end matter), and most of it is tweaks and refinements on things with which you’ll probably be at least brushingly familiar if you’re a regular 10almonds reader.
Dr. Rose addresses the nine hallmarks of aging, of which there are ten, ranging from such things as “telomeres get shorter” and “DNA accumulates damage”, to “stem cells become exhausted” and “cells fail to communicate properly”, and asks the question “what if we were to target all these things simultaneously?”.
Rather than going for drugs on drugs on drugs (half of them to deal with undesired side effects of the previous ones), Dr. Cole leaves no stone unturned to find lifestyle interventions that will improve each of these, even if just a little. Because, all those “little” improvements add up and even compound, and on the flipside, mean that factors of aging aren’t adding up and compounding so much or so quickly anymore.
The rather broad umbrella of “lifestyle interventions” obviously includes food under its auspices, and with it, nutraceuticals. So to give one example, if you’re taking a fisetin supplement (a natural senolytic agent), you’ll find science vindicating that here. And much more.
The style is… Less pop-science and more “textbook written for laypersons”, and you may be thinking “isn’t that the same?” and the difference is that the textbook has a lot less polish and finesse, but often more precise information.
Bottom line: if you’d like to combat aging on 10 different fronts with easily implementable lifestyle interventions, and know exactly what is doing what and how, then this is the book for you.
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100 Ways to Change Your Life – by Liz Moody
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Sometimes we crave changing things up, just to feel something new. This can result in anything from bad haircut decisions or impulsive purchases, to crashing and burning-out of a job, project, or relationship. It doesn’t have to be that way, though!
This book brings us (as the title suggest) 100 evidence-based ways of changing things up in a good way—small things that can make a big difference in many areas of life.
In terms of format, these are presented in 100 tiny chapters, each approximately 2 pages long (obviously it depends on the edition, but you get the idea). Great to read in any of at least three ways:
- Cover-to-cover
- One per day for 100 days
- Look up what you need on an ad hoc basis
Bottom line: even if you already do half of these things, the other half will each compound your health happiness one-by-one as you add them. This is a very enjoyable and practical book!
Click here to check out 100 Ways to Change Your Life, and level-up yours!
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