The Osteoporosis Breakthrough – by Dr. Doug Lucas
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“Osteoporosis” and “break” often don’t go well together, but here they do. So, what’s the breakthrough here?
There isn’t one, honestly. But if we overlook the marketing choices and focus on the book itself, the content here is genuinely good:
The book offers a comprehensive multivector approach to combatting osteoporosis, e.g:
- Diet
- Exercise
- Other lifestyle considerations
- Supplements
- Hormones
- Drugs
The author considers drugs a good and important tool for some people with osteoporosis, but not most. The majority of people, he considers, will do better without drugs—by tackling things more holistically.
The advice here is sound and covers all reasonable angles without getting hung up on the idea of there being a single magical solution for all.
Bottom line: if you’re looking for a book that’s a one-stop-shop for strategies against osteoporosis, this is a good option.
Click here to check out The Osteoporosis Breakthrough, and keep your bones strong!
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What’s The Deal With The New US Diet Guidelines?
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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!
No question/request too big or small 😎
❝Would love to hear your thoughts on the new U.S. dietary guideline pyramid❞
Science-wise, it’s a mixed bag!
The good
The new guidelines advocate for reducing one’s intake of ultraprocessed foods, and especially to reduce one’s intake of added sugars.
About ultraprocessed foods: technically they’re not all bad, but one really can’t go wrong with avoiding them to be on the safe side, if you don’t want to have to research every product to find out, per: How Processed Is The Food You Buy, Really?
As for why you might want to skip them, see: How Likely Is It That Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs) Will Kill You?
And about sugars: From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose Cs: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same? ← this is important to understand, and a lot of people don’t!
The new guidelines also still say to eat plenty of fruit & veg, as well as whole grains.
This too is supported by good science, and we’ve written about this before, for example:
- What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
- Grains: Bread Of Life, Or Cereal Killer?
- Should You Go Light Or Heavy On Carbs?
- The Real Magic Number For Daily Fruit/Veg
- Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
- What Do The Different Kinds Of Fiber Do? 30 Foods That Rank Highest
- What Matters Most For Your Heart? Eat More (Of This) For Lower Blood Pressure ← Spoiler: it’s fiber
Here’s a good guest article about the global scientific community’s position on this:
More veg, less meat: the latest global update on a diet that’s good for people and the planet
The bad
It now puts meat and dairy in the “eat most” category, having flipped the triangle to put it in a broad base at the top, even going so far as to say to include red meat, butter, and beef tallow.
This is very much against the global scientific consensus.
For example:
- Health Risks Associated with Meat Consumption: A Review of Epidemiological Studies
- Meat Consumption and the Risk of Cancer: A Critical Evaluation of the Constraints of Current Evidence from Epidemiological Studies
- Red Meat Consumption (Heme Iron Intake) and Risk for Diabetes and Comorbidities
- Associations of Processed Meat, Unprocessed Red Meat, Poultry, or Fish Intake With Incident Cardiovascular Disease and All-Cause Mortality
- Meat consumption: Which are the current global risks? A review of recent (2010-2020) evidences
And as for butter, a recent huge study with nearly a quarter of a million participants found that every 10g increase butter consumption was associated with:
- 12% higher cancer mortality
- 15% higher all-cause mortality
- 17% higher CVD mortality
However, in the realm of small changes, substituting even 10g/intake of total butter with an equivalent amount of plant-based oils yielded 17% lower total mortality.
You can read the study in full, here: Butter and Plant-Based Oils Intake and Mortality
And you can read our article about it, here: Butter vs Plant Oils: What The Latest Evidence Shows
Another big problem with the advocacy for eating lots of red meat and butter and suchlike is that this takes one well over the 10g limit for saturated fats (which these new guidelines still recommend as the limit).
For more on why that matters so much, see: What’s The Truth? Can Saturated Fats Be Healthy?
As for how this controversial advice got into the guidelines…
❝Conflicts of interest:
The scientific report accompanying the new guidelines disclosed that several committee members had financial relationships with food industry groups.
Three of nine members received grants or consulting fees from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. One also received support from the National Pork Board.
At least three members were linked to dairy industry organizations❞
Read in full: Prioritizing protein? What the new US dietary guidelines get right—and wrong—according to nutrition experts
Meanwhile, the American Heart Association has said in response:
❝For example, we are concerned that recommendations regarding salt seasoning and red meat consumption could inadvertently lead consumers to exceed recommended limits for sodium and saturated fats, which are primary drivers of cardiovascular disease.
We encourage consumers to prioritize plant-based proteins, seafood and lean meats and to limit high-fat animal products including red meat, butter, lard and tallow, which are linked to increased cardiovascular risk.❞
Read in full: New dietary guidelines underscore importance of healthy eating ← a very polite title
The downright confusing
Well, this is also bad, but it’s simply more confusingly bad.
The new guidelines no longer give a recommended unit-based numerical limit on alcohol, and instead simply say “Consume less alcohol for better overall health”, without saying how much less.
At first that may seem like an exhortation to avoid it entirely, but they also go on to say “People who should completely avoid alcohol include pregnant women, people who are recovering from alcohol use disorder or are unable to control the amount they drink, and people taking medications or with medical conditions that can interact with alcohol. For those with a family history of alcoholism, be mindful of alcohol consumption and associated addictive behaviors.”
…which rather implies that other people should not completely avoid alcohol, and/or should not be mindful of alcohol consumption and associated addictive behaviors.
Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that alcohol increases all-cause mortality at any dose (even “low-risk drinking”): Alcohol Consumption Patterns and Mortality Among Older Adults
…and the World Health Organization has declared that the only safe amount of alcohol is zero: WHO: No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health
On which note, no, not even the famous “small glass of red” is recommended: Can We Drink To Good Health?
For how that myth got started, see French biochemist Jessie Inchauspé’s explanation: Are You Making This Alcohol Mistake?
Want to learn more?
Check out:
The FDA Just Redefined “Healthy”—But How?
Take care!
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3 Ways To Pick The Best-Quality Supplements
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.
Two seemingly conflicting statements that are nevertheless both true:
- Very many people are taking supplements and not getting good results
- And yet, as many studies* show, many supplements can and often do have a big positive impact on health
*Studies like the ones we write about every day at 10almonds!
So, what gives? If supplements work, why are so many people not getting good results?
There are three main reasons the former group aren’t getting the latter benefits:
Firstly, most products don’t actually use the clinically therapeutic doses proven in studies. That would mean actually giving you what you asked for (what a shocking notion), and companies do hate spending more than they have to on product development, so they will tend to cut corners where they can and hope most people won’t notice.
Secondly, there’s the issue of quality and verification of the ingredients within the supplement. Again, this costs companies a great deal of money to do this properly, as it involves independent 3rd-party verification that they correct ingredient really is there in the correct quantities, as well as screening for unwanted impurities.
But even with the perfect supplement, the user has to make a critical mindset shift in order to truly get the most out of supplements:
Lastly, instead of merely managing symptoms, health optimization has to be the goal for long-term benefits, otherwise you’re just putting out fires. And instead of waiting for the symptoms to appear first before doing something, you have to understand healthy aging is the result of years of incremental benefits accrued from correct ongoing choices, so it’s important to choose wisely as you go, think ahead, and when it comes to supplementation, pick the ones that will best support that.
Of course, no supplement company can do the mindset shift for you, so this third one’s entirely down to you.
But if you’re looking for a company that does the first two reliably without fail, our partner BioLongevity Supplements is a top-tier choice:
- The known formulations that actually work best, based on the results established in published medical journals, with ingredient working synergistically with each other where possible
- >99% purity for all supplements, verified by 3rd party lab tests (that you can see with your own eyes before buying)
- They’re also 100% made in the USA, which means accountability and transparency, meeting the highest industry standards.
Click here to experience the next generation of evidence-backed supplements!
Disclosure: this is a sponsored article, written by 10almonds with same level of care that goes into the rest of our articles, based on extensive information provided by our highly recommendable partner, BioLongevity Supplements.
In other words, we stand by all we say; it’s just important we tell you we’re getting paid for this one! Do check them out, and you’ll see what we mean about their quality assurance processes 😎
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Hormones & Health, Beyond The Obvious
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Wholesome Health
This is Dr. Sara Gottfried, who some decades ago got her MD from Harvard and specialized as an OB/GYN at MIT. She’s since then spent the more recent part of her career educating people (mostly: women) about hormonal health, precision, functional, & integrative medicine, and the importance of lifestyle medicine in general.
What does she want us to know?
Beyond “bikini zone health”
Dr. Gottfried urges us to pay attention to our whole health, in context.
“Women’s health” is often thought of as what lies beneath a bikini, and if it’s not in those places, then we can basically treat a woman like a man.
And that’s often not actually true—because hormones affect every living cell in our body, and as a result, while prepubescent girls and postmenopausal women (specifically, those who are not on HRT) may share a few more similarities with boys and men of similar respective ages, for most people at most ages, men and women are by default quite different metabolically—which is what counts for a lot of diseases! And note, that difference is not just “faster” or “slower””, but is often very different in manner also.
That’s why, even in cases where incidence of disease is approximately similar in men and women when other factors are controlled for (age, lifestyle, medical history, etc), the disease course and response to treatment may vary considerable. For a strong example of this, see for example:
- The well-known: Heart Attack: His & Hers ← most people know these differences exist, but it’s always good to brush up on what they actually are
- The less-known: Statins: His & Hers ← most people don’t know these differences exist, and it pays to know, especially if you are a woman or care about one
Nor are brains exempt from his…
The female brain (kinda)
While the notion of an anatomically different brain for men and women has long since been thrown out as unscientific phrenology, and the idea of a genetically different brain is… Well, it’s an unreliable indicator, because technically the cells will have DNA and that DNA will usually (but not always; there are other options) have XX or XY chromosomes, which will usually (but again, not always) match apparent sex (in about 1/2000 cases there’s a mismatch, which is more common than, say, red hair; sometimes people find out about a chromosomal mismatch only later in life when getting a DNA test for some unrelated reason), and in any case, even for most of us, the chromosomal differences don’t count for much outside of antenatal development (telling the default genital materials which genitals to develop into, though this too can get diverted, per many intersex possibilities, which is also a lot more common than people think) or chromosome-specific conditions like colorblindness…
The notion of a hormonally different brain is, in contrast to all of the above, a reliable and easily verifiable thing.
See for example:
Alzheimer’s Sex Differences May Not Be What They Appear
Dr. Gottfried urges us to take the above seriously!
Because, if women get Alzheimer’s much more commonly than men, and the disease progresses much more quickly in women than men, but that’s based on postmenopausal women not on HRT, then that’s saying “Women, without women’s usual hormones, don’t do so well as men with men’s usual hormones”.
She does, by the way, advocate for bioidentical HRT for menopausal women, unless contraindicated for some important reason that your doctor/endocrinologist knows about. See also:
Menopausal HRT: A Tale Of Two Approaches (Bioidentical vs Animal)
The other very relevant hormone
…that Dr. Gottfried wants us to pay attention to is insulin.
Or rather, its scrubbing enzyme, the prosaically-named “insulin-degrading enzyme”, but it doesn’t only scrub insulin. It also scrubs amyloid beta—yes, the same that produces the amyloid beta plaques in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s. And, there’s only so much insulin-degrading enzyme to go around, and if it’s all busy breaking down excess insulin, there’s not enough left to do the other job too, and thus can’t break down amyloid beta.
In other words: to fight neurodegeneration, keep your blood sugars healthy.
This may actually work by multiple mechanisms besides the amyloid hypothesis, by the way:
The Surprising Link Between Type 2 Diabetes & Alzheimer’s
Want more from Dr. Gottfried?
You might like this interview with Dr. Gottfried by Dr. Benson at the IMCJ:
Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal | Conversations with Sara Gottfried, MD
…in which she discusses some of the things we talked about today, and also about her shift from a pharmaceutical-heavy approach to a predominantly lifestyle medicine approach.
Enjoy!
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As people live longer and healthier, nurse training needs to respond to avoid ageist attitudes
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.
Life expectancy in New Zealand has increased dramatically over the past five decades. In 1970, men lived on average to 68. Today, it’s over 80.
These gains reflect major advances in public health and medical technology. But living longer can mean more years with multiple chronic conditions and disabilities, because age is a significant risk factor for most disease.
This demographic shift will reshape healthcare. Future health professionals will need to be aware of the increasingly complex social, technological and ethical challenges of caring for older people.
Ageism, or discrimination based on a person’s age, should be considered as one of these challenges.
Age influences how health concerns are interpreted. In a recent World Health Organization report, nearly 60% of health professionals admitted to making age-based (or ageist) assumptions about their patients’ abilities or needs.
Genuine symptoms are dismissed as part of normal ageing, leading to flawed decisions. There is evidence that older people are also under-treated, raising the risk of disease progression.
Other consequences include missed diagnoses. Inequalities occur where there is limited access to services or inclusion criteria are set to exclude people over 65.
There is the potential for this kind of thinking to creep into health professional education. It shows up in stereotypes that appear in case studies for learning, or in the way programmes are structured and in the kinds of clinical placements that are used.
Getty Images Why ageism matters in healthcare
Our national nursing programme review in the polytechnic sector looked at New Zealand student nurses’ experiences.
It shows case studies often favoured information about older people with dementia, falls or end of life care. They rarely reflected active ageing or older adults’ resilience and agency.
Health professionals may adopt ageist attitudes from the rest of society. Student nurses begin their training programmes having been subject to both societal and cultural narratives about the role and importance of older people.
Nurse education programmes often communicated underlying beliefs about the complexity of care. Placements in aged residential care were typically scheduled in the first year of nursing, implying the work was basic if new students could do it.
Almost all nursing students were allocated to an aged-care facility where the frailest 7% of older people live. This reinforces a narrative that older adults are a homogeneous population of dependent, vulnerable people.
It misses the opportunity to teach health promotion for people who are older but remain active and independent.
What students saw
Students’ reflections highlighted the realities of aged residential care and the impact of their perceptions. One participant said:
While on placement, I saw how conveyor belt life was for the residents. It broke my heart. Residents had lost their individual identities and all fun was gone. The nurses and healthcare assistant staff were all so busy and didn’t have much time to interact on personal levels with each resident.
Others noted systemic issues:
People [nurses and carers] in aged residential care do not get paid what they are worth. This severely needs to be changed. They work so hard to not get appreciated as much as they deserve. [They are] constantly understaffed making the workload insurmountable and overwhelming.
Some worried about career stigma:
Being a new graduate and working in aged care would make me unemployable in other areas of nursing.
These comments illustrate how education and system design shape the attitudes of the future nursing workforce towards ageing and aged care. They also highlight the crucial role clinical placements have in shaping future career choices.
Tackling ageism starts in education
The programme review and student comments demonstrate how ageism influences learning, from case studies portraying older people as less capable to placements that equate ageing with frailty and funding systems that appear to devalue older people.
Addressing these issues starts with obvious steps, such as more appropriate design of learning materials and using placements that reflect a spectrum of health needs in later life.
For students who have little experience of older people, fostering inter-generational connection and building empathy can be a powerful tool to reduce ageist stereotypes.
But there is one more area to which we should be alert: ageism is in fact an emerging social determinant of health in later life.
There is a high risk that ageism will compound existing health inequities as Māori, Pacific people and rainbow communities grow older
Preparing the future healthcare workforce means recognising the diverse realities of ageing in contemporary New Zealand. If we want healthcare to meet the needs of an ageing population, education must reflect this complexity.
Tackling ageism in healthcare professional education is a critical first step.
Samantha Heath, Senior Lecturer in Nursing , University of Waikato
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Red Cabbage vs White Cabbage – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing red cabbage to white cabbage, we picked the red.
Why?
Perhaps you guessed this one, based on the “darker and/or more colorful foods are usually more nutritionally dense” dictum. That’s not always true, by the way, but it is a good rule of thumb and it is correct here. In the case of cabbages, each type is a nutritional powerhouse, but red does beat white:
In terms of macros, they’re quite comparable. They’re both >90% water with just enough other stuff (carbs, fiber, protein) to hold them together, and the “other stuff” in question is quite similarly proportioned in both cases. Within the carbs, even the sugar breakdown is similar. There are slight differences, but the differences are not only tiny, but also they balance out in any case. Thus, a tie in this round.
When it comes to vitamins, as you might expect, the colorful red cabbage does better with more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, and C, while white has more of vitamins B5, B9, E, and K. So, a 6:4 win for red.
In the category of minerals, it’s even more polarized; red cabbage has more calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. On the other hand, white contains a tiny amount more copper.
Adding up the sections shows a clear overall win for red, but do enjoy either or both, as diversity is good!
Today was one of those cases where red just makes white look bad by standing next to it, but honestly, white has lots of all those same things too, just not quite as much as red, and this writer will continue to use white when making her favorite shchi 🥬💕
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Take care!
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The Path to Longevity – by Dr. Luigi Fontana
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We’ve reviewed other “expand your healthspan” books, and while they’re good (or else we wouldn’t include them), this is top-tier, up there with Dr. Greger’s books while being more accessible (more on this later).
This book is far more informational than opinionated, and while some reviewers have described the book as motivating them, that’s not at all the tone, and it’s clear that (beyond hoping for the reader to have to information to promote a long healthy life), the author has no particular agenda to push.
One example: while he gives a whole-foods, plant-based diet a “A+” rating, he puts the (often meat/fish-heavy) paleo diet at a close “A-“, depending on the animal products chosen (which can swing it a lot, and he discusses this in some detail).
In the category of criticism… This reviewer has none. Sometimes it seemed something was going unaddressed, but it would be addressed later.
Stylistically, the text is easy-reading and/but has a lot of references to hard science, complete with charts, diagrams, and so forth. The impression that this reviewer got is that Dr. Fontana took pains to convey as much science as possible, with (unlike Dr. Greger) as little jargon as possible. And that goes a long way.
Bottom line: if you’re looking for a “healthy aging” book that has a lot more science than “copy the Blue Zone supercentenarians and hope” without being so scientifically dense as “How Not To Die” or “How Not To Age“, then this is the book for you.
Click here to check out The Path to Longevity, and optimize the path you take!
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