The Power Foods Diet – by Dr. Neal Barnard
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First, what this is not: it’s not a cookbook. There are recipes, more than a hundred if we consider such things as “barbecue sauce” as a standalone recipe, and if we overlook such things as how “perfect hot oatmeal” is followed on the next page by a recipe for “perfect hot oatmeal with berries”.
However, as we say, it’s not a cookbook; it’s first and foremost an educational text on the topic of nutrition.
Here we will learn about good eating for general health, which foods are natural appetite-suppressants, which foods reduce our body’s absorption of sugars from foods (not merely slowing, but flushing them away so they cannot be absorbed at all), and which foods actually boost metabolism for a few hours after the meal.
Dr. Barnard also talks about some foods that are more healthy, or less healthy, than popularly believed, and how to use all this information to craft a good, optimized, dietary plan for you.
Bottom line: there’s a lot of good information here, and the recipes are simply a bonus.
Click here to check out The Power Foods Diet, and optimize yours!
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Blackberries vs Grapes – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing blackberries to grapes, we picked the blackberries.
Why?
It’s not even close:
In terms of macros, blackberries have more than 5x the fiber, for about half the carbs, resulting in a notably lower glycemic index. They also have more than 2x the protein, but unlike the fiber, it’s not much in either fruit, so we might disregard it. Still, an easy win for blackberries either way.
In the category of vitamins, blackberries have more of vitamins A, B3, B5, B9, C, E, K, and choline, while grapes have more of vitamins B1, B2, and B6. Another clear win for blackberries.
When it comes to minerals, blackberries have a lot more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc, while grapes have slightly more manganese and potassium. Once again, blackberries emerge victorious.
Looking at polyphenols, both have an abundance of many polyphenols, but blackberries have more, both in types and in total mass (mg/100g).
Thus, blackberries overwhelmingly win the day, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
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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The Path To Revenue – by Theresa Marcroft
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So many books about start-ups skip right over the elephant in the room: survivorship bias. Not so for Marcroft! This book contains the most comprehensive and unapologetic treatment of it we’ve seen.
Less “here’s what Steve Jobs did right and here’s what Chocolate-Teapots-For-Dogs-R-Us did wrong; don’t mess up that badly and you’ll be fine”… and more realism. Marcroft gives us a many-angled critical analytic approach. In it, she examines why many things can seem similar in both content and presentation… but can cause growth or failure (and how and why), based on more than anecdotes and luck.
The book is information-dense (taking a marketing-centric approach) and/but well-presented in a very readable format.
If we can find any criticism of the book, it’s less about what’s in it and more about what’s not in it. This can never be a “your start-up bible!” book because it’s not comprehensive. It doesn’t cover assembling your team, for example. Nor does it give a lot of attention to management, preferring to focus on strategy.
But no single book can be all things, and we highly recommend this one—the marketing advice alone is more than worth the cost of the book!
Take Your First Step Along The Path To Revenue By Checking It Out On Amazon!
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Caffeine Blues – by Stephen Cherniske
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Caffeine use is an interesting and often-underexamined factor in health. Beyond the most superficial of sleep hygiene advice (à la “if you aren’t sleeping well, consider skipping your triple espresso martini at bedtime”), it’s often considered a “everybody has this” drug.
In this book, Cherniske explores a lot of the lesser-known effects of caffeine, and the book certainly is a litany against caffeine dependence, ultimately arguing strongly against caffeine use itself. The goal is certainly to persuade the reader to desist in caffeine use, and while the book’s selling point is “learn about caffeine” not “how to quit caffeine”, a program for quitting caffeine is nevertheless included.
You may notice the title and cover design are strongly reminiscent of “Sugar Blues”, which came decades before it, and that’s clearly not accidental. The style is similar—very sensationalist, and with a lot of strong claims. In this case, however, there is actually a more robust bibliography, albeit somewhat dated now as science has continued to progress since this book was published.
Bottom line: in this reviewer’s opinion, the book overstates its case a little, and is prone to undue sensationalism, but there is a lot of genuinely very good information in here too, making it definitely worth reading.
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The Bates Method for Better Eyesight Without Glasses − by Dr. William Bates
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This is a very popular book and method, albeit not a very new one. It was first published in 1920; self-published by Dr. Bates, as the American Medical Association (AMA) considered it quackery.
Of course, our understanding of eyesight has improved a lot in the past 100 years, so, with the benefit of an extra century of ophthalmological research, who was on the right side of history?
As it turns out, all of Dr. Bates’ ideas have been firmly disproven, and eyes simply do not work the way he thought they do (for example, he believed that rather than adjusting the lens for focus, the muscles around the eye elongate the eyeball; this absolutely is not how focusing works, and while how much those muscles squeeze the eye does vary depending on some physiological factors, there are no known exercises that can change them).
Nevertheless, for the interested, his techniques include such things as:
- putting pressure on one’s eyes with one’s hands (which can increase glaucoma risk)
- visualization, rather than actual viewing, of an eye chart (this is ironic, because the book cover promises that an eye chart is included; it is not; perhaps it was hoped that we would visualize it more vividly and thus see it?)
- sunning, which is not only directly looking at the sun, but also using a burning glass to increase the focus of the sunlight onto one’s eye (please do not do this under any circumstances)
His primary thesis in this work, though, is that eyesight problems of all kinds (from short- and long-sightedness, to more serious things like cataracts and glaucoma) are caused by the tension produced by reading books, so relaxation exercises are his prescription for this.
The style is characteristic of its era and then some; bold claims are made with no evidence, there are no references, and the text is (ironically, given his opinions on tension being produced by reading books) quite dense. It certainly doesn’t lend itself well to skimming, for example, because something critical can easily be buried in a wall of text of what is, honestly, mostly waffle.
Bottom line: if you’d like to improve your eyesight and reduce your dependency on glasses, then we absolutely cannot recommend this book, and would direct you instead to Vision for Life, Revised Edition – by Dr. Meir Schneider, which is much more consistent with actual science.
Click here if you are, nonetheless, curious about Dr. Bates’ book and wish to check it out!
PS: Dr. Bates certainly was an interesting fellow; he disappeared mysteriously, but was found working as a medical assistant a few weeks later by his wife, whom he now claimed to not recognize. Then he disappeared again two days later (his wife never found him, this time, despite trying for many years), only to show up again, 13 years later, shortly after his wife’s death, whereupon he remarried (to his long-time personal assistant). None of this has anything to do with his fascinating opinions on eyesight, but it’s a story worth mentioning.
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Steps For Keeping Your Feet A Healthy Foundation
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Important Steps For Good Health
This is Dr. Kelly Starrett. He’s a physiotherapist, author, speaker, trainer. He has been described as a “celebrity” and “founding father” of CrossFit. He mostly speaks and writes about mobility in general; today we’re going to be looking at what he has to say specifically about our feet.
A strong foundation
“An army marches on its stomach”, Napoleon famously wrote.
More prosaically: an army marches on its feet, and good foot-care is a top priority for soldiers—indeed, in some militaries, even so much as negligently getting blisters is a military offense.
Most of us are not soldiers, but there’s a lesson to be learned here:
Your feet are the foundation for much of the rest of your health and effectiveness.
KISS for feet
No, not like that.
Rather: “Keep It Simple, Stupid”
Dr. Starrett is not only a big fan of not overcomplicating things, but also, he tells us how overcomplicating things can actively cause problems. When it comes to footwear, for example, he advises:
❝When you wear shoes, wear the flat kind. If you’re walking the red carpet on Oscar night, fine, go ahead and wear a shoe with a heel. Once in a while is okay.
But most of the time, you should wear shoes that are flat and won’t throw your biological movement hardware into disarray.
When you have to wear shoes, whether it’s running shoes, work shoes, or combat boots, buy the flat kind, also known as “zero drop”—meaning that the heel is not raised above the forefoot (at all).
What you want to avoid, or wean yourself away from, are shoes with the heels raised higher off the ground than the forefeet.❞
Of course, going barefoot is great for this, but may not be an option for all of us when out and about. And in the home, going barefoot (or shod in just socks) will only confer health benefits if we’re actually on our feet! So… How much time do you spend on your feet at home?
Allow your feet to move like feet
By evolution, the human body is built for movement—especially walking and running. That came with moving away from hanging around in trees for fruit, to hunting and gathering between different areas of the savannah. Today, our hunting and gathering may be done at the local grocery store, but we still need to keep our mobility, especially when it comes to our feet.
Now comes the flat footwear you don’t want: flip-flops and similar
If we wear flip-flops, or other slippers or shoes that hold onto our feet only at the front, we’re no longer walking like we’re supposed to. Instead of being the elegant product of so much evolution, we’re now walking like those AT-AT walkers in Star Wars, you know, the ones that fell over so easily?
Our feet need to be able to tilt naturally while walking/running, without our footwear coming off.
Golden rule for this: if you can’t run in them, you shouldn’t be walking in them
Exception: if for example you need something on your feet for a minute or two in the shower at the gym/pool, flip-flops are fine. But anything more than that, and you want something better.
Watch your step
There’s a lot here that’s beyond the scope of what we can include in this short newsletter, but:
If we stand or walk or run incorrectly, we’re doing gradual continual damage to our feet and ankles (potentially also our knees and hips, which problems in turn have a knock-on effect for our spine, and you get the idea—this is Bad™)
Some general pointers for keeping things in good order include:
- Your weight should be mostly on the balls of your feet, not your heels
- Your feet should be pretty much parallel, not turned out or in
- When standing, your center of gravity should be balanced between heel and forefoot
Quick tip for accomplishing this last one: Stand comfortably, your feet parallel, shoulder-width apart. Now, go up on your tip-toes. When you’ve done so, note where your spine is, and keep it there (apart from in its up-down axis) when you slowly go back to having your feet flat on the ground, so it’s as though your spine is sliding down a pole that’s fixed in place.
If you do this right, your center of gravity will now be perfectly aligned with where it’s supposed to be. It might feel a bit weird at first, but you’ll get used to it, and can always reset it whenever you want/need, by repeating the exercise.
If you’d like to know more from Dr. Starrett, you can check out his website here 🙂
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Improve Your Insulin Sensitivity!
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We’ve written before about blood sugar management, for example:
10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars ← this one really is the most solid foundation possible; if you do nothing else, do these 10 things!
And as for why we care:
Good (Or Bad) Health Starts With Your Blood
…because the same things that cause type 2 diabetes, go on to cause many other woes, with particularly strong comorbidities in the case of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, as well as heart disease of various kinds, and a long long laundry list of immune dysfunctions / inflammatory disorders in general.
In short, if you can’t keep your blood sugars even, the rest of your health will fall like so many dominoes.
Getting a baseline
Are you counting steps? Counting calories? Monitoring your sleep? Heart rate zones? These all have their merits:
- Steps: One More Resource Against Osteoporosis!
- Calories: Is Cutting Calories The Key To Healthy Long Life?
- Sleep: A Head-To-Head Of Google and Apple’s Top Apps For Getting Your Head Down
- Heart Rate Zones: Heart Rate Zones, Oxalates, & More
But something far fewer people do unless they have diabetes or are very enthusiastic about personal health, is to track blood sugars:
Here’s how: Track Your Blood Sugars For Better Personalized Health
And for understanding some things to watch out for when using a continuous glucose monitor:
Continuous Glucose Monitors Without Diabetes: Pros & Cons
Writer’s anecdote: I decided to give one a try for a few months, and so far it has been informative, albeit unexciting. It seems that with my diet (mostly whole-foods plant based, though I do have a wholegrain wheat product about twice per week (usually: flatbread once, pasta once) which is… Well, we could argue it’s whole-food plant based, but let’s be honest, it’s a little processed), my blood sugars don’t really have spikes at all; the graph looks more like gently rolling low hills (which is good). However! Even so, by experimenting with it, I can see for myself what differences different foods/interventions make to my blood sugars, which is helpful, and it also improves my motivation for intermittent fasting. It also means that if I think “hmm, my energy levels are feeling low; I need a snack” I can touch my phone to my arm and find out if that is really the reason (so far, it hasn’t been). I expect that as I monitor my blood sugars continuously and look at the data frequently, I’ll start to get a much more intuitive feel for my own blood sugars, in much the same way I can generally intuit my hormone levels correctly after years of taking-and-testing.
So much for blood sugars. Now, what about insulin?
Step Zero
If taking care of blood sugars is step one, then taking care of insulin is step zero.
Often’s it’s viewed the other way around: we try to keep our blood sugars balanced, to reduce the need for our bodies to produce so much insulin that it gets worn out. And that’s good and fine, but…
To quote what we wrote when reviewing “Why We Get Sick” last month:
❝Dr. Bikman makes the case that while indeed hyper- or hypoglycemia bring their problems, mostly these are symptoms rather than causes, and the real culprit is insulin resistance, and this is important for two main reasons:
- Insulin resistance occurs well before the other symptoms set in (which means: it is the thing that truly needs to be nipped in the bud; if your fasting blood sugars are rising, then you missed “nipping it in the bud” likely by a decade or more)
- Insulin resistance causes more problems than “mere” hyperglycemia (the most commonly-known result of insulin resistance) does, so again, it really needs to be considered separately from blood sugar management.
This latter, Dr. Bikman goes into in great detail, linking insulin resistance (even if blood sugar levels are normal) to all manner of diseases (hence the title).
You may be wondering: how can blood sugar levels be normal, if we have insulin resistance?
And the answer is that for as long as it is still able, your pancreas will just faithfully crank out more and more insulin to deal with the blood sugar levels that would otherwise be steadily rising. Since people measure blood sugar levels much more regularly than anyone checks for actual insulin levels, this means that one can be insulin resistant for years without knowing it, until finally the pancreas is no longer able to keep up with the demand—then that’s when people finally notice.❞
You can read the full book review here:
Now, testing for insulin is not so quick, easy, or accessible as testing for glucose, but it can be worthwhile to order such a test—because, as discussed, your insulin levels could be high even while your blood sugars are still normal, and it won’t be until the pancreas finally reaches breaking point that your blood sugars show it.
So, knowing your insulin levels can help you intervene before your pancreas reaches that breaking point.
We can’t advise on local services available for ordering blood tests (because they will vary depending on location), but a simple Google search should suffice to show what’s available in your region.
Once you know your insulin levels (or even if you don’t, but simply take the principled position that improving insulin sensitivity will be good regardless), you can set about managing them.
Insulin sensitivity is important, because the better it is (higher insulin sensitivity), the less insulin the pancreas has to make to tidy up the same amount of glucose into places that are good for it to go—which is good. In contrast, the worse it is (higher insulin resistance), the more insulin the pancreas has to make to do the same blood sugar management. Which is bad.
What to do about it
We imagine you will already be eating in a way that is conducive to avoiding or reversing type 2 diabetes, but for anyone who wants a refresher,
See: How To Prevent And Reverse Type 2 Diabetes
…which yes, as well as meaning eating/avoiding certain foods, does recommend intermittent fasting. For anyone who wants a primer on that,
See: Intermittent Fasting: Methods & Benefits
There are also drugs you may want to consider:
Metformin Without Diabetes, For Weight-Loss & More
And “nutraceuticals” that sound like drugs, for example:
Glutathione’s Benefits: The Usual And The Unique ← the good news is, it’s found in several common foods
You may have heard the hype about “nature’s Ozempic”, and berberine isn’t exactly that (works in mostly different ways), but its benefits do include improving insulin sensitivity:
Berberine For Metabolic Health
Lastly, while eating for blood sugar management is all well and good, do be aware that some things affect insulin levels without increased blood sugar levels. So even if you’re using a CGM, you may go blissfully unaware of an insulin spike, because there was no glucose spike on the graph—and in contrast, there could even be a dip in blood sugar levels, if you consumed something that increased insulin levels without providing glucose at the same time, making you think “I should have some carbs”, which visually on the graph would even out your blood sugars, but invisibly, would worsen the already-extant insulin spike.
Read more about this: Strange Things Happening In The Islets Of Langerhans: When Carbs, Proteins, & Fats Switch Metabolic Roles
Now, since you probably can’t test your insulin at a moment’s notice, the way to watch out for this is “hmm, I ate some protein/fats (delete as applicable) without carbs and my blood sugars dipped; I know what’s going on here”.
Want to know more?
We heartily recommend the “Why We Get Sick” book we linked above, as this focuses on insulin resistance/sensitivity itself!
However, a very good general primer on blood sugar management (and thus, by extension, at least moderately good insulin management), is:
Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar – by Jessie Inchauspé
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
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