The Protein Mistake That’s Sabotaging Your Progress
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Many Americans consume too much protein and also don’t get enough. And no, it’s not even about protein “quality”.
Here’s the real reason:
The numbers game
Protein protein is important, especially as we get older. It’s critical for muscle repair, connective tissue, hormones, and structural tissues, and without enough of it your body can’t rebuild when it needs to (spoiler: it needs to literally all the time).
From our 30s onwards, our bodies will tend towards sarcopenia (muscle loss), if we don’t take great care to maintain our muscle mass.
Now, maybe you are not planning on entering any bodybuilding competitions (this writer neither!), but higher muscle mass is associated with lower mortality risk, meaning adequate protein and strength training contribute not just to lifespan but to maintaining independence and quality of life. And that’s something that’s important for all of us!
As for how much: research suggests about 1.2–2.0g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day for people with normal* body fat levels, though many benefit from aiming closer to 1.6 g/kg or higher.
*Which for this purpose is “normal healthy”, which for most people is in the ballpark of 15% for men and 21% for women. If you have more body fat than that, you will still need to get your protein in to keep your lean muscle mass levels up, but you can (after the 15% or 21% cutoff) disregard the rest of your bodyweight that comes from additional fat after that, because your body doesn’t need protein to maintain fat!
The mistake: a lot of people, if trying to get enough protein in, will get most of it in one sitting to “get it out of the way” for the day. However, the body simply cannot make use of that much protein at once, so it needs to be spread out more, with 30g/meal being generally considered ideal.
That does of course mean that if you weigh more than 45kg (99 lbs, Americans), then you’ll need more than 3 “meals”, but that’s fine, because a “meal” containing 30g of protein can easily be a high-protein snack, or a protein supplement, between meals (this writer eats so many nuts that you might be tempted to tell me I am what I eat!).
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
- Protein: How Much Do We Need, Really?
- Why You Can’t Skimp On Amino Acids
- Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy? ← this covers which animal products are definitely very health-risky, and which are probably fine according to current best science
Take care!
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Glutathione: More Than An Antioxidant
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Glutathione’s Benefits: The Usual And The Unique
Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant that does all the things we might reasonably expect an antioxidant to do, plus some beneficial quirks of its own.
We do make glutathione in our bodies, but we can also get it from our diet, and of course, we can also supplement it.
What foods is it in?
It’s in a lot of foods, but some top examples include:
- turmeric
- avocado
- asparagus
- almonds
- cruciferous vegetables
- watermelon
- garlic
For a fuller list and discussion, see:
What does it do?
Let’s start with the obvious; as with most things that are antioxidant, it is also anti-inflammatory. Increasing or decreasing glutathione levels is associated with decreased or increased inflammation, respectively. For example:
It being anti-inflammatory also means it can be beneficial in calming autoimmune disorders:
Glutathione: a key player in autoimmunity
And to complete the triad of “those three things that generally go together”, yes, this means it also has anticancer potential, but watch out!
❝Although in healthy cells [glutathione] is crucial for the removal and detoxification of carcinogens, elevated [glutathione] levels in tumor cells are associated with tumor progression and increased resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs❞
~ Dr. Miroslava Cuperlovic-Culf et al.
Read in full: Role of Glutathione in Cancer: From Mechanisms to Therapies
So in other words, when it comes to cancer risk management, glutathione is a great preventative, but the opposite of a cure.
What were those “beneficial quirks of its own”?
They are mainly twofold, and the first is that it improves insulin sensitivity. There are many studies showing this, but here’s a recent one from earlier this year:
The Role of Glutathione and Its Precursors in Type 2 Diabetes
The other main “beneficial quirk of its own” is that it helps prevent and/or reverse non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, as in this study from last year:
Because of glutathione’s presence in nuts, fruits, and vegetables, this makes it a great thing to work in tandem with a dietary approach to preventing/reversing NAFLD, by the way:
Anything else?
It’s being investigated as a potential treatment for Parkinson’s disease symptoms, but the science is young for this one, so there is no definitive recommendation yet in this case. If you’re interested in that, though, do check out the current state of the science at:
Potential use of glutathione as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease
Is it safe?
While there is no 100% blanket statement of safety that can ever be made about anything (even water can kill people, and oxygen ultimately kills everyone that something else doesn’t get first), glutathione has one of the safest general safety profiles possible, with the exception we noted earlier (if you have cancer, it is probably better to skip this one unless an oncologist or similar advises you otherwise).
As ever, do speak with your doctor/pharmacist to be sure in any case, though!
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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How Anxiety About Aging Accelerates Aging
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“Stress makes your hair turn gray” is a well-known thing (it’s only one factor in hair turning gray, and neither a necessary nor uniquely sufficient factor, but it is a factor).
See also: Can You Reverse Gray Hair? A Dermatologist Explains
But gray hair is trivial (it’s health-neutral in and of itself, and does not necessarily denote ill-health, though ill-health can increase its likelihood), and there’s a lot more to aging than that.
Biological age often gets talked about as a simplified number, but it’s more complex than that, as we can age in different ways at different rates, for example:
- Visual markers of aging (e.g. wrinkles, graying hair)
- Performative markers of aging (e.g. mobility tests)
- Internal functional markers of aging (e.g. tests for cognitive decline, eyesight, hearing, etc)
- Cellular markers or aging (e.g. telomere length)
- …and more, but we only have so much room here
Learn more: Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?
So, how about the impact of anxiety on aging? And how about, in particular, the impact of anxiety about aging?
Young at heart (and brain, and gut, and kidneys, and…)
Researchers (Dr. Mariana Rodrigues et al.) from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases investigated this, and found that that women who worry about growing older, particularly fears around declining health, may experience faster biological aging at a cellular level.
Dr. Rodrigues and her team looked at data from 726 women (average age 50.4 years) who participated in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study. Participants reported how much they worried about different aspects of aging, including declining attractiveness, worsening health, and fertility loss.
Blood samples were then used to assess biological aging through two epigenetic clock models:
- DunedinPACE measures the current pace at which the body is aging
- GrimAge2 estimates cumulative biological damage and mortality risk
What they found was quite telling, as some factors were a lot more relevant than others (and some, it seems, weren’t relevant at all).
For example, women who worried more about their future health showed a faster pace of biological aging, reflected in higher scores with the aforementioned epigenetic clocks (that’s bad). In contrast, anxiety about appearance or fertility didn’t show a meaningful association with these aging markers at all.
You can find the paper itself, here: Aging anxiety and epigenetic aging in a national sample of adult women in the United States
So, what to do about that?
Well, first there are quite general approaches. For example, we have written previously about:
…and, for that matter, even: The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)
And when it comes to fear of aging and all that might come with it, it is good to consider: When The World Moves Without Us… Can We Side-Step Age-Related Alienation?
It’s also worth meeting some physical health concerns head-on.
On the one hand, in a lot of ways you really can “think yourself younger”, as per: When Age Is A Flexible Number
On the other hand, sometimes you need to acknowledge challenges in order to meet them. We haven’t really done a main feature on this yet, but we did touch on it in: Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
…because what’s key here is ensuring that you do have what you need to meet those challenges. In the article we just linked, it’s about chronic pain, but the same philosophy applies to chronic adverse health conditions of all kinds, and certainly goes for disabilities also.
“Disabled” can be a bit frightening as a word, especially to Americans specifically, given how the culture prizes independence and self-reliance.
A recent survey of 3,881 Americans aged 50–95 (of whom, 1,353 from Michigan) found that many older Americans avoid the disability label even though far more report significant functional limits (there’s a medical word for those, and guess what, that word is “disability”).
Some notes about numbers:
- Disability incidence: about ⅓ of people aged 65–74 and more than 44% of those over 75 had difficulties with hearing, seeing, walking, climbing stairs, dressing, bathing, concentrating, remembering, working, or leaving the home
- ADA-related conditions: when asked about conditions such as speech or breathing difficulties that would qualify for accommodations under disability law, half of adults aged 65 to 74 and about ⅔ of older respondents reported disability-level needs
- The accommodations gap: fewer than 1 in 5 older adults had ever received a healthcare accommodation and only 1 in 4 had asked for one
And yet, studies show that people who do identify as disabled have higher self-esteem, less depression and anxiety, and stronger self-efficacy, and it has been noted that the disability community often works together to solve problems that others ignore:
Source: Many older Americans don’t see themselves as disabled, survey finds
Now, the word itself may not change your life. It’s just a word. But, you might want to consider:
- Find people who are older than you whom you admire
- Find people who are more disabled than you whom you admire
- Not in a “disability porn” way! If you’ve not encountered that phrase before, no, it’s not about a sexual fetish; rather it is used by many disabled people to refer to how abled people will put certain “inspirational” disabled people on a pedestal—and then hold all disabled people to those standards. And now suddenly Peggy from accounting has to live up to Trischa Zorn (very successful Paralympian whose blindness has of course not interfered with winning 55 medals for swimming), forgetting that Paralympians might have a disability in one area but are still Olympians and have absurd abilities in other areas that the other 99.99999% of humanity do not. But rather, you just happen to admire someone who, coincidentally, also happens to be disabled, or more disabled than you are.
- Be prepared! Do not fret about disability aids. If it helps, it helps. Do you wear glasses? That’s a disability aid. If you’re not afraid of glasses, or don’t think that someone wearing glasses makes them a lesser person, then get that grippy jar opener, get yourself a cane if it helps.
- Writer’s anecdote: my usually trivial EDS had a ridiculous flare-up these past few days, to the point I could barely go up and down stairs; my knees were just giving out constantly; I had to strategize and use supports. Now [I’m doing much better again, back to normal, and/but] I’ve ordered myself a cute cane, and a differently cute folding travel cane. More than 99% of the time I’m the last person to need such things; my lower body is very strong and I am broadly in excellent health. But for the <1% of the time that my body says “Yes but is it really? We’re not convinced, so why don’t we just collapse your joints for you to save you from overloading them”, it means I can navigate steps without risk of disaster. So if you’ve been putting off getting something that “Well, I don’t realllllly need it”, then this is your sign to get it in ready just in case. Sincerely, I had to improvize with a non-handled stick to get around my house because I didn’t already have a made-for-purpose cane. So, do better than I did!
Want to learn more?
You should definitely check out this excellent book we reviewed a while back:
This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism – by Ashton Applewhite
…and the equally highly recommendable:
Women Rowing North – by Dr. Mary Pipher
Take care!
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What’s Lurking In Your Household Air?
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As individuals, we can’t do much about the outside air. We can try to spend more time in green spaces* and away from traffic, and we can wear face-masks—as was popular in Tokyo and other such large cities long before the pandemic struck.
*The well-known mental health benefits aside (and contrary to British politician Amber Rudd’s famous assertion in a televised political debate that “clean air doesn’t grow on trees”), clean air comes mostly from trees—their natural process of respiration scrubs not only carbon dioxide, but also pollutants, from the air before releasing oxygen without the pollutants. Neat!
See also this study: Site new care homes near trees and away from busy roads to protect residents’ lungs
We are fortunate to be living in a world where most of us in industrialized countries can exercise a great degree of control over our home’s climate. But, what to do with all that power?
Temperature
Let’s start with the basics. Outside temperature may vary, but you probably have heating and air conditioning. There’s a simple answer here; the optimal temperature for human comfort and wellbeing is 20℃ / 68℉:
Scientists Identify a Universal Optimal Temperature For Life on Earth
Note: this does not mean that that is the ideal global average temperature, because that would mean the polar caps are completely gone, the methane stored there released, many large cities underwater, currently hot places will be too hot for human life (e.g. outside temperatures above human body temperature), there will be mass extinctions of many kinds of animals and plants, including those we humans require for survival, and a great proliferation of many bugs that will kill us. Basically we need diversity for the planet to survive, arctic through to tropical and yes, even deserts (deserts are important carbon sinks!). The ideal global average temperature is about 14℃ (we currently have about 15℃ and rising).
But, for setting the thermostat in your home, 20℃ / 68℉ is perfect for most people, though down as far as 17℃ / 61℉ is fine too, provided other things such as humidity are in order. In fact, for sleeping, 18℃ / 62℉ is ideal. This is because the cooler temperature is one of the several things that tell our brain it is nighttime now, and thus trigger secretion of melatonin.
If you’re wondering about temperatures and respiratory viruses, by the way, check out:
The Cold Truth About Respiratory Infections: The Pathogens That Came In From The Cold
Humidity
Most people pay more attention to the temperature in their home than the humidity, and the latter is just as important:
❝Conditions that fall outside of the optimal range of 40–60% can have significant impacts on health, including facilitating infectious transmission and exacerbating respiratory diseases.
When humidity is too low, it can cause dryness and irritation of the respiratory tract and skin, making individuals more susceptible to infections.
When humidity is too high, it can create a damp environment that encourages the growth of harmful microorganisms like mould, bacteria, and viruses.❞
~ Dr. Gabriella Guarnieri et al.
So, if your average indoor humidity falls outside of that range, consider getting a humidifier or dehumidifier, to correct it. Example items on Amazon, for your convenience:
Humidity monitor | Humidifier | Dehumidifier
See also, about a seriously underestimated killer:
Pneumonia: Prevention Is Better Than Cure
Now, one last component to deal with, for perfect indoor air:
Pollution
We tend to think of pollution as an outdoors thing, and indeed, the pollution in your home will (hopefully!) be lower than that of a busy traffic intersection. However…
- The air you have inside comes from outside, and that matters if you’re in an urban area
- Even in suburban and rural areas, general atmospheric pollutants will reach you, and if you’ve ever been subject to wildfire smoke, you’ll know that’s no fun either.
- Gas appliances in the home cause indoor pollution, even when carbon monoxide is within levels considered acceptable. This polluting effect is much stronger for open gas flames (such as on gas cookers/stoves, or gas fires), than for closed gas heating systems (such as a gas-powered boiler for central heating).
- Wood stoves/fireplaces are not an improvement, in fact they are worse, and don’t get us started on coal. You should not be breathing these things, and definitely should not be burning them in an enclosed space.
- That air conditioning, humidifier, dehumidifier? They may be great for temperature and humidity, but please clean/change the filter more often than you think is necessary, or things will grow there and then your device will be adding pathogens to the air as it goes.
- Plug-in air-freshening devices? They may smell clean, but they are effectively spraying cleaning fluids into your lungs. So please don’t.
So, what of air purifiers? They can definitely be of benefit. for example:
But watch out! Because if you don’t clean/change the filter regularly, guess what happens! That’s right, it’ll be colonized with bacteria/fungus and then be blowing those at you.
And no, not all of them will be visible to the naked eye:
Is Unnoticed Environmental Mold Harming Your Health?
Taking a holistic approach
The air is a very important factor for the health of your lungs (and thus, for the health of everything that’s fed oxygen by your lungs), but there are more things we can do as well:
Seven Things To Do For Good Lung Health!
Take care!
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Why can’t I keep still after intense exercise?
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Do you ever feel like you can’t stop moving after you’ve pushed yourself exercising? Maybe you find yourself walking around in circles when you come off the pitch, or squatting and standing and squatting again when you finish a run.
Sometimes the body knows what’s best for us, even if we’re not aware of the science.
Moving around after intense exercise actually helps the body recover faster. Here’s how it works – plus a tip for if you feel exactly the opposite (and just want to lie down).
Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock What is ‘intense’ exercise?
There are different ways to measure exercise intensity. One is simply how hard it feels to you, known as the “rating of perceived exertion”.
This takes into account how fast you’re breathing, how much you’re sweating and how tired your muscles are. It also considers heart rate.
The average resting heart rate when you’re not exerting yourself is around 60–80 beats per minute, although this can vary between people.
The maximum healthy heart rate is based on subtracting your age from 220. So, if you’re 20 years old, that’s 200 beats per minute when you’re exercising as hard as you can.
This decreases as you age. If you’re 50 years old, your maximum heart rate would be around 170 beats per minute.
An increased heart rate helps pump blood faster to deliver fuel and oxygen to the muscles that are working hard. Once you stop exercising your body will begin its recovery, to return to resting levels.
Let’s look at how continuing to move after intense exercise helps do this.
Removing waste from the muscles
Whenever the body converts fuel into energy it also produces leftover substances, known as metabolic byproducts. This includes lactate (sometimes called lactic acid).
During intense exercise we need to burn more fuel (oxygen and glucose) and this can make the body produce lactate much more quickly than it can clear it. When lactate accumulates in the muscles it may delay their recovery.
We can reuse lactate to provide energy to the heart and brain and modulate the immune system. But to do this, lactate must be cleared from the muscles into the bloodstream.
After intense exercise, continuing to move your body – but less intensely – can help do this. This kind of active recovery has been shown to be more efficient than passive recovery (meaning you don’t move).
Intense exercise can mean your muscles produce more metabolic byproducts. Tom Wang/Shutterstock Returning blood to the heart
Intense exercise also makes our heart pump more blood into the body. The volume pumped to the muscles increases dramatically, while blood flow to other tissues – especially the abdominal organs such as the kidneys – is reduced.
Moving after intense exercise can help redistribute the blood flow and speed up recovery of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. This will also clear metabolic byproducts faster.
After a long run, for example, there will be much more blood in your leg muscles. If you stand still for a long time, you may feel dizzy or faint, thanks to lowered blood pressure and less blood flow to the brain.
Moving your legs, whether through stretching or walking, will help pump blood back to the heart.
In fact around 90% of the blood returning from the legs via veins relies on the foot, calf and thigh muscles moving and pumping. The calf muscle plays the largest role (about 65%). Moving your heels up and down after exercising can help activate this motion.
What if you don’t feel like moving?
Maybe after exercise you just want to sit down in a heap. Should you?
If you’re too tired to do light movement such as stretching or walking, you may still benefit from elevating your legs.
You can lie down – research has shown blood from the veins returns more easily to the heart after exercise when you’re lying down, compared to sitting up, even if you’re still. Elevating your legs has an added benefit, as it reverses the effect of gravity and helps circulation.
Ken Nosaka, Professor of Exercise and Sports Science, Edith Cowan University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Fermenting Everything – by Andy Hamilton
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This is not justanother pickling book! This is, instead, what it says on the front cover, “fermenting everything”.
Ok, maybe not literally everything, but every kind of thing that can reasonably be fermented, and it’s probably a lot more things than you might think.
From habanero chutney to lacto-lemonade, aioli to kombucha, Ukrainian fermented tomatoes to kvass. We could go on, but we’d soon run out of space. You get the idea. If it’s a fermented product (food, drink, condiment) and you’ve heard of it, there’s probably a recipe in here.
All in all, this is a great way to get in your gut-healthy daily dose of fermented products!
He does also talk safety, and troubleshooting too. And so long as you have a collection of big jars and a fairly normally-furnished kitchen, you shouldn’t need any more special equipment than that, unless you decide to you your fermentation skills for making beer (which does need some extra equipment, and he offers advice on that—our advice as a health science publication is “don’t drink beer”, though).
Bottom line: with this in hand, you can create a lot of amazing foods/drinks/condiments that are not only delicious, but also great for gut health.
Click here to check out Fermenting Everything, and widen your culinary horizons!
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How to Think More Effectively – by Alain de Botton
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Our brain is our most powerful organ, and our mind is an astonishing thing. So why do we sometimes go off-piste?
The School of Life‘s Alain de Botton lays out for us a framework of cumulative thinking, directions for effort, and unlikely tools for cognitive improvement.
The book especially highlights the importance of such things as…
- making time for cumulative thinking
- not, however, trying to force it
- working with, rather than in spite of, distractions
- noting and making use of our irrationalities
- taking what we think/do both seriously and lightly, at once
- practising constructive self-doubt
The style is as clear and easy as you may have come to expect from Alain de Botton / The School of Life, and yet, its ideas are still likely to challenge every reader in some (good!) way.
Bottom line: if you would like what you think, say, do to be more meaningful, this book will help you to make the most of your abilities!
Click here to check out How To Think More Effectively, and upgrade your thought processes!
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