The Salt Fix – by Dr. James DiNicolantonio
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This book has a bold premise: high salt consumption is not, as global scientific consensus holds, a serious health risk, but rather, as the title suggests, a health fix.
Dr. DiNicolantonio, a pharmacist, explains how “our ancestors crawled out of the sea millions of years ago and we still crave that salt”, giving this as a reason why we should consume salt ad libitum, aiming for 8–10g per day, and thereafter a fair portion of the book is given over to discussing how many health conditions are caused/exacerbated by sugar, and that therefore we have demonized the wrong white crystal (scientific consensus is that there are many white crystals that can cause us harm).
Indeed, sugar can be a big health problem, but reading it at such length felt a lot like when all a politician can talk about is how their political rival is worse.
A lot of the studies the author cites to support the idea of healthy higher salt consumption rates were on non-human animals, and it’s always a lottery as to whether those results translate to humans or not. Also, many of the studies he’s citing are old and have methodological flaws, while others we could not find when we looked them up.
One of the sources cited is “my friend Jose tried this and it worked for him”.
Bottom line: sodium is an essential mineral that we do need to live, but we are not convinced that this book’s ideas have scientific merit. But are they well-argued? Also no.
Click here to check out The Salt Fix for yourself! It’s a fascinating book.
(Usually, if we do not approve of a book, we simply do not review it. We like to keep things positive. However, this one came up in Q&A, so it seemed appropriate to share our review. Also, the occasional negative review may reassure you, dear readers, that when we praise a book, we mean it)
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Olive oil is healthy. Turns out olive leaf extract may be good for us too
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Olive oil is synonymous with the Mediterranean diet, and the health benefits of both are well documented.
Olive oil reduces the risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and premature death. Olives also contain numerous healthy nutrients.
Now evidence is mounting about the health benefits of olive leaves, including from studies in a recent review.
Here’s what’s in olive leaves and who might benefit from taking olive leaf extract.
mtphoto19/Shutterstock What’s in olive leaves?
Olive leaves have traditionally been brewed as a tea in the Mediterranean and drunk to treat fever and malaria.
The leaves contain high levels of a type of antioxidant called oleuropein. Olives and olive oil contain this too, but at lower levels.
Generally, the greener the leaf (the less yellowish) the more oleuropein it contains. Leaves picked in spring also have higher levels compared to ones picked in autumn, indicating levels of oleuropein reduce as the leaves get older.
Olive leaves also contain other antioxidants such as hydroxytyrosol, luteolin, apigenin and verbascoside.
Antioxidants work by reducing the oxidative stress in the body. Oxidative stress causes damage to our DNA, cell membranes and tissues, which can lead to chronic diseases such as cancer and heart disease.
Are olive leaves healthy?
One review and analysis combined data from 12 experimental studies with 819 participants in total. Overall, olive leaf extract improved risk factors for heart disease. This included healthier blood lipids (fats) and lowering blood pressure.
The effect was greater for people who already had high blood pressure.
Most studies in this review gave olive leaf extract as a capsule, with daily doses of 500 milligrams to 5 grams for six to 48 weeks.
Another review and analysis published late last year looked at data from 12 experimental studies, with a total of 703 people. Some of these studies involved people with high blood lipids, people with high blood pressure, people who were overweight or obese, and some involved healthy people.
Daily doses were 250-1,000mg taken as tablets or baked into bread.
Individual studies in the review showed significant benefits in improving blood glucose (sugar) control, blood lipid levels and reducing blood pressure. But when all the data was combined, there were no significant health effects. We’ll explain why this may be the case shortly.
Olive leaves can be brewed into tea. Picture Partners/Shutterstock Another review looked at people who took oleuropein and hydroxytyrosol (the antioxidants in olive leaves). This found significant improvement in body weight, blood lipid profiles, glucose metabolism and improvements in bones, joints and cognitive function.
The individual studies included tested either the two antioxidants or olive leaf incorporated into foods such as bread and cooking oils (but not olive oil). The doses were 6-500mg per day of olive leaf extract.
So what can we make of these studies overall? They show olive leaf extract may help reduce blood pressure, improve blood lipids and help our bodies handle glucose.
But these studies show inconsistent results. This is likely due to differences in the way people took olive leaf extract, how much they took and how long for. This type of inconsistency normally tells us we need some more research to clarify the health effects of olive leaves.
Can you eat olive leaves?
Olive leaves can be brewed into a tea, or the leaves added to salads. Others report grinding olive leaves into smoothies.
However the leaves are bitter, because of the antioxidants, which can make them hard to eat, or the tea unpalatable.
Olive leaf extract has also been added to bread and other baked goods. Researchers find this improves the level of antioxidants in these products and people say the foods tasted better.
Olive leaves can taste bitter, which can put people off. But you can bake the extract into bread. Repina Valeriya/Shutterstock Is olive leaf extract toxic?
No, there seem to be no reported toxic effects of eating or drinking olive leaf extract.
It appears safe up to 1g a day, according to studies that have used olive leaf extract. However, there are no official guidelines about how much is safe to consume.
There have been reports of potential toxicity if taken over 85mg/kg of body weight per day. For an 80kg adult, this would mean 6.8g a day, well above the dose used in the studies mentioned in this article.
Pregnant and breastfeeding women are recommended not to consume it as we don’t know if it’s safe for them.
What should I do?
If you have high blood pressure, diabetes or raised blood lipids you may see some benefit from taking olive leaf extract. But it is important you discuss this with your doctor first and not change any medications or start taking olive leaf extract until you have spoken to them.
But there are plenty of antioxidants in all plant foods, and you should try to eat a wide variety of different coloured plant foods. This will allow you to get a range of nutrients and antioxidants.
Olive leaf and its extract is not going to be a panacea for your health if you’re not eating a healthy diet and following other health advice.
Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, University of South Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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How Processed Is The Food You Buy, Really?
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Ultraprocessed foods are a) ubiquitous in industrialized nations b) generally not fabulous for the health. See for example:
- Eat To Beat Cancer ← skipping the ultraprocessed foods is one main point
- What To Leave Off Your Table (To Stay Off This Surgeon’s) ← have a guess
Abstaining from ultraprocessed food can also be difficult psychologically, because they are generally engineered specifically to trigger certain physiological responses, often with their combination of sweet and/or salty flavors with simple carbohydrates that will zip straight into one’s veins and feel immediately rewarding, even if there is a health price to pay later.
And worse, being habituated to ultraprocessed food can make unprocessed or minimally-processed food seem less appealing:
What causes food cravings? And what can we do about them?
Fortunately, we can reverse this, and once we get habituated to unprocessed or minimally-processed food, the ultraprocessed will start to seem like not-food to us. You will wonder: how did I ever eat that crap?
Now, one other thing to bear in mind:
There is a scale of “badness”
You might recall this article:
Not all ultra-processed foods are bad for your health, whatever you might have heard
For example, Reese’s confectionary and Huel nutrition powder are both ultra-processed, but one is definitely better than the other.
See also: Are plant-based burgers really bad for your heart? Here’s what’s behind the scary headlines
Some comparisons are obvious; others, not so much. So, how to tell the difference?
The “True Food” Scale
A large study analyzed ingredient lists, nutrition facts, and prices of over 50,000 food items from Target, Whole Foods, and Walmart. Using a rigorous statistical method, they assigned processing scores and compiled data into a giant database, with results published publicly.
You can find the study here:
Prevalence of processed foods in major US grocery stores
That in and of itself doesn’t tell a lot that’s useful to the consumer, because the paper itself does not have all of the data from all 50,000 food items, just the aggregate results, trends, implications for public health, and suggestions for public health policy.
However, what does tell a lot, is the public face of the database itself, which you can browse for free, and look up your regular shopping items, if you are wondering “are these textured soy pieces basically a step away from soy beans, or a frankenfood that will murder me in my sleep?”
How it works: it examines each food, its listed ingredients, and what is known about the processedness of such ingredients. It also draws a distinction between ingredients and additives, rendering the entire process of the production of the food into an “ingredient tree”, showing what was added to what along the way. Minimally-processed foods will have barely an ingredient sapling, while ultraprocessed foods will have an ingredient tree whose branches can barely be counted, they are so numerous. It’s not just about the number of ingredients though; it’s about the processes that each underwent.
How it represents this data: you can look at the food in the database, and it’ll tell you the ingredients and nutritional facts (which you probably knew already; it’s written on the packaging), and then show you how processed it is, and then ranking that against all other foods in the database of the same kind.
So for example, if you are looking at a pizza (have you ever noticed how some are marketed with bright flashy colors, and others in natural tones to suggest minimal processing? This is marketing, not reliable information! Sometimes the product that looks healthier, isn’t!), then it’ll give it a score reflecting how it ranks compared to all other pizze in the database. This number is out of a hundred, and it reflects the percentile into which it falls.
So for example, if the score your pizza gets is 47, then that means that if you looked at it next to 99 others, on average your pizza would would rank better than 46 of them and worse than 53 of them.
In other words, the lower the score, the less processed it is on the whole.
Here’s a side-by-side example of two cakes, one of which got a score of 3, and the other got a score of 61:
Mini No Sugar Added Cheesecake vs EDWARDS Desserts Original Whipped Cheesecake
And here is the main menu of the database, in which you can use the search function to look up the food you want to check, or else browse by category:
The TrueFood Database: Search or Browse (it’s free!)
Enjoy!
Want to know more?
You might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:
Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food – by Dr. Chris van Tulleken
Enjoy!
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Dates vs Figs – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing dates to figs, we picked the dates.
Why?
Dates are higher in sugar, but also have a lower glycemic index than figs, which makes the sugar content much healthier. On the flipside, figs do have around 3x more fiber.
So far, so balanced.
When it comes to micronutrients though, dates take the prize much more clearly.
Dates have slightly more of most vitamins, and a lot more of most minerals.
In particular, dates are several times higher in copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc.
As for other phytochemical benefits going on:
- both are good against diabetes for reasons beyond the macros
- both have anti-inflammatory properties
- dates have anticancer properties
- dates have kidney-protecting properties
So in this last case, another win for dates.
Both are still great though, so do enjoy both!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Take care!
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Hitting the beach? Here are some dangers to watch out for – plus 10 essentials for your first aid kit
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Summer is here and for many that means going to the beach. You grab your swimmers, beach towel and sunscreen then maybe check the weather forecast. Did you think to grab a first aid kit?
The vast majority of trips to the beach will be uneventful. However, if trouble strikes, being prepared can make a huge difference to you, a loved one or a stranger.
So, what exactly should you be prepared for?
FTiare/Shutterstock Knowing the dangers
The first step in being prepared for the beach is to learn about where you are going and associated levels of risk.
In Broome, you are more likely to be bitten by a dog at the beach than stung by an Irukandji jellyfish.
In Byron Bay, you are more likely to come across a brown snake than a shark.
In the summer of 2023–24, Surf Life Saving Australia reported more than 14 million Australian adults visited beaches. Surf lifesavers, lifeguards and lifesaving services performed 49,331 first aid treatments across 117 local government areas around Australia. Surveys of beach goers found perceptions of common beach hazards include rips, tropical stingers, sun exposure, crocodiles, sharks, rocky platforms and waves.
Sun and heat exposure are likely the most common beach hazard. The Cancer Council has reported that almost 1.5 million Australians surveyed during summer had experienced sunburn during the previous week. Without adequate fluid intake, heat stroke can also occur.
Lacerations and abrasions are a further common hazard. While surfboards, rocks, shells and litter might seem more dangerous, the humble beach umbrella has been implicated in thousands of injuries.
Sprains and fractures are also associated with beach activities. A 2022 study linked data from hospital, ambulance and Surf Life Saving cases on the Sunshine Coast over six years and found 79 of 574 (13.8%) cervical spine injuries occurred at the beach. Surfing, smaller wave heights and shallow water diving were the main risks.
Rips and rough waves present a higher risk at areas of unpatrolled beach, including away from surf lifesaving flags. Out of 150 coastal drowning deaths around Australia in 2023–24, nearly half were during summer. Of those deaths:
- 56% occurred at the beach
- 31% were rip-related
- 86% were male, and
- 100% occurred away from patrolled areas.
People who had lived in Australia for less than two years were more worried about the dangers, but also more likely to be caught in a rip.
Safety Beach on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. Still bring your first aid essentials though. Julia Kuleshova/Shutterstock Knowing your DR ABCs
So, beach accidents can vary by type, severity and impact. How you respond will depend on your level of first aid knowledge, ability and what’s in your first aid kit.
A first aid training company survey of just over 1,000 Australians indicated 80% of people agree cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is the most important skill to learn, but nearly half reported feeling intimidated by the prospect.
CPR training covers an established checklist for emergency situations. Using the acronym “DR ABC” means checking for:
- Danger
- Response
- Airway
- Breathing
- Circulation
A complete first aid course will provide a range of skills to build confidence and be accredited by the national regulator, the Australian Skills Quality Authority.
What to bring – 10 first aid essentials
Whether you buy a first aid kit or put together you own, it should include ten essential items in a watertight, sealable container:
- Band-Aids for small cuts and abrasions
- sterile gauze pads
- bandages (one small one for children, one medium crepe to hold on a dressing or support strains or sprains, and one large compression bandage for a limb)
- large fabric for sling
- a tourniquet bandage or belt to restrict blood flow
- non-latex disposable gloves
- scissors and tweezers
- medical tape
- thermal or foil blanket
- CPR shield or breathing mask.
Before you leave for the beach, check the expiry dates of any sunscreen, solutions or potions you choose to add.
If you’re further from help
If you are travelling to a remote or unpatrolled beach, your kit should also contain:
- sterile saline solution to flush wounds or rinse eyes
- hydrogel or sunburn gel
- an instant cool pack
- paracetamol and antihistamine medication
- insect repellent.
Make sure you carry any “as-required” medications, such as a Ventolin puffer for asthma or an EpiPen for severe allergy.
Vinegar is no longer recommended for most jellyfish stings, including Blue Bottles. Hot water is advised instead.
In remote areas, also look out for Emergency Response Beacons. Located in high-risk spots, these allow bystanders to instantly activate the surf emergency response system.
If you have your mobile phone or a smart watch with GPS function, make sure it is charged and switched on and that you know how to use it to make emergency calls.
First aid kits suitable for the beach range in price from $35 to over $120. Buy these from certified first aid organisations such as Surf Lifesaving Australia, Australian Red Cross, St John Ambulance or Royal Life Saving. Kits that come with a waterproof sealable bag are recommended.
Be prepared this summer for your trip to the beach and pack your first aid kit. Take care and have fun in the sun.
Andrew Woods, Lecturer, Nursing, Faculty of Health, Southern Cross University and Willa Maguire, Associate Lecturer in Nursing, Southern Cross University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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PTSD, But, Well…. Complex.
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PTSD is typically associated with military veterans, for example, or sexual assault survivors. There was a clear, indisputable, Bad Thing™ that was experienced, and it left a psychological scar. When something happens to remind us of that—say, there are fireworks, or somebody touches us a certain way—it’ll trigger an immediate strong response of some kind.
These days the word “triggered” has been popularly misappropriated to mean any adverse emotional reaction, often to something trivial.
But, not all trauma is so clear. If PTSD refers to the result of that one time you were smashed with a sledgehammer, C-PTSD (Complex PTSD) refers to the result of having been hit with a rolled-up newspaper every few days for fifteen years, say.
This might have been…
- childhood emotional neglect
- a parent with a hair-trigger temper
- bullying at school
- extended financial hardship as a young adult
- “just” being told or shown all too often that your best was never good enough
- the persistent threat (real or imagined) of doom of some kind
- the often-reinforced idea that you might lose everything at any moment
If you’re reading this list and thinking “that’s just life though”, you might be in the estimated 1 in 5 people with (often undiagnosed) C-PTSD.
How About You? Take The (5mins) Test Here
Now, we at 10almonds are not doctors or therapists and even if we were, we certainly wouldn’t try to diagnose from afar. But, even if there’s only a partial match, sometimes the same advice can help.
So what are the symptoms of C-PTSD?
- A feeling that nothing is safe; we might suddenly lose what we have gained
- The body keeps the score… And it shows. We may have trouble relaxing, an aversion to exercise for reasons that don’t really add up, or an aversion to being touched.
- Trouble sleeping, born of nagging sense that to sleep is to be vulnerable to attack, and/or lazy, and/or negligent of our duties
- Poor self-image, about our body and/or about ourself as a person.
- We’re often drawn to highly unavailable people—or we are the highly unavailable person to which our complementary C-PTSD sufferers are attracted.
- We are prone to feelings of rage. Whether we keep a calm lid on it or lose our temper, we know it’s there. We’re angry at the world and at ourselves.
- We are not quick to trust—we may go through the motions of showing trust, but we’re already half-expecting that trust to have been misplaced.
- “Hell is other people” has become such a rule of life that we may tend to cloister ourselves away from company.
- We may try to order our environment around us as a matter of safety, and be easily perturbed by sudden changes being imposed on us, even if ostensibly quite minor or harmless.
- In a bid to try to find safety, we may throw ourselves into work—whatever that is for us. It could be literally our job, or passion projects, or our family, or community, and in and of itself that’s great! But the motivation is more of an attempt to distract ourselves from The Horrors™.
“Alright, I scored more of those than I care to admit. What now?”
A lot of the answer lies in first acknowledging to yourself what happened, to make you feel the way you do now. If you, for example, have an abject hatred of Christmas, what were your childhood Christmases like? If you fear losing money that you’ve accumulated, what underpins that fear? It could be something that directly happened to you, but it also could just be repeated messages you received from your parents, for example.
It could even be that you had superficially an idyllic perfect childhood. Health, wealth, security, a loving family… and simply a chemical imbalance in your brain made it a special kind of Hell for you that nobody understood, and perhaps you didn’t either.
Unfortunately, a difficult task now lies ahead: giving love, understanding, compassion, and reassurance to the person for whom you may have the most contempt in the world: yourself.
If you’d like some help with that, here are some resources:
ComplexTrauma.org (a lot of very good free resources, with no need for interaction)
CPTSD Foundation (mostly paid courses and the like)
Some final words about healing…
- You are in fact amazing,
- You can do it, and
- You deserve it.
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Black Cohosh vs The Menopause
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Black Cohosh, By Any Other Name…
Black cohosh is a flowering plant whose extracts are popularly used to relieve menopausal (and postmenopausal) symptoms.
Note on terms: we’ll use “black cohosh” in this article, but if you see the botanical names in studies, the reason it sometimes appears as Actaea racemosa and sometimes as Cimicfuga racemosa, is because it got changed and changed back on account of some disagreements between botanists. It’s the same plant, in any case!
Read: Reclassification of Actaea to include Cimicifuga and Souliea (Ranunculaceae)
Does it work?
In few words: it works for physical symptoms, but not emotional ones, based on this large (n=2,310) meta-analysis of studies:
❝Black cohosh extracts were associated with significant improvements in overall menopausal symptoms (Hedges’ g = 0.575, 95% CI = 0.283 to 0.867, P < 0.001), as well as in hot flashes (Hedges’ g = 0.315, 95% CIs = 0.107 to 0.524, P = 0.003), and somatic symptoms (Hedges’ g = 0.418, 95% CI = 0.165 to 0.670, P = 0.001), compared with placebo.
However, black cohosh did not significantly improve anxiety (Hedges’ g = 0.194, 95% CI = -0.296 to 0.684, P = 0.438) or depressive symptoms (Hedges’ g = 0.406, 95% CI = -0.121 to 0.932, P = 0.131)❞
~ Dr. Ryochi Sadahiro et al., 2023
Source: Black cohosh extracts in women with menopausal symptoms: an updated pairwise meta-analysis
Here’s an even larger (n=43,759) one that found similarly, and also noted on safety:
❝Treatment with iCR/iCR+HP was well tolerated with few minor adverse events, with a frequency comparable to placebo. The clinical data did not reveal any evidence of hepatotoxicity.
Hormone levels remained unchanged and estrogen-sensitive tissues (e.g. breast, endometrium) were unaffected by iCR treatment.
As benefits clearly outweigh risks, iCR/iCR+HP should be recommended as an evidence-based treatment option for natural climacteric symptoms.
With its good safety profile in general and at estrogen-sensitive organs, iCR as a non-hormonal herbal therapy can also be used in patients with hormone-dependent diseases who suffer from iatrogenic climacteric symptoms.❞
~ Dr. Castelo-Branco et al., 2020
(iCR = isopropanolic Cimicifuga racemosa)
So, is this estrogenic or not?
This is the question many scientists were asking, about 20 or so years ago. There are many papers from around 2000–2005, but here’s a good one that’s quite representative:
❝These new data dispute the estrogenic theory and demonstrate that extracts of black cohosh do not bind to the estrogen receptor in vitro, up-regulate estrogen-dependent genes, or stimulate the growth of estrogen-dependent tumors❞
Source: Is Black Cohosh Estrogenic?
(the abstract is a little vague, but if you click on the PDF icon, you can read the full paper, which is a lot clearer and more detailed)
The short answer: no, black cohosh is not estrogenic
Is it safe?
As ever, check with your doctor as everyone’s situation can vary, but broadly speaking, yes, it has a very good safety profile—including for breast cancer patients, at that. See for example:
- Black cohosh efficacy and safety for menopausal symptoms: the Spanish Menopause Society statement
- Black cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa): safety and efficacy for cancer patients
- The safety of black cohosh (Actaea racemosa, Cimicifuga racemosa)
Where can I get some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon
Enjoy!
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