The Science of Nutrition – by Rhiannon Lambert
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While there are a lot of conflicting dietary approaches out there, the science itself is actually fairly cohesive in most regards. This book does a lot of what we do here at 10almonds, and presents the science in a clear fashion without having any particular agenda to push.
The author is a nutritionist (BSc, MSc, RNutr) and therefore provides an up-to-date evidence-based approach for eating.
As a result, the only part of this book that brings it down in this reviewer’s opinion is the section on Intermittent Fasting. Being not strictly about nutrition, she has less expertise on that topic, and it shows.
The information is largely presented in double-page spreads each answering a particular question. Because of this, and the fact there are colorful graphic representations of information too, we do recommend the print version over Kindle*.
Bottom line: if you like the notion of real science being presented in a clear and simple fashion (we like to think our subscribers do!), then you’ll surely enjoy this book.
Click here to check out the Science of Nutrition, and get a clear overview!
*Writer’s note: I realize I’ve two days in a row recommended this (yesterday because there are checkboxes to check, worksheets to complete, etc), but it’s not a new trend; just how it happened to be with these two books. I love my Kindle dearly, but sometimes print has the edge for one reason or another!
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The Meds That Impair Decision-Making
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Impairment to cognitive function is often comorbid with Parkinson’s disease. That is to say: it’s not a symptom of Parkinson’s, but it often occurs in the same people. This may seem natural: after all, both are strongly associated with aging.
However, recent (last month, at time of writing) research has brought to light a very specific way in which medication for Parkinson’s may impair the ability to make sound decisions.
Obviously, this is a big deal, because it can affect healthcare decisions, financial decisions, and more—greatly impacting quality of life.
See also: Age-related differences in financial decision-making and social influence
(in which older people were found more likely to be influenced by the impulsive financial preferences of others than their younger counterparts, when other factors are controlled for)
As for how this pans out when it comes to Parkinson’s meds…
Pramipexole (PPX)
This drug can, due to an overlap in molecular shape, mimic dopamine in the brains of people who don’t have enough—such as those with Parkinson’s disease. This (as you might expect) helps alleviate Parkinson’s symptoms.
However, researchers found that mice treated with PPX and given a touch-screen based gambling game picked the high-risk, high reward option much more often. In the hopes of winning strawberry milkshake (the reward), they got themselves subjected to a lot of blindingly-bright flashing lights (the risk, to which untreated mice were much more averse, as this is very stressful for a mouse).
You may be wondering: did the mice have Parkinson’s?
The answer: kind of; they had been subjected to injections with 6-hydroxydopamine, which damages dopamine-producing neurons similarly to Parkinson’s.
This result was somewhat surprising, because one would expect that a mouse whose depleted dopamine was being mimicked by a stand-in (thus, doing much of the job of dopamine) would be less swayed by the allure of gambling (a high-dopamine activity), since gambling is typically most attractive to those who are desperate to find a crumb of dopamine somewhere.
They did find out why this happened, by the way, the PPX hyperactivated the external globus pallidus (also called GPe, and notwithstanding the name, this is located deep inside the brain). Chemically inhibiting this area of the brain reduced the risk-taking activity of the mice.
This has important implications for Parkinson’s patients, because:
- on an individual level, it means this is a side effect of PPX to be aware of
- on a research-and-development level, it means drugs need to be developed that specifically target the GPe, to avoid/mitigate this side effect.
You can read the study in full here:
Don’t want to get Parkinson’s in the first place?
While nothing is a magic bullet, there are things that can greatly increase or decrease Parkinson’s risk. Here’s a big one, as found recently (last week, at the time of writing):
Air Pollution and Parkinson’s Disease in a Population-Based Study
Also: knowing about its onset sooner rather than later is scary, but beneficial. So, with that in mind…
Recognize The Early Symptoms Of Parkinson’s Disease
Finally, because Parkinson’s disease is theorized to be caused by a dysfunction of alpha-synuclein clearance (much like the dysfunction of beta-amyloid clearance, in the case of Alzheimer’s disease), this means that having a healthy glymphatic system (glial cells doing the same clean-up job as the lymphatic system, but in the brain) is critical:
How To Clean Your Brain (Glymphatic Health Primer)
Take care!
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How they did it: STAT reporters expose how ailing seniors suffer when Medicare Advantage plans use algorithms to deny care
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In a call with a long-time source, what stood out most to STAT reporters Bob Herman and Casey Ross was just how viscerally frustrated and angry the source was about an algorithm used by insurance companies to decide how long patients should stay in a nursing home or rehab facility before being sent home.
The STAT stories had a far-reaching impact:
- The U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs took a rare step of launching a formal investigation into the use of algorithms by the country’s three largest Medicare Advantage insurers.
- Thirty-two House members urged the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to increase the oversight of algorithms that health insurers use to make coverage decisions.
- In a rare step, CMS launched its own investigation into UnitedHealth. It also stiffened its regulations on the use of proprietary algorithms and introduced plans to audit denials across Medicare Advantage plans in 2024.
- Based on STAT’s reporting, Medicare Advantage beneficiaries filed two class-action lawsuits against UnitedHealth and its NaviHealth subsidiary, the maker of the algorithm, and against Humana, another major health insurance company that was also using the algorithm.
- Amid scrutiny, UnitedHealth renamed NaviHealth.
The companies never allowed an on-the-record interview with their executives, but they acknowledged that STAT’s reporting was true, according to the news organization.
Ross and Herman spoke with The Journalist’s Resource about their project and shared the following eight tips.
1. Search public comments on proposed federal rules to find sources.
Herman and Ross knew that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had put out a request for public comments, asking stakeholders within the Medicare Advantage industry how the system could improve.
There are two main ways to get Medicare coverage: original Medicare, which is a fee-for-service health plan, and Medicare Advantage, which is a type of Medicare health plan offered by private insurance companies that contract with Medicare. Medicare Advantage plans have increasingly become popular in recent years.
Under the Social Security Act, the public has the opportunity to submit comments on Medicare’s proposed national coverage determinations. CMS uses public comments to inform its proposed and final decisions. It responds in detail to all public comments when issuing a final decision.
The reporters began combing through hundreds of public comments attached to a proposed Medicare Advantage rule that was undergoing federal review. NaviHealth, the UnitedHealth subsidiary and the maker of the algorithm, came up in many of the comments, which include the submitters’ information.
“These are screaming all-caps comments to federal regulators about YOU NEED TO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS BECAUSE IT’S DISGUSTING,” Ross says.
“The federal government is proposing rules and regulations all the time,” adds Herman, STAT’s business of health care reporter. “If someone’s going to take the time and effort to comment on them, they must have at least some knowledge of what’s going on. It’s just a great tool for any journalist to use to figure out more and who to contact.”
The reporters also found several attorneys who had complained in the comments. They began reaching out to them, eventually gaining access to confidential documents and intermediaries who put them in touch with patients to show the human impact of the algorithm.
2. Harness the power of the reader submission box.
At the suggestion of an editor, the reporters added a reader submission box at the bottom of their first story, asking them to share their own experiences with Medicare Advantage denials.
The floodgates opened. Hundreds of submissions arrived.
By the end of their first story, Herman and Ross had confidential records and some patients, but they had no internal sources in the companies they were investigating, including Navihealth. The submission box led them to their first internal source.
(Screenshot of STAT’s submission box.) The journalists also combed through LinkedIn and reached out to former and current employees, but the response rate was much lower than what they received via the submission box.
The submission box “is just right there,” Herman says. “People who would want to reach out to us can do it right then and there after they read the story and it’s fresh in their minds.”
3. Mine podcasts relevant to your story.
The reporters weren’t sure if they could get interviews with some of the key figures in the story, including Tom Scully, the former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who drew up the initial plans for NaviHealth years before UnitedHealth acquired it.
But Herman and another colleague had written previously about Scully’s private equity firm and they had found a podcast where he talked about his work. So Herman went back to the podcast — where he discovered Scully had also discussed NaviHealth.
The reporters also used the podcast to get Scully on the phone for an interview.
“So we knew we had a good jumping off point there to be like, ‘OK, you’ve talked about NaviHealth on a podcast, let’s talk about this,’” Herman says. “I think that helped make him more willing to speak with us.”
4. When covering AI initiatives, proceed with caution.
“A source of mine once said to me, ‘AI is not magic,’” Ross says. “People need to just ask questions about it because AI has this aura about it that it’s objective, that it’s accurate, that it’s unquestionable, that it never fails. And that is not true.”
AI is not a neutral, objective machine, Ross says. “It’s based on data that’s fed into it and people need to ask questions about that data.”
He suggests several questions to ask about the data behind AI tools:
- Where does the data come from?
- Who does it represent?
- How is this tool being applied?
- Do the people to whom the tool is being applied match the data on which it was trained? “If racial groups or genders or age of economic situations are not adequately represented in the training set, then there can be an awful lot of bias in the output of the tool and how it’s applied,” Ross says.
- How is the tool applied within the institution? Are people being forced to forsake their judgment and their own ability to do their jobs to follow the algorithm?
5. Localize the story.
More than half of all Medicare beneficiaries have Medicare Advantage and there’s a high likelihood that there are multiple Medicare Advantage plans in every county across the nation.
“So it’s worth looking to see how Medicare Advantage plans are growing in your area,” Herman says.
Finding out about AI use will most likely rely on shoe-leather reporting of speaking with providers, nursing homes and rehab facilities, attorneys and patients in your community, he says. Another source is home health agencies, which may be caring for patients who were kicked out of nursing homes and rehab facilities too soon because of a decision by an algorithm.
The anecdote that opens their first story involves a small regional health insurer in Wisconsin, which was using NaviHealth and a contractor to manage post-acute care services, Ross says.
“It’s happening to people in small communities who have no idea that this insurer they’ve signed up with is using this tool made by this other company that operates nationally,” Ross says.
There are also plenty of other companies like NaviHealth that are being used by Medicare Advantage plans, Herman says. “So it’s understanding which Medicare Advantage plans are being sold in your area and then which post-acute management companies they’re using,” he adds.
Some regional insurers have online documents that show which contractors they use to evaluate post-acute care services.
6. Get familiar with Medicare’s appeals databases
Medicare beneficiaries can contest Medicare Advantage denials through a five-stage process, which can last months to years. The appeals can be filed via the Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals.
“Between 2020 and 2022, the number of appeals filed to contest Medicare Advantage denials shot up 58%, with nearly 150,000 requests to review a denial filed in 2022, according to a federal database,” Ross and Herman write in their first story. “Federal records show most denials for skilled nursing care are eventually overturned, either by the plan itself or an independent body that adjudicates Medicare appeals.”
There are several sources to find appeals data. Be mindful that the cases themselves are not public to protect patient privacy, but you can find the number of appeals filed and the rationale for decisions.
CMS has two quality improvement organizations, or QIOs, Livanta and Kepro, which are required to file free, publicly-available annual reports, about the cases they handle, Ross says.
Another company, Maximus, a Quality Improvement Contractor, also files reports on prior authorization cases it adjudicates for Medicare. The free annual reports include data on raw numbers of cases and basic information about the percentage denials either overturned or upheld on appeal, Ross explains.
CMS also maintains its own database on appeals for Medicare Part C (Medicare Advantage plans) and Part D, which covers prescription drugs, although the data is not complete, Ross explains.
7. Give your editor regular updates.
“Sprinkle the breadcrumbs in front of your editors,” Ross says.
“If you wrap your editors in the process, you’re more likely to be able to get to the end of [the story] before they say, ‘That’s it! Give me your copy,’” Ross says.
8. Get that first story out.
“You don’t have to know everything before you write that first story,” Ross says. “Because with that first story, if it has credibility and it resonates with people, sources will come forward and sources will continue to come forward.”
Read the stories
Denied by AI: How Medicare Advantage plans use algorithms to cut off care for seniors in need
UnitedHealth pushed employees to follow an algorithm to cut off Medicare patients’ rehab care
UnitedHealth used secret rules to restrict rehab care for seriously ill Medicare Advantage patients
This article first appeared on The Journalist’s Resource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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‘Naked carbs’ and ‘net carbs’ – what are they and should you count them?
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According to social media, carbs come in various guises: naked carbs, net carbs, complex carbs and more.
You might be wondering what these terms mean or if all carbs are really the same. If you are into “carb counting” or “cutting carbs”, it’s important to make informed decisions about what you eat.
What are carbs?
Carbohydrates, or “carbs” for short, are one of the main sources of energy we need for brain function, muscle movement, digestion and pretty much everything our bodies do.
There are two classifications of carbs, simple and complex. Simple carbs have one or two sugar molecules, while complex carbs are three or more sugar molecules joined together. For example, table sugar is a simple carb, but starch in potatoes is a complex carb.
All carbs need to be broken down into individual molecules by our digestive enzymes to be absorbed. Digestion of complex carbs is a much slower process than simple carbs, leading to a more gradual blood sugar increase.
Fibre is also considered a complex carb, but it has a structure our body is not capable of digesting. This means we don’t absorb it, but it helps with the movement of our stool and prevents constipation. Our good gut bacteria also love fibre as they can digest it and use it for energy – important for a healthy gut.
What about ‘naked carbs’?
“Naked carbs” is a popular term usually used to refer to foods that are mostly simple carbs, without fibre or accompanying protein or fat. White bread, sugary drinks, jams, sweets, white rice, white flour, crackers and fruit juice are examples of these foods. Ultra-processed foods, where the grains are stripped of their outer layers (including fibre and most nutrients) leaving “refined carbs”, also fall into this category.
One of the problems with naked carbs or refined carbs is they digest and absorb quickly, causing an immediate rise in blood sugar. This is followed by a rapid spike in insulin (a hormone that signals cells to remove sugar from blood) and then a drop in blood sugar. This can lead to hunger and cravings – a vicious cycle that only gets worse with eating more of the same foods.
Naked carbs can make blood sugars spike then crash.
Pexels/Alexander GreyWhat about ‘net carbs’?
This is another popular term tossed around in dieting discussions. Net carbs refer to the part of the carb food that we actually absorb.
Again, fibre is not easily digestible. And some carb-rich foods contain sugar alcohols, such as sweeteners (like xylitol and sorbitol) that have limited absorption and little to no effect on blood sugar. Deducting the value of fibre and sugar alcohols from the total carbohydrate content of a food gives what’s considered its net carb value.
For example, canned pear in juice has around 12.3g of “total carbohydrates” per 100g, including 1.7g carb + 1.7g fibre + 1.9g sugar alcohol. So its net carb is 12.3g – 1.7g – 1.9g = 8.7g. This means 8.7g of the 12.3g total carbs impacts blood sugar.
The nutrition labels on packaged foods in Australia and New Zealand usually list fibre separately to carbohydrates, so the net carbs have already been calculated. This is not the case in other countries, where “total carbohydrates” are listed.
Does it matter though?
Whether or not you should care about net or naked carbs depends on your dietary preferences, health goals, food accessibility and overall nutritional needs. Generally speaking, we should try to limit our consumption of simple and refined carbs.
The latest World Health Organization guidelines recommend our carbohydrate intake should ideally come primarily from whole grains, vegetables, fruits and pulses, which are rich in complex carbs and fibre. This can have significant health benefits (to regulate hunger, improve cholesterol or help with weight management) and reduce the risk of conditions such as heart disease, obesity and colon cancer.
In moderation, naked carbs aren’t necessarily bad. But pairing them with fats, protein or fibre can slow down the digestion and absorption of sugar. This can help to stabilise blood sugar levels, prevent spikes and crashes and support personal weight management goals. If you’re managing diabetes or insulin resistance, paying attention to the composition of your meals, and the quality of your carbohydrate sources is essential.
A ketogenic (high fat, low carb) diet typically restricts carb intake to between 20 and 50g each day. But this carb amount refers to net carbs – so it is possible to eat more carbs from high-fibre sources.
Choose complex carbohydrates with lots of fibre.
ShutterstockSome tips to try
Some simple strategies can help you get the most out of your carb intake:
reduce your intake of naked carbs and foods high in sugar and white flour, such as white bread, table sugar, honey, lollies, maple syrup, jam, and fruit juice
opt for protein- and fibre-rich carbs. These include oats, sweet potatoes, nuts, avocados, beans, whole grains and broccoli
if you are eating naked carbs, dress them up with some protein, fat and fibre. For example, top white bread with a nut butter rather than jam
if you are trying to reduce the carb content in your diet, be wary of any symptoms of low blood glucose, including headaches, nausea, and dizziness
- working with a health-care professional such as an accredited practising dietitian or your GP can help develop an individualised diet plan that meets your specific needs and goals.
Correction: this article has been updated to indicate how carbohydrates are listed on food nutrition labels in Australia and New Zealand.
Saman Khalesi, Senior Lecturer and Discipline Lead in Nutrition, School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences, CQUniversity Australia; Anna Balzer, Lecturer, Medical Science School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences, CQUniversity Australia; Charlotte Gupta, Postdoctoral research fellow, CQUniversity Australia; Chris Irwin, Senior Lecturer in Nutrition and Dietetics, School of Health Sciences & Social Work, Griffith University, and Grace Vincent, Senior Lecturer, Appleton Institute, CQUniversity Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Calculate (And Enjoy) The Perfect Night’s Sleep
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This is Dr. Michael Breus, a clinical psychologist and sleep specialist, and he wants you to get a good night’s sleep, every night.
First, let’s assume you know a lot of good advice about how to do that already in terms of environment and preparation, etc. If you want a recap before proceeding, then we recommend:
Get Better Sleep: Beyond The Basics
Now, what does he want to add?
Wake up refreshed
Of course, how obtainable this is will depend on the previous night’s sleep, but there is something important we can do here regardless, and it’s: beat sleep inertia.
Sleep inertia is what happens when we wake up groggy (for reasons other than being ill, drugged, etc) rather than refreshed. It’s not actually related to how much sleep we have, though!
Rather, it pertains to whether we woke up during a sleep cycle, or between cycles:
- If we wake up between sleep cycles, we’ll avoid sleep inertia.
- If we wake up during a sleep cycle, we’ll be groggy.
Deep sleep generally occurs in 90-minute blocks, albeit secretly that is generally 3× 20 minute blocks in a trenchcoat, with transition periods between, during which the brainwaves change frequency.
REM sleep generally occurs in 20 minute blocks, and will usually arrive in series towards the end of our natural sleep period, to fit neatly into the last 90-minute cycle.
Sometimes these will appear a little out of order, because we are complicated organic beings, but those are the general trends.
In any case, the take-away here is: interrupt them at your peril. You need to wake up between cycles. There are two ways you can do this:
- Carefully calculate everything, and set a very precise alarm clock (this will work so long as you are correct in guessing how long it will take you to fall asleep)
- Use a “sunrise” lamp alarm clock, that in the hour approaching your set alarm time, will gradually increase the light. Because the body will not naturally wake up during a cycle unless a threat is perceived (loud noise, physical rousing, etc), the sunrise lamp method means that you will wake up between sleep cycles at some point during that hour (towards the beginning or end, depending on what your sleep balance/debt is like).
Do not sleep in (even if you have a sleep debt); it will throw everything out.
Caffeine will not help much in the morning
Assuming you got a reasonable night’s sleep, your brain has been cleansed of adenosine (a sleepy chemical), and if you are suffering from sleep inertia, the grogginess is due to melatonin (a different sleepy chemical).
Caffeine is an adenosine receptor blocker, so that will do nothing to mitigate the effects of melatonin in your brain that doesn’t have any meaningful quantity of adenosine in it in the morning.
Adenosine gradually accumulates in the brain over the course of the day (and then gets washed out while we sleep), so if you’re sleepy in the afternoon (for reasons other than: you just had a nap and now have sleep inertia again), then caffeine can block that adenosine in the afternoon.
Of course, caffeine is also a stimulant (it increases adrenaline levels and promotes vasoconstriction), but its effects at healthily small doses are modest for most people, and you’d do better by splashing cold water on your face and/or listening to some upbeat music.
Learn more: The Two Sides Of Caffeine
Time your naps correctly (if you take naps)
Dr. Breus has a lot to say about this, based on a lot of clinical research, but as it’s entirely consistent with what we’ve written before (based on the exact same research), to save space we’ll link to that here:
How To Be An Expert Nap-Artist (With No “Sleep-Hangovers”)
Calculate your bedtime correctly
Remember what we said about sleep cycles? This means that that famous “7–9 hours sleep” is actually “either 7½ or 9 hours sleep”—because those are multiples of 90 minutes, whereas 8 hours (for example) is not.
So, consider the time you want to get up (ideally, this should be relatively early, and the same time every day), and then count backwards either 7½ or 9 hours sleep (you choose), add 20–30 minutes to fall asleep, and that’s your bedtime.
So for example: if you want to have 7½ hours sleep and get up at 6am, then your bedtime is anywhere between 10pm and 10:10pm.
Remember how we said not to sleep in, even if you have a sleep debt? Now is the time to pay it off, if you have one. If you normally sleep 7½ hours, then make tonight a 9-hour sleep (plus 20–30 minutes to fall asleep). This means you’ll still get up at 6am, but your bedtime is now anywhere between 8:30pm and 8:40pm.
Want to know more from Dr. Breus?
You might like this excellent book of his that we reviewed a while back:
The Power of When – by Dr. Michael Breus
Enjoy!
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The Case Against Sugar – by Gary Taubes
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We generally already know that sugar is bad for the health. Most people don’t know how bad.
Taubes makes, as the title goes, “the case against sugar”. Implicated in everything from metabolic syndrome to cancer to Alzheimer’s, sugar is ruinous to the health.
It’s hard to review this book without making a comparison to William Duffy’s 1975 bestseller, “Sugar Blues“. Stylistically it’s very similar, and the general gist is certainly the same.
However! Where this book beats Sugar Blues is in content; Duffy’s book often makes bold claims without scientific backing. Some of those claims didn’t stand the test of time and are now disproven. Instead, Taubes’ book leans on actual up-to-date science, and talks more about what we actually know, than what we imagine.
If this book has a weak point, it’s when it veers away from its main topic and starts talking about, for example, saturated fat. In this side-topic, the book makes some good points, but is less well-considered, cherry-picks data, and lacks nuance.
On its main topic, though, the investigation of sugar, it is rather more thorough.
Bottom line: if you want a next-level motivation to reduce or eliminate dietary sugar, this book may certainly provide that.
Click here to check out The Case Against Sugar and reduce a lot of your health risks!
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Anise vs Diabetes & Menopause
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What A Daily Gram Of Anise Can Do
Anise, specifically the seed of the plant, also called aniseed, is enjoyed for its licorice taste—as well as its medicinal properties.
Let’s see how well the science lives up to the folk medicine…
What medicinal properties does it claim?
The main contenders are:
- Reduces menopause symptoms
- Reduces blood sugar levels
- Reduces inflammation
Does it reduce menopause symptoms?
At least some of them! Including hot flashes and bone density loss. This seems to be due to the estrogenic-like activity of anethole, the active compound in anise that gives it these effects:
Estrogenic activity of isolated compounds and essential oils of Pimpinella species
1g of anise/day yielded a huge reduction in frequency and severity of hot flashes, compared to placebo*:
*you may be wondering what the placebo is for 1g of a substance that has a very distinctive taste. The researchers used capsules, with 3x330g as the dose, either anise seed or potato starch.
❝In the experimental group, the frequency and severity of hot flashes before the treatment were 4.21% and 56.21% and, after that, were 1.06% and 14.44% at the end of the fourth week respectively. No change was found in the frequency and severity of hot flashes in the control group. The frequency and severity of hot flashes was decreased during 4 weeks of follow up period. P. anisum is effective on the frequency and severity of hot flashes in postmenopausal women. ❞
See for yourself: The Study on the Effects of Pimpinella anisum on Relief and Recurrence of Menopausal Hot Flashes
As for bone mineral density, we couldn’t find a good study for anise, but we did find this one for fennel, which is a plant of the same family and also with the primary active compound anethole:
The Prophylactic Effect of Fennel Essential Oil on Experimental Osteoporosis
That was a rat study, though, so we’d like to see studies done with humans.
Summary on this one: it clearly helps against hot flashes (per the very convincing human study we listed above); it probably helps against bone mineral density loss.
Does it reduce blood sugar levels?
This one got a flurry of attention all so recently, on account of this research review:
Review on Anti-diabetic Research on Two Important Spices: Trachyspermum ammi and Pimpinella anisum
If you read this (and we do recommend reading it! It has a lot more information than we can squeeze in here!) one of the most interesting things about the in vivo anti-diabetic activity of anise was that while it did lower the fasting blood glucose levels, that wasn’t the only effect:
❝Over a course of 60 days, study participants were administered seed powders (5 g/d), which resulted in significant antioxidant, anti-diabetic, and hypolipidemic effects.
Notably, significant reductions in fasting blood glucose levels were observed. This intervention also elicited alterations in the lipid profile, LPO, lipoprotein levels, and the high-density lipoprotein (HDL) level.
Moreover, the serum levels of essential antioxidants, such as beta carotene, vitamin C, vitamin A, and vitamin E, which are typically decreased in diabetic patients, underwent a reversal.❞
That’s just one of the studies cited in that review (the comments lightly edited here for brevity), but it stands out, and you can read that study in its entirety (it’s well worth reading).
Rajeshwari et al, bless them, added a “tl;dr” at the top of their already concise abstract; their “tl;dr” reads:
❝Both the seeds significantly influenced almost all the parameters without any detrimental effects by virtue of a number of phytochemicals, vitamins and minerals present in the seeds having therapeutic effects.❞
Shortest answer: yes, yes it does
Does it fight inflammation?
This one’s quick and simple enough: yes it does; it’s full of antioxidants which thus also have an anti-inflammatory effect:
Review of Pharmacological Properties and Chemical Constituents of Pimpinella anisum
…which can also be used an essential oil, applied topically, to fight both pain and the inflammation that causes it—at least in rats and mice:
❝Indomethacin and etodolac were treated reference drugs for the anti-inflammatory activity. Aspirin and morphine hydrochloride were treated reference drugs for the analgesic activity. The results showed that fixed oil of P. anisum has an anti-inflammatory action more than etodolac and this effect was as strong as indomethacin. P. anisum induces analgesic effect comparable to that of 100 mg/kg Aspirin and 10 mg/kg morphine at 30 th min. of the study❞
Summary of this section:
- Aniseeds are a potent source of antioxidants, which fight inflammation.
- Anise essential oil is probably also useful as a topical anti-inflammatory and analgesic agent, but we’d like to see human tests to know for sure.
Is it safe?
For most people, enjoyed in moderation (e.g., within the dosage parameters described in the above studies), anise is safe. However:
- If you’re allergic to it, it won’t be safe
- Its estrogen-mimicking effects could cause problems if you have (or have a higher risk factor for) breast cancer, ovarian cancer, or endometriosis.
- For most men, the main concern is that it may lower sperm count.
Where to get it?
As ever, we don’t sell it (or anything else), but for your convenience, you can buy the seeds in bulk on Amazon, or in case you prefer it, here’s an example of it available as an essential oil.
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