The Seven-Day Sleep Prescription – by Dr. Aric Prather
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You probably already know about sleep hygiene. So, what does this book have to offer?
Dr. Aric Prather offers seven days’ worth of adjustments, practices to take up, from when you get up in the morning to when you lay your head down at night.
Some you’ll surely be familiar with, like avoiding blue light and social media at night.
Others, you might not be familiar with, like scheduling 15 minutes for worrying in the daytime. The rationale for this one is that when you find yourself inclined to worry at a time that will keep you awake, you’ll know that you can put off such thoughts to your scheduled “worrying time”. That they’ll be addressed then, and that you can thus sleep soundly meanwhile.
Where the book really comes into its own is in such things as discussing how to not just manage sleep debt, but how to actually use it in your favour.
Nor does Dr. Prather shy away from the truths of our world… That the world these days is not built for us to sleep well. That there are so many other priorities; to get our work done, to succeed and achieve, to pay bills, to support our kids and partners. That so many of these things make plenty of sense in the moment, but catch up with us eventually.
Bottom line: what this book aims to give is a genuinely sustainable approach to sleeping—controlling what we can, and working with what we can’t. If you’d like to have a better relationship with sleep, this book is an excellent choice.
Click here to check out the Seven-Day Sleep Prescription, and improve yours!
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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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Food Fix – by Dr. Mark Hyman
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On a simplistic level, “eat more plants, but ideally not monocrops, and definitely fewer animals” is respectable, ecologically-aware advice that is also consistent with good health. But it is a simplification, and perhaps an oversimplification.
Is there space on a healthy, ecologically sound plate for animal products? Yes, argues Dr. Mark Hyman. It’s a small space, but it’s there.
For example, some kinds of fish are both healthier and more sustainable as a food source than others, same goes for some kinds of dairy products. Poultry, too, can be farmed sustainably in a way that promotes a small self-contained ecosystem—and in terms of health, consumption of poultry appears to be health-neutral at worst.
As this book explores:
- Oftentimes, food choices look like: healthy/sustainable/cheap (choose one).
- Dr. Hyman shows how in fact, we can have it more like: healthy/sustainable/cheap (choose two).
- He argues that if more people “vote with their fork”, production will continue to adjust accordingly, and we’ll get: healthy/sustainable/cheap (all three).
To this end, while some parts of the book can feel like they are purely academic (pertaining less to what we can do as individuals, and more on what governments, farming companies, etc can do), it’s good to know what issues we might also take to the ballot box, if we’re able.
The big picture aside, the book remains very strong even just from an individual health perspective, though.
Bottom line: if you have an interest in preserving your own health, and possibly humanity itself, this is an excellent book.
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Fruit, Fiber, & Leafy Greens… On A Low-FODMAP Diet!
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Fiber For FODMAP-Avoiders
First, let’s quickly cover: what are FODMAPs?
FODMAPs are fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols.
In plainer English: they’re carbohydrates that are resistant to digestion.
This is, for most people most of the time, a good thing, for example:
When Is A Fiber Not A Fiber? When It’s A Resistant Starch.
Not for everyone…
However, if you have inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS), including ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, or similar, then suddenly a lot of common dietary advice gets flipped on its head:
While digestion-resistant carbohydrates making it to the end parts of our digestive tract are good for our bacteria there, in the case of people with IBS or similar, it can be a bit too good for our bacteria there.
Which can mean gas (a natural by-product of bacterial respiration) accumulation, discomfort, water retention (as the pseudo-fiber draws water in and keeps it), and other related symptoms, causing discomfort, and potentially disease such as diarrhea.
Again: for most people this is not so (usually: quite the opposite; resistant starches improve things down there), but for those for whom it’s a thing, it’s a Big Bad Thing™.
Hold the veg? Hold your horses.
A common knee-jerk reaction is “I will avoid fruit and veg, then”.
Superficially, this can work, as many fruit & veg are high in FODMAPs (as are fermented dairy products, by the way).
However, a diet free from fruit and veg is not going to be healthy in any sustainable fashion.
There are, however, options for low-FODMAP fruit & veg, such as:
Fruits: bananas (if not overripe), kiwi, grapefruit, lemons, limes, melons, oranges, passionfruit, strawberries
Vegetables: alfalfa, bell peppers, bok choy, carrots, celery, cucumbers, eggplant, green beans, kale, lettuce, olives, parsnips, potatoes (and sweet potatoes, yams etc), radishes, spinach, squash, tomatoes*, turnips, zucchini
*our stance: botanically it’s a fruit, but culinarily it’s a vegetable.
For more on the science of this, check out:
Strategies for Producing Low FODMAPs Foodstuffs: Challenges and Perspectives ← table 2 is particularly informative when it comes to the above examples, and table 3 will advise about…
Bonus
Grains: oats, quinoa, rice, tapioca
…and wheat if the conditions in table 3 (linked above) are satisfied
(worth mentioning since grains also get a bad press when it comes to IBS, but that’s mostly because of wheat)
See also: Gluten: What’s The Truth?
Enjoy!
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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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Beetroot For More Than Just Your Blood Pressure
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Beetroot is well-known for being good for blood pressure, but what else can it do?
Firstly, blood pressure, yes
This is because… Well, we’ll quote from a paper:
❝As a source of nitrate, beetroot ingestion provides a natural means of increasing in vivo nitric oxide (NO) availability and has emerged as a potential strategy to prevent and manage pathologies associated with diminished NO bioavailability, notably hypertension and endothelial function❞
Source: The Potential Benefits of Red Beetroot Supplementation in Health and Disease
That’s a little modest in its wording though, so let’s just be clear, it does work:
- The effects of dietary nitrate on blood pressure and endothelial function: a review of human intervention studies
- Clinical evidence demonstrating the utility of inorganic nitrate in cardiovascular health
- Vascular effects of dietary nitrate (as found in green leafy vegetables and beetroot) via the nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide pathway
…where you can see that it significantly reduced systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
Note: this does mean that if you suffer conversely from hypotension (dangerously low blood pressure) you should probably skip the beetroot.
For your blood sugar levels, too
The fiber in whole beetroot or powdered beetroot extract (but not beetroot juice) is, as usual, good for balancing blood sugars. However, in the case of beetroot, it (probably because of the betalain content, specifically betanin) also improves insulin sensitivity, resulting in lower fasting and postprandial (after-dinner) insulin levels:
See also (cited in the above paper): Post-prandial effect of beetroot (beta vulgaris) juice on glucose and lipids levels of apparently healthy subjects
For your blood lipids, also
This one has less readily available research to support it, so in the category of “papers that aren’t paywalled into oblivion”, here’s one that concludes with the entertainingly specific:
❝Results: Beetroot juice intake increased plasma high density lipoprotein (t= -60.88, P<0.05). Triglyceride, total cholesterol, and low density lipoprotein were reduced (P<0.05). Compared with placebo, beetroot juice reduced the concentrations of triglyceride, total cholesterol, and low density lipoprotein (P<0.05).
Conclusion: Regular beetroot juice intake has significant effects on lipid profile in female soccer players, hence its suggestion for preventing diseases such as hypercholesterolemia and hypertension in female soccer players.❞
However, even if you are not a female soccer player, chances are it will have the same effect on your physiology as theirs (but, credit where it’s due, it’s right that they make claims about only what they know for sure).
Here’s the paper: Efficacy of Beetroot Juice Consumption on the Lipid Profile of Female Soccer Players
What’s good for your blood, is good for your brain
…and that’s just as true here:
When reading that, you’ll see that as well as two health outcome benefits (antidiabetic and anti-Alzheimer’s), there are also two mechanisms of action, which are:
- The blood sugar lowering, insulin sensitivity increasing, lipid improving, qualities we discussed already
- Its fabulous flavonoid content
These two things each in turn have a lot of other components and nuances, so here’s an infographic covering them ← this flowchart makes it all a lot clearer
On which note, those flavonoids aren’t the only active compounds present that result in…
Antioxidant & anti-inflammatory action
This one’s pretty straightforward, but it’s worth mentioning also that (as is commonly the case) what fights oxidation also fights cancer:
❝In recent years, the beetroot, especially the betalains (betanin) and nitrates it contains, now has received increasing attention for their effective biological activity.
Betalains have been proven to eliminate oxidative and nitrative stress by scavenging DPPH, preventing DNA damage, and reducing LDL.
It also has been found to exert antitumor activity by inhibiting cell proliferation, angiogenesis, inducing cell apoptosis, and autophagy.❞
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but you can easily grow your own or find it at your local supermarket; if you prefer it in supplement form, dried is better than juice (for a multitude of reasons), so here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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Does This New Machine Cure Depression?
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Let us first talk briefly about the slightly older tech that this may replace, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
TMS involves electromagnetic fields to stimulate the left half of the brain and inhibit the right half of the brain. It sounds like something from the late 19th century—“cure your melancholy with the mystical power of magnetism”—but the thing is, it works:
The main barriers to its use are that the machine itself is expensive, and it has to be done in a clinic by a trained clinician. Which, if it were treating one’s heart, say, would not be so much of an issue, but when treating depression, there is a problem that depressed people are not the most likely to commit to (and follow through with) going somewhere probably out-of-town regularly to get a treatment, when merely getting out of the door was already a challenge and motivation is thin on the ground to start with.
Thus, antidepressant medications are more often the go-to for cost-effectiveness and adherence. Of course, some will work better than others for different people, and some may not work at all in the case of what is generally called “treatment-resistant depression”:
Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!
Transcranial stimulation… At home?
Move over transcranial magnetic stimulation; it’s time for transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS).
First, what it’s not: electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Rather, it uses a very low current.
What it is: a small and portable headset (as opposed to the big machine to go sit in for TMS) that one can use at home. Here’s an example product on Amazon, though there are more stylish versions around, this is the same basic technology.
In a recent study, 45% of those who received treatment with this device experienced remission in 10 weeks, significantly beating placebo (bearing in mind that placebo effect is strongest when it comes to invisible ailments such as depression).
See also: How To Leverage Placebo Effect For Yourself ← this explains more about how the placebo effect works, to the extent that it can even be an adjuvant tool to augment “real” therapies
And as for the study, here it is:
…which rather cuts through the “depressed people don’t make it to the clinic consistently, if at all” problem. Of course, it still requires adherence to its use at home, for example three 30-minute sessions per week, but honestly, “lie/sit still” is likely within the abilities of the majority of depressed people. However…
Important note: you remember we said “in 10 weeks”? That may be critical, because shorter studies (e.g. 6 weeks) have previously returned without such glowing results:
Home-Use Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation for the Treatment of a Major Depressive Episode
This means that if you get this tech for yourself or a loved one, it’ll be necessary to persist for likely 10 weeks, certainly more than 6 weeks, and not abandon it after a few sessions when it hasn’t been life-changing yet. And that may be more of a challenge for a depressed person, so likely an “accountability buddy” of some kind is in order (partner, close friend, etc) to help ensure adherence and generally bug you/them into doing it consistently.
And then, of course, you/they might still be in the 55% of people for whom it didn’t work. And that does suck, but random antidepressant medications (i.e., not personalized) don’t fare much better, statistically.
Want something else against depression meanwhile?
Here are some strategies that not only can significantly help, but also are tailored to be actually doable while depressed:
The Mental Health First-Aid You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← written by your writer who has previously suffered extensively from depression and knows what it is like
Take care!
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