The Truth About Statins – by Barbara H. Roberts, M.D.
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All too often, doctors looking to dispense a “quick fix” will prescribe from their playbook of a dozen or so “this will get you out of my office” drugs. Most commonly, things that treat symptoms rather than the cause. Sometimes, this can be fine! For example, in some cases, painkillers and antidepressants can make a big improvement to people’s lives. What about statins, though?
Prescribed to lower cholesterol, they broadly do exactly that. However…
Dr. Roberts wants us to know that we could be missing the big picture of heart health, and making a potentially fatal mistake.
This is not to say that the book argues that statins are necessarily terrible, or that they don’t have their place. Just, we need to understand what they will and won’t do, and make an informed choice.
To which end, she does advise regards when statins can help the most, and when they may not help at all. She also covers the questions to ask if your doctor wants to prescribe them. And—all so frequently overlooked—the important differences between men’s and women’s heart health, and the implications these have for the efficacy (or not) of statins.
With regard to the “alternatives to cholesterol-lowering drugs” promised in the subtitle… we won’t keep any secrets here:
Dr. Roberts (uncontroversially) recommends the Mediterranean diet. She also provides two weeks’ worth of recipes for such, in the final part of the book.
All in all, an important book to read if you or a loved one are taking, or thinking of taking, statins.
Pick up your copy of The Truth About Statins on Amazon today!
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Slow-Cooker Moroccan Tagine
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Tagine (طاجين) (tā-jīn) is a traditional dish named after, well, the traditional dish that it’s cooked in. Here’s an example tagine pot on Amazon. It’s a very nifty bit of kit, and while it’s often used for cooking over charcoal, one of its features is that if you have a hot sunny day, you can just leave it out in the sun and it will cook the contents nicely. Today though, we’re going to assume you don’t have one of these, and are going to give instructions for cooking a tagine-style dish with a slow cooker, which we’re going to assume you do have.
You will need
- 2 large red onions, finely chopped
- 2 large red peppers, cut into 1″ chunks
- 2 large zucchini, cut into ½” chunks
- 1 large eggplant, cut into ½” chunks
- 3 cups tomato passata
- 2 cups cooked chickpeas
- 16 pitted Medjool dates, chopped
- ½ bulb garlic, finely chopped
- 1 tbsp ras el-hanout
- A little extra virgin olive oil
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Let your slow cooker heat up while you chop the things that need chopping
2) Add a splash of olive oil to the slow cooker; ensure the base is coated and there’s a little oil spare in there too; a thin coat to the base plus a couple of tbsp should do it nicely.
3) Add the onions and garlic, and leave for an hour.
4) Add the passata, dates, ras el-hanout, stir it and leave for an hour.
5) Add the chickpeas, peppers, and eggplant; stir it and leave for an hour.
6) Add the zucchini, stir it and leave for an hour.
7) Serve—it goes great with its traditional pairing of wholegrain couscous, but if you prefer, you can use our tasty versatile rice. In broader culinary terms, serving it with any carb is fine.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)
- What Matters Most For Your Heart? Eat More (Of This) For Lower Blood Pressure
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
Take care!
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How To Out-Cheat “Cheat Days”
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Out-Cheating “Cheat Days” (Or Even Just “Cheat Meals”)
If you are in the habit of eating healthily, the idea of a “cheat day” probably isn’t appealing—because you simply don’t crave junk food; it’s not what your gut is used to.
Nevertheless, sometimes cheat days, or at least cheat meals, choose us rather than the other way around. If your social group is having a pizza night or meeting up at the burger bar, probably you’re going to be having a meal that’s not ideal.
So, what to do about it?
Well, first of all, relax. If it really is an exception and not a regular occurrence, it’s not going to have a big health impact. Assuming that your basic dietary requirements are taken care of (e.g. free from allergens as necessary, vegan/vegetarian if that’s appropriate for you, adhering to any religious restrictions that are important to you, etc), then you’re going to have a good time, which is what scientists call a “pro-social activity” and is not a terrible thing.
See also: Is Fast Food Really All That Bad? ← answer: yes it is, but the harm is cumulative and won’t all happen the instant you take a bite of a chicken nugget
Think positive
No, not in the “think positive thoughts” sense (though feel free, if that’s your thing), but rather: focus on adding things rather than subtracting things.
It’s said:
❝It’s not the calories in your food that make the biggest impact on your health; it’s the food in your calories❞e
…and that’s generally true. The same goes for “bad things” in the food, e.g. added sugar, salt, seed oils, etc. They really are bad! But, in this case you’re going to be eating them and they’re going to be nearly impossible to avoid in the social scenarios we described. So, forget that sunk treasure, and instead, add nutrients.
10almonds tip: added nutrients remain added nutrients, even if the sources were not glowing with health-appeal and/or you ate them alongside something unhealthy:
- Those breaded garlic mushrooms are still full of magnesium and fiber and ergothioneine.
- The chili-and-mint peas that came as an overpriced optional side-dish with your burger are still full of protein, fiber, and a stack of polyphenols.
…and so on. And, the more time you spend eating those things, the less time you spend eating the real empty-calorie foods.
Fix the flaw
We set out to offer this guide without arguing for abstemiousness or making healthy substitutions, because we assume you knew already that you can not eat things, and as for substitutions, often they are not practical, especially if dining out or ordering in.
Also, sometimes even when home-cooking something unhealthy, taking the bad ingredient out takes some of the joy out with it.
Writers example: I once incorrectly tried to solve the fat conundrum of my favorite shchi (recipe here) by trying purely steaming the vegetables instead of my usual frying/sautéing them, and let’s just say, that errant-and-swiftly-abandoned version got recorded in my nutrition-tracker app as “sad shchi”.
So instead, fix the flaw by countering it if possible:
- The meal is devoid of fiber? Preload with some dried figs (you can never have too many dried figs in your pantry)
- The meal is high in saturated fat? Enjoy fiber before/during/after, per what’s convenient for you. Fiber helps clear out excess cholesterol, which is usually the main issue with saturated fat.
- The meal is salty? Double down on your hydration before, during, and after. If that sounds like a chore, then remember, it’s more fun than getting bloated (which results, counterintuitively, from dehydration—because your body detects the salt, and panics and tries to retain as much water as possible to restore homeostasis, resulting in bloating) and hypertensive (which results from the combination of the blood having too much salt and too little water, and cells retaining too much water and pressing inwards because it is the cells themselves that are bloated). So, tending to your hydration can help mitigate all of the above.
- The meal is full of high-GI carbs? Preload with fiber, enjoy the carbs together with fats, and have something acidic (e.g. some kind of vinegar, or citrus fruit) with it if that’s a reasonable option. Yes, this does mean that a Whiskey Sour is better for your blood sugars than an Old Fashioned, by the way, and/but no, it doesn’t make either of them healthy.
- The meal is inflammatory? Doing all of the above things will help, as will eating it slowly/mindfully, which latter makes it less of a shock to your system.
See also: How To Get More Nutrition From The Same Food
Enjoy!
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Self-Care for Tough Times – by Suzy Reading
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A note on the author: while not “Dr. Reading”, she is a “CPsychol, B Psych (Hons), M Psych”; a Chartered Psychologist specializing in wellbeing, stress management and facilitation of healthy lifestyle change. So this is coming from a place of research and evidence!
The kinds of “tough times” she has in mind are so numerous that listing them takes two pages in the book, so we won’t try here. But suffice it to say, there are a lot of things that can go wrong for us as humans, and this book addresses how to take care of ourselves mindfully in light of them.
The author takes a “self-care is health care” approach, and goes about things with a clinical mindset and/but a light tone, offering both background information, and hands-on practical advice.
Bottom line: there may be troubles ahead (and maybe you’re in the middle of troubles right now), but there’s always room for a little sunshine too.
Click here to check out Self-Care For Tough Times, and care for yourself in tough times!
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Seven Steps to Managing Your Memory – by Dr. Andrew Budson & Dr. Maureen O’Connor
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
First, what this is not: a “how to improve your memory” book of the kind marketed to students and/or people who want to do memory-themed party tricks.
What this book actually is: exactly what the title and subtitle claim it to be: seven steps to managing your memory: what’s normal, what’s not, and what to do about it.
Drs. Budson & O’Connor cover:
- which memory errors can (and usually do) happen at any age
- how memory changes with normal aging, and
- what kinds of memory problems are not normal.
One thing that sets this book aside from a lot of its genre is that it also covers which kinds of memory loss are reversible—and, where appropriate, what can be undertaken to effect such a reversal.
The authors talk about what things have (and what things haven’t!) been shown to strengthen memory and reduce cognitive decline, and in the worst case scenario, what medications can help against Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.
The style is halfway between pop-science and a science textbook. The structure of the book, with its headings, subheadings, bullet points, summaries, etc, helps the reader to process and remember the information.
Bottom line: if you’d like to get on top of managing your memory before you forget, then this book is for you.
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Body Language (In The Real World)
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Forget What You Think You Know About Body Language
…unless it’s about a specific person whose habits and mannerisms you know intimately, in which case, you probably have enough personal data stored up to actually recognize patterns à la “when my spouse does this, then…”, and probably do know what’s going on.
For everyone else… our body language can be as unique as our idiolect
What’s an idiolect? It’s any one given person’s way of speaking/writing, in their natural state (i.e. without having to adjust their style for some reason, for example in a public-facing role at work, where style often becomes much narrower and more consciously-chosen).
Extreme example first
To give an extreme example of how non-verbal communication can be very different than a person thinks, there’s an anecdote floating around the web of someone whose non-verbal autistic kid would, when he liked someone who was visiting the house, hide their shoes when they were about to leave, to cause them to stay longer. Then one day some relative visited and when she suggested that she “should be going sometime soon”, he hurried to bring her her shoes. She left, happy that the kid liked her (he did not).
The above misunderstanding happened because the visitor had the previous life experience of “a person who brings me things is being helpful, and if they do it of their own free will, it’s because they like me”.
In other words…
Generalizations are often sound… In general
…which does not help us when dealing with individuals, which as it turns out, everyone is.
Clenched fists = tense and angry… Except when it’s just what’s comfortable for someone, or they have circulation issues, or this, or that, or the other.
Pacing = agitated… Except when it’s just someone who finds the body in motion more comfortable
Relaxed arms and hands = at ease and unthreatening… Unless it’s a practitioner of various martial arts for whom that is their default ready-for-action state.
Folded arms = closed-off, cold, distant… Or it was just somewhere to put one’s hands.
Lack of eye contact = deceitful, hiding something… Unless it’s actually for any one of a wide number of reasons, which brings us to our next section:
A liar’s “tells”
Again, if you know someone intimately and know what signs are associated with deceit in them, then great, that’s a thing you know. But for people in general…
A lot of what is repeated about “how to know if someone is lying” has seeped into public consciousness from “what police use to justify their belief that someone is lying”.
This is why many of the traditional “this person is lying” signs are based around behaviors that show up when in fact “this person is afraid, under pressure, and talking to an authority figure who has the power to ruin their life”:
Research on Non-verbal Signs of Lies and Deceit: A Blind Alley
But what about eye-accessing cues? They have science to them, right?
For any unfamiliar: this is about the theory that when we are accessing different parts of our mind (such as memory or creativity, thus truthfulness or lying), our eyes move one way or another according to what faculty we’re accessing.
Does it work? No
But, if you carefully calibrate it for a specific person, such as by asking them questions along the lines of “describe your front door” or “describe your ideal holiday”, to see which ways they look for recall or creativity… Then also no:
The Eyes Don’t Have It: Lie Detection and Neuro-Linguistic Programming
How can we know what non-verbal communication means, then?
With strangers? We can’t, simply. It’s on us to be open-minded, with a healthy balance of optimism and wariness.
With people we know? We can build up a picture over time, learn the person’s patterns. Best of all, we can ask them. In the moment, and in general.
For more on optimizing interpersonal communication, check out:
Save Time With Better Communication
…and the flipside of that:
The Problem With Active Listening (And How To Do It Better)
Take care!
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Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight
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Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight
This is Dr. Michael Greger. We’ve featured him before: Brain Food? The Eyes Have It!
This time, we’re working from his latest book, the excellent “How Not To Age”, which we reviewed all so recently. It is very information-dense, but we’re going to be focussing on one part, his “anti-aging eight”, that is to say, eight interventions he rates the most highly to slow aging in general (other parts of the book pertained to slowing eleven specific pathways of aging, or preserving specific bodily functions against aging, for example).
Without further ado, his “anti-aging eight” are…
- Nuts
- Greens
- Berries
- Xenohormesis & microRNA manipulation
- Prebiotics & postbiotics
- Caloric restriction / IF
- Protein restriction
- NAD+
As you may have noticed, some of these are things might appear already on your grocery shopping list; others don’t seem so “household”. Let’s break them down:
Nuts, greens, berries
These are amongst the most nutrient-dense and phytochemical-useful parts of the diet that Dr. Greger advocates for in his already-famous “Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen”.
For brevity, we’ll not go into the science of these here, but will advise you: eat a daily portion of nuts, a daily portion of berries, and a couple of daily portions of greens.
Xenohormesis & microRNA manipulation
You might, actually, have these on your grocery shopping list too!
Hormesis, you may recall from previous editions of 10almonds, is about engaging in a small amount of eustress to trigger the body’s self-strengthening response, for example:
Xenohormesis is about getting similar benefits, second-hand.
For example, plants that have been grown to “organic” standards (i.e. without artificial pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers) have had to adapt to their relatively harsher environment by upping their levels of protective polyphenols and other phytochemicals that, as it turns out, are as beneficial to us as they are to the plants:
Hormetic Effects of Phytochemicals on Health and Longevity
Additionally, the flip side of xenohormesis is that some plant compounds can themselves act as a source of hormetic stress that end up bolstering us. For example:
In essence, it’s not just that it has anti-oxidant effect; it also provides a tiny oxidative-stress immunization against serious sources of oxidative stress—and thus, aging.
MicroRNA manipulation is, alas, too complex to truly summarize an entire chapter in a line or two, but it has to do with genetic information from the food that we eat having a beneficial or deleterious effect to our own health:
Diet-derived microRNAs: unicorn or silver bullet?
A couple of quick takeaways (out of very many) from Dr. Greger’s chapter on this is to spring for the better quality olive oil, and skip the cow’s milk:
- Impact of Phenol-Enriched Virgin Olive Oils on the Postprandial Levels of Circulating microRNAs Related to Cardiovascular Disease
- MicroRNA exosomes of pasteurized milk: potential pathogens of Western diseases
Prebiotics & Postbiotics
We’re short on space, so we’ll link you to a previous article, and tell you that it’s important against aging too:
Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
An example of how one of Dr. Greger’s most-recommended postbiotics helps against aging, by the way:
- The mitophagy activator urolithin A is safe and induces a molecular signature of improved mitochondrial and cellular health in humans
- Urolithin A improves muscle strength, exercise performance, and biomarkers of mitochondrial health in a randomized trial in middle-aged adults
(Urolithin can be found in many plants, and especially those containing tannins)
See also: How to Make Urolithin Postbiotics from Tannins
Caloric restriction / Intermittent fasting
This is about lowering metabolic load and promoting cellular apoptosis (programmed cell death; sounds bad; is good) and autophagy (self-consumption; again, sounds bad; is good).
For example, he cites the intermittent fasters’ 46% lower risk of dying in the subsequent years of follow-up in this longitudinal study:
For brevity we’ll link to our previous IF article, but we’ll revisit caloric restriction in a main feature on of these days:
Fasting Without Crashing? We sort the science from the hype!
Dr. Greger favours caloric restriction over intermittent fasting, arguing that it is easier to adhere to and harder to get wrong if one has some confounding factor (e.g. diabetes, or a medication that requires food at certain times, etc). If adhered to healthily, the benefits appear to be comparable for each, though.
Protein restriction
In contrast to our recent main feature Protein vs Sarcopenia, in which that week’s featured expert argued for high protein consumption levels, protein restriction can, on the other hand, have anti-aging effects. A reminder that our body is a complex organism, and sometimes what’s good for one thing is bad for another!
Dr. Greger offers protein restriction as a way to get many of the benefits of caloric restriction, without caloric restriction. He further notes that caloric restriction without protein restriction doesn’t decrease IGF-1 levels (a marker of aging).
However, for FGF21 levels (these are good and we want them higher to stay younger), what matters more than lowering proteins in general is lowering levels of the amino acid methionine—found mostly in animal products, not plants—so the source of the protein matters:
For example, legumes deliver only 5–10% of the methionine that meat does, for the same amount of protein, so that’s a factor to bear in mind.
NAD+
This is about nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD+ to its friends.
NAD+ levels decline with age, and that decline is a causal factor in aging, and boosting the levels can slow aging:
Therapeutic Potential of NAD-Boosting Molecules: The In Vivo Evidence
Can we get NAD+ from food? We can, but not in useful quantities or with sufficient bioavailability.
Supplements, then? Dr. Greger finds the evidence for their usefulness lacking, in interventional trials.
How to boost NAD+, then? Dr. Greger prescribes…
Exercise! It boosts levels by 127% (i.e., it more than doubles the levels), based on a modest three-week exercise bike regimen:
Skeletal muscle NAMPT is induced by exercise in humans
Another study on resistance training found the same 127% boost:
Take care!
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