The Vitamin Solution – by Dr. Romy Block & Dr. Arielle Levitan
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A quick note: it would be remiss of us not to mention that the authors of this book are also the founders of a vitamin company, thus presenting a potential conflict of interest.
That said… In this reviewer’s opinion, the book does seem balanced and objective, regardless.
We talk a lot about supplements here at 10almonds, especially in our Monday Research Review editions. And yesterday, we featured a book by a doctor who hates supplements. Today, we feature a book by two doctors who have made them their business.
The authors cover all the most common vitamins and minerals popularly enjoyed as supplements, and examine:
- why people take them
- factors affecting whether they help
- problems that can arise
- complicating factors
The “complicating factors” include, for example, the way many vitamins and/or minerals interplay with each other, either by requiring the presence of another, or else competing for resources for absorption, or needing to be delicately balanced on pain of diverse woes.
This is the greatest value of the book, perhaps; it’s where most people go wrong with supplementation, if they go wrong.
While both authors are medical doctors, Dr. Romy Block is an endocrinologist specifically, and she clearly brought a lot of extra attention to relevant metabolic/thyroid issues, and how vitamins and minerals (such as thiamin and iron) can improve or sabotage such, depending on various factors that she explains. Informative, and so far as this reviewer could see, objective and well-balanced.
Bottom line: supplementation is a vast and complex topic, but this book does a fine job of demystifying and simplifying it in a clear and objective fashion, without resorting to either scaremongering or hype.
Click here to check out The Vitamin Solution, and upgrade your knowledge!
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Basic Baked Tofu
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One of the main criticisms of tofu is that it is tasteless. Well, so is flour, but you’re not supposed to eat it plain, and the same goes for tofu. It’s a blank canvas that you get to decide what to do with—not to mention, it’s a canvas that’s very high in protein, and is a complete protein too, containing all essential amino acids. Anyway, here’s a starter recipe that elevates tofu from “nutrition” to “nutritious tasty snack”!
We were going to do a fancier recipe today, but considered that it might be judicious to cover this basic element first, that can be incorporated into a larger recipe later, a bit like we have done with recipes such as our Tasty Versatile Rice, and Plant-Based Healthy Cream Cheese (amongst others).
You will need
- 1 block of extra-firm tofu; these are quite standardized in size; it should be about 12oz; don’t worry if it’s a little more or less.
- 2 tbsp arrowroot powder (or potato starch if you don’t have arrowroot)
- 1½ tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
- 1 tsp black pepper
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Optional: ½ tsp garlic powder
- Optional: ½ tsp ground turmeric
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Preheat the oven to 425ºF / 220ºC.
2) Press the tofu for about 15 minutes (to remove excess moisture), using a tofu press if you have one. If you don’t, then here is an example product on Amazon, or alternatively, you can go with the time-honored tradition of cutting the tofu lengthways into slabs, and wrapping it in a lint-free kitchen towel or muslin cloth, and pressing it with heavy books. We don’t recommend pressing for more than about 15 minutes, as you are going to bake the tofu so you don’t want it too dry going in.
3) Cut the tofu into cubes. Size is up to you, but half-inch cubes are very respectable.
4) Combine the tofu cubes in a big bowl with the oil and seasonings, including the nutritional yeast but not the arrowroot powder or potato starch yet. You will need to toss them gently (very gently; they are fragile!) to combine.
5) Add the arrowroot powder or potato starch, and again toss gently to combine. We do this last, because it would stop the other things from sticking properly if we did it earlier.
6) Arrange the tofu on a baking tray lined with baking paper, in a single layer so that the cubes don’t touch. Bake for 15 minutes, turn them over, and bake for a further 15 minutes on the other side. They should now be golden and crisp, but if they’re not, just give them a little more time.
7) Serve as a snack, or set aside for whatever else you’re going to do with them in a larger more complex recipe.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Tofu vs Seitan – Which is Healthier?
- Plant vs Animal Protein: Head to Head
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
Take care!
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Bright Line Eating – by Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson
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This is a great title! It’s a great book too, but let’s talk about the title for a moment:
The “Bright Line” referenced (often used in the plural within the book) is the line one draws between what one will and will not do. It’s a line one doesn’t cross, and it’s a bright line, because it’s not a case of “oh woe is me I cannot have the thing”, but rather “oh yay is me for I being joyously healthy”.
And as for living happy, thin, and free? The author makes clear that “thin” is only a laudable goal if it’s bookended by “happy” and “free”. Eating things because we want to, and being happy about our choices.
To this end, while some of the book is about nutrition (and for example the strong recommendation to make the first “bright lines” one draws cutting out sugar and flour), the majority of it is about the psychology of eating.
This includes, hunger and satiety, willpower and lack thereof, disordered eating and addictions, body image issues and social considerations, the works. She realizes and explains, that if being healthy were just a matter of the right diet plan, everyone would be healthy. But it’s not; our eating behaviors don’t exist in a vacuum, and there’s a lot more to consider.
Despite all the odds, however, this is a cheerful and uplifting book throughout, while dispensing very practical, well-evidenced methods for getting your brain to get your body to do what you want it to.
Bottom line: this isn’t your average diet book, and it’s not just a motivational pep talk either. It’s an enjoyable read that’s also full of science and can make a huge difference to how you see food.
Click here to check out Bright Line Eating, and enjoy life, healthily!
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Sleep Tracking, For Five Million Nights
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5 Sleep Phenotypes, By Actual Science
You probably know people can be broadly divided into “early birds” and “night owls”:
Early Bird Or Night Owl? Genes vs Environment
…and then the term “hummingbird” gets used for a person who flits between the two.
That’s three animals so far. If you read a book we reviewed recently, specifically this one:
The Power of When – by Dr. Michael Breus
…then you may have used the guide within to self-diagnose your circadian rhythm type (chronotype) according to Dr. Breus’s system, which divides people into bears, lions, wolves, and dolphins.
That’s another four animals. If you have a FitBit, it can “diagnose” you with being those and/or a menagerie of others, such as giraffe, hedgehog, parrot, and tortoise:
How Fitbit Developed the Sleep Profile Experience (Part 2 – Sleep Animals)
Five million nights
A team of researchers recently took a step away from this veritable zoo of 11 different animals and counting, and used a sophisticated modelling system to create a spatial-temporal map of people’s sleep habits, and this map created five main “islands” that people’s sleep habits could settle on, or sometimes move from island to island.
Those “five million nights” by the way? It was actually 5,095,798 nights! You might notice that would take from the 2020s to the 15970s to complete, so this was rather a matter of monitoring 33,152 individuals between January and October of the same year. Between them, they got those 5,095,798 nights of sleep (or in some cases, nights of little or no sleep, but still, they were there for the nights).
The five main phenotypes that the researchers found were:
- What we think of as “normal” sleep. In this phenotype, people get about eight hours of uninterrupted sleep for at least six days in a row.
- As above for half the nights, but they only sleep for short periods of time in bouts of less than three hours the other half.
- As per normal sleep, but with one interrupted night per week, consisting of a 5 hour sleep period and then broken sleep for a few more hours.
- As per normal sleep generally, but with occasional nights in which long bouts of sleep are separated by a mid-sleep waking.
- Sleeping for very short periods of time every night. This phenotype was the rarest the researchers found, and represents extremely disrupted sleep.
As you might suspect, phenotype 1 is healthier than phenotype 5. But that’s not hugely informational, as the correlation between getting good sleep and having good health is well-established. So, what did the study teach us?
❝We found that little changes in sleep quality helped us identify health risks. Those little changes wouldn’t show up on an average night, or on a questionnaire, so it really shows how wearables help us detect risks that would otherwise be missed.❞
More specifically,
❝We found that the little differences in how sleep disruptions occur can tell us a lot. Even if these instances are rare, their frequency is also telling. So it’s not just whether you sleep well or not – it’s the patterns of sleep over time where the key info hides❞
…and, which gets to the absolute point,
❝If you imagine there’s a landscape of sleep types, then it’s less about where you tend to live on that landscape, and more about how often you leave that area❞
In other words: if your sleep pattern is not ideal, that’s one thing and it’d probably be good to address it, by improving your sleep. However, if your sleep pattern changes phenotype without an obvious known reason why, this may be considered an alarm bell warning of something else that needs addressing, which may be an underlying illness or condition—meaning it can be worthwhile being a little extra vigilant when it comes to regular health screenings, in case something new has appeared.
Want to read more?
You can read the paper in full here:
Five million nights: temporal dynamics in human sleep phenotypes
Take care!
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The Easiest Way To Take Up Journaling
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Dear Diary…
It’s well-established that journaling is generally good for mental health. It’s not a magical panacea, as evidenced by The Diaries of Franz Kafka for example (that man was not in good mental health). But for most of us, putting our thoughts and feelings down on paper (or the digital equivalent) is a good step for tidying our mind.
And as it can be said: mental health is also just health.
But…
What to write about?
It’s about self-expression (even if only you will read it), and…
❝Writing about traumatic, stressful or emotional events has been found to result in improvements in both physical and psychological health, in non-clinical and clinical populations.
In the expressive writing paradigm, participants are asked to write about such events for 15–20 minutes on 3–5 occasions.
Those who do so generally have significantly better physical and psychological outcomes compared with those who write about neutral topics.❞
Source: Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing
In other words, write about whatever moves you.
Working from prompts
If you read the advice above and thought “but I don’t know what moves me”, then fear not. It’s perfectly respectable to work from prompts, such as:
- What last made you cry?
- What last made you laugh?
- What was a recent meaningful moment with family?
- What is a serious mistake that you made and learned from?
- If you could be remembered for just one thing, what would you want it to be?
In fact, sometimes working from prompts has extra benefits, precisely because it challenges us to examine things we might not otherwise think about.
If a prompt asks “What tends to bring you most joy recently?” and the question stumps you, then a) you now are prompted to look at what you can change to find more joy b) you probably wouldn’t have thought of this question—most depressed people don’t, and if you cannot remember recent joy, then well, we’re not here to diagnose, but let’s just say that’s a symptom.
A quick aside: if you or a loved oneare prone to depressive episodes, here’s a good resource, by the way:
The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need
And in the event of the mental health worst case scenario:
The six prompts we gave earlier are just ideas that came to this writer’s mind, but they’re (ok, some bias here) very good ones. If you’d like more though, here’s a good resource:
550+ Journal Prompts: The Ultimate List
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
While it’s not good to get stuck in ruminative negative thought spirals, it is good to have a safe outlet to express one’s negative thoughts/feelings:
Remember, your journal is (or ideally, should be) a place without censure. If you fear social consequences should your journal be read, then using an app with a good security policy and encryption options can be a good idea for journaling
Finch App is a good free option if it’s not too cutesy for your taste, because in terms of security:
- It can’t leak your data because your data never leaves your phone (unless you manually back up your data and then you choose to put it somewhere unsafe)
- It has an option to require passcode/biometrics etc to open the app
As a bonus, it also has very many optional journaling prompts, and also (optional) behavioral activation prompts, amongst more other offerings that we don’t have room to list here.
Take care!
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Total Recovery – by Dr. Gary Kaplan
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First, know: Dr. Kaplan is an osteopath, and as such, will be mostly approaching things from that angle. That said, he is also board certified in other things too, including family medicine, so he’s by no means a “one-trick pony”, nor are there “when your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail” problems to be found here. Instead, the scope of the book is quite broad.
Dr. Kaplan talks us through the diagnostic process that a doctor goes through when presented with a patient, what questions need to be asked and answered—and by this we mean the deeper technical questions, e.g. “what do these symptoms have in common”, and “what mechanism was at work when the pain become chronic”, not the very basic questions asked in the initial debriefing with the patient.
He also asks such questions (and questions like these get chapters devoted to them) as “what if physical traumas build up”, and “what if physical and emotional pain influence each other”, and then examines how to interrupt the vicious cycles that lead to deterioration of one’s condition.
The style of the book is very pop-science and often narrative in its presentation, giving lots of anecdotes to illustrate the principles. It’s a “sit down and read it cover-to-cover” book—or a chapter a day, whatever your preferred pace; the point is, it’s not a “dip directly to the part that answers your immediate question” book; it’s not a textbook or manual.
Bottom line: a lot of this work is about prompting the reader to ask the right questions to get to where we need to be, but there are many illustrative possible conclusions and practical advices to be found and given too, making this a useful read if you and/or a loved one suffers from chronic pain.
Click here to check out Total Recovery, and solve your own mysteries!
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Gut-Healthy Sunset Soup
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So-called for its gut-healthy ingredients, and its flavor profile being from the Maghreb (“Sunset”) region, the western half of the N. African coast.
You will need
- 1 can chickpeas (do not drain)
- 1 cup low-sodium vegetable stock
- 1 small onion, finely chopped
- 1 carrot, finely chopped
- 2 tbsp sauerkraut, drained and chopped (yes, it is already chopped, but we want it chopped smaller so it can disperse evenly in the soup)
- 2 tbsp tomato paste
- 1 tbsp harissa paste (adjust per your heat preference)
- 1 tbsp ras el-hanout
- ¼ bulb garlic, crushed
- Juice of ½ lemon
- ¼ tsp MSG or ½ tsp low-sodium salt
- Extra virgin olive oil
- Optional: herb garnish; we recommend cilantro or flat-leaf parsley
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Heat a little oil in a sauté pan or similar (something suitable for combination cooking, as we’ll be frying first and then adding liquids), and fry the onion and carrot until the onion is soft and translucent; about 5 minutes.
2) Stir in the garlic, tomato paste, harissa paste, and ras el-hanout, and fry for a further 1 minute.
3) Add the remaining ingredients* except the lemon juice. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 5 minutes.
*So yes, this includes adding the “chickpea water” also called “aquafaba”; it adds flavor and also gut-healthy fiber in the form of oligosaccharides and resistant starches, which your gut microbiota can use to make short-chain fatty acids, which improve immune function and benefit the health in more ways than we can reasonably mention as a by-the-way in a recipe.
4) Stir in the lemon juice, and serve, adding a herb garnish if you wish.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits? ← today’s recipe scored 5/5 of these, plus quite a few more! Remember that ras el-hanout is a spice blend, so if you’re thinking “wait, where’s the…?” then it’s in the ras el-hanout 😉
- Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
- Lycopene’s Benefits For The Gut, Heart, Brain, & More ← not to be underestimated!
Take care!
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