This Is Your Brain on Music – by Dr. Daniel Levitin

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Music has sometimes been touted as having cognitive benefits, by its practice and even by the passive experience of it. But what’s the actual science of it?

Dr. Levitin, an accomplished musician and neuroscientist, explores and explains.

We learn about how music in all likelihood allowed our ancestors to develop speech, something that set us apart (and ahead!) as a species. How music was naturally-selected-for in accordance with its relationship with health. How processing music involves almost every part of the brain. How music pertains specifically to memory. And more.

As a bonus, as well as explaining a lot about our brain, this book offers those of us with limited knowledge of music theory a valuable overview of the seven main dimensions of music, too.

Bottom line: if you’d like to know more about the many-faceted relationship between music and cognitive function, this is a top-tier book about such.

Click here to check out “This Is Your Brain On Music”, and learn more about yours!

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  • Learning to Love Midlife – by Chip Conley
    Chip Conley redefines midlife, presenting 12 reasons and 5 categories why life improves as we age, mixing casual prose with scientific backup. Embrace the aging process with style!

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  • Young Forever – by Dr. Mark Hyman

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    A lot of work on the topic of aging looks at dealing with symptoms of aging, rather than the causes. And, that’s worthy too! Those symptoms often do need addressing. But this book is about treating the causes.

    Dr. Hyman outlines:

    • How and why we age
    • The root causes of aging
    • The ten hallmarks of aging

    From there, we go on to learn about the foundations of longevity, and balancing our seven core biological systems:

    1. Nutrition, digestion, and the microbiome
    2. Immune and inflammatory system
    3. Cellular energy
    4. Biotransformation and elimination/detoxification*
    5. Hormones, neurotransmitters, and other signalling molecules
    6. Circulation and lymphatic flow
    7. Structural health, from muscle and bones to cells and tissues

    *This isn’t about celery juice fasts and the like; this talking about the work your kidneys, liver, and other organs do

    The book goes on to detail how, precisely, with practical actionable advices, to optimize and take care of each of those systems.

    All in all: if you want a great foundational understanding of aging and how to slow it to increase your healthy lifespan, this is a very respectable option.

    Click here to get your copy of “Young Forever” from Amazon today!

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  • Gentle Nutrition – by Rachel Hartley, RD, LD

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    The subtitle here claims “a non-diet approach”, but doesn’t everything, nowadays? Even books titled “The such-and-such Diet” tend to also assure us “it’s not actually a diet; it’s just a way of eating”, as if a diet is not—by definition—a way of eating. Usually what they want to communicate is that it’s not a restrictive diet, usually meaning not restrictive in quantity, or not restrictive in food type (rarely both).

    This book is about intuitive eating, which is about as non-restrictive as any dietary approach can be, since it doesn’t restrict food type at at all, and it doesn’t restrict quantity in advance—rather, we learn to pay closer attention to our full signals.

    No wait, we don’t. This time, it’s not about “full”, it’s about “satisfied”. This comes in two forms:

    1. A principle somewhat akin to the “eat until 80% full” idea
    2. A principle of ensuring the good is culinarily satisfying

    This latter is important, if we want to have a good relationship with eating, and it also helps reduce portion sizes, when we truly take the time to mindfully savor a tasty morsel, rather than wolf down a plate of mediocre food.

    The style is one that balance being encouraging with delivering science to back up that encouragement. This not only means encouragement to take up this dietary approach, but also, encouragement to let go of things like calorie-counting and BMI.

    The recipes arranged per meal type, and indeed include things not found in many healthy eating books, such as gyoza dumplings, gnocchi, wontons, and shortbread. The recipes are mostly not, by default, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, or such. So if you have your own food restriction(s), the number of usable recipes will be diminished, barring any substitutions you can make yourself.

    Bottom line: this is more about about how to go about intuitive eating, than it is a book with a lot of nutritional information (though there is some of that too). If you’d like to get going with intuitive eating, then this book can help.

    Click here to check out Gentle Nutrition, and nourish gently!

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  • How Aging Changes At 44 And Again At 60 (And What To Do About It)

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    As it turns out, aging is not linear. Or rather: chronological aging may be, but biological aging isn’t, and there are parts of our life where it kicks into a different gear. This study looked at 108 people (65 of whom women) between the ages of 25 and 75, as part of a longitudinal cohort study, tracked for around 2–8 years (imprecise as not all follow-up durations were the same). They took frequent blood and urine samples, and tested them for thousands of different molecules and analyzing changes in gene expression, proteomic, blood biomarkers, and more. All things that are indicators of various kinds of health/disease, and which might seem more simple but it isn’t: aging.

    Here’s what they found:

    Landmark waypoints

    At 44, significant changes occur in the metabolism, including notably the metabolism of carbs, caffeine, and alcohol. A large portion of this may be hormone related, as that’s a time of change not just for those undergoing the menopause, but also the andropause (not entirely analogous to the menopause, but it does usually entail a significant reduction in sex hormone production; in this case, testosterone).

    However, the study authors also hypothesize that lifestyle factors may be relevant, as one’s 40s are often a stressful time, and an increase in alcohol consumption often occurs around the same time as one’s ability to metabolize it drops, resulting in further dysfunctional alcohol metabolism.

    At 60, carb metabolism slows again, with big changes in glucose metabolism specifically, as well as an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, and a decline in kidney function. In case that wasn’t enough: also an increase free radical pathology, meaning a greatly increased risk of cancer. Immune function drops too.

    What to do about this: the recommendation is of course to be proactive, and look after various aspects of your health before it becomes readily apparent that you need to. For example, good advice for anyone approaching 44 might be to quit alcohol, go easy on caffeine, and eat a diet that is conducive to good glucose metabolism. Similarly, good advice for anyone approaching 60 might be to do the same, and also pay close attention to keeping your kidneys healthy. Getting regular tests done is also key, including optional extras that your doctor might not suggest but you should ask for, such as blood urea nitrogen levels (biomarkers of kidney function). The more we look after each part of our body, the more they can look after us in turn, and the fewer/smaller problems we’ll have down the line.

    If you, dear reader, are approaching the age 44 or 60… Be neither despondent nor complacent. We must avoid falling into the dual traps of “Well, that’s it, bad health is around the corner, nothing I can do about it; that’s nature”, vs “I’ll be fine, statistics are for other people, and don’t apply to me”.

    Those are averages, and we do not have to be average. Every population has statistical outliers. But it would be hubris to think none of this will apply to us and we can just carry on regardless. So, for those of us who are approaching one of those two ages… It’s time to saddle up, knuckle down, and do our best!

    For more on all of this, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Also, if you’d like to read the actual paper by Dr. Xiaotao Shen et al., here it is:

    Nonlinear dynamics of multi-omics profiles during human aging ← honestly, it’s a lot clearer and more informative than the video, and also obviously discusses things in a lot more detail than we have room to here

    Take care!

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  • Gentler Hair Health Options

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    Hair, Gently

    We have previously talked about the medicinal options for combatting the thinning hair that comes with age especially for men, but also for a lot of women. You can read about those medicinal options here:

    Hair-Loss Remedies, By Science

    We also did a whole supplement spotlight research review for saw palmetto! You can read about how that might help you keep your hair present and correct, here:

    One Man’s Saw Palmetto Is Another Woman’s Serenoa Repens

    Today we’re going to talk options that are less “heavy guns”, and/but still very useful.

    Supplementation

    First, the obvious. Taking vitamins and minerals, especially biotin, can help a lot. This writer takes 10,000µg (that’s micrograms, not milligrams!) biotin gummies, similar to this example product on Amazon (except mine also has other vitamins and minerals in, but the exact product doesn’t seem to be available on Amazon).

    When thinking “what vitamins and minerals help hair?”, honestly, it’s most of them. So, focus on the ones that count for the most (usually: biotin and zinc), and then cover your bases for the rest with good diet and additional supplementation if you wish.

    Caffeine (topical)

    It may feel silly, giving one’s hair a stimulant, but topical caffeine application really does work to stimulate hair growth. And not “just a little help”, either:

    ❝Specifically, 0.2% topical caffeine-based solutions are typically safe with very minimal adverse effects for long-term treatment of AGA, and they are not inferior to topical 5% minoxidil therapy❞

    ~ Dr. Bajoria et al.

    (AGA = Androgenic Alopecia)

    Read more: Comparing Current Therapeutic Modalities of Androgenic Alopecia: A Literature Review of Clinical Trials

    Argan oil

    As with coconut oil, argan oil is great on hair. It won’t do a thing to improve hair growth or decrease hair shedding, but it will help you hair stay moisturized and thus reduce breakage—thus, may not be relevant for everyone, but for those of us with hair long enough to brush, it’s important.

    Bonus: get an argan oil based hair serum that also contains keratin (the protein used to make hair), as this helps strengthen the hair too.

    Here’s an example product on Amazon

    Silk pillowcases

    Or a silk hair bonnet to sleep in! They both do the same thing, which is prevent damaging the hair in one’s sleep by reducing the friction that it may have when moving/turning against the pillow in one’s sleep.

    • Pros of the bonnet: if you have lots of hair and a partner in bed with you, your hair need not be in their face, and you also won’t get it caught under you or them.
    • Pros of the pillowcase: you don’t have to wear a bonnet

    Both are also used widely by people without hair loss issues, but with easily damaged and/or tangled hair—Black people especially with 3C or tighter curls in particular often benefit from this. Other people whose hair is curly and/or gray also stand to gain a lot.

    Here are Amazon example products of a silk pillowcase (it’s expensive, but worth it) and a silk bonnet, respectively

    Want to read more?

    You might like this article:

    From straight to curly, thick to thin: here’s how hormones and chemotherapy can change your hair

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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  • Stop Sabotaging Your Gut

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    This is Dr. Robynne Chutkan. She’s an integrative gastroenterologist, and founder of the Digestive Center for Wellness, in Washington DC, which for the past 20 years has been dedicated to uncovering the root causes of gastrointestinal disorders, while the therapeutic side of things has been focused on microbial optimization, nutritional therapy, mind-body techniques, and lifestyle changes.

    In other words, maximal health for minimal medicalization.

    So… What does she want us to know?

    Live dirty

    While attentive handwashing is important to avoid the spread of communicable diseases*, excessive cleanliness in general can result in an immune system that has no idea how to deal with pathogens when exposure does finally occur.

    *See also: The Truth About Handwashing

    This goes doubly for babies: especially those who were born by c-section and thus missed out on getting colonized by vaginal bacteria, and especially those who are not breast-fed, and thus miss out on nutrients given in breast milk that are made solely for the benefit of certain symbiotic bacteria (humans can’t even digest those particular nutrients, we literally evolved to produce some nutrients solely for the bacteria).

    See also: Breast Milk’s Benefits That Are (So Far) Not Replicable

    However, it still goes for the rest of us who are not babies, too. We could, Dr. Chutkan tells us, stand to wash less in general, and definitely ease up on antibacterial soaps and so forth.

    See also: Should You Shower Daily?

    Take antibiotics only if absolutely necessary (and avoid taking them by proxy)

    Dr. Chutkan describes antibiotics as the single biggest threat to our microbiome, not just because of overprescription, but also the antibiotics that are used in animal agriculture and thus enter the food chain (and thus, enter us, if we eat animal products).

    Still, while the antibiotics meat/dairy-enjoyers will get from food are better avoided, antibiotics actually taken directly are even worse, and are absolutely a “scorched earth” tactic against whatever they’re being prescribed for.

    See also: Antibiotics? Think Thrice ← which also brings up “Four Ways Antibiotics Can Kill You”; seriously, the risks of antibiotics are not to be underestimated, including the risks associated only with them working exactly as intended—let alone if something goes wrong.

    Probiotics won’t save you

    While like any gastroenterologist (or really, almost any person in general), she notes that probiotics can give a boost to health. However, she wants us to know about two shortcomings that are little-discussed:

    1) Your body has a collection of microbiomes each with their own needs, and while it is possible to take “generally good” bacteria in probiotics and assume they’ll do good, taking Lactobacillus sp. will do nothing for a shortage of Bifidobacteria sp, and even taking the correct genus can have similar shortcomings if a different species of that genus is needed, e.g. taking L. acidophilus will do nothing for a shortage of L. reuteri.

    It’d be like a person with a vitamin D deficiency taking vitamin B12 supplements and wondering why they’re not getting better.

    2) Probiotics are often wasted if not taken mindfully of their recipient environment. For example, most gut bacteria only live for about 20 minutes in the gut. They’re usually inactive in the supplement form, they’re activated in the presence of heat and moisture and appropriate pH etc, and then the clock is ticking for them to thrive or die.

    This means that if you take a supplement offering two billion strains of good gut bacteria, and you take it on an empty stomach, then congratulations, 20 minutes later, they’re mostly dead, because they had nothing to eat. Or if you take it after drinking a soda, congratulations, they’re mostly dead because not only were they starved, but also their competing “bad” microbes weren’t starved and changed the environment to make it worse for the “good” ones.

    For this reason, taking probiotics with (or immediately after) plenty of fiber is best.

    This is all accentuated if you’re recovering from using antibiotics, by the way.

    Imagine: a nuclear war devastates the population of the Earth. Some astronauts manage to safely return, finding a mostly-dead world covered in nuclear winter. Is the addition of a few astronauts going to quickly repopulate the world? No, of course not. They are few, the death toll is many, and the environment is very hostile to life. A hundred years later, the population will be pretty much the same—a few straggling survivors.

    It’s the same after taking antibiotics, just, generations pass in minutes instead of decades. You can’t wipe out almost everything beneficial in the gut, create a hostile environment there, throw in a couple of probiotic gummies, and expect the population to bounce back.

    That said, although “probiotics will not save you”, they can help provided you give them a nice soft bed of fiber to land on, some is better than none, and guessing at what strains are needed is better than giving nothing.

    See also: How Much Difference Do Probiotic Supplements Make, Really?

    What she recommends

    So to recap, we’ve had:

    • Wash less, and/or with less harsh chemicals
    • Avoid antibiotics like the plague, unless you literally have The Plague, for which the treatment is indeed antibiotics
    • Avoid antibiotic-contaminated foods, which in the US is pretty much all animal products unless it’s, for example, your own back-yard hens whom you did not give antibiotics. Do not fall for greenwashing aesthetics in the packaging of “happy cows” and their beef, milk, etc, “happy hens” and their meat, eggs, etc… If it doesn’t explicitly claim to be free from the use of antibiotics, then antibiotics were almost certainly used.
      • Dr. Chutkan herself is not even vegan, by the way, but very much wants us to be able to make informed choices about this, and does recommend at least a “plants-forward” diet, for the avoiding-antibiotics reason and for the plenty-of-fiber reason, amongst others.
    • Consider probiotics, but don’t expect them to work miracles by themselves; you’ve got to help them to help you.
      • Dr. Chutkan also recommends getting microbiome tests done if you think something might be amiss, and then you can supplement with probiotics in a more targetted fashion instead of guessing at what species is needed where.

    She also recommends, of course, a good gut-healthy diet in general, especially “leafy green things that were recently alive; not powders”, beans, and nuts, while avoiding gut-unhealthy things such as sugars-without-fiber, alcohol, or some gut-harmful additives (such as most artificial sweeteners, although stevia is a gut-healthy exception, and sucralose is ok in moderation).

    For more on gut-healthy eating, check out:

    Make Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)

    Want to know more from Dr. Chutkan?

    We recently reviewed an excellent book of hers:

    The Anti-Viral Gut: Tackling Pathogens From The Inside Out – by Dr. Robynne Chutkan

    Enjoy!

    Don’t Forget…

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  • How To *Really* Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits

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    The Healthiest Habit-Building

    Why was that book “Atomic Habits” called that? It wasn’t just because it’s a catchy title…

    Habits are—much like atoms—things that are almost imperceptibly small, yet when stacked, they make up the substance of many much larger and more obvious things, and also contain an immense amount of potential power.

    About that power…

    Habits are the “compound interest” of natural human life. Every action we take, every decision we make, makes our life (often imperceptibly) better or worse. But getting even just 1% better or 1% worse at something every day? That’s going to not just add up over time… It’ll actively compound over time.

    Habits will snowball one way or the other, good or bad. So, we want to control that snowball so that it works for us rather than against us.

    Thus, we need to choose habits that are helpful to us, rather than those that are harmful to us. Top examples include:

    • Making healthy food choices rather than unhealthy ones
    • Moving our body regularly rather than being sedentary
    • Having a good bedtime/morning routine rather than a daily chaotic blur
    • Learning constantly rather than digging into old beliefs out of habit
    • Forging healthy relationships rather than isolating ourselves

    We all know that to make a habit stick, we need to practice it regularly, with opinions varying on how long it takes for something to become habit. Some say 21 days; some say 66. The number isn’t the important part!

    What is important

    You will never get to day 66, much less will you get to day 366, if you don’t first get to day 6 (New Year’s Resolutions, anyone?).

    So in the early days especially, when the habit is most likely to get dropped, it’s critical to make the habit as easy as possible to form.

    That means:

    • The habit should be made as pleasant as possible
      • (e.g. by making modifications to it if it’s not already intrinsically pleasant)
    • The habit should take under 2 minutes to do at first
      • (no matter if it takes longer than 2 minutes to be useful; it’ll never be useful if you don’t first get it to stick, so make your initial commitment only 2 minutes, just to get in the habit)
    • The habit should have cues to remind you
      • (as it’s not habit yet, you will need to either set a reminder on your phone, or leave a visual reminder, such as your workout clothes laid out ready for you in the morning, or a bowl of fruit in plain view where you spend a lot of time)

    What gets measured, gets done

    Streaks are a great way to do this. Habit-tracking apps help. Marks on a calendar or in a journal are also totally fine.

    What can help especially, and that a lot of people don’t do, is to have a system of regular personal reviews—like a work “performance review”, but for oneself and one’s own life.

    Set a reminder or write on the calendar / in your diary, to review monthly, or weekly if you prefer, such things as:

    • How am I doing in the areas of life that are important to me?
      • Have a list of the areas of life that are important to you, by the way, and genuinely reflect on each of them, e.g:
        • Health
        • Finances
        • Relationships
        • Learning
        • Sleep
        • Etc
    • What is working for me, and what isn’t working for me?
    • What will I do better in this next month/week?

    …and then do it!

    Good luck, and may it all stack up in your favor!

    Don’t Forget…

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