Three-Bean Chili & Cashew Cream
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.
A hearty classic with a twist! Delicious and filling and full of protein, fiber, and powerful phytonutrients (including heavy-hitters ergothioneine and lycopene), this recipe is also quite flexible, so you can always add in extra seasonal vegetables if you like (to get you started: cherry tomatoes in summer and sweet potato in fall are fine options)!
You will need
- 1 cup low-sodium vegetable stock (ideally you made it yourself from vegetable offcuts you kept in the freezer for this purpose, but if not, you should be able to find low-sodium stock cubes)
- 1 can kidney beans, drained and rinsed
- 1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
- 1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
- 2 cans chopped tomatoes
- 1 onion, finely chopped
- 1 carrot, diced
- 2 celery sticks, chopped
- 4 oz mushrooms, chopped
- ½ bulb garlic, crushed
- 2 tbsp tomato purée
- 1 red chili pepper, finely chopped (multiply per your heat preferences)
- 1 tbsp ground paprika
- 1 tbsp black pepper, coarse ground
- 2 tsp fresh rosemary (or 1 tbsp dried)
- 2 tsp fresh thyme (or 1 tbsp dried)
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Extra virgin olive oil
For the cashew cream:
- 6 oz cashews, soaked in kettle-hot water for at least 15 minutes
- 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
- 1 tsp lemon juice
To serve:
- Handful of chopped parsley
- Your carbohydrates of choice; we recommend our Tasty Versatile Rice recipe, and/or our Delicious Quinoa Avocado Bread recipe.
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Heat some olive oil in a skillet and fry the onion for about 5 minutes, stirring as necessary.
2) Add the garlic and chili and cook for a further 1 minute.
3) Add the celery, carrot, and mushrooms and continue cooking for 1–2 minutes.
4) Add everything else from the main section, taking care to stir well to distribute the seasonings evenly. Reduce the heat and allow to simmer for around 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
5) While you are waiting, drain the cashews, and add them to a high-speed blender with ½ cup (fresh) cold water, as well as the nutritional yeast and lemon juice. Blend on full power until smooth; this may take about 3 minutes, so we recommend doing it in 30-second bursts to avoid overheating the motor. You’ll also probably need to scrape it down the sides at least once. You can add a little more water if you want the cream to be thinner than it is appearing, but go slowly if you do.
6) Serve with rice, adding a dollop of the cream and garnishing with parsley, with bread on the side if you like.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
- Three Daily Servings of Beans?
- Kidney Beans or Black Beans – Which is Healthier?
- What Matters Most For Your Heart?
- “The Longevity Vitamin” (That’s Not A Vitamin)
- Lycopene’s Benefits For The Gut, Heart, Brain, & More
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
Take care!
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Planning Festivities Your Body Won’t Regret
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The Festive Dilemma
For many, Christmas is approaching. Other holidays abound too, and even for the non-observant, it’d be hard to escape seasonal jollities entirely.
So, what’s the plan?
- Eat, drink, and be merry, and have New Year’s Resolutions for the first few days of January before collapsing in a heap?
- Approach the Yuletide with Spartan abstemiousness and miss all the fun while simultaneously annoying your relatives?
Let’s try to find a third approach instead…
What’s festive and healthy?
We’re doing this article this week, because many people will be shopping already, making plans, and so forth. So here are some things to bear in mind:
Make your own mindful choices
Coca-Cola company really did a number on Christmas, but it doesn’t mean their product is truly integral to the season. Same goes for many other things that flood the stores around this time of year. So much sugary confectionary! But remember, they’re not the boss of you. If you wouldn’t buy it ordinarily, why are you buying it now? Do you actually even want it?
If you really do, then you do you, but mindful choices will invariably be healthier than “because there were three additional aisles of confectionary now so I stopped and looked and picked some things”.
Pick your battles
If you’re having a big family gathering, likely there will be occasions with few healthy options available. But you can decide what’s most important for you to avoid, perhaps picking a theme, e.g:
- No alcohol this year, or
- No processed sugary foods, or
- Eat/drink whatever, but practice intermittent fasting
Some resources:
Fight inflammation
This is a big one so it deserves its own category. In the season of sugar and alcohol and fatty meat, inflammation can be a big problem to come around and bite us in the behind. We’ve written on this previously:
Positive dieting
In other words, less of a focus on what to exclude, and more of a focus on what to include in your diet. Fruity drinks and sweets are common at this time of year, but you know what’s also fruity? Fruit!
And it can be festive, too! Berries are great, and those tiny orange-like fruits that may be called clementines or tangerines or satsumas or, as Aldi would have it, “easy peelers”. Apple and cinnamon are also a great combination that both bring sweetness without needing added sugar.
And as for mains? Make your salads that bit fancier, get plenty of greens with your main, have hearty soups and strews with lentils and beams!
See also: Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)
Your gut will thank us later!
Get moving!
That doesn’t mean you have to beat the New Year rush to the gym (unless you want to!). But it could mean, for example, more time in your walking shoes (or dancing shoes! With a nod to today’s sponsor) and less time in the armchair.
See also: The doctor who wants us to exercise less; move more
Lastly…
Remember it’s supposed to be fun! And being healthy can be a lot more fun than suffering because of unfortunate choices that we come to regret.
Take care!
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As the U.S. Struggles With a Stillbirth Crisis, Australia Offers a Model for How to Do Better
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ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Series: Stillbirths:When Babies Die Before Taking Their First Breath
The U.S. has not prioritized stillbirth prevention, and American parents are losing babies even as other countries make larger strides to reduce deaths late in pregnancy.
The stillbirth of her daughter in 1999 cleaved Kristina Keneally’s life into a before and an after. It later became a catalyst for transforming how an entire country approaches stillbirths.
In a world where preventing stillbirths is typically far down the list of health care priorities, Australia — where Keneally was elected as a senator — has emerged as a global leader in the effort to lower the number of babies that die before taking their first breaths. Stillbirth prevention is embedded in the nation’s health care system, supported by its doctors, midwives and nurses, and touted by its politicians.
In 2017, funding from the Australian government established a groundbreaking center for research into stillbirths. The next year, its Senate established a committee on stillbirth research and education. By 2020, the country had adopted a national stillbirth plan, which combines the efforts of health care providers and researchers, bereaved families and advocacy groups, and lawmakers and government officials, all in the name of reducing stillbirths and supporting families. As part of that plan, researchers and advocates teamed up to launch a public awareness campaign. All told, the government has invested more than $40 million.
Meanwhile, the United States, which has a far larger population, has no national stillbirth plan, no public awareness campaign and no government-funded stillbirth research center. Indeed, the U.S. has long lagged behind Australia and other wealthy countries in a crucial measure: how fast the stillbirth rate drops each year.
According to the latest UNICEF report, the U.S. was worse than 151 countries in reducing its stillbirth rate between 2000 and 2021, cutting it by just 0.9%. That figure lands the U.S. in the company of South Sudan in Africa and doing slightly better than Turkmenistan in central Asia. During that period, Australia’s reduction rate was more than double that.
Definitions of stillbirth vary by country, and though both Australia and the U.S. mark stillbirths as the death of a fetus at 20 weeks or more of pregnancy, to fairly compare countries globally, international standards call for the use of the World Health Organization definition that defines stillbirth as a loss after 28 weeks. That puts the U.S. stillbirth rate in 2021 at 2.7 per 1,000 total births, compared with 2.4 in Australia the same year.
Every year in the United States, more than 20,000 pregnancies end in a stillbirth. Each day, roughly 60 babies are stillborn. Australia experiences six stillbirths a day.
Over the past two years, ProPublica has revealed systemic failures at the federal and local levels, including not prioritizing research, awareness and data collection, conducting too few autopsies after stillbirths and doing little to combat stark racial disparities. And while efforts are starting to surface in the U.S. — including two stillbirth-prevention bills that are pending in Congress — they lack the scope and urgency seen in Australia.
“If you ask which parts of the work in Australia can be done in or should be done in the U.S., the answer is all of it,” said Susannah Hopkins Leisher, a stillbirth parent, epidemiologist and assistant professor in the stillbirth research program at the University of Utah Health. “There’s no physical reason why we cannot do exactly what Australia has done.”
Australia’s goal, which has been complicated by the pandemic, is to, by 2025, reduce the country’s rate of stillbirths after 28 weeks by 20% from its 2020 rate. The national plan laid out the target, and it is up to each jurisdiction to determine how to implement it based on their local needs.
The most significant development came in 2019, when the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence — the headquarters for Australia’s stillbirth-prevention efforts — launched the core of its strategy, a checklist of five evidence-based priorities known as the Safer Baby Bundle. They include supporting pregnant patients to stop smoking; regular monitoring for signs that the fetus is not growing as expected, which is known as fetal growth restriction; explaining the importance of acting quickly if fetal movement changes or decreases; advising pregnant patients to go to sleep on their side after 28 weeks; and encouraging patients to talk to their doctors about when to deliver because in some cases that may be before their due date.
Officials estimate that at least half of all births in the country are covered by maternity services that have adopted the bundle, which focuses on preventing stillbirths after 28 weeks.
“These are babies whose lives you would expect to save because they would survive if they were born alive,” said Dr. David Ellwood, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Griffith University, director of maternal-fetal medicine at Gold Coast University Hospital and a co-director of the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence.
Australia wasn’t always a leader in stillbirth prevention.
In 2000, when the stillbirth rate in the U.S. was 3.3 per 1,000 total births, Australia’s was 3.7. A group of doctors, midwives and parents recognized the need to do more and began working on improving their data classification and collection to better understand the problem areas. By 2014, Australia published its first in-depth national report on stillbirth. Two years later, the medical journal The Lancet published the second report in a landmark series on stillbirths, and Australian researchers applied for the first grant from the government to create the stillbirth research center.
But full federal buy-in remained elusive.
As parent advocates, researchers, doctors and midwives worked to gain national support, they didn’t yet know they would find a champion in Keneally.
Keneally’s improbable journey began when she was born in Nevada to an American father and Australian mother. She grew up in Ohio, graduating from the University of Dayton before meeting the man who would become her husband and moving to Australia.
When she learned that her daughter, who she named Caroline, would be stillborn, she remembers thinking, “I’m smart. I’m educated. How did I let this happen? And why did nobody tell me this was a possible outcome?”
A few years later, in 2003, Keneally decided to enter politics. She was elected to the lower house of state parliament in New South Wales, of which Sydney is the capital. In Australia, newly elected members are expected to give a “first speech.” She was able to get through just one sentence about Caroline before starting to tear up.
As a legislator, Keneally didn’t think of tackling stillbirth as part of her job. There wasn’t any public discourse about preventing stillbirths or supporting families who’d had one. When Caroline was born still, all Keneally got was a book titled “When a Baby Dies.”
In 2009, Keneally became New South Wales’ first woman premier, a role similar to that of an American governor. Another woman who had suffered her own stillbirth and was starting a stillbirth foundation learned of Keneally’s experience. She wrote to Keneally and asked the premier to be the foundation’s patron.
What’s the point of being the first female premier, Keneally thought, if I can’t support this group?
Like the U.S., Australia had previously launched an awareness campaign that contributed to a staggering reduction in sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. But there was no similar push for stillbirths.
“If we can figure out ways to reduce SIDS,” Keneally said, “surely it’s not beyond us to figure out ways to reduce stillbirth.”
She lost her seat after two years and took a break from politics, only to return six years later. In 2018, she was selected to serve as a senator at Australia’s federal level.
Keneally saw this as her second chance to fight for stillbirth prevention. In the short period between her election and her inaugural speech, she had put everything in place for a Senate inquiry into stillbirth.
In her address, Keneally declared stillbirth a national public health crisis. This time, she spoke at length about Caroline.
“When it comes to stillbirth prevention,” she said, “there are things that we know that we’re not telling parents, and there are things we don’t know, but we could, if we changed how we collected data and how we funded research.”
The day of her speech, March 27, 2018, she and her fellow senators established the Select Committee on Stillbirth Research and Education.
Things moved quickly over the next nine months. Keneally and other lawmakers traveled the country holding hearings, listening to testimony from grieving parents and writing up their findings in a report released that December.
“The culture of silence around stillbirth means that parents and families who experience it are less likely to be prepared to deal with the personal, social and financial consequences,” the report said. “This failure to regard stillbirth as a public health issue also has significant consequences for the level of funding available for research and education, and for public awareness of the social and economic costs to the community as a whole.”
It would be easy to swap the U.S. for Australia in many places throughout the report. Women of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds experienced double the rate of stillbirth of other Australian women; Black women in America are more than twice as likely as white women to have a stillbirth. Both countries faced a lack of coordinated research and corresponding funding, low autopsy rates following a stillbirth and poor public awareness of the problem.
The day after the report’s release, the Australian government announced that it would develop a national plan and pledged $7.2 million in funding for prevention. Nearly half was to go to education and awareness programs for women and their health care providers.
In the following months, government officials rolled out the Safer Baby Bundle and pledged another $26 million to support parents’ mental health after a loss.
Many in Australia see Keneally’s first speech as senator, in 2018, as the turning point for the country’s fight for stillbirth prevention. Her words forced the federal government to acknowledge the stillbirth crisis and launch the national action plan with bipartisan support.
Australia’s assistant minister for health and aged care, Ged Kearney, cited Keneally’s speech in an email to ProPublica where she noted that Australia has become a world leader in stillbirth awareness, prevention and supporting families after a loss.
“Kristina highlighted the power of women telling their story for positive change,” Kearney said, adding, “As a Labor Senator Kristina Keneally bravely shared her deeply personal story of her daughter Caroline who was stillborn in 1999. Like so many mothers, she helped pave the way for creating a more compassionate and inclusive society.”
Keneally, who is now CEO of Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation, said the number of stillbirths a day in Australia spurred the movement for change.
“Six babies a day,” Keneally said. “Once you hear that fact, you can’t unhear it.”
Australia’s leading stillbirth experts watched closely as the country moved closer to a unified effort. This was the moment for which they had been waiting.
“We had all the information needed, but that’s really what made it happen.” said Vicki Flenady, a perinatal epidemiologist, co-director of the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence based at the Mater Research Institute at the University of Queensland, and a lead author on The Lancet’s stillbirth series. “I don’t think there’s a person who could dispute that.”
Flenady and her co-director Ellwood had spent more than two decades focused on stillbirths. After establishing the center in 2017, they were now able to expand their team. As part of their work with the International Stillbirth Alliance, they reached out to other countries with a track record of innovation and evidence-based research: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ireland. They modeled the Safer Baby Bundle after a similar one in the U.K., though they added some elements.
In 2019, the state of Victoria, home to Melbourne, was the first to implement the Safer Baby Bundle. But 10 months into the program, the effort had to be paused for several months because of the pandemic, which forced other states to cancel their launches altogether.
“COVID was a major disruption. We stopped and started,” Flenady said.
Still, between 2019 and 2021, participating hospitals across Victoria were able to reduce their stillbirth rate by 21%. That improvement has yet to be seen at the national level.
A number of areas are still working on implementing the bundle. Westmead Hospital, one of Australia’s largest hospitals, planned to wrap that phase up last month. Like many hospitals, Westmead prominently displays the bundle’s key messages in the colorful posters and flyers hanging in patient rooms and in the hallways. They include easy-to-understand slogans such as, “Big or small. Your baby’s growth matters,” and, “Sleep on your side when baby’s inside.”
As patients at Westmead wait for their names to be called, a TV in the waiting room plays a video on stillbirth prevention, highlighting the importance of fetal movement. If a patient is concerned their baby’s movements have slowed down, they are instructed to come in to be seen within two hours. The patient’s chart gets a colorful sticker with a 16-point checklist of stillbirth risk factors.
Susan Heath, a senior clinical midwife at Westmead, came up with the idea for the stickers. Her office is tucked inside the hospital’s maternity wing, down a maze of hallways. As she makes the familiar walk to her desk, with her faded hospital badge bouncing against her navy blue scrubs, it’s clear she is a woman on a mission. The bundle gives doctors and midwives structure and uniform guidance, she said, and takes stillbirth out of the shadows. She reminds her staff of how making the practices a routine part of their job has the power to change their patients’ lives.
“You’re trying,” she said, “to help them prevent having the worst day of their life.”
Christine Andrews, a senior researcher at the Stillbirth Centre who is leading an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness, said the national stillbirth rate beyond 28 weeks has continued to slowly improve.
“It is going to take a while until we see the stillbirth rate across the whole entire country go down,” Andrews said. “We are anticipating that we’re going to start to see a shift in that rate soon.”
As officials wait to receive and standardize the data from hospitals and states, they are encouraged by a number of indicators.
For example, several states are reporting increases in the detection of babies that aren’t growing as they should, a major factor in many late-gestation stillbirths. Many also have seen an increase in the number of pregnant patients who stopped smoking. Health care providers also are more consistently offering post-stillbirth investigations, such as autopsies.
In addition to the Safer Baby Bundle, the national plan also calls for raising awareness and reducing racial disparities. The improvements it recommends for bereavement care are already gaining global attention.
To fulfill those directives, Australia has launched a “Still Six Lives” public awareness campaign, has implemented a national stillbirth clinical care standard and has spent two years developing a culturally inclusive version of the Safer Baby Bundle for First Nations, migrant and refugee communities. Those resources, which were recently released, incorporated cultural traditions and used terms like Stronger Bubba Born for the bundle and “sorry business babies,” which is how some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women refer to stillbirth. There are also audio versions for those who can’t or prefer not to read the information.
In May, nearly 50 people from the state of Queensland met in a large hotel conference room. Midwives, doctors and nurses sat at round tables with government officials, hospital administrators and maternal and infant health advocates. Some even wore their bright blue Safer Baby T-shirts.
One by one, they discussed their experiences implementing the Safer Baby Bundle. One midwifery group was able to get more than a third of its patients to stop smoking between their first visit and giving birth.
Officials from a hospital in one of the fastest-growing areas in the state discussed how they carefully monitored for fetal growth restriction.
And staff from another hospital, which serves many low-income and immigrant patients, described how 97% of pregnant patients who said their baby’s movements had decreased were seen for additional monitoring within two hours of voicing their concern.
As the midwives, nurses and doctors ticked off the progress they were seeing, they also discussed the fear of unintended consequences: higher rates of premature births or increased admissions to neonatal intensive care units. But neither, they said, has materialized.
“The bundle isn’t causing any harm and may be improving other outcomes, like reducing early-term birth,” Flenady said. “I think it really shows a lot of positive impact.”
As far behind as the U.S. is in prioritizing stillbirth prevention, there is still hope.
Dr. Bob Silver, who co-authored a study that estimated that nearly 1 in 4 stillbirths are potentially preventable, has looked to the international community as a model. Now, he and Leisher — the University of Utah epidemiologist and stillbirth parent — are working to create one of the first stillbirth research and prevention centers in the U.S. in partnership with stillbirth leaders from Australia and other countries. They hope to launch next year.
“There’s no question that Australia has done a better job than we have,” said Silver, who is also chair of the University of Utah Health obstetrics and gynecology department. “Part of it is just highlighting it and paying attention to it.”
It’s hard to know what parts of Australia’s strategy are making a difference — the bundle as a whole, just certain elements of it, the increased stillbirth awareness across the country, or some combination of those things. Not every component has been proven to decrease stillbirth.
The lack of U.S. research on the issue has made some cautious to adopt the bundle, Silver said, but it is clear the U.S. can and should do more.
There comes a point when an issue is so critical, Silver said, that people have to do the best they can with the information that they have. The U.S. has done that with other problems, such as maternal mortality, he said, though many of the tactics used to combat that problem have not been proven scientifically.
“But we’ve decided this problem is so bad, we’re going to try the things that we think are most likely to be helpful,” Silver said.
After more than 30 years of working on stillbirth prevention, Silver said the U.S. may be at a turning point. Parents’ voices are getting louder and starting to reach lawmakers. More doctors are affirming that stillbirths are not inevitable. And pressure is mounting on federal institutions to do more.
Of the two stillbirth prevention bills in Congress, one already sailed through the Senate. The second bill, the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education for Autumn Act, includes features that also appeared in Australia’s plan, such as improving data, increasing awareness and providing support for autopsies.
And after many years, the National Institutes of Health has turned its focus back to stillbirths. In March, it released a report with a series of recommendations to reduce the nation’s stillbirth rate that mirror ProPublica’s reporting about some of the causes of the crisis. Since then, it has launched additional groups to begin to tackle three critical angles: prevention, data and bereavement. Silver co-chairs the prevention group.
In November, more than 100 doctors, parents and advocates gathered for a symposium in New York City to discuss everything from improving bereavement care in the U.S to tackling racial disparities in stillbirth. In 2022, after taking a page out of the U.K.’s book, the city’s Mount Sinai Hospital opened the first Rainbow Clinic in the U.S., which employs specific protocols to care for people who have had a stillbirth.
But given the financial resources in the U.S. and the academic capacity at American universities and research institutions, Leisher and others said federal and state governments aren’t doing nearly enough.
“The U.S. is not pulling its weight in relation either to our burden or to the resources that we have at our disposal,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of babies dying, and we’ve got a really bad imbalance of who those babies are as well. And yet we look at a country with a much smaller number of stillbirths who is leading the world.”
“We can do more. Much more. We’re just not,” she added. “It’s unacceptable.”
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Metabolical – by Dr. Robert Lustig
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The premise of this book itself is not novel: processed food is bad, food giants lie to us, and eating better makes us less prone to disease (especially metabolic disease).
What this book does offer that’s less commonly found is a comprehensive guide, a walkthrough of each relevant what and why and how, with plenty of good science and practical real-world examples.
In terms of unique selling points, perhaps the greatest strength of this book is its focus on two things in particular that affect many aspects of health: looking after our liver, and looking after our gut.
The style is… A little dramatic perhaps, but that’s just the style; there’s no hyperbole, he is stating well-established scientific facts.
Bottom line: very much of chronic disease would be a lot less diseasey if we all ate with these aspects of our health in mind. This book’s a comprehensive guide to that.
Click here to check out Metabolical, and let food be thy medicine!
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Dark Calories – by Dr. Catherine Shanahan
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You may be wondering: do we really need a 416-page book to say “don’t use vegetable oils”?
The author, who was a biochemist before becoming a family physician, takes a lot of care to explain in ways the non-chemists amongst us can understand (with molecular diagrams very well-labelled), exactly why certain seed/vegetable oils (both of those names being imprecise and unhelpful as umbrella terms) cause metabolic problems for us, when in contrast olive oil, avocado oil, and even peanut oil, do not.
Understanding is, for many, the root foundation of compliance. We are more likely to abide by rules we understand the logic behind, than seemingly arbitrary “thou shalt not…” proclamations.
So that’s an important strength of the book, demystifying various fats and how our body responds to them on a biochemical level, not just “is associated with such-and-such, based on observational population studies”. This kind of explanation clears up why, for example, seed oils correlate with obesity more than calories, sugar, wheat, or beef—having as it does to do with affecting our body’s ability to generate and use energy.
She also offers practical tips/reminders throughout, such as how “organic” does not necessarily mean “healthy” (indeed, many poisonous plants can be grown “organically”), and nor does “organic” mean “unrefined”, it speaks only for the conditions in which the raw product was first made, before other things were done to it later.
We learn a lot, too, about the processes of oxidation, the biochemistry behind that (more diagrams!), and of course the inflammatory response to same (an important factor in most if not all chronic disease).
The style is mostly very easy-to-read pop-science, though if you’re not a chemist, you’ll probably need to slow down for the biochemistry explanations (this reviewer certainly did).
Bottom line: this is more than just a litany against vegetable oils; it’s a ground-upwards education in metabolic biochemistry for the layperson, and what that means for us in terms of chronic disease risks.
Click here to check out Dark Calories, and learn what’s going on with these oils!
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Cheeky diet soft drink getting you through the work day? Here’s what that may mean for your health
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Many people are drinking less sugary soft drink than in the past. This is a great win for public health, given the recognised risks of diets high in sugar-sweetened drinks.
But over time, intake of diet soft drinks has grown. In fact, it’s so high that these products are now regularly detected in wastewater.
So what does the research say about how your health is affected in the long term if you drink them often?
Breakingpic/Pexels What makes diet soft drinks sweet?
The World Health Organization (WHO) advises people “reduce their daily intake of free sugars to less than 10% of their total energy intake. A further reduction to below 5% or roughly 25 grams (six teaspoons) per day would provide additional health benefits.”
But most regular soft drinks contain a lot of sugar. A regular 335 millilitre can of original Coca-Cola contains at least seven teaspoons of added sugar.
Diet soft drinks are designed to taste similar to regular soft drinks but without the sugar. Instead of sugar, diet soft drinks contain artificial or natural sweeteners. The artificial sweeteners include aspartame, saccharin and sucralose. The natural sweeteners include stevia and monk fruit extract, which come from plant sources.
Many artificial sweeteners are much sweeter than sugar so less is needed to provide the same burst of sweetness.
Diet soft drinks are marketed as healthier alternatives to regular soft drinks, particularly for people who want to reduce their sugar intake or manage their weight.
But while surveys of Australian adults and adolescents show most people understand the benefits of reducing their sugar intake, they often aren’t as aware about how diet drinks may affect health more broadly.
Diet soft drinks contain artificial or natural sweeteners. Vintage Tone/Shutterstock What does the research say about aspartame?
The artificial sweeteners in soft drinks are considered safe for consumption by food authorities, including in the US and Australia. However, some researchers have raised concern about the long-term risks of consumption.
People who drink diet soft drinks regularly and often are more likely to develop certain metabolic conditions (such as diabetes and heart disease) than those who don’t drink diet soft drinks.
The link was found even after accounting for other dietary and lifestyle factors (such as physical activity).
In 2023, the WHO announced reports had found aspartame – the main sweetener used in diet soft drinks – was “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (carcinogenic means cancer-causing).
Importantly though, the report noted there is not enough current scientific evidence to be truly confident aspartame may increase the risk of cancer and emphasised it’s safe to consume occasionally.
Will diet soft drinks help manage weight?
Despite the word “diet” in the name, diet soft drinks are not strongly linked with weight management.
In 2022, the WHO conducted a systematic review (where researchers look at all available evidence on a topic) on whether the use of artificial sweeteners is beneficial for weight management.
Overall, the randomised controlled trials they looked at suggested slightly more weight loss in people who used artificial sweeteners.
But the observational studies (where no intervention occurs and participants are monitored over time) found people who consume high amounts of artificial sweeteners tended to have an increased risk of higher body mass index and a 76% increased likelihood of having obesity.
In other words, artificial sweeteners may not directly help manage weight over the long term. This resulted in the WHO advising artificial sweeteners should not be used to manage weight.
Studies in animals have suggested consuming high levels of artificial sweeteners can signal to the brain it is being starved of fuel, which can lead to more eating. However, the evidence for this happening in humans is still unproven.
You can’t go wrong with water. hurricanehank/Shutterstock What about inflammation and dental issues?
There is some early evidence artificial sweeteners may irritate the lining of the digestive system, causing inflammation and increasing the likelihood of diarrhoea, constipation, bloating and other symptoms often associated with irritable bowel syndrome. However, this study noted more research is needed.
High amounts of diet soft drinks have also been linked with liver disease, which is based on inflammation.
The consumption of diet soft drinks is also associated with dental erosion.
Many soft drinks contain phosphoric and citric acid, which can damage your tooth enamel and contribute to dental erosion.
Moderation is key
As with many aspects of nutrition, moderation is key with diet soft drinks.
Drinking diet soft drinks occasionally is unlikely to harm your health, but frequent or excessive intake may increase health risks in the longer term.
Plain water, infused water, sparkling water, herbal teas or milks remain the best options for hydration.
Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland and Emily Burch, Accredited Practising Dietitian and Lecturer, Southern Cross University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Seasonal Affective Disorder (Beyond Sunlight!)
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For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the time of increasing darkness is upon us again. Depending on our latitude, the sun barely rises before it skitters off again. And depending on other factors of our geography, we might not get much sun during that time (writer’s example: the ancient bog from which I write has been surrounded by fog for two weeks now).
So, what to do about it?
Firstly, we can make the most of whatever sun we do get (especially in the morning, if possible), and we can of course make some use of artificial sunlight. To save doubling up, we’ll link to what we previously wrote about optimizing both of those things:
‘Tis To Season To Be SAD-Savvy
More ways to get serotonin
Sunlight, of course, triggers our bodies to make serotonin, and hence we often make less of it during winter. But, there are other ways to get serotonin too, and one of the best ways is spending time in nature. Yes, even if the weather is gloomy, provided there are still visible green things and you are seeing them, it will promote serotonin production.
Of course, it may not be the season for picnics, but a morning walk through a local park or other green space is ideal.
On which note, gardening remains a good activity. Not a lot of people do so much gardening after a certain point in the year, but in one way, it’s more important than ever to get some soil under your fingernails:
There are bacteria in soil (specifically: Mycobacterium vaccae) that work similarly to antidepressants.
When something is described as having an effect similar to antidepressants, it’s usually hyperbole. In this case, it’s medicine, and literally works directly on the serotonergic system (as do many, but not all, antidepressants).
See also: Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!
While many antidepressants are selective serotonin uptake inhibitors (i.e., they slow the rate at which your brain loses serotonin), Mycobacterium vaccae increases the rate at which you produce serotonin. So, you feel happier, more relaxed, while also feeling more energized.
^this one’s a mouse study, but we’re including it because it covers exactly how it works in the brain, which is something that the ethics board wouldn’t let them do on humans, due to the need for slicing the brains up for examination.
As to how to benefit: touching soil will get you “infected” by the bacteria, yes, even if you wash your hands later. Growing food in the soil and eating the good (including if you wash and cook it) is even better.
Boost the other “happiness chemicals”
Serotonin is just one “happiness hormone”, other feel-good neurotransmitters that are just as important include dopamine and oxytocin.
Dopamine is most associated with being the “reward chemical”, so it pays to do things that you find rewarding. If you’re stuck for ideas, engaging in small acts of kindness is a sure-fire way to get dopamine flowing and lift your own mood as well as theirs.
See also: 10 Ways To Naturally Boost Dopamine
Oxytocin, meanwhile is the “cuddle chemical”, and can be triggered even if you have nobody to cuddle*. If you do, by the way, make it at least 20–30 seconds, as that’s generally how long it takes to get oxytocin flowing.
*Vividly imagining it has much the same effect, since the brain can’t tell the difference. Alternatively, looking at pictures/videos (your choice) of small cute animals tends to work for most people also.
For more on these things, check out: Neurotransmitter Cheatsheet
Take care!
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