Tofu vs Seitan – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing tofu to seitan, we picked the tofu.
Why?
This one is not close!
In terms of macros, seitan does have about 2x the protein, but it also has 6x the carbs and 6x the sodium of tofu, as well as less fiber than tofu.. So we’ll call it a tie on macros. But…
Seitan is also much more processed than tofu, as tofu has usually just been fermented and possibly pressed (depending on kind). Seitan, in contrast, is processed gluten that has been extracted from wheat and usually had lots of things happen to it on the way (depending on kind).
About that protein… Tofu is a complete protein, meaning it has all of the essential amino acids. Seitain, meanwhile, is lacking in lysine.
When it comes to vitamins and minerals, again tofu easily comes out on top; tofu has 5x the calcium, similar iron, more magnesium, 2x the phosphorous, 150% of the potassium, and contains several other nutrients that seitan doesn’t, such as folate and choline.
So, easy winning for tofu across the board on micronutrients.
Tofu is also rich in isoflavones, antioxidant phytonutrients, while seitan has no such benefits.
So, another win for tofu.
There are two reasons you might choose seitan:
- prioritizing bulk protein above all other health considerations
- you are allergic to soy and not allergic to gluten
If neither of those things are the case, then tofu is the healthier choice!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Tempeh vs Tofu – Which is Healthier? ← tempeh is, nutritionally speaking, tofu but better. Of course on a culinary level, there are many recipes where tofu will work and tempeh wouldn’t, though.
- Gluten: What’s The Truth?
Take care!
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7 Essential Devices For Hand Arthritis: Regain Control of Your Life
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Dr. Diana Girnita is a double board-certified physician in rheumatology and internal medicine. With a PhD in immunology (on top of her MD), and training at Harvard and top universities, she founded Rheumatologist OnCall, offering integrative medicine to broaden rheumatology access. Here’s what she has to say about things that make life easier:
Get your hands on these…
The seven devices that Dr. Girnita recommends are:
- Hand grip strengthener: helps build grip strength with a spring-loaded mechanism. Regular use can improve strength and reduce pain.
- Finger exerciser: different device; similar principle: it strengthens hand and finger muscles using resistance, enhancing hand function.
- Moisturizing paraffin bath: a heated paraffin wax bath that soothes hands, providing heat therapy and moisturizing the skin.
- Weighted silverware: weighted utensils (knives, forks, spoons) make gripping easier and provide stability for eating.
- Foam tubing grips: foam covers to make kitchen tools, toothbrushes, and hairbrushes easier to grip.
- Electric can-opener: reduces strain in opening cans, making meal preparation more accessible.
- Compression gloves: provide gentle compression to reduce swelling and pain, improving hand flexibility and circulation.
- Door knob cover grips: make it easier to turn doorknobs by providing a larger surface to grip.
- Wider-grip pens: ergonomically designed pens with a larger diameter and softer grip reduce hand strain while writing.
This writer, who does not have arthritis but also does not have anything like the grip strength she used to, also recommends a jar opener like this one.
As a bonus, if you spend a lot of time writing at a computer, an ergonomic split keyboard like this one goes a long way to avoiding carpal tunnel syndrome, and logically must be better for arthritis than a regular keyboard; another excellent thing to have (that again this writer uses and swears by) is an ergonomic vertical mouse like this one (aligns the wrist bones correctly; the “normal” horizontal version is woeful for the carpal bones). These things are both also excellent to help avoid worsening peripheral neuropathy (something that troubles this writer’s wrists if she’s not careful, due to old injuries there).
For more on the seven things otherwise listed above, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Avoiding/Managing Rheumatoid Arthritis
- Avoiding/Managing Osteoarthritis
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
Take care!
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Reclaiming Body Trust – by Hilary Kinavey & Dana Sturtevant
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Authored by a therapist and a dietician, this book draws from both of their extensive professional clinical experiences, to explore how we can (often early in our lives) be led into disordered thinking when it comes to food and our bodies, and how we can “take back that which has been stolen from us”.
More prosaically: the presented goal here is for us to each figure out where we are with our own body, and how we might build our relationship with same going forwards, in the way that will work the best for us.
The style is relaxed and conversational, while taking care to cover topics that are often tricky with no less seriousness. Chapter headings such as “Your coping is rooted in wisdom”, “What does grief have to do with it?” and “Allowing for pleasure and satisfaction” give an idea of the flavors at hand here.
Bottom line: if you think your relationship with food and your body could be better, not only are you probably right, but also, this book can help.
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Sleep wrinkles are real. Here’s how they leave their mark
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You wake up, stagger to the bathroom and gaze into the mirror. No, you’re not imagining it. You’ve developed face wrinkles overnight. They’re sleep wrinkles.
Sleep wrinkles are temporary. But as your skin loses its elasticity as you age, they can set in.
Here’s what you can do to minimise the chance of them forming in the first place.
How side-sleeping affects your face
Your skin wrinkles for a number of reasons, including ageing, sun damage, smoking, poor hydration, habitual facial expressions (such as grinning, pouting, frowning, squinting) and sleeping positions.
When you sleep on your side or stomach, your face skin is squeezed and crushed a lot more than if you sleep on your back. When you sleep on your side or stomach, gravity presses your face against the pillow. Your face skin is distorted as your skin is stretched, compressed and pulled in all directions as you move about in your sleep.
You can reduce these external forces acting on the face by sleeping on your back or changing positions frequently.
Doctors can tell which side you sleep on by looking at your face
In a young face, sleep wrinkles are transient and disappear after waking.
Temporary sleep wrinkles can become persistent with time and repetition. As we age, our skin loses elasticity (recoil) and extensibility (stretch), creating ideal conditions for sleep wrinkles or lines to set in and last longer.
The time spent in each sleeping position, the magnitude of external forces applied to each area of the face, as well as the surface area of contact with the pillow surface, also affects the pattern and rate of sleep wrinkle formation.
Skin specialists can often recognise this. People who favour sleeping on one side of their body tend to have a flatter face on their sleeping side and more visible sleep lines.
Can a night skincare routine avoid sleep wrinkles?
Collagen and elastin are two primary components of the dermis (inner layer) of skin. They form the skin structure and maintain the elasticity of skin.
The dermis is the inner layer of skin. mermaid3/Shutterstock Supplementing collagen through skincare routines to enhance skin elasticity can help reduce wrinkle formation.
Hyaluronic acid is a naturally occurring molecule in human bodies. It holds our skin’s collagen and elastin in a proper configuration, stimulates the production of collagen and adds hydration, which can help slow down wrinkle formation. Hyaluronic acid is one of the most common active ingredients in skincare creams, gels and lotions.
Moisturisers can hydrate the skin in different ways. “Occlusive” substances produce a thin layer of oil on the skin that prevents water loss due to evaporation. “Humectants” attract and hold water in the skin, and they can differ in their capacity to bind with water, which influences the degree of skin hydration.
Do silk pillowcases actually make a difference?
Can they help? New Africa/Shutterstock Silk pillowcases can make a difference in wrinkle formation, if they let your skin glide and move, rather than adding friction and pressure on a single spot. If you can, use silk sheets and silk pillows.
Studies have also shown pillows designed to reduce mechanical stress during sleep can prevent skin deformations. Such a pillow could be useful in slowing down and preventing the formation of certain facial wrinkles.
Sleeping on your back can reduce the risk of sleep lines, as can a nighttime routine of moisturising before sleep.
Otherwise, lifestyle choices and habits, such quitting smoking, drinking plenty of water, a healthy diet (eating enough vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, healthy fats, yogurt and other fermented foods) and regular use of sunscreens can help improve the appearance of the skin on our face.
Yousuf Mohammed, Dermatology researcher, The University of Queensland; Khanh Phan, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Frazer Institute, The University of Queensland, and Vania Rodrigues Leite E. Silva, Honorary Associate Professor, Frazer Institute, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Make Your Coffee Heart-Healthier!
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Health-Hack Your Coffee
We have previously written about the general health considerations (benefits and potential problems) of coffee:
The Bitter Truth About Coffee (or is it?)
Today, we will broadly assume that you are drinking coffee (in general, not necessarily right now, though if you are, same!) and would like to continue to do so. We also assume you’d like to do so as healthily as possible.
Not all coffees are created equal
If you order a coffee in France or Italy without specifying what kind, the coffee you receive will be short, dark,
and handsomeand without sugar. Healthwise, this is not a bad starting point. However…- It will usually be espresso
- Or it may be what in N. America is called a French press (in Europe it’s just called a cafetière)
Both of these kinds of coffee mean that cafestol, a compound found in the oily part of coffee and which is known to raise LDL (“bad” cholesterol”), stays in the drink.
Read: Cafestol and Kahweol: A Review on Their Bioactivities and Pharmacological Properties
Also: Cafestol extraction yield from different coffee brew mechanisms
If you’re reading that second one and wondering what a mocha pot or a Turkish coffee is, they are these things:
- Mocha pot: a stovetop device used for making espresso without an espresso machine
- Turkish coffee pot: also a stovetop device; this thing makes some of the strongest coffee you have ever encountered. Turks usually add sugar (this writer doesn’t; but my taste in coffee been described as “coffee like a punch in the face”)
So, wonderful as they are for those of us who love strong coffee, they also produce the highest in-drink levels of cafestol. If you’d like to cut the cafestol (for example, if you are keeping an eye on your LDL), we recommend…
The humble filter coffee
Whether by your favorite filter coffee machine or a pour-over low-tech coffee setup of the kind you could use even without an electricity supply, the filter keeps more than just the coffee grinds out; it keeps the cafestol out too; most of it, anyway, depending on what kind of filter you use, and the grind of the coffee:
Physical characteristics of the paper filter and low cafestol content filter coffee brews
What about instant coffee?
It has very little cafestol in it. It’s up to you whether that’s sufficient reason to choose it over any other form of coffee (this coffee-lover could never)
Want to make any coffee healthier?
This one isn’t about the cafestol, but…
If you take l-theanine (see here for our previous main feature about l-theanine), the l-theanine acts as a moderator and modulator of the caffeine, amongst other benefits:
The Cognitive-Enhancing Outcomes of Caffeine and L-theanine: A Systematic Review
As to where to get that, we don’t sell it, but here’s an example product on Amazon
Enjoy!
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Good Energy – by Dr. Casey Means
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For a book with a title like “Good Energy” and chapters such as “Bad Energy Is the Root of Disease”, this is actually a very science-based book (and there are a flock of well-known doctors saying so in the “praise for” section, too).
The premise is simple: most of our health is a matter of what our metabolism is (or isn’t) doing, and it’s not just a case of “doing more” or “doing less”. Indeed, a lot of “our” energy is expended doing bad things (such as chronic inflammation, to give an obvious example).
Dr. Means outlines about a dozen things many people do wrong, and about a dozen things we can do right, to get our body’s energy system working for us, rather than against us.
The style here is pop-science throughout, and in the category of criticism, the bibliography is offloaded to her website (we prefer to have things in our hands). However, the information here is good, clearly-presented, and usefully actionable.
Bottom line: if you ever find yourself feeling run-down and like your body is using your resources against you rather than for you, this is the book to get you out of that slump!
Click here to check out Good Energy, and get your metabolism working for you!
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How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol
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Rethinking Drinking
When we’re looking at certain health risks, there are often five key lifestyle factors that have a big impact; they are:
- Have a good diet
- Get good exercise
- Get good sleep
- Reduce (or eliminate) alcohol
- Don’t smoke
Today, we’re focussing the alcohol bit. Maybe you’d like to quit, maybe just cut down, maybe the topic just interests you… So, here’s a quick rundown of some things that will help make that a lot easier:
With a big enough “why”, you can overcome any “how”
Research and understand the harm done by drinking, including:
And especially as we get older, memory problems:
Alcohol-related dementia: an update of the evidence
And as for fear of missing out, or perhaps even of no longer being relaxed/fun… Did you ever, while sober, have a very drunk person try to converse with you, and you thought “I wish that were me”?
Probably not
Know your triggers
Why do you drink? If your knee-jerk response is “because I like it”, dig deeper. What events prompt you to have a drink?
- Some will be pure habit born of convention—perhaps with a meal, for example
- Others may be stress-management—after work, perhaps
- Others may be pseudo-medicinal—a nightcap for better* sleep, for instance
*this will not work. Alcohol may make us sleepy but it will then proceed to disrupt that very sleep and make it less restorative
Become mindful
Now that you know why you’d like to drink less (or quit entirely), and you know what triggers you to drink, you can circumvent that a little, by making deals with yourself, for example
- “I can drink alcohol, if and only if I have consumed a large glass of water first” (cuts out being thirsty as a trigger to drink)
- “I can drink alcohol, if and only if I meditate for at least 5 minutes first” (reduces likelihood of stress-drinking)
- “I can drink alcohol, if and only if it is with the largest meal of the day” (minimizes total alcohol consumption)
Note that these things also work around any FOMO, “Fear Of Missing Out”. It’s easier to say “no” when you know you can have it later if you still want it.
Get a good replacement drink
There are a lot of alcohol-free alcohol-like drinks around these days, and many of them are very good. Experiment and see. But!
It doesn’t even have to be that. Sometimes what we need is not even an alcohol-like drink, but rather, drinkable culinary entertainment.
If you like “punch-in-the-face” flavors (as this writer does), maybe strong black coffee is the answer. If you like “crisp and clear refreshment” (again, same), maybe your favorite herbal tea will do it for you. Or maybe for you it’ll be lemon-water. Or homemade ginger ale.
Whatever it is… make it fun, and make it yours!
Bonus item: find replacement coping strategies
This one goes if you’ve been using alcohol to cope with something. Stress, depression, anxiety, whatever it may be for you.
The thing is, it feels like it helps briefly in the moment, but it makes each of those things progressively worse in the long-run, so it’s not sustainable.
Consider instead things like therapy, exercise, and/or a new hobby to get immersed in; whatever works for you!
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