10almonds Tells The Tea…
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Let’s Bust Some Myths!
It’s too late after puberty, hormones won’t change xyz
While yes, many adult trans people dearly wish they’d been able to medically transition before going through the “wrong” puberty, the truth is that a lot of changes will still occur later… even to “unchangeable” things like the skeleton.
The body is remaking itself throughout life, and hormones tell it how to do that. Some parts are just quicker or slower than others. Also: the skeleton is pulled-on constantly by our muscles, and in a battle of muscle vs bone, muscle will always win over time.
Examples of this include:
- trans men building bigger bones to support their bigger muscles
- trans women getting smaller, with wider hips and a pelvic tilt
Trans people have sporting advantages
Assuming at least a year’s cross-sex hormonal treatment, there is no useful advantage to being trans when engaging in a sport. There are small advantages and disadvantages (which goes for any person’s body, really). For example:
- Trans women will tend to be taller than cis women on average…
- …but that larger frame is now being powered by smaller muscles, because they shrink much quicker than the skeleton.
- Trans men taking T are the only athletes allowed to take testosterone…
- …but they will still often be smaller than their fellow male competitors, for example.
Read: Do Trans Women Athletes Have Advantages? (A rather balanced expert overview, which does also cover trans men)
There’s a trans population explosion; it’s a social contagion epidemic!
Source for figures: The Overall Rate Of Left-Handedness (Researchgate)
Left-handed people used to make up around 3% of the population… Until the 1920s, when that figure jumped sharply upwards, before plateauing at around 12% in around 1960, where it’s stayed since. What happened?! Simple, schools stopped forcing children to use their right hand.
Today, people ask for trans healthcare because they know it exists! Decades ago, it wasn’t such common knowledge.
The same explanation can be applied to other “population explosions” such as for autism and ADHD.
Fun fact: Mt. Everest was “discovered” in 1852, but scientists suspect it probably existed long before then! People whose ancestors were living on it long before 1852 also agree. Sometimes something exists for a long time, and only comes to wider public awareness later.
Transgender healthcare is too readily available, especially to children!
To believe some press outlets, you’d think:
- HRT is available from school vending machines,
- kids can get a walk-in top surgery at recess,
- and there’s an after-school sterilization club.
In reality, while availability varies from place to place, trans healthcare is heavily gatekept. Even adults have trouble getting it, often having to wait years and/or pay large sums of money… and get permission from a flock of doctors, psychologists, and the like. For those under the age of 18, it’s almost impossible in many places, even with parental support.
Puberty-blockers shouldn’t be given to teenagers, as the effects are irreversible
Quick question: who do you think should be given puberty-blockers? For whom do you think they were developed? Not adults, for sure! They were not developed for trans teens either, but for cis pre-teens with precocious puberty, to keep puberty at bay, to do it correctly later. Nobody argues they’re unsafe for much younger cis children, and only object when it’s trans teens.
They’re not only safe and reversible, but also self-reversing. Stop taking them, and the normally scheduled puberty promptly ensues by itself. For trans kids, the desired effect is to buy the kid time to make an informed and well-considered decision. After all, the effects of the wrong puberty are really difficult to undo!
A lot of people rush medical transition and regret it!
Trans people wish it could be rushed! It’s a lot harder to get gender-affirming care as a trans person, than it is to get the same (or comparable) care as a cis person. Yes, cis people get gender-affirming care, from hormones to surgeries, and have done for a long time.
As for regret… Medical transition has around a 1% regret rate. For comparison, hip replacement has a 4.8% regret rate and knee replacement has a 17.1% regret rate.
A medical procedure with a 99% success rate would generally be considered a miracle cure!
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Keeping Your Kidneys Healthy (Especially After 60)
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Keeping your kidneys happy: it’s more than just hydration!
Your kidneys are very busy organs. They filter waste products, balance hydration, pH, salt, and potassium. They also make some of our hormones, and are responsible for regulating red blood cell production too. They also handle vitamin D in a way our bodies would not work without, making them essential for calcium absorption and the health of our bones, and even muscular function.
So, how to keep them in good working order?
Yes, hydrate
This is obvious and may go without saying, but we try to not leave important things without saying. So yes, get plenty of water, spread out over the day (you can only usefully absorb so much at once!). If you feel thirsty, you’re probably already dehydrated, so have a little (hydrating!) drink.
Don’t smoke
It’s bad for everything, including your kidneys.
Look after your blood
Not just “try to keep it inside your body”, but also:
- Keep your blood sugar levels healthy (hyperglycemia can cause kidney damage)
- Keep your blood pressure healthy (hypertension can cause kidney damage)
Basically, your kidneys’ primary job of filtering blood will go much more smoothly if that blood is less problematic on the way in.
Watch your over-the-counter pill intake
A lot of PRN OTC NSAIDs (PRN = pro re nata, i.e. you take them as and when symptoms arise) (NSAIDs = Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs, such as ibuprofen for example) can cause kidney damage if taken regularly.
Many people take ibuprofen (for example) constantly for chronic pain, especially the kind cause by chronic inflammation, including many autoimmune diseases.
It is recommended to not take them for more than 10 days, nor more than 8 per day. Taking more than that, or taking them for longer, could damage your kidneys temporarily or permanently.
Read more: National Kidney Foundation: Advice About Pain Medicines
See also: Which Drugs Are Harmful To Your Kidneys?
Get a regular kidney function checkup if you’re in a high risk group
Who’s in a high risk group?
- If you’re over 60
- If you have diabetes
- If you have cardiovascular disease
- If you have high blood pressure
- If you believe, or know, you have existing kidney damage
The tests are very noninvasive, and will be a urine and/or blood test.
For more information, see:
Kidney Testing: Everything You Need to Know
Take care!
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Calm Your Mind with Food – by Dr. Uma Naidoo
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From the author of This Is Your Brain On Food, the psychiatrist-chef (literally, she is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and an award-winning chef) is back with a more specific work, this time aimed squarely at what it says in the title; how to calm your mind with food.
You may be wondering: does this mean comfort-eating? And, well, not in the sense that term’s usually used. There will be eating and comfort will occur, but the process involves an abundance of nutrients, a minimization of health-deleterious ingredients, and a “for every chemical its task” approach. In other words, very much “nutraceuticals”, as our diet.
On which note: as we’ve come to expect from Dr. Naidoo, we see a lot of hard science presented simply and clearly, with neither undue sensationalization nor unnecessary jargon. We learn about the brain, the gut, relevant biology and chemistry, and build up from understanding ingredients to dietary patterns to having a whole meal plan, complete with recipes.
You may further be wondering: how much does it add that we couldn’t get from the previous book? And the answer is, not necessarily a huge amount, especially if you’re fairly comfortable taking ideas and creating your own path forwards using them. If, on the other hand, you’re a little anxious about doing that (as someone perusing this book may well be), then Dr. Naidoo will cheerfully lead you by the hand through what you need to know and do.
Bottom line: if not being compared to her previous book, this is a great standalone book with a lot of very valuable content. However, the previous book is a tough act to follow! So… All in all we’d recommend this more to people who want to indeed “calm your mind with food”, who haven’t read the other book, as this one will be more specialized for you.
Click here to check out Calm Your Mind With Food, and do just that!
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Make Your Negativity Work For You
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What’s The Right Balance?
We’ve written before about positivity the pitfalls and perils of toxic positivity:
How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)
…as well as the benefits that can be found from selectively opting out of complaining:
A Bone To Pick… Up And Then Put Back Where We Found It
So… What place, if any, does negativity usefully have in our lives?
Carrot and Stick
We tend to think of “carrot and stick” motivation being extrinsic, i.e. there is some authority figure offering is reward and/or punishment, in response to our reactions.
In those cases when it really is extrinsic, the “stick” can still work for most people, by the way! At least in the short term.
Because in the long term, people are more likely to rebel against a “stick” that they consider unjust, and/or enter a state of learned helplessness, per “I’ll never be good enough to satisfy this person” and give up trying to please them.
But what about when you have your own carrot and stick? What about when it comes to, for example, your own management of your own healthy practices?
Here it becomes a little different—and more effective. We’ll get to that, but first, bear with us for a touch more about extrinsic motivation, because here be science:
We will generally be swayed more easily by negative feelings than positive ones.
For example, a study was conducted as part of a blood donation drive, and:
- Group A was told that their donation could save a life
- Group B was told that their donation could prevent a death
The negative wording given to group B boosted donations severalfold:
Read the paper: Life or Death Decisions: Framing the Call for Help
We have, by the way, noticed a similar trend—when it comes to subject lines in our newsletters. We continually change things up to see if trends change (and also to avoid becoming boring), but as a rule, the response we get from subscribers is typically greater when a subject line is phrased negatively, e.g. “how to avoid this bad thing” rather than “how to have this good thing”.
How we can all apply this as individuals?
When we want to make a health change (or keep up a healthy practice we already have)…
- it’s good to note the benefits of that change/practice!
- it’s even better to note the negative consequences of not doing it
For example, if you want to overcome an addiction, you will do better for your self-reminders to be about the bad consequences of using, more than the good consequences of abstinence.
See also: How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol
This goes even just for things like diet and exercise! Things like diet and exercise can seem much more low-stakes than substance abuse, but at the end of the day, they can add healthy years onto our lives, or take them off.
Because of this, it’s good to take time to remember, when you don’t feel like exercising or do feel like ordering that triple cheeseburger with fries, the bad outcomes that you are planning to avoid with good diet and exercise.
Imagine yourself going in for that quadruple bypass surgery, asking yourself whether the unhealthy lifestyle was worth it. Double down on the emotions; imagine your loved ones grieving your premature death.
Oof, that was hard-hitting
It was, but it’s effective—if you choose to do it. We’re not the boss of you! Either way, we’ll continue to send the same good health advice and tips and research and whatnot every day, with the same (usually!) cheery tone.
One last thing…
While it’s good to note the negative, in order to avoid the things that lead to it, it’s not so good to dwell on the negative.
So if you get caught in negative thought spirals or the like, it’s still good to get yourself out of those.
If you need a little help with that sometimes, check out these:
Take care!
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Dealing With Hearing Loss
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.
Hearing is important, not only for convenience, but also for cognitive health—as an inability to participate in what for most people is an important part of social life, has been shown to accelerate cognitive decline:
14 Powerful Strategies To Prevent Dementia ← one of them is looking after your hearing
To this end, we’ve written before about ways to retain (or at least slow the loss of) your hearing, here:
But, what if, despite our best efforts, your hearing is declining regardless, or is already impaired in some way?
Working with the hand we’ve been dealt
So, your hearing is bad and/or deteriorating. Assuming you’ve ruled out possibilities of fixing it, the next step is how to manage this new state of affairs.
One thing to seriously consider, sooner than you think you need to, is using hearing aids. This is because they will not only help you in the obvious practical way, but also, they will slow the associated decline of the parts of your brain that process the language you hear:
ACHIEVE study finds hearing aids cut cognitive decline by 48%
…and here’s the paper itself:
Furthermore, hearing aid use can significantly reduce all-cause mortality:
Your ears are not the only organs
Remember, today’s about dealing with hearing loss, not preventing it (for preventing it, see the second link we dropped up top).
With this in mind: do not underestimate the usefulness of learning to lipread.
Lipreading is not a panacea; it has its limitations:
- You can’t lipread an audio-only phonecall, or a podcast, or the radio
- You can’t lipread a video call if the video quality is poor
- You can’t lipread if someone is wearing a mask (as in many healthcare settings)
- You can’t lipread multiple people at once; you have to choose whose mouth to watch (or at least, you will miss the first word(s) each time while switching)
- You can’t lipread during sex if your/their face is somewhere else (may seem like a silly example, but actually communication can be important in sex, and the number of times this writer has had to say “Say again?” in intimate moments is ridiculous)
However, it can also make a huge difference the rest of the time, and can even be a superpower in times/places when other people’s hearing is nullified, such as a noisy environment, or a video call in which someone’s mic isn’t working.
The good news is, it’s really very easy to learn to lipread. There are many valid ways (often involving consciously memorizing mouth-shapes from charts, and then putting them together one by one to build a vocabulary), but this writer recommends a more organic, less effort-intensive approach:
- Choose a video of someone who speaks clearly, and for which video you already know what is being said (such as by using subtitles first, or a transcript, or perhaps the person is delivering a famous speech or reciting a poem that you know well, or it’s your favorite movie that you’ve watched many times).
- Now watch it with the sound off (assuming you do normally have some hearing; if you don’t, then you’re probably ahead of the game here) and just pay close attention to the lips. Do this on repeat; soon you’ll be able to “hear” the sounds as you see them made.
- Now choose a video of someone who speaks clearly, for which video you do not already know what is being said. You’ll probably only get parts of it at first; that’s ok.
- Now learn the rest of what they said in that video (by reading a transcript or such), and use it like you used the first video.
- Now repeat steps 3 and 4 until you are lipreading most people easily unless there is some clear obfuscation preventing you.
This process should not take long, as there are only about 44 phonemes (distinct sounds) in English, and once you’ve learned them, you’re set. If you speak more languages, those same 44 phonemes should cover most of most of them, but if not, just repeat the above process with the next language.
Remember, if you have at least some hearing, then most of the time your lipreading and your hearing are going to be working together, and neither will be as strong without the other—but if necessary, well-practised lipreading can indeed often stand in for hearing when hearing isn’t available.
A note on sign language:
Sign language is great, and cool, and useful. However, it’s only as useful as the people who know it, which means that it’s top-tier in the Deaf community (where people will dodge hearing-related cognitive decline entirely, because their social interaction is predominantly signed rather than spoken), and can be useful with close friends or family members who learn it (or at least learn some), but isn’t as useful in most of the wider world when people don’t know it. But if you do want to learn it, don’t let that hold you back—be the change you want to see!
Most of our readers are American, so here’s a good starting place for American Sign Language ← this is a list of mostly-free resources
Enjoy!
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Top 8 Habits Of The Top 1% Healthiest Over-50s
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Will Harlow, over-50s specialist physio, compiled some stats from over a thousand over-50s clients:
Checklist
The findings:
- Consistency: the healthiest individuals practised some kind(s) of health habit daily. Consistency was emphasized as more important than perfection.
- Resistance training: 75% of the sample engaged in resistance training for better mobility, strength, and mental health. Not all used gyms; some used household objects like bags of books or resistance bands.
- Walking: everyone walked at least 6,000 steps per day, often briskly. Walking speed, not just step count, made a significant difference
- Purpose: most participants (bearing in mind that 80% of the total sample were retired) engaged in purposeful activities like volunteering, joining groups, or writing. Having a sense of purpose correlated with longer and healthier lives.
- Flexible dieting: participants paid attention to their eating without strictly following specific diets. Portion size discipline and consistency (eating well 90% of the time) were key.
- Mobility: they worked on joint stiffness with regular mobility and stretching routines. And, importantly, they do not accept stiffness as inevitable.
- Social engagement: they maintained at-least-weekly social contact (e.g. clubs, family meetups, outings). Social isolation, in contrast, was linked to severe health risks like dementia and early death.
- Positivity: participants maintained a positive attitude despite hardships, focussing on the things they could control. Broader scientific consensus supports the premise that a positive outlook improves health and longevity.
10almonds note: we’re curious as to how causality was established in some of these, since (for example) it could easily be that someone who is in better health will more readily walk more quickly, meaning that a higher walking speed was not necessarily such a causative factor in good health, but rather a result thereof. Of course, there may also be a degree of two-way causality, but still, we like good science and there seem to be some leaps of logic here that have otherwise gone unacknowledged.
This does not take away from the fact that those eight things are most certainly good things to be doing for one’s health, all the same.
For more on each of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Take care!
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Ras El-Hanout
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This is a spice blend, and its name (رأس الحانوت) means “head of the shop”. It’s popular throughout Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, but can often be found elsewhere. The exact blend will vary a little from place to place and even from maker to maker, but the general idea is the same. The one we provide here today is very representative (and for an example of its use, see our Marrakesh Sorghum Salad recipe!).
Note: we’re giving all the quantities in whole tsp today, to make multiplying/dividing easier if you want to make more/less ras el-hanout.
You will need
- 6 tsp ground ginger
- 6 tsp ground coriander seeds
- 4 tsp ground turmeric
- 4 tsp ground sweet cinnamon
- 4 tsp ground cumin
- 2 tsp ground allspice ← not a spice mix! This is the name of a spice!
- 2 tsp ground cardamom
- 2 tsp ground anise
- 2 tsp ground black pepper
- 1 tsp ground cayenne pepper
- 1 tsp ground cloves
Note: you may notice that garlic and salt are conspicuous by their absence. The reason for this is that they are usually added separately per dish, if desired.
Method
1) Mix them thoroughly
That’s it! 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?
- A Tale Of Two Cinnamons ← this is important, to understand why it’s critical to use sweet cinnamon specifically
- Sweet Cinnamon vs Regular Cinnamon – Which is Healthier? ← not even exaggerating; one is health-giving and the other contains a compound that is toxic at 01.mg/kg; guess which one is easier to find in the US and Canada?
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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