Understanding Spinach Oxalates and Health

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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small

❝Interesting, but… Did you know spinach is high in oxylates? Some people are sensitive and can cause increased inflammation, joint pain or even kidney stones. Moderation is key. My sister and I like to eat healthy but found out by experience that too much spinach salad caused us joint and other aches.❞

It’s certainly good to be mindful of such things! For most people, a daily serving of spinach shouldn’t cause ill effects, and certainly there are other greens to eat.

We wondered whether there was a way to reduce the oxalate content, and we found:

How to Reduce Oxalic Acid in Spinach: Neutralizing Oxalates

…which led us this product on Amazon:

Nephure Oxalate Reducing Enzyme, Low Oxalate Diet Support

We wondered what “nephure” was, and whether it could be trusted, and came across this “Supplement Police” article about it:

Nephure Review – Oxalate Reducing Enzyme Powder Health Benefits?

…which honestly, seems to have been written as a paid advertisement. But! It did reference a study, which we were able to look up, and find:

In vitro and in vivo safety evaluation of Nephure™

…which seems to indicate that it was safe (for rats) in all the ways that they checked. They did not, however, check whether it actually reduced oxalate content in spinach or any other food.

The authors did declare a conflict of interest, in that they had a financial relationship with the sponsor of the study, Captozyme Inc.

All in all, it may be better to just have kale instead of spinach:

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  • Vodka vs Beer – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing vodka to beer, we picked the vodka.

    Why?

    As you might have guessed, neither are exactly healthy. But one of them is relatively, and we stress relatively, less bad than the other.

    In the category of nutrients, vodka is devoid of nutrients, and beer has small amounts of some vitamins and minerals—but the amounts are so small, that you would need to drink yourself to death before benefiting from them meaningfully. And while beer gets touted as “liquid bread”, it really isn’t. A thousand years ago it will have been a lot less alcoholic and more carby, but even then, it wasn’t a health product aside from that it provided a way of making potentially contaminated water safer to drink.

    In the category of carbohydrates, vodka nominally has none, due to the distillation process, and beer has some. Glycemic index websites often advise that the GI of beers, wines, and spirits can’t be measured as their carb content is not sufficient to get a meaningful sample, but diabetes research tells a more useful story:

    Any alcoholic drink will generally cause a brief drop in blood sugars, followed by a spike. This happens because the liver prioritises metabolizing alcohol over producing glycogen, so it hits pause on the sugar metabolism and then has a backlog to catch up on. In the case of alcoholic drinks that have alcohol and carbs, this will be more pronounced—so this means that the functional glycemic load of beer is higher.

    That’s a point in favor of vodka.

    Additionally, in terms of the alcohol content, correctly-distilled vodka’s alcohol is pure ethanol, while beer will contain an amount of methanol that will vary per beer, but an illustrative nominal figure could be about 16mg/L. Methanol is more harmful than ethanol.

    So that’s another point in favor of vodka.

    Once again, neither drink is healthy; both are distinctly unhealthy. But unit for unit, beer is the least healthy of the two, making vodka the lesser of two evils.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Take care!

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  • Cherries’ Very Healthy Wealth Of Benefits!

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    Cherry’s Health Benefits Simply Pop

    We wrote recently about some of the health benefits of cherries, in our “This or That” challenge, pitting them against strawberries:

    Strawberries vs Cherries – Which is Healthier?

    We said there that we’d do a main feature on cherries sometime soon, so here it is!

    Sweet & Sour

    Cherries can be divided into sweet vs sour. These are mostly nutritionally similar, though sour ones do have some extra benefits.

    Sweet and sour cherries are closely related but botanically different plants; it’s not simply a matter of ripeness (or preparation).

    These can mostly be sorted into varieties of Prunus avium and Prunus cerasus, respectively:

    Cherry Antioxidants: From Farm to Table

    Sour cherry varieties include morello and montmorency, so look out for those names in particular when doing your grocery-shopping.

    You may remember that it’s a good rule of thumb that foods that are more “bitter, astringent, or pungent” will tend to have a higher polyphenol content (that’s good):

    Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain

    Juiced up

    Almost certainly for reasons of budget and convenience, as much as for standardization, most studies into the benefits of cherries have been conducted using concentrated cherry juice as a supplement.

    At home, we need not worry so much about standardization, and our budget and convenience are ours to manage. To this end, as a general rule of thumb, whole fruits are pretty much always better than juice:

    Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?

    Antioxidant & anti-inflammatory!

    Cherries are a very good source of antioxidants, and as such they also reduce inflammation, which in turn means ameliorating autoimmune diseases, from common things like arthritis…

    Efficacy of Tart Cherry Juice to Reduce Inflammation Biomarkers among Women with Inflammatory Osteoarthritis (OA)

    …to less common things like gout:

    Cherry Consumption and the Risk of Recurrent Gout Attacks

    This can also be measured by monitoring uric acid metabolites:

    Consumption of cherries lowers plasma urate in healthy women

    Anti-diabetic effect

    Most of the studies on this have been rat studies, and the human studies have been less “the effect of cherry consumption on diabetes” and more a matter of separate studies adding up to this conclusion in, the manner of “cherries have this substance, this substance has this effect, therefore cherries will have this effect”. You can see an example of this discussed over the course of 15 studies, here:

    A Review of the Health Benefits of Cherries ← skip to section 2.2.1: “Cherry Intake And Diabetes”

    In short, the jury is out on cherry juice, but eating cherries themselves (much like getting plenty of fruit in general) is considered good against diabetes.

    Good for healthy sleep

    For this one, the juice suffices (actual cherries are still recommended, but the juice gave clear significant positive results):

    Pilot Study of the Tart Cherry Juice for the Treatment of Insomnia and Investigation of Mechanisms ← this was specifically in people over the age of 50

    Importantly, it’s not that cherries have a sedative effect, but rather they support the body’s ability to produce melatonin adequately when the time comes:

    Effect of tart cherry juice (Prunus cerasus) on melatonin levels and enhanced sleep quality

    Post-exercise recovery

    Cherries are well-known for boosting post-exercise recovery, though they may actually improve performance during exercise too, if eaten beforehand/

    For example, these marathon-runners who averaged 13% compared to placebo control:

    Effects of powdered Montmorency tart cherry supplementation on acute endurance exercise performance in aerobically trained individuals

    As for its recovery benefits, we wrote about this before:

    How To Speed Up Recovery After A Workout (According To Actual Science)

    Want to get some?

    We recommend your local supermarket (or farmer’s market!), but if for any reason you prefer to take a supplement, here’s an example product on Amazon

    Enjoy!

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  • How worried should I be about cryptosporidiosis? Am I safe at the pool?

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    You might have heard of something called “cryptosporidiosis” recently, closely followed by warnings to stay away from your local swimming pool if you’ve had diarrhoea.

    More than 700 cases of this gastrointestinal disease were reported in Queensland in January, which is 13 times more than in January last year. Just under 500 cases have been recorded in New South Wales this year to-date, while other states have similarly reported an increase in the number of cryptosporidiosis infections in recent months.

    Cryptosporidiosis has been listed as a national notifiable disease in Australia since 2001.
    But what exactly is it, and should we be worried?

    What causes cryptosporidiosis, and who is affected?

    Cryptosporidiosis is the disease caused by the parasite Cryptosporidium, of which there are two types that can make us sick. Cryptosporidum hominis only affects humans and is the major cause of recent outbreaks in Australia, while Cryptosporidium parvum can also affect animals.

    The infection is spread by spores called oocysts in the stools of humans and animals. When ingested, these oocysts migrate and mature in the small bowel. They damage the small bowel lining and can lead to diarrhoea, nausea, vomiting, fever and abdominal discomfort.

    Most people develop symptoms anywhere from one to 12 days after becoming infected. Usually these symptoms resolve within two weeks, but the illness may last longer and can be severe in those with a weakened immune system.

    Children and the elderly tend to be the most commonly affected. Cryptosporidiosis is more prevalent in young children, particularly those under five, but the disease can affect people of any age.

    A 'pool closed' sign in front of a swimming pool.
    A number of public pools have been closed lately due to cryptosporidiosis outbreaks.
    LBeddoe/Shutterstock

    So how do we catch it?

    Most major outbreaks of cryptosporidiosis have been due to people drinking contaminated water. The largest recorded outbreak occurred in Milwaukee in 1993 where 403,000 people were believed to have been infected.

    Cryptosporidium oocysts are very small in size and in Milwaukee they passed through the filtration system of one of the water treatment plants undetected, infecting the city’s water supply. As few as ten oocysts can cause infection, making it possible for contaminated drinking water to affect a very large number of people.

    Four days after infection a person with cryptosporidiosis can shed up to ten billion oocysts into their stool a day, with the shedding persisting for about two weeks. This is why one infected person in a swimming pool can infect the entire pool in a single visit.

    Cryptosporidium oocysts excreted in the faeces of infected humans and animals can also reach natural bodies of water such as beaches, rivers and lakes directly through sewer pipes or indirectly such as in manure transported with surface runoff after heavy rain.

    One study which modelled Cryptosporidium concentrations in rivers around the world estimated there are anywhere from 100 to one million oocysts in a litre of river water.

    In Australia, cryptosporidiosis outbreaks tend to occur during the late spring and early summer periods when there’s an increase in recreational water activities such as swimming in natural water holes, water catchments and public pools. We don’t know exactly why cases have seen such a surge this summer compared to other years, but we know Cryptosporidium is very infectious.

    Oocysts have been found in foods such as fresh vegetables and seafood but these are not common sources of infection in Australia.

    What about chlorine?

    Contrary to popular belief, chlorine doesn’t kill off all infectious microbes in a swimming pool. Cryptosporidium oocysts are hardy, thick-walled and resistant to chlorine and acid. They are not destroyed by chlorine at the normal concentrations found in swimming pools.

    We also know oocysts can be significantly protected from the effects of chlorine in swimming pools by faecal material, so the presence of even small amounts of faecal matter contaminated with Cryptosporidium in a swimming pool would necessitate closure and a thorough decontamination.

    Young children and in particular children in nappies are known to increase the potential for disease transmission in recreational water. Proper nappy changing, frequent bathroom breaks and showering before swimming to remove faecal residue are helpful ways to reduce the risk.

    Two children playing in a body of water.
    Cryptosporidium can spread in other bodies of water, not just swimming pools.
    Yulia Simonova/Shutterstock

    Some sensible precautions

    Other measures you can take to reduce yours and others’ risk of cryptosporidiosis include:

    • avoid swimming in natural waters such as rivers and creeks during and for at least three days after heavy rain
    • avoid swimming in beaches for at least one day after heavy rain
    • avoid drinking untreated water such as water from rivers or springs. If you need to drink untreated water, boiling it first will kill the Cryptosporidium
    • avoid swallowing water when swimming if you can
    • if you’ve had diarrhoea, avoid swimming for at least two weeks after it has resolved
    • avoid sharing towels or linen for at least two weeks after diarrhoea has resolved
    • avoid sharing, touching or preparing food that other people may eat for at least 48 hours after diarrhoea has resolved
    • wash your hands with soap and water after going to the bathroom or before preparing food (Cryptosporidium is not killed by alcohol gels and sanitisers).

    Not all cases of diarrhoea are due to cryptosporidiosis. There are many other causes of infectious gastroenteritis and because the vast majority of the time recovery is uneventful you don’t need to see a doctor unless very unwell. If you do suspect you may have cryptosporidiosis you can ask your doctor to refer you for a stool test.The Conversation

    Vincent Ho, Associate Professor and clinical academic gastroenterologist, Western Sydney University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • The Dark Side Of Memory (And How To Make Your Life Better)

    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.

    How To Stop Revisiting Those Memories

    We’ve talked before about putting the brakes on negative thought spirals (and that’s a really useful technique, so if you weren’t with us yet for that one, we do recommend hopping back and reading it!).

    We’ve also talked about optimizing memory, to include making moments unforgettable.

    But what about the moments we’d rather forget?

    First, a quick note: we have no pressing wish or need to re-traumatize any readers, so if you’ve a pressing reason to think your memories you’d rather forget are beyond the scope of a few hundred words “one quick trick” in a newsletter, feel free to skip this section today.

    One more quick note: it is generally not considered healthy to repress important memories. Some things are best worked through consciously in therapy with a competent professional.

    Today’s technique is more for things in the category of “do you really need to keep remembering that one time you did something embarrassing 20 years ago?”

    That said… sometimes, even when it does come to the management of serious PTSD, therapy can (intentionally, reasonably) throw in the towel on processing all of something big, and instead seek to simply look at minimizing its effect on ongoing life. Again, that’s best undertaken with a well-trained professional, however.

    For more trivial annoyances, meanwhile…

    Two Steps To Forgetting

    The first step:

    You may remember that memories are tied to the senses, and the more senses are involved, the more easily and fully we remember a thing. To remember something, therefore, we make sure to pay full attention to all the sensory experience of the memory, bringing in all 5 senses if possible.

    To forget, the reverse is true. Drain the memory of color, make it black and white, fuzzier, blurrier, smaller, further away, sterile, silent, gone.

    You can make a habit of doing this automatically whenever your unwanted memory resurfaces.

    The second missing step:

    This is the second step, but it’s going to be a missing step. Memories, like paths in a forest, are easier to access the more often we access them. A memory we visit every day will have a well-worn path, easy to follow. A memory we haven’t visited for decades will have an overgrown, sometimes nearly impossible-to-find path.

    To labor the metaphor a little: if your memory has literal steps leading to it, we’re going to remove one of the steps now, to make it very difficult to access accidentally. Don’t worry, you can always put the step back later if you want to.

    Let’s say you want to forget something that happened once upon a time in a certain workplace. Rather than wait for the memory in question to come up, we’re going to apply the first step that we just learned, to the entire workplace.

    So, in this example, you’d make the memory of that workplace drained of color, made black and white, fuzzier, blurrier, smaller, further away, sterile, silent, gone.

    Then, you’d make a habit of doing that whenever that workplace nearly comes to mind.

    The result? You’re unlikely to accidentally access a memory that occurred in that workplace, if even mentally wandering to the workplace itself causes it to shrivel up and disappear like paper in fire.

    Important reminder

    The above psychological technique is to psychological trauma what painkillers are to physical pain. It can ease the symptom, while masking the cause. If it’s something serious, we recommend enlisting the help of a professional, rather than “self-medicating” in this fashion.

    If it’s just a small annoying thing, though, sometimes it’s easier to just be able to refrain from prodding and poking it daily, forget about it, and enjoy life.

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  • What causes food cravings? And what can we do about them?

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    Many of us try to eat more fruits and vegetables and less ultra-processed food. But why is sticking to your goals so hard?

    High-fat, sugar-rich and salty foods are simply so enjoyable to eat. And it’s not just you – we’ve evolved that way. These foods activate the brain’s reward system because in the past they were rare.

    Now, they’re all around us. In wealthy modern societies we are bombarded by advertising which intentionally reminds us about the sight, smell and taste of calorie-dense foods. And in response to these powerful cues, our brains respond just as they’re designed to, triggering an intense urge to eat them.

    Here’s how food cravings work and what you can do if you find yourself hunting for sweet or salty foods.

    Fascinadora/Shutterstock

    What causes cravings?

    A food craving is an intense desire or urge to eat something, often focused on a particular food.

    We are programmed to learn how good a food tastes and smells and where we can find it again, especially if it’s high in fat, sugar or salt.

    Something that reminds us of enjoying a certain food, such as an eye-catching ad or delicious smell, can cause us to crave it.

    Three people holding a cone of french fries.
    Our brains learn to crave foods based on what we’ve enjoyed before. fon thachakul/Shutterstock

    The cue triggers a physical response, increasing saliva production and gastric activity. These responses are relatively automatic and difficult to control.

    What else influences our choices?

    While the effect of cues on our physical response is relatively automatic, what we do next is influenced by complex factors.
    Whether or not you eat the food might depend on things like cost, whether it’s easily available, and if eating it would align with your health goals.

    But it’s usually hard to keep healthy eating in mind. This is because we tend to prioritise a more immediate reward, like the pleasure of eating, over one that’s delayed or abstract – including health goals that will make us feel good in the long term.

    Stress can also make us eat more. When hungry, we choose larger portions, underestimate calories and find eating more rewarding.

    Looking for something salty or sweet

    So what if a cue prompts us to look for a certain food, but it’s not available?

    Previous research suggested you would then look for anything that makes you feel good. So if you saw someone eating a doughnut but there were none around, you might eat chips or even drink alcohol.

    But our new research has confirmed something you probably knew: it’s more specific than that.

    If an ad for chips makes you look for food, it’s likely a slice of cake won’t cut it – you’ll be looking for something salty. Cues in our environment don’t just make us crave food generally, they prompt us to look for certain food “categories”, such as salty, sweet or creamy.

    Food cues and mindless eating

    Your eating history and genetics can also make it harder to suppress food cravings. But don’t beat yourself up – relying on willpower alone is hard for almost everyone.

    Food cues are so powerful they can prompt us to seek out a certain food, even if we’re not overcome by a particularly strong urge to eat it. The effect is more intense if the food is easily available.

    This helps explain why we can eat an entire large bag of chips that’s in front of us, even though our pleasure decreases as we eat. Sometimes we use finishing the packet as the signal to stop eating rather than hunger or desire.

    Is there anything I can do to resist cravings?

    We largely don’t have control over cues in our environment and the cravings they trigger. But there are some ways you can try and control the situations you make food choices in.

    • Acknowledge your craving and think about a healthier way to satisfy it. For example, if you’re craving chips, could you have lightly-salted nuts instead? If you want something sweet, you could try fruit.
    • Avoid shopping when you’re hungry, and make a list beforehand. Making the most of supermarket “click and collect” or delivery options can also help avoid ads and impulse buys in the aisle.
    • At home, have fruit and vegetables easily available – and easy to see. Also have other nutrient dense, fibre-rich and unprocessed foods on hand such as nuts or plain yoghurt. If you can, remove high-fat, sugar-rich and salty foods from your environment.
    • Make sure your goals for eating are SMART. This means they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
    • Be kind to yourself. Don’t beat yourself up if you eat something that doesn’t meet your health goals. Just keep on trying.

    Gabrielle Weidemann, Associate Professor in Psychological Science, Western Sydney University and Justin Mahlberg, Research Fellow, Pyschology, Monash University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Decoding Hormone Balancing in Ads

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    It’s Q&A Time!

    This is the bit whereby each week, we respond to subscriber questions/requests/etc

    Have something you’d like to ask us, or ask us to look into? Hit reply to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom, and a Real Human™ will be glad to read it!

    Q: As to specific health topics, I would love to see someone address all these Instagram ads targeted to women that claim “You only need to ‘balance your hormones’ to lose weight, get ripped, etc.” What does this mean? Which hormones are they all talking about? They all seem to be selling a workout program and/or supplements or something similar, as they are ads, after all. Is there any science behind this stuff or is it mostly hot air, as I suspect?

    Thank you for asking this, as your question prompted yesterday’s main feature, What Does “Balancing Your Hormones” Even Mean?

    That’s a great suggestion also about addressing ads (and goes for health-related things in general, not just hormonal stuff) and examining their claims, what they mean, how they work (if they work!), and what’s “technically true but may be misleading* cause confusion”

    *We don’t want companies to sue us, of course.

    Only, we’re going to need your help for this one, subscribers!

    See, here at 10almonds we practice what we preach. We limit screen time, we focus on our work when working, and simply put, we don’t see as many ads as our thousands of subscribers do. Also, ads tend to be targeted to the individual, and often vary from country to country, so chances are good that we’re not seeing the same ads that you’re seeing.

    So, how about we pull together as a bit of a 10almonds community project?

    • Step 1: add our email address to your contacts list, if you haven’t already
    • Step 2: When you see an ad you’re curious about, select “share” (there is usually an option to share ads, but if not, feel free to screenshot or such)
    • Step 3: Send the ad to us by email

    We’ll do the rest! Whenever we have enough ads to review, we’ll do a special on the topic.

    We will categorically not be able to do this without you, so please do join in—Many thanks in advance!

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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