Unlock Your Air-Fryer’s Potential!
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Unlock Your Air-Fryer’s Potential!
You know what they say:
“you get out of it what you put in”
…and in the case of an air-fryer, that’s very true!
More seriously:
A lot of people buy an air fryer for its health benefits and convenience, make fries a couple of times, and then mostly let it gather dust. But for those who want to unlock its potential, there’s plenty more it can do!
Let’s go over the basics first…
Isn’t it just a tiny convection oven?
Mechanically, yes. But the reason that it can be used to “air-fry” food rather than merely bake or roast the food is because of its tiny size allowing for much more rapid cooking at high temperatures.
On which note… If you’re shopping for an air-fryer:
- First of all, congratulations! You’re going to love it.
- Secondly: bigger is not better. If you go over more than about 4 liters capacity, then you don’t have an air-fryer; you have a convection oven. Which is great and all, but probably not what you wanted.
Are there health benefits beyond using less oil?
It also creates much less acrylamide than deep-frying starchy foods does. The jury is out on the health risks of acrylamide, but we can say with confidence: it’s not exactly a health food.
I tried it, but the food doesn’t cook or just burns!
The usual reason for this is either over-packing the fryer compartment (air needs to be able to circulate!), or not coating the contents in oil. The oil only needs to be a super-thin layer, but it does need to be there, or else again, you’re just baking things.
Two ways to get a super thin layer of oil on your food:
- (works for anything you can air-fry) spray the food with oil. You can buy spray-on oils at the grocery store (Fry-light and similar brands are great), or put oil in little spray bottle (of the kind that you might buy for haircare) yourself.
- (works with anything that can be shaken vigorously without harming it, e.g. root vegetables) chop the food, and put it in a tub (or a pan with a lid) with about a tablespoon of olive oil. Don’t worry if that looks like it’s not nearly enough—it will be! Now’s a great time to add your seasonings* too, by the way. Put the lid on, and holding the lid firmly in place, shake the tub/pan/whatever vigorously. Open it, and you’ll find the oil has now distributed itself into a very thin layer all over the food.
*About those seasonings…
Obviously not everything will go with everything, but some very healthful seasonings to consider adding are:
- Garlic minced/granules/powder (great for the heart and immune health)
- Black pepper (boosts absorption of other nutrients, and provides more benefits of its own than we can list here)
- Turmeric (slows aging and has anti-cancer properties)
- Cinnamon (great for the heart and has anti-inflammatory properties)
Garlic and black pepper can go with almost anything (and in this writer’s house, they usually do!)
Turmeric has a sweet nutty taste, and will add its color anything it touches. So if you want beautiful golden fries, perfect! If you don’t want yellow eggplant, maybe skip it.
Cinnamon is, of course, great as part of breakfast and dessert dishes
On which note, things most people don’t think of air-frying:
- Breakfast frittata—the healthy way!
- Omelets—no more accidental scrambled egg and you don’t have to babysit it! Just take out the tray that things normally sit on, and build it directly onto the (spray-oiled) bottom of the air-fryer pan. If you’re worried it’ll burn: a) it won’t, because the heat is coming from above, not below b) you can always use greaseproof paper or even a small heatproof plate
- French toast—again with no cooking skills required
- Fish cakes—make the patties as normal, spray-oil and lightly bread them
- Cauliflower bites—spray oil or do the pan-jiggle we described; for seasonings, we recommend adding smoked paprika and, if you like heat, your preferred kind of hot pepper! These are delicious, and an amazing healthy snack that feels like junk food.
- Falafel—make the balls as usual, spray-oil (do not jiggle violently; they won’t have the structural integrity for that) and air-fry!
- Calamari (vegan option: onion rings!)—cut the squid (or onions) into rings, and lightly coat in batter and refrigerate for about an hour before air-frying at the highest heat your fryer does. This is critical, because air-fryers don’t like wet things, and if you don’t refrigerate it and then use a high heat, the batter will just drip, and you don’t want that. But with those two tips, it’ll work just great.
Want more ideas?
Check out EatingWell’s 65+ Healthy Air-Fryer Recipes ← the recipes are right there, no need to fight one’s way to them in any fashion!
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Three-Bean Chili & Cashew Cream
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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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Healthy Mind In A Healthy Body
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The 8-minute piece of music “Weightless” by Marconi was created scientifically to lower the heart rate and relax the listener. How did they do it? You can read the British Academy of Sound Therapy’s explanation of the methodology here, but important results of the study were:
- “Weightless” was able to induce greater relaxation levels than a massage (increase of 6%).
- “Weightless” also induced an 11% increase in relaxation over all other relaxing music tracks in the study.
- “Weightless” was also subjectively rated as more relaxing than any other music by all the participants.
Try it for yourself!
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Isn’t that better? Whenever you’re ready, read on…
Today we’re going to share a technique for dealing with difficult emotions. The technique is used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and it’s called RAIN:
- Recognizing: ask yourself “what is it that I’m feeling?”, and put a name to it. It could be anger, despair, fear, frustration, anxiety, overwhelm etc.
- Accepting: “OK, so, I’m feeling ________”. There’s no point in denying it, or being defensive about it, these things won’t help you. For now, just accept it.
- Investigating: “Why am I feeling ________?” Maybe there is an obvious reason, maybe you need to dig for a reason—or dig deeper for the real reason. Most bad feelings are driven by some sort of fear or insecurity, so that can be a good avenue for examination. Important: your feelings may be rational or irrational. That’s fine. This is a time for investigating, not judging.
- Non-Identification: not making whatever it is you’re feeling into a part of you. Once you get too attached to “I am jealous”, “I am angry”, “I am sad” etc, it can be difficult to manage something that has become a part of your personality; you’ll defend your jealousy, anger, sadness etc rather than tackle it.
As a CBT tool, this is something you can do for yourself at any time. It won’t magically solve your problems, but it can stop you from spiralling into a state of crisis, and get you back on a more useful track.
As a DBT tool, to give this its full strength, ideally now you will communicate what you’re feeling, to somebody you trust, perhaps a partner or friend, for instance.
Humans are fundamentally social creatures, and we achieve our greatest strengths when we support each other—and that also means sometimes seeking and accepting support!
Do you have a good technique you’d like to share? Reply to this email and let us know!
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Gut Health and Anxiety
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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
❝I’d like to read articles on gut health and anxiety❞
We hope you caught yesterday’s edition of 10almonds, which touched on both of those! Other past editions you might like include:
We’ll be sure to include more going forward, too!
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Lacking Motivation? Science Has The Answer
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The Science Of Motivation (And How To Use It To Your Advantage)
When we do something rewarding, our brain gets a little (or big!) spike of dopamine. Dopamine is popularly associated with pleasure—which is fair— but there’s more to it than this.
Dopamine is also responsible for motivation itself, as a prime mover before we do the thing that we find rewarding. If we eat a banana, and enjoy it, perhaps because our body needed the nutrients from it, our brain gets a hit of dopamine.
(and not because bananas contain dopamine; that dopamine is useful for the body, but can’t pass the blood-brain barrier to have an effect on the brain)
So where does the dopamine in our brain come from? That dopamine is made in the brain itself.
Key Important Fact: the brain produces dopamine when it expects an activity to be rewarding.
If you take nothing else away from today’s newsletter, let it be this!
It makes no difference if the activity is then not rewarding. And, it will keep on motivating you to do something it anticipated being rewarding, no matter how many times the activity disappoints, because it’ll remember the very dopamine that it created, as having been the reward.
To put this into an example:
- How often have you spent time aimlessly scrolling social media, flitting between the same three apps, or sifting through TV channels when “there’s nothing good on to watch”?
- And how often did you think afterwards “that was a good and rewarding use of my time; I’m glad I did that”?
In reality, whatever you felt like you were in search of, you were really in search of dopamine. And you didn’t find it, but your brain did make some, just enough to keep you going.
Don’t try to “dopamine detox”, though.
While taking a break from social media / doomscrolling the news / mindless TV-watching can be a great and healthful idea, you can’t actually “detox” from a substance your body makes inside itself.
Which is fortunate, because if you could, you’d die, horribly and miserably.
If you could “detox” completely from dopamine, you’d lose all motivation, and also other things that dopamine is responsible for, including motor control, language faculties, and critical task analysis (i.e. planning).
This doesn’t just mean that you’d not be able to plan a wedding; it also means:
- you wouldn’t be able to plan how to get a drink of water
- you wouldn’t have any motivation to get water even if you were literally dying of thirst
- you wouldn’t have the motor control to be able to physically drink it anyway
Read: Dopamine and Reward: The Anhedonia Hypothesis 30 years on
(this article is deep and covers a lot of ground, but is a fascinating read if you have time)
Note: if you’re wondering why that article mentions schizophrenia so much, it’s because schizophrenia is in large part a disease of having too much dopamine.
Consequently, antipsychotic drugs (and similar) used in the treatment of schizophrenia are generally dopamine antagonists, and scientists have been working on how to treat schizophrenia without also crippling the patient’s ability to function.
Do be clever about how you get your dopamine fix
Since we are hardwired to crave dopamine, and the only way to outright quash that craving is by inducing anhedonic depression, we have to leverage what we can’t change.
The trick is: question how much your motivation aligns with your goals (or doesn’t).
So if you feel like checking Facebook for the eleventieth time today, ask yourself: “am I really looking for new exciting events that surely happened in the past 60 seconds since I last checked, or am I just looking for dopamine?”
You might then realize: “Hmm, I’m actually just looking for dopamine, and I’m not going to find it there”
Then, pick something else to do that will actually be more rewarding. It helps if you make a sort of dopa-menu in advance, of things to pick from. You can keep this as a list on your phone, or printed and pinned up near your computer.
Examples might be: Working on that passion project of yours, or engaging in your preferred hobby. Or spending quality time with a loved one. Or doing housework (surprisingly not something we’re commonly motivated-by-default to do, but actually is rewarding when done). Or exercising (same deal). Or learning that language on Duolingo (all those bells and whistles the app has are very much intentional dopamine-triggers to make it addictive, but it’s not a terrible outcome to be addicted to learning!).
Basically… Let your brain’s tendency to get led astray work in your favor, by putting things in front of it that will lead you in good directions.
Things for your health and/or education are almost always great things to allow yourself the “ooh, shiny” reaction and pick them up, try something new, etc.
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NADᐩ Against Aging
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Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or “NAD” to its friends, is a coenzyme produced in the human body (amongst other places), and it is critical for cellular energy metabolism, but there’s more to it than that.
Today we’ll be looking mostly at NAD+, of which the + indicates the positive formal charge of one of its nitrogen atoms. We won’t get too much into the chemistry of this, but we will mention that it’s a cofactor with NADH—the former accepting electrons and the latter donating electrons.
Both NAD+ and NADH are critical to good health, but we’re going to focus on NAD+ for the simple reason that it gets depleted with aging.
Note: it gets depleted with aging.
Chronological age is not so important here, but there is a direct relationship between biological aging and NAD+ depletion.
For example, healthy centenarians tend not to have depleted NAD+ levels. Further, its depletion (in those in whom it is depleted) is then a causal factor for many age-related diseases:
❝Remarkably, ageing is accompanied by a gradual decline in tissue and cellular NAD+ levels in multiple model organisms, including rodents and humans.
This decline in NAD+ levels is linked causally to numerous ageing-associated diseases, including cognitive decline, cancer, metabolic disease, sarcopenia and frailty.
Many of these ageing-associated diseases can be slowed down and even reversed by restoring NAD+ levels.❞
~ Dr. Rosalba Perrone et al.
Read in full: NAD+ metabolism and its roles in cellular processes during ageing
As for restoring those NADᐩ levels, that does help in interventional trials, whether by supplementing directly, or with NAD precursors*:
❝NAD+ levels steadily decline with age, resulting in altered metabolism and increased disease susceptibility.
Restoration of NAD+ levels in old or diseased animals can promote health and extend lifespan, prompting a search for safe and efficacious NAD-boosting molecules that hold the promise of increasing the body’s resilience, not just to one disease, but to many, thereby extending healthy human lifespan.❞
~ Dr. David Sinclair et al.
Read more: Therapeutic Potential of NAD-Boosting Molecules: The In Vivo Evidence
*There are actually also other NAD-boosting molecules besides NAD itself and its precursors. For example, the liver will not produce NADᐩ unless it has aminocarboxymuconate-semialdehyde decarboxylase (or “ACMSD”, to its friends), which limits the production of NADᐩ. Why, you ask? The theory is that it is a kind of evolutionary conservativism, much like not lighting a fire without the ability to put it out. In any case, taking ACMSD-blockers will thus result in an increased endogenous production of NADᐩ.
You can read about this here:
De novo NAD+ synthesis enhances mitochondrial function and improves health
Nor is taking supplements or drugs the only way to get more of it; there’s an enzyme nicotinamide phosphoribosyltransferase (“NAMPT”, to its friends) involved in the synthesis of NADᐩ, and exercise boosts levels by 127% (i.e., it more than doubles the levels), based on a modest three-week exercise bike regimen:
Skeletal muscle NAMPT is induced by exercise in humans
And to underline that point, another study found that resistance training (so, a different kind of exercise from that of the previous study) boosts levels of NADᐩ itself by the same 127%:
One way to get more out of NADᐩ
We’ll get straight to the point: it works very well paired with a senolytic agent, i.e. something that kills aging cells so that they get recycled sooner:
NAD+, Senolytics, or Pyruvate for Healthy Aging?
To read more about senolytics, check out:
Fisetin: The Anti-Aging Assassin
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
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Green Tea Allergies and Capsules
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.
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
❝Hey Sheila – As always, your articles are superb !! So, I have a topic that I’d love you guys to discuss: green tea. I used to try + drink it years ago but I always got an allergic reaction to it. So the question I’d like answered is: Will I still get the same allergic reaction if I take the capsules ? Also, because it’s caffeinated, will taking it interfere with iron pills, other vitamins + meds ? I read that the health benefits of the decaffeinated tea/capsules are not as great as the caffeinated. Any info would be greatly appreciated !! Thanks much !!❞
Hi! I’m not Sheila, but I’ll answer this one in the first person as I’ve had a similar issue:
I found long ago that taking any kind of tea (not herbal infusions, but true teas, e.g. green tea, black tea, red tea, etc) on an empty stomach made me want to throw up. The feeling would subside within about half an hour, but I learned it was far better to circumvent it by just not taking tea on an empty stomach.
However! I take an l-theanine supplement when I wake up, to complement my morning coffee, and have never had a problem with that. Of course, my physiology is not your physiology, and this “shouldn’t” be happening to either of us in the first place, so it’s not something there’s a lot of scientific literature about, and we just have to figure out what works for us.
This last Monday I wrote (inspired in part by your query) about l-theanine supplementation, and how it doesn’t require caffeine to unlock its benefits after all, by the way. So that’s that part in order.
I can’t speak for interactions with your other supplements or medications without knowing what they are, but I’m not aware of any known issue, beyond that l-theanine will tend to give a gentler curve to the expression of some neurotransmitters. So, if for example you’re talking anything that affects that (e.g. antidepressants, antipsychotics, ADHD meds, sleepy/wakefulness meds, etc) then checking with your doctor is best.
Don’t Forget…
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