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 take a vitamin supplement for strengthening my nails (particularly one of my big toes!) – but they are running out! What do you recommend for strengthening nails? What is/are the key ingredient(s)?❞

Vitamin-wise, biotin (vitamin B7) is an underrated and very important one. As a bonus, it’s really good for your hair too (hair and nails being made of fundamentally the same “stuff”. Because it has exceptionally low toxicity, it can be taken up to 10,000% of the NRV, so if shopping for supplements, a high biotin content is better than a low one.

A lot of products marketed as for “skin, hair, and nails” focus on vitamins A and E, which are good for the skin but aren’t so relevant for nails.

Nutritionally, getting plenty of protein (whatever form you normally take it is fine) is also important since keratin (as nails are made of) is a kind of protein.

Outside of nutritional factors, a few other considerations:

• Testosterone strengthens nails, and declining testosterone levels (as experienced by most men over the age of 45) can result in weaker nails. So for men over 45 especially, a diet that favors testosterone (think foods rich in magnesium and zinc) is good.
• Because estrogen doesn’t do for women’s nails what testosterone does for men’s nails, increasing our magnesium and zinc intake won’t help our nails (but it’s still good for other things, including energy levels in the day and good sleep at night, and most people are deficient in magnesium anyway)
• Those of us who enjoy painted nails would do well to let our nails go without polish sometimes, as it can dry them out. And, acrylic nails are truly ruinous to nail health, as are gel nails (the kind that use a UV lamp to harden them—which is also bad for the skin)
• When nails are brittle, it can be tempting to soak them to reduce their brittleness. However, this is actually counterproductive, as the water will leech nutrients from the nails, and by the time you’ve been out of the footbath (for example) for about an hour, your nails will bemore brittle than before you soaked them.
  • Use a moisturizing lotion or nail-oil instead—bonus if it contains biotin, keratin, and/or other helpful nutrients.
  • Keep yourself hydrated, too! Hydration that comes to your nails from the inside will deliver nutrients, rather than removing them.

About those supplements: we don’t sell them (or anything else) but for your convenience, here are some great ones (this writer takes pretty much the same, just a different brand because I’m in a different country):

Magnesium Gummies (600mg) & Biotin Gummies (10,000µg)

Enjoy!

❝I was wondering whether there were very simple, clear bullet points or instructions on things to be wary of in Yoga.❞

That’s quite a large topic, and not one that lends itself well to being conveyed in bullet points, but first we’ll share the article you sent us when sending this question:

Tips for Avoiding Yoga Injuries

…and next we’ll recommend the YouTube channel @livinleggings, whose videos we feature here from time to time. She (Liv) has a lot of good videos on problems/mistakes/injuries to avoid.

Here’s a great one to get you started:

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 watched a documentary recently on Fluoride in our drinking water & the dangers of it. Why are we poisoning our water?❞

This is a great question, and it certainly is controversial. It sounds like the documentary you watched was predominantly or entirely negative, but there’s a lot of science to back both sides of this, and it’s not even that the science is contradictory (it’s not). It’s that what differs is people’s opinions about whether benefiting one thing is worth creating a risk to another, and that means looking at:

• What is the risk associated with taking no action (error of omission)?
• What is the risk associated with taking an action (error of commission)?

The whole topic is worth a main feature, but to summarize a few key points:

• Water fluoridation is considered good for the prevention of dental cavities
• Water fluoridation aims to deliver fluoride and doses far below dangerous levels
  • This requires working on consumer averages, though
• ”Where do we put the safety margins?” is to some extent a subjective question, in terms of trading off one aspect of health for another
• Too much fluoride can also be bad for the teeth (at least cosmetically, creating little white* spots)
• Detractors of fluoride tend to mostly be worried about neurological harm
  • However, the doses in public water supplies are almost certainly far below the levels required to cause this harm.
    • That said, again this is working on consumer averages, though.
• A good guide is: watch your teeth! Those white* spots will be “the canary in the coal mine” of more serious harm that could potentially come from higher levels due to overconsumption of fluorine.

*Teeth are not supposed to be pure white. The “Hollywood smile” is a lie. Teeth are supposed to be a slightly off-white, ivory color. Anything whiter than that is adding something else that shouldn’t be there, or stripping something off that should be there.

❝How does your diet change clean out your arteries of the bad cholesterol?❞

There’s good news and bad news here, and they can both be delivered with a one-word reply:

Slowly.

Or rather: what’s being cleaned out is mostly not the LDL (bad) cholesterol, but rather, the result of that.

When our diet is bad for cardiovascular health, our arteries get fatty deposits on their walls. Cholesterol gets stuck here too, but that’s not the main physical problem.

Our body’s natural defenses come into action and try to clean it up, but they (for example macrophages, a kind of white blood cell that consumes invaders and then dies, before being recycled by the next part of the system) often get stuck and become part of the buildup (called atheroma), which can lead to atherosclerosis and (if calcium levels are high) hardening of the arteries, which is the worst end of this.

This can then require medical attention, precisely because the body can’t remove it very well—especially if you are still maintaining a heart-unhealthy diet, thus continuing to add to the mess.

However, if it is not too bad yet, yes, a dietary change alone will reverse this process. Without new material being added to the arterial walls, the body’s continual process of rejuvenation will eventually fix it, given time (free from things making it worse) and resources.

In fact, your arteries can be one of the quickest places for your body to make something better or worse, because the blood is the means by which the body moves most things (good or bad) around the body.

All the more reason to take extra care of it, since everything else depends on it!

You might also like our previous main feature:

All Things Heart Health