Eat All You Want (But Wisely)
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Some Surprising Truths About Hunger And Satiety
This is Dr. Barbara Rolls. She’s Professor and Guthrie Chair in Nutritional Sciences, and Director of the Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestive Behavior at Pennsylvania State University, after graduating herself from Oxford and Cambridge (yes, both). Her “awards and honors” take up four A4 pages, so we won’t list them all here.
Most importantly, she’s an expert on hunger, satiety, and eating behavior in general.
What does she want us to know?
First and foremost: you cannot starve yourself thin, unless you literally starve yourself to death.
What this is about: any weight lost due to malnutrition (“not eating enough” is malnutrition) will always go back on once food becomes available. So unless you die first (not a great health plan), merely restricting good will always result in “yo-yo dieting”.
So, to avoid putting the weight back on and feeling miserable every day along the way… You need to eat as much as you feel you need.
But, there’s a trick here (it’s about making you genuinely feel you need less)!
Your body is an instrument—so play it
Your body is the tool you use to accomplish pretty much anything you do. It is, in large part, at your command. Then there are other parts you can’t control directly.
Dr. Rolls advises taking advantage of the fact that much of your body is a mindless machine that will simply follow instructions given.
That includes instructions like “feel hungry” or “feel full”. But how to choose those?
Volume matters
An important part of our satiety signalling is based on a physical sensation of fullness. This, by the way, is why bariatric surgery (making a stomach a small fraction of the size it was before) works. It’s not that people can’t eat more (the stomach is stretchy and can also be filled repeatedly), it’s that they don’t want to eat more because the pressure sensors around the stomach feel full, and signal the hormone leptin to tell the brain we’re full now.
Now consider:
- On the one hand, 20 grapes, fresh and bursting with flavor
- On the other hand, 20 raisins (so, dried grapes), containing the same calories
Which do you think will get the leptin flowing sooner? Of course, the fresh grapes, because of the volume.
So if you’ve ever seen those photos that show two foods side by side with the same number of calories but one is much larger (say, a small slice of pizza or a big salad), it’s not quite the cheap trick that it might have appeared.
Or rather… It is a cheap trick; it’s just a cheap trick that works because your stomach is quite a simple organ.
So, Dr. Rolls’ advice: generally speaking, go for voluminous food. Fruit is great from this, because there’s so much water. Air-popped popcorn also works great. Vegetables, too.
Water matters, but differently than you might think
A well-known trick is to drink water before and with a meal. That’s good, it’s good to be hydrated. However, it can be better. Dr. Rolls did an experiment:
The design:
❝Subjects received 1 of 3 isoenergetic (1128 kJ) preloads 17 min before lunch on 3 d and no preload on 1 d.
The preloads consisted of 1) chicken rice casserole, 2) chicken rice casserole served with a glass of water (356 g), and 3) chicken rice soup.
The soup contained the same ingredients (type and amount) as the casserole that was served with water.❞
The results:
❝Decreasing the energy density of and increasing the volume of the preload by adding water to it significantly increased fullness and reduced hunger and subsequent energy intake at lunch.
The equivalent amount of water served as a beverage with a food did not affect satiety.❞
The conclusion:
❝Consuming foods with a high water content more effectively reduced subsequent energy intake than did drinking water with food.❞
You can read the study in full (it’s a worthwhile read!) here:
Water incorporated into a food but not served with a food decreases energy intake in lean women
Protein matters
With all those fruits and vegetables and water, you may be wondering Dr. Rolls’ stance on proteins. It’s simple: protein is an appetite suppressant.
However, it takes about 20 minutes to signal the brain about that, so having some protein in a starter (if like this writer, you’re the cook of the household, a great option is to enjoy a small portion of nuts while cooking!) gets that clock ticking, to signal satiety sooner.
It may also help in other ways:
Clinical Evidence and Mechanisms of High-Protein Diet-Induced Weight Loss
As for other foods that can suppress appetite, by the way, you might like;
25 Foods That Act As Natural Appetite Suppressants
Variety matters, and in ways other than you might think
A wide variety of foods (especially: a wide variety of plants) in one’s diet is well recognized as a key to a good balanced diet.
However…
A wide variety of dishes at the table, meanwhile, promotes greater consumption of food.
Dr. Rolls did a study on this too, a while ago now (you’ll see how old it is) but the science seems robust:
Variety in a Meal Enhances Food Intake in Man
Notwithstanding the title, it wasnot about a man (that was just how scientists wrote in ye ancient times of 1981). The test subjects were, in order: rats, cats, a mixed group of men and women, the same group again, and then a different group of all women.
So, Dr. Rolls’ advice is: it’s better to have one 20-ingredient dish, than 10 dishes with 20 ingredients between them.
Sorry! We love tapas and buffets too, but that’s the science!
So, “one-pot” meals are king in this regard; even if you serve it with one side (reasonable), that’s still only two dishes, which is pretty good going.
Note that the most delicious many-ingredient stir-fries and similar dishes from around the world also fall into this category!
Want to know more?
If you have the time (it’s an hour), you can enjoy a class of hers for free:
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later
Enjoy!
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Get Rid Of Female Facial Hair Easily
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Dr. Sam Ellis, dermatologist, explains:
Hair today; gone tomorrow
While a little peach fuzz is pretty ubiquitous, coarser hairs are less common in women especially earlier in life. However, even before menopause, such hair can be caused by main things, ranging from PCOS to genetics and more. In most cases, the underlying issue is excess androgen production, for one reason or another (i.e. there are many possible reasons, beyond the scope of this article).
Options for dealing with this include…
- Topical, such as eflornithine (e.g. Vaniqa) thins terminal hairs (those are the coarse kind); a course of 6–8 weeks continued use is needed.
- Hormonal, such as estrogen (opposes testosterone and suppresses it), progesterone (downregulates 5α-reductase, which means less serum testosterone is converted to the more powerful dihydrogen testosterone (DHT) form), and spironolactone or other testosterone-blockers; not hormones themselves, but they do what it says on the tin (block testosterone).
- Non-medical, such as electrolysis, laser, and IPL. Electrolysis works on all hair colors but takes longer; laser needs to be darker hair against paler skin* (because it works by superheating the pigment of the hair while not doing the same to the skin) but takes more treatments, and IPL is a less-effective more-convenient at-home option, that works on the same principles as laser (and so has the same color-based requirements), and simply takes even longer than laser.
*so for example:
- Black hair on white skin? Yes
- Red hair on white skin? Potentially; it depends on the level of pigmentation. But it’s probably not the best option.
- Gray/blonde hair on white skin? No
- Black hair on mid-tone skin? Yes, but a slower pace may be needed for safety
- Anything else on mid-tone skin? No
- Anything on dark skin? No
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Too Much Or Too Little Testosterone?
Take care!
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Healthy Cook’s Anti-Inflammatory Diet & Cookbook – by Dr. Albert Orbinati
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Chronic inflammation is a root cause of very many illnesses, and exacerbates almost all the ones it doesn’t cause. So, reducing inflammation is a very good way to stay well in general, reducing one’s risk factors for very many other diseases.
Dr. Orbinati starts by giving advice for adjusting to an anti-inflammatory diet, including advice on trying an elimination diet, if you suspect an undiagnosed allergy/intolerance.
Thereafter, he gives guidance on pantry-stocking—not just what anti-inflammatory foods to include and what inflammatory foods to skip, but also, what food and nutrient pairings are particularly beneficial, like how black pepper and turmeric are both anti-inflammatory by themselves, but the former greatly increases the bioavailability of the latter if consumed together.
The rest of the book—aside from assorted appendices, such as 8 pages of scientific references—is given over to the recipes.
The recipes themselves are, obviously, anti-inflammatory in focus. As one might expect, therefore, most are vegetarian and many are vegan, but we do find many recipes with chicken and fish as well; there’s also some use of eggs and fermented dairy in some of the recipes too.
The book certainly does deliver on its promise of flavorful healthy food; that’s what happens when one includes a lot of herbs and spices in one’s cooking, as well as the fact that many other polyphenol-rich foods are, by nature, tasty in and of themselves.
Bottom line: if you’d like to expand your anti-inflammatory culinary repertoire, this book is a top-tier choice for that.
Click here to check out Healthy Cook’s Anti-Inflammatory Diet & Cookbook, and spice up your kitchen!
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Elderberries vs Cranberries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing elderberries to cranberries, we picked the elderberries.
Why?
In terms of macros, elderberry has slightly more carbs and 2x the fiber, the ratio of which gives elderberries the lower glycemic index also. A win for elderberries, then.
Looking at the vitamins, elderberries have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, B9, and C, while cranberries have more vitamin B5. An easy win for elderberries in this category.
In the category of minerals, we see a similar story: elderberries have more calcium, copper, iron, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while cranberries have (barely) more magnesium. Another clear win for elderberries.
Both of these fruits have additional “special” properties, and it’s worth noting that:
- elderberries’ bonus properties include that they significantly hasten recovery from upper respiratory tract viral infections.
- cranberries’ bonus properties (including: famously very good at reducing UTI risk) come with some warnings, including that they may increase the risk of kidney stones if you are prone to such, and also that cranberries have anti-clotting effects, which are great for heart health but can be a risk of you’re on blood thinners or have a bleeding disorder.
You can read about both of these fruits’ special properties in more detail below:
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Herbs for Evidence-Based Health & Healing ← elderberry is in the list. We haven’t, at time of writing, done a main feature just on elderberry. Maybe soon!
- Health Benefits Of Cranberries (But: You’d Better Watch Out)
Enjoy!
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Could not getting enough sleep increase your risk of type 2 diabetes?
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Not getting enough sleep is a common affliction in the modern age. If you don’t always get as many hours of shut-eye as you’d like, perhaps you were concerned by news of a recent study that found people who sleep less than six hours a night are at higher risk of type 2 diabetes.
So what can we make of these findings? It turns out the relationship between sleep and diabetes is complex.
The study
Researchers analysed data from the UK Biobank, a large biomedical database which serves as a global resource for health and medical research. They looked at information from 247,867 adults, following their health outcomes for more than a decade.
The researchers wanted to understand the associations between sleep duration and type 2 diabetes, and whether a healthy diet reduced the effects of short sleep on diabetes risk.
As part of their involvement in the UK Biobank, participants had been asked roughly how much sleep they get in 24 hours. Seven to eight hours was the average and considered normal sleep. Short sleep duration was broken up into three categories: mild (six hours), moderate (five hours) and extreme (three to four hours). The researchers analysed sleep data alongside information about people’s diets.
Some 3.2% of participants were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes during the follow-up period. Although healthy eating habits were associated with a lower overall risk of diabetes, when people ate healthily but slept less than six hours a day, their risk of type 2 diabetes increased compared to people in the normal sleep category.
The researchers found sleep duration of five hours was linked with a 16% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, while the risk for people who slept three to four hours was 41% higher, compared to people who slept seven to eight hours.
One limitation is the study defined a healthy diet based on the number of servings of fruit, vegetables, red meat and fish a person consumed over a day or a week. In doing so, it didn’t consider how dietary patterns such as time-restricted eating or the Mediterranean diet may modify the risk of diabetes among those who slept less.
Also, information on participants’ sleep quantity and diet was only captured at recruitment and may have changed over the course of the study. The authors acknowledge these limitations.
Why might short sleep increase diabetes risk?
In people with type 2 diabetes, the body becomes resistant to the effects of a hormone called insulin, and slowly loses the capacity to produce enough of it in the pancreas. Insulin is important because it regulates glucose (sugar) in our blood that comes from the food we eat by helping move it to cells throughout the body.
We don’t know the precise reasons why people who sleep less may be at higher risk of type 2 diabetes. But previous research has shown sleep-deprived people often have increased inflammatory markers and free fatty acids in their blood, which impair insulin sensitivity, leading to insulin resistance. This means the body struggles to use insulin properly to regulate blood glucose levels, and therefore increases the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Further, people who don’t sleep enough, as well as people who sleep in irregular patterns (such as shift workers), experience disruptions to their body’s natural rhythm, known as the circadian rhythm.
This can interfere with the release of hormones like cortisol, glucagon and growth hormones. These hormones are released through the day to meet the body’s changing energy needs, and normally keep blood glucose levels nicely balanced. If they’re compromised, this may reduce the body’s ability to handle glucose as the day progresses.
These factors, and others, may contribute to the increased risk of type 2 diabetes seen among people sleeping less than six hours.
Millions of people around the world have diabetes. WESTOCK PRODUCTIONS/Shutterstock While this study primarily focused on people who sleep eight hours or less, it’s possible longer sleepers may also face an increased risk of type 2 diabetes.
Research has previously shown a U-shaped correlation between sleep duration and type 2 diabetes risk. A review of multiple studies found getting between seven to eight hours of sleep daily was associated with the lowest risk. When people got less than seven hours sleep, or more than eight hours, the risk began to increase.
The reason sleeping longer is associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes may be linked to weight gain, which is also correlated with longer sleep. Likewise, people who don’t sleep enough are more likely to be overweight or obese.
Good sleep, healthy diet
Getting enough sleep is an important part of a healthy lifestyle and may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Based on this study and other evidence, it seems that when it comes to diabetes risk, seven to eight hours of sleep may be the sweet spot. However, other factors could influence the relationship between sleep duration and diabetes risk, such as individual differences in sleep quality and lifestyle.
While this study’s findings question whether a healthy diet can mitigate the effects of a lack of sleep on diabetes risk, a wide range of evidence points to the benefits of healthy eating for overall health.
The authors of the study acknowledge it’s not always possible to get enough sleep, and suggest doing high-intensity interval exercise during the day may offset some of the potential effects of short sleep on diabetes risk.
In fact, exercise at any intensity can improve blood glucose levels.
Giuliana Murfet, Casual Academic, Faculty of Health, University of Technology Sydney and ShanShan Lin, Senior Lecturer, School of Public Health, University of Technology Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Do Essential Oils Really Have Medicinal Properties?
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
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 😎
❝Do essential oils really have scientific merit?❞
Great question! Assuming you mean “…for medicinal purposes” then it really depends on the oil in question.
For example, one can probably buy a big book of essential oils from a New Age store, and a lot of claims for different oils will not have any scientific backing whatsoever.
However! Some definitely do. For example, we wrote a little while back about ginger:
Ginger Does A Lot More Than You Think
Now, the active compound that gives ginger those properties and more is gingerol. Which is usually found as pure ginger oil, in other words, ginger essential oil.
Another essential oil that definitely does have benefits is that of Boswellia serrata, commonly known as frankincense. It can be used in various forms, and the essential oil is one of them; see:
- Five Supplements That Actually Work Vs Arthritis
- When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might: Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief
Meanwhile, menthol, the essential oil of peppermint, has its pros and cons:
Peppermint For Digestion & Against Nausea: How Useful Is Peppermint, Really?
And lavender essential oil does really have a sedative effect:
Herbs for Evidence-Based Health & Healing
If you have a different, particular essential oil in mind, let us know, and we can do a deep-dive on it for one of our “Research Review” editions!
A note on safety
Essential oils are pure and undiluted extracts of what’s usually a particularly potent chemical from a plant. Two things to bear in mind about this:
- Just because a chemical is potent, does not mean it will necessarily help you in a specific way, or indeed at all. On the contrary, many potent chemicals are simply harmful. So, be careful.
- Essential oils being so strong means that usually only a drop or two is required for effects; consult available literature (or ask us to do that for you!), and employ good safety practices such as:
- Do not use undiluted essential oils on your skin or internally
- If you are going to use it internally (diluted, following instructions from a reputable source, and with your doctor’s blessing, please) then test it on your skin first at the same dilution, in case of any adverse reaction.
- However you are using it, if you have any kind of adverse reaction, stop, and seek medical attention if it’s severe and/or it persists.
Take care!
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The Good, The Bad, & The Vigorously Debated
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This week in health news sees some pretty varied topics:
One more reason to care about the gut-brain axis
Stroke is a top killer in much of the industrialized world, usually making it into the top-few list on a per-country basis. And, it’s rising in prevalence, too. This is partly because our longevity is increasing so age-related things kill us more often, statistically, than age-unrelated things. But that’s only part of the reason; another is that our lifestyle (on the national level) is becoming more conducive to stroke. Diet is a large contributor to that, and gut health has now been identified as a key factor.
What recent research has shown is that minutes after a stroke occurs, normal gut anatomy is disrupted, and cells responsible for gut barrier integrity are eroded, and bugs from the gut get into the blood, and arrive at the (newly damaged) brain vasculature, where the blood-brain barrier is often also compromised on account of the stroke.
Because of this, critical to reducing post-stroke neuroinflammation (something that makes stroke damage more severe and recovery a lot harder) is improving the gut’s ability to heal itself quickly.
This can be helped with a dose of Insulin-like Growth Factor (IGF-1), but there are other things that can help or hinder, and those other things are modifiable by us as individuals in our lifestyle choices (e.g. a gut-healthy diet with plenty of fiber, and avoiding gut-unhealthy things like sugar and alcohol that feed C. albicans growths that will put roots through your intestines and make holes as they do), because the better/worse your gut barrier integrity is to start with, the easier/harder it will be for your gut to repair itself quickly:
Read in full: Healing the gut can reduce long-term impact of stroke
Related: Stop Sabotaging Your Gut
How about that seasonal lead-spiced hot drink?
Lead contamination in ground spices has become a bit of an issue, ground turmeric has had quite some flak in this regard, and now the spotlight is on cinnamon.
These reports, by the way, do not specify what kind of cinnamon (i.e. cassia vs Ceylon), however, clicking through to assorted sources and then doing our own digging finds that all cinnamon products we found listed as contaminated, were cassia cinnamon. This is unsurprising, as a) it’s cheaper b) it’s the kind most readily found on shelves in the US. That said, when it comes to Ceylon (sweet) cinnamon, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so that doesn’t mean they got the all-clear on lead contamination, but rather, that they haven’t received the same scrutiny as yet.
It’s worth noting that cinnamon sticks have been found to have less contamination than ground cinnamon, though.
It’s also worth noting that since some adulterated products have had lead added deliberately in increase the weight and darken the color, this is more likely to happen to cassia cinnamon than sweet cinnamon because cassia cinnamon is visibly darker, so adding a darkening agent to sweet cinnamon would just make it look like cassia (which no seller would want to do since cassia is the cheaper of the two).
Read in full: Why lead-tainted cinnamon products have turned up on shelves, and what questions consumers should ask
Related: Sweet Cinnamon vs Regular Cinnamon – Which is Healthier? ← this also covers toxicity issues, by the way
A matter of life and death
Assisted dying is currently legal in 10/40 US states, and Canada. Over in the UK, it’s being debated (and voted on) in Parliament today, at time of writing.
While bodily autonomy discussions are usually quite straightforward arguments between the very separate camps of
- “my body, my choice” vs
- “they shouldn’t be allowed to do that”,
…this one comes with a considerable middleground, because
- “people should have to right to end things without extra suffering and on their own terms”, and
- “many disabled people fear being placed in a position of having justify why they are not exercising their right to die when it might be cheaper and easier for others if they did”
…are positions with a lot of potential overlap.
In any case, we know most of our readers are in the US, but with a 10/40 split in US states (and some recent controversies in Canada), it’s likely a topic that’ll come up for most people at some point, so it’s good to understand it, and this is as good an opportunity as any:
Read in full: How would the assisted dying bill work and what issues might it create?
Related: Managing Your Mortality ← this talks about psychological/social considerations, as well as end-of-life care, palliative care (which is not quite the same thing!) and euthanasia in various forms, including the unofficial kind that you might want to be aware of if you want to avoid that happening.
Take care!
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