
Wakefulness, Cognitive Enhancement, AND Improved Mood?
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Old Drug, New Tricks?
Modafinil (also known by brand names including Modalert and Provigil) is a dopamine uptake inhibitor.
What does that mean? It means it won’t put any extra dopamine in your brain, but it will slow down the rate at which your brain removes naturally-occuring dopamine.
The result is that your brain will get to make more use of the dopamine it does have.
(dopamine is a neutrotransmitter that allows you to feel wakeful and happy, and perform complex cognitive tasks)
Modafinil is prescribed for treatment of excessive daytime sleepiness. Often that’s caused by shift work sleep disorder, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, or narcolepsy.
Read: Overview of the Clinical Uses, Pharmacology, and Safety of Modafinil
Many studies done on humans (rather than rats) have been military experiments to reduce the effects of sleep deprivation:
Click Here To See A Military Study On Modafinil!
They’ve found modafinil to be helpful, and more effective and more long-lasting than caffeine, without the same “crash” later. This is for two reasons:
1) while caffeine works by blocking adenosine (so you don’t feel how tired you are) and by constricting blood vessels (so you feel more ready-for-action), modafinil works by allowing your brain to accumulate more dopamine (so you’re genuinely more wakeful, and you get to keep the dopamine)
2) the biological half-life of modafinil is 12–15 hours, as opposed to 4–8 hours* for caffeine.
*Note: a lot of sources quote 5–6 hours for caffeine, but this average is misleading. In reality, we are each genetically predetermined to be either a fast caffeine metabolizer (nearer 4 hours) or a slow caffeine metabolizer (nearer 8 hours).
What’s a biological half-life (also called: elimination half-life)?
A substance’s biological half-life is the time it takes for the amount in the body to be reduced by exactly half.
For example: Let’s say you’re a fast caffeine metabolizer and you have a double-espresso (containing 100mg caffeine) at 8am.
By midday, you’ll have 50mg of caffeine left in your body. So far, so simple.
By 4pm you might expect it to be gone, but instead you have 25mg remaining (because the amount halves every four hours).
By 8pm, you have 12.5mg remaining.
When midnight comes and you’re tucking yourself into bed, you still have 6.25mg of caffeine remaining from your morning coffee!
Use as a nootropic
Many healthy people who are not sleep-deprived use modafinil “off-label” as a nootropic (i.e., a cognitive enhancer).
Read: Modafinil for cognitive neuroenhancement in healthy non-sleep-deprived subjects: A systematic review
Important Note: modafinil is prescription-controlled, and only FDA-approved for sleep disorders.
To get around this, a lot of perfectly healthy biohackers describe the symptoms of sleep pattern disorder to their doctor, to get a prescription.
We do not recommend lying to your healthcare provider, and nor do we recommend turning to the online “grey market”.
Such websites often use anonymized private doctors to prescribe on an “informed consent” basis, rather than making a full examination. Those websites then dispense the prescribed medicines directly to the patient with no further questions asked (i.e. very questionable practices).
Caveat emptor!
A new mood-brightener?
Modafinil was recently tested head-to-head against Citalapram for the treatment of depression, and scored well:
See its head-to-head scores here!
How does it work? Modafinil does for dopamine what a lot of anti-depressants do for serotonin. Both dopamine and serotonin promote happiness and wakefulness.
This is very promising, especially as modafinil (in most people, at least) has fewer unwanted side-effects than a lot of common anti-depressant medications.
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The Best Form Of Sugar During Exercise
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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 😎
❝What is the best form of sugar for an energy kick during exercise? Both type of sugar eg glicoae fructose dextrose etc and medium, ie drink, gel, solids etc❞
Great question! Let’s be clear first that we’re going to answer this specifically for the context of during exercise.
Because, if you’re not actively exercising strenuously right at the time when you’re taking the various things we’re going to be talking about, the results will not be the same.
For scenarios that are anything less than “I am exercising right now and my muscles (not joints, or anything else) are feeling the burn”, then instead please see this:
Snacks & Hacks: Eating For Energy (In Ways That Actually Work)
Because, to answer your question, we’re going to be going 100% against the first piece of advice in that article, which was “Skip the quasi-injectables”, i.e., anything marketed as very quick release. Those things are useful for diabetics to have handy just in case of needing to urgently correct a hypo, but for most people most of the time, they’re not. See also:
Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
However…
When strenuously exercising in a way that is taxing our muscles, we do not have to worry about the usual problem of messing up our glucose metabolism by overloading our body with sugars faster than it can use it (thus: it has to hurriedly convert glucose and shove it anywhere it’ll fit to put it away, which is very bad for us), because right now, in the exercise scenario we’re describing, the body is already running its fastest metabolism and is grabbing glucose anywhere it can find it.
Which brings us to our first key: the best type of sugar for this purpose is glucose. Because:
- glucose: the body can use immediately and easily convert whatever’s spare to glycogen (a polysaccharide of glucose) for storage
- fructose: the body cannot use immediately and any conversion of fructose to glycogen has to happen in the liver, so if you take too much fructose (without anything to slow it down, such as the fiber in whole fruit), you’re not only not going to get usable energy (the sugar is just going to be there in your bloodstream, circulating, not getting used, because it doesn’t trigger insulin release and insulin is the gatekeeper that allows sugar to be used), but also, it’s going to tax the liver, which if done to excess, is how we get non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
- sucrose: is just a disaccharide of glucose and fructose, so it first gets broken down into those, and then its constituent parts get processed as above. Other disaccharides you’ll see mentioned sometimes are maltose and lactose, but again, they’re just an extra step removed from useful metabolism, so to save space, we’ll leave it at that for those today.
- dextrose: is just glucose, but when the labeller is feeling fancy. It’s technically informational because it specifies what isomer of glucose it is, but basically all glucose found in food is d-glucose, i.e. dextrose. Other isomers of glucose can be synthesized (very expensively) in laboratories or potentially found in obscure places (the universe is vast and weird), but in short: unless someone’s going to extreme lengths to get something else, all glucose we encounter is dextrose, and all (absolutely all) dextrose is glucose.
We’d like to show scientific papers contesting these head-to-head for empirical proof, but since the above is basic chemistry and physiology, all we could find is papers taking this for granted and stating in their initial premise that sports drinks, gels, bars usually contain glucose as their main sugar, potentially with some fructose and sucrose. Like this one:
A Comprehensive Study on Sports and Energy Drinks
As for how to take it, again this is the complete opposite of our usual health advice of “don’t drink your calories”, because in this case, for once…
(and again, we must emphasize: only while actively doing strenuous exercise that is making specifically your muscles burn, not your joints or anything else; if your joints are burning you need to rest and definitely don’t spike your blood sugars because that will worsen inflammation)
…just this once, we do want those sugars to be zipping straight into the blood. Which means: liquid is best for this purpose.
And when we say liquid: gel is the same as a drink, so far as the body is concerned, provided the body in question is adequately hydrated (i.e., you are also drinking water).
Here are a pair of studies (by the same team, with the same general methodology), testing things head-to-head, with endurance cyclists on 6-hour stationary cycle rides:
CHO Oxidation from a CHO Gel Compared with a Drink during Exercise
Meanwhile, liquid beat solid, but only significantly so from the 90-minute mark onwards, and even that significant difference was modest (i.e. it’s clinically significant, it’s a statistically reliable result and improbable as random happenstance, but the actual size of the difference was not huge):
Oxidation of Solid versus Liquid CHO Sources during Exercise
We would hypothesize that the reason that liquids only barely outperformed solids for this task is precisely because the solids in question were also designed for the task. When a company makes a fast-release energy bar, they don’t load it with fiber to slow it down. Which differentiates this greatly from, say, getting one’s sugars from whole fruit.
If the study had compared apples to apple juice, we hypothesize the results would have been very different. But alas, if that study has been done, we couldn’t find it.
Today has been all about what’s best during exercise, so let’s quickly finish with a note on what’s best before and after:
Before: What To Eat, Take, And Do Before A Workout
After: Overdone It? How To Speed Up Recovery After Exercise
Take care!
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What Harm Can One Sleepless Night Do?
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We’ll not bury the lede: a study found that just one night of 24-hour sleep deprivation can alter immune cell profiles in young, lean, healthy people to resemble those of people with obesity and chronic inflammation.
Chronic inflammation, in turn, causes very many other chronic diseases, and worsens most of the ones it doesn’t outright cause.
The reason this happens is because in principle, inflammation is supposed to be good for us—it’s our body’s defenses coming to the rescue. However, if we imagine our immune cells as firefighters, then compare:
- A team of firefighters who are in great shape and ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, are mostly allowed to rest, sometimes get training, and get called out to a fire from time time, just enough to keep them on their toes. Today, something in your house caught fire, and they showed up in 5 minutes and put it out safely.
- A team of firefighters who have been pulling 24-hour shifts every day for the past 20 years, getting called out constantly for lost cats, burned toast, wrong numbers, the neighbor’s music, a broken fridge, and even the occasional fire. Today, your printer got jammed so they broke down your door and also your windows just for good measure, and blasted your general desk area with a fire hose, which did not resolve the problem but now your computer itself is broken.
Which team would you rather have?
The former team is a healthy immune system; the latter is the immune system of someone with chronic inflammation.
But if it’s one night, it’s not chronic, right?
Contingently true. However, the problem is that because the immune profile was made to be like the bad team we described (imagine that chaos in your house, now remember that for this metaphor, it’s your body that that’s happening to), the immediate strong negative health impact will already have knock-on effects, which in turn make it more likely that you’ll struggle to get your sleep back on track quickly.
For example, the next night you may oversleep “to compensate”, but then the following day your sleep schedule is now slid back considerably; one thing leads to another, and a month later you’re thinking “I really must sort my sleep out”.
See also: How Regularity Of Sleep Can Be Even More Important Than Duration ← A recent, large (n=72,269) 8-year prospective* observational study of adults aged 40-79 found a strong association between irregular sleep and major cardiovascular events, to such an extent that it was worse than undersleeping.
*this means they started the study at a given point, and measured what happened for the next eight years—as opposed to a retrospective study, which would look at what had happened during the previous 8 years.
What about sleep fragmentation?
In other words: getting sleep, but heavily disrupted sleep.
The answer is: basically the same deal as with missed sleep.
Specifically, elevated proinflammatory cytokines (in this context, that’s bad) and an increase in nonclassical monocytes—as are typically seen in people with obesity and chronic inflammation.
Remember: these were young, lean, healthy participants going into the study, who signed up for a controlled sleep deprivation experiment.
This is important, because the unhealthy inflammatory profile means that people with such are a lot more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and many more things besides. And, famously, most people in the industrialized world are not sleeping that well.
Even amongst 10almonds readers, a health-conscious demographic by nature, 62% of 10almonds readers do not regularly get the prescribed 7–9 hours sleep (i.e. they get under 7 hours).
You can see the data on this one, here: Why You Probably Need More Sleep ← yes, including if you are in the older age range; we bust that myth in the article too!*
*Unless you have a (rare!) mutated ADRB1 gene, which reduces that. But we also cover that in the article, and how to know whether you have it.
With regard to “most people in the industrialized world are not sleeping that well”, this means that most people in the industrialized world are subject to an unseen epidemic of sleep-deprivation-induced inflammation that is creating vulnerability to many other diseases. In short, the lifestyle of the industrialized world (especially: having to work certain hours) is making most of the working population sick.
Dr. Fatema Al-Rashed, lead researcher, concluded:
❝In the long term, we aim for this research to drive policies and strategies that recognize the critical role of sleep in public health.
We envision workplace reforms and educational campaigns promoting better sleep practices, particularly for populations at risk of sleep disruption due to technological and occupational demands.
Ultimately, this could help mitigate the burden of inflammatory diseases like obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.❞
You can read the paper in full here: Impact of sleep deprivation on monocyte subclasses and function
What can we do about it?
With regard to sleep, we’ve written so much about this, but here are three key articles that contain a lot of valuable information:
- Get Better Sleep: Beyond The Basics
- Calculate (And Enjoy) The Perfect Night’s Sleep
- Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors
…and with regard to inflammation, a good concise overview of how to dial it down is:
How To Prevent Or Reduce Inflammation
Take care!
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Ridged Nails: What Are They Telling You?
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Dr. Yaseen Arsalan, a Doctor of Pharmacy, has advice on the “nutraceutical” side of things:
Onychorrhexis
Sounds like the name of a dinosaur, but it’s actually the condition that creates the vertical ridges that sometimes appear on nails. It’s especially likely in the case of thinner nails, and/or certain nutritional deficiencies. Overuse of certain chemicals (including nail polish remover, hair products that get on your hands a lot, and cleaning fluids) can also cause it. It can also be worsened by various conditions, including eczema, psoriasis, hypothyroidism, anemia, and amyloidosis, but it won’t usually be outright caused by those alone.
There are two main kinds of ridges on nails:
- Vertical ridges: associated with hypothyroidism, anemia, and aging. Often an indicator of low iron.
- Horizontal ridges (Beau’s lines): caused by interrupted nail growth, brute force trauma, chemotherapy, acrylic nails, and gel nail polishes. Can also be an indicator of low zinc.
There are an assortment of medical treatments available, which Dr. Arsalan discusses in the video, but for home remedy treatment, he recommends:
- Nail-strengthening creams (look for coconut oil, shea butter, beeswax, vitamin E)
- Hydration (this is about overall hydration e.g. water intake)
- Careful nail trimming (fingernails with a curved shape and toenails straight across)
- Nail ridge filler (he recommends the brand Barrielle, for not containing formaldehyde or formalin)
- Moisturization (with cuticle oil or hand creams, because that hydration we talked about earlier is important, and we want it to stay inside the nail)
For more on those things, plus the medical treatments plus other “how to avoid this” measures, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- The Counterintuitive Dos and Don’ts of Nail Health
- Regular Nail Polish vs Gel Nail Polish – Which is Healthier?
Take care!
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Is Your Gut Leading You Into Osteoporosis?
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Bacterioides Vulgatus & Bone Health
We’ve talked before about the importance of gut health:
And we’ve shared quite some information and resources on osteoporosis:
- The Bare-bones Truth: Osteoporosis Mythbusting
- Osteoporosis Exercises (What To Do, And What To Avoid)
- Vit D + Calcium: Too Much Of A Good Thing?
- Collagen For Bones: We Are Such Stuff As Fish Are Made Of
- Which Osteoporosis Medication, If Any, Is Right For You?
How the two are connected
A recent study looked at Bacterioides vulgatus, a very common gut bacterium, and found that it suppresses the gut’s production of valeric acid, a short-chain fatty acid that enhances bone density:
❝For the study, researchers analyzed the gut bacteria of more than 500 peri- and post-menopausal women in China and further confirmed the link between B. vulgatus and a loss of bone density in a smaller cohort of non-Hispanic White women in the United States.❞
Pop-sci source: Does gut bacteria cause osteoporosis?
The study didn’t stop there, though. They proceeded to test, with a rodent model, the effect of giving them either:
- more B. vulgatus, or
- valeric acid supplements
The results of this were as expected:
- Those who were given more B. vulgatus got worse bone microstructure
- Those who were given valeric acid supplements got stronger bones overall
Study source: Gut microbiota impacts bone via Bacteroides vulgatus-valeric acid-related pathways
Where can I get valeric acid?
We couldn’t find a handy supplement for this, but it is in many foods, including avocados, blueberries, cocoa beans, and an assortment of birds.
Click here to see a more extensive food list (you’ll need to scroll down a little)
Bonus: if you happen to be on HRT in the form of Estradiol valerate (e.g: Progynova), then that “valerate” is an ester of valeric acid, that your body can metabolize and use as such.
Enjoy!
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Fluoride Toothpaste vs Non-Fluoride Toothpaste – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing fluoride toothpaste to non-fluoride toothpaste, we picked the fluoride.
Why?
Fluoride is indeed toxic; that’s why it’s in toothpaste (to kill things; namely, bacteria whose waste products would harm our teeth). However, we are much bigger than those bacteria.
Given the amount of fluoride in toothpaste (usually under 1mg per strip of toothpaste to cover a toothbrush head), the amount that people swallow unintentionally (about 1/20th of that, so about 0.1mg daily if brushing teeth twice daily), and the toxicity level of fluoride (32–64mg/kg), then even if we take the most dangerous ends of all those numbers (and an average body size), to suffer ill effects from fluoride due to brushing your teeth, would require that you brush your teeth more than 23,000 times per day.
Alternatively, if you were to ravenously eat the toothpaste instead of spitting it out, you’d only need to brush your teeth a little over 1,000 times per day.
All the same, please don’t eat toothpaste; that’s not the message here.
However! In head-to-head tests, fluoride toothpaste has almost always beaten non-fluoride toothpaste.
Almost? Yes, almost: hydroxyapatite performed equally in one study, but that’s not usually an option on as many supermarket shelves.
We found some on Amazon, though, which is the one we used for today’s head-to-head. Here it is:
However, before you rush to buy it, do be aware that the toxicity of hydroxyapatite appears to be about twice that of fluoride:
Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety Opinion On Hydroxyapatite (Nano)
…which is still very safe (you’d need to brush your teeth, and eat all the toothpaste, about 500 times per day, to get to toxic levels, if we run with the same numbers we discussed before. Again, please do not do that, though).
But, since the science so far suggests it’s about twice as toxic as fluoride, then regardless of that still being very safe, the fluoride is obviously (by the same metric) twice as safe, hence picking the fluoride.
Want more options?
Check out our previous main feature:
Less Common Oral Hygiene Options
(the above article also links back to our discussion of different toothpastes and mouthwashes, by the way)
Take care!
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10 Powerful Tips To Improve Lymph Flow – by Laurel West
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The lymphatic system is a large part of the body’s “clean-up” system, as well having an important role in fighting cancer specifically. As such, while it doesn’t get nearly as much popular attention as our circulatory system or our nervous system, say, it is critically important.
The author, a massage therapist, knows her stuff when it comes to lymph, and shows that here.
As this is a very lean book, weighing in at a mere 87 pages, you can imagine it gets straight to the point.
So will we! The titular “10 powerful tips” are:
- Drink water
- Matcha meditation
- Breathwork
- Dry brushing
- Hydrotherapy
- Stretching
- Sweating
- Lymphatic facial massage
- Advanced lymphatic massage
- Anti-inflammatory diet
Of course, she does explain each of those; some are more obvious than others; “drink water” takes less explanation than “advanced lymphatic massage”, say.
The style is, as you might expect, concise. It’s more of a primer than a textbook, and it does communicate its ideas clearly.
Bottom line: if you’d like to manage your lymph better, this book is an excellent way to get started.
Click here to check out 10 Powerful Tips To Improve Lymph Flow, and improve your lymph flow.
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