What’s Better Than Walking, After 60
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And before, really:
Step it up
Walking is great—it helps your heart health and maintains fitness as well as boosting your mood. So please do keep walking, if you are able!
However, it doesn’t build meaningful strength, improve reactive balance, or provide enough load to strengthen your bones.
But, who needs those things?
- Why strength matters: low-load activity like walking doesn’t stimulate muscle (re)growth or bone adaptation, which become increasingly important in later life.
- Why balance matters: walking is (usually!) predictable, but real-life falls happen during unexpected movements, so you need to train coordination and reaction.
- Why bone loading matters: bones require impact or resistance to maintain density, and walking alone doesn’t provide a strong enough signal to encourage this.
So, with that in mind, here are three exercises to address these things:
- Squat and press: hold weights at your chest, sit back into a squat, then drive up and press overhead to build full-body strength while stabilizing your core and improving functional movement.
- Obstacle step: step in a controlled pattern over crossed towels on the floor, changing direction and lead foot, to improve your balance, coordination, and agility.
- Heel drops: rise onto your toes, then drop your heels down with control to create safe impact that stimulates bone growth, especially at your hips.
He recommends to combine strength work (2–3 days), balance practice (2–3 days), and bone-loading impact (5–7 days) alongside your regular walking routine—because yes, walking is still good too and brings its own benefits!
For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Walking: Have We Had It Backwards?
Take care!
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5 Ways To Naturally Boost The “Ozempic Effect”
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Dr. Jason Fung is perhaps most well-known for his work in functional medicine for reversing diabetes, and he’s once again giving us sound advice about metabolic hormone-hacking with dietary tweaks:
All about incretin
As you may gather from the thumbnail, this video is about incretin, a hormone group (the most well-known of which is GLP-1, as in GLP-1 receptor agonists like semaglutide drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, etc) that slows down stomach emptying, which means a gentler blood sugar curve and feeling fuller for longer. It also acts on the hypothalamus, controlling appetite via the brain too (signalling fullness and reducing hunger).
Dr. Fung recommends 5 ways to increase incretin levels:
- Enjoy dietary fat: healthy kinds, please (e.g. nuts, seeds, eggs, etc—not fried foods), but this increases incretin levels more than carbs
- Enjoy protein: again, prompts higher incretin levels of promotes satiety
- Enjoy fiber: this is more about slowing digestion, but when it’s fermented in the gut into short-chain fatty acids, those too increase incretin secretion
- Enjoy bitter foods: these don’t actually affect incretin levels, but they can bind to incretin receptors, making the body “believe” that you got more incretin (think of it like a skeleton key that fits the lock that was designed to be opened by a different key)
- Enjoy turmeric: for its curcumin content, which increases GLP-1 levels specifically
For more information on each of these, here’s Dr. Fung himself:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Semaglutide for Weight Loss?
- Ozempic vs Five Natural Supplements
- How To Prevent And Reverse Type 2 Diabetes ← this was our “Expert Insights” feature on Dr. Fung’s work
Take care!
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If We Had A Nickel For Every Time We Were Asked About Nickel Poisoning…
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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!
No question/request too big or small 😎
❝I was just reading something about nickel poisoning. It’s not anything I had come across before. Is it very common and is it something people should be wary of?❞
If we had a nickel for every time we were asked about nickel poisoning, then we’d have one nickel, but it’s a good question and worthy of exploring.
So…
In most cases, nickel’s health risk is more about its allergenic properties, than its toxicity per se.
Nickel allergy is a form of contact dermatitis in which your immune system reacts to nickel after skin contact, most commonly causing an itchy rash at the point of exposure, though it can get worse. For example, symptoms usually appear within 1–3 days after contact and may include a rash, bumps, severe itching, skin discoloration, dry cracked skin, blisters, and/or fluid drainage.
This is mostly about piercings, jewelry, and accessories such as belts or wristwatches, though there are plenty of other possible sources (including, yes, the US coin of the same name, which usually contains 25% nickel). Inconveniently, other sources include various pieces of medical/dental kit, so do watch out for those.
However, sometimes it really is about poisoning, and nickel’s toxicity.
Nick poisoning is usually about nickel carbonyl, whose ingestion or inhalation can cause all manner of woes, for example, as the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) details:
❝An industrial accident is described in which 100 oil refinery workers were exposed to nickel-carbonyl, 31 were hospitalized, and 3 died.
Mild initial symptoms are listed, including headache, vertigo, nausea, and local pains. Delayed reactions are described, including constrictive chest pain, cough, pneumonia like symptoms, stomach pains, nausea, and weakness.
Death between 4 and 11 days after exposure is noted. The presence of nickel in tobacco, and the formation of nickel-carbonyl during smoking are discussed.❞
You can find the JAMA article’s entry here: Nickel May Be Potentially Hazardous to Health
And you can find a lot more information on the UK’s “Health & Security Agency” website, here:
- Sources and Route of Human Exposure ← food and cigarette smoke are the main sources of nickel exposure in the general public!
- Health effects of acute or single exposure ← spoiler: it’s not good
- Health effects following chronic or repeated exposure ← what doesn’t kill you, gives you cancer, which then gets a second chance to kill you
So all this to say, it’s definitely something that it’s well worth knowing about and avoiding!
You can also learn more about its other also-dangerous forms, here: Nickel; a metal with threats to human health, focusing on its intoxication mechanisms
Want to learn more?
For a much deeper dive into the broader topic of avoiding the toxins the industrial world is keen to throw our way, you might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:
Healthy Living in a Contaminated World – by Dr. Donald Hoernschemeyer
Take care!
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Heart Smarter for Women – by Dr. Jennifer Mieres
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Dr. Mieres takes us through understanding our own heart disease risks as individuals rather than as averages. As the title suggests, she does assume a female readership, so if you are a man and have no female loved ones, this might not be the book for you. But aside from that, she walks us through examining risk in the context of age, other health conditions, lifestyle factors, and so forth—including not turning a blind eye to factors that might intersect, such as for example if a physical condition reduces how much we can exercise, or if there’s some reason we can’t follow the usual gold standard of heart-healthy diet.
On which note, she does offer dietary advice, including information around recipes, meal-planning, and what things to always have in stock, as well as what things matter the most when it comes to what and how we eat.
It’s not all lifestyle medicine though; Dr. Mieres gives due attention to many of the medications available for heart health issues—and the pros and cons of these.
The style of the book is very simple and readable pop-science, without undue jargon, and with a generous glossary. As with many books of this genre, it does rely on (presumably apocryphal) anecdotes, though an interesting choice for this book is that it keeps a standing cast of four recurring characters, each to represent a set of circumstances and illustrate how certain things can go differently for different people, with different things then being needed and/or possible. Hopefully, any given reader will find themself represented at least moderately well somewhere in or between these four characters.
Bottom line: this is a very informative and accessible book, that demystifies a lot of common confusions around heart health.
Click here to check out Heart Smarter For Women, and take control of your health!
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Food and Nutrition – by Dr. P.K. Newby
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The “What Everyone Needs To Know” part of the title is the name of a series of books, of which this one, “Food and Nutrition”, is one.
In this case, the title is apt, and/or could have been “What Everyone Really Should Know”, or “What Everyone Would Like To Think They Know But Have Often Just Been Bluffing Their Way Through The Supermarket Aisles”.
The chapter and section headings are all in the forms of questions, such that all-together in such volume in the table of contents, they’re reminiscent of the “Jonathan Frakes Asks You Things” meme.
But, this serves a dual purpose—for one, it makes the whole book one big FAQ, which is a very convenient format. Furthermore, it prompts a little thought on the part of the reader before each section, if we indeed question for ourselves:
- Are fertilizers in farming friend or foe?
- How have the Digital Revolution and Information Age impacted our diet?
- Are canned and frozen foods inferior to fresh?
- Does snacking or meal timing matter?
- What are cereal grains and “pseudograins”?
…And so many more. But what’s best about this is:
Dr. Newby doesn’t reference her own preferences, or even have a particular way of eating she’d like us to adopt. She just lays out the science to answer each question, as discovered by high-quality studies and a general weight of evidence.
Bottom line: this book can level-up your nutritional knowledge from bluffing to really knowing! A worthy addition to anyone’s bookshelf.
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If You’re Not Flexible, These Are The Only 3 Stretches You Need, To Fix That
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If you can’t put your leg behind your head while standing, try doing the splits against a wall first, and progress from there! ← text version of an item from a “if you can’t do this yet, try this first” picture set this writer saw on Instagram once upon a time
So, what if you’re more at the point of not quite being able to touch your toes yet?
From zero to…
Liv, of LivInLeggings fame, has these three starter-stretches that are actually starter-stretches:
Stretch 1: Reverse Tabletop with Foot Tuck Variation
- Sit on the floor, feet slightly wider than your hips, lean back onto your hands (fingertips pointing outward).
- Lift your hips towards a reverse tabletop, engage your glutes, and flatten the front of your hips.
- Add a foot tuck variation by stepping one foot back and pressing your weight forward.
Benefits:
- Stretches multiple muscles, including the soles of the feet.
- Improves foot arches, balance, and stability.
- Loosens fascia, enhancing flexibility in subsequent stretches.
Stretch 2: Squat to Forward Fold
- Start in a low squat (feet wider than your hips, toes mostly forward).
- Alternate between a low squat and a forward fold, keeping your hands on the floor or your toes.
Benefits:
- Stretches hamstrings, glutes, and lower back.
- Maintains good form and avoids overstraining.
Stretch 3: Side Lunge with Side Body Reach
- Begin in a tall kneeling position, step one foot out to the side (toes pointing outward).
- Lunge your hips towards your front ankle, keeping your tailbone tucked.
- Add a side body reach by resting your forearm on your thigh and reaching the other arm overhead.
- For a deeper stretch, cradle the back of your head with your hand, pressing lightly for a tricep stretch.
Benefits:
- Stretches inner thighs, lats, and triceps.
- Improves posture, shoulder mobility, and low squat ability.
For more on each of these plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Test For Whether You Will Be Able To Achieve The Splits
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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How To Walk Away From Alzheimer’s
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We have written before avoiding Alzheimer’s in many different ways, for example:
Alzheimer’s Causative Factors To Avoid
…and regular readers will also be aware of our dictum “what’s good for the heart, is good for the brain”, which is because the heart feeds the brain, with oxygen and nutrients, and also ultimately clears away detritus like beta-amyloid (associated with Alzheimer’s).
For much more detail on this, see: What’s Your Vascular Dementia Risk? ← includes actual numbers and a risk calculator tool and things like that
So, it’s no surprise of course that exercise is protective against dementia, and as per the above, typically the most important thing here is heart health, so getting regular cardiovascular exercise, such walking, running, or dancing is great. Cycling too. Things like that.
Beyond cardio
First, some background. A previous (2023) study concluded:
❝Among older adults, more time spent in sedentary behaviors was significantly associated with higher incidence of all-cause dementia. Future research is needed to determine whether the association between sedentary behavior and risk of dementia is causal.❞
Source: Sedentary Behavior and Incident Dementia Among Older Adults
We’re not going to go deeply into that paper, because our interest today is about the answer to that call of “future research is needed”, because a team of scientists have now delivered on that.
In terms of how recent this new research is, it was published today (at time of writing), in the Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
In it, Dr. Marissa Gogniat et al. examined the relationship between sedentary behavior and cognitive decline and neurodegeneration, in 404 adults aged 50+.
A note on “cognitive decline” and “neurodegeneration”: those two terms are often used interchangeably, because they are usually strongly associated with each other so if one goes up or down then so does the other, but technically:
- cognitive decline = a decline of cognitive abilities, as measured by cognitive performance tests
- neurodegeneration = physical degeneration of neural tissue, typically specifically in the brain, as measured by various physical markers of neurodegeneration (tests range from brain scans to blood markers to biopsies and more, but the point is that it’s all physical stuff)
While based on the one-line summary we gave (“examined the relationship between sedentary behavior and cognitive decline / neurodegeneration”), this can sound a bit like a “examined whether water is wet” study, but in fact it becomes interesting when physical exercise is controlled for, since they found:
❝Reducing your risk for Alzheimer’s disease is not just about working out once a day. Minimizing the time spent sitting, even if you do exercise daily, reduces the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease.❞
~ Dr. Marissa Gogniat
Too vague? Here’s the less vague version:
❝In cross-sectional models, greater sedentary time related to a smaller AD-neuroimaging signature (β = -0.0001, p = 0.01) and worse episodic memory (β = -0.001, p = 0.003). Associations differed by APOE-ε4 status. In longitudinal models, greater sedentary time related to faster hippocampal volume reductions (β = -0.1, p = 0.008) and declines in naming (β = -0.001, p = 0.03) and processing speed (β = -0.003, p = 0.02; β = 0.01, p = 0.01).❞
In other words:
- Those are very significant findings, statistically speaking; the causal association cannot be reasonably denied without some strong new evidence for why
- Greater sedentary behavior is related to neurodegeneration and worse cognition.
- Sedentary behavior is an independent* risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.
- Associations differed by APOE-ε4 carrier status in cross-sectional models.
*as in, the sedentary risk factor stands (so to speak) regardless of whether you exercise a lot
With regard to “Associations differed by APOE-ε4 carrier status in cross-sectional models.”, that’s a little complicated, as …
❝Interestingly, we only found a sedentary time x APOE-ε4 status interaction on occipital volume longitudinally (which did not survive correction for multiple comparisons) and no interactions on cognition. The significant effect on occipital lobe volume was driven by APOE-ε4 non-carriers, which does not align with our cross-sectional findings. APOE-ε4 carriers are thought to have accelerated gray matter volume loss, starting possibly in middle age. Therefore, while increased sedentary time may impact gray matter volume among APOE-ε4 carriers, this effect may be masked by the cumulative effect of APOE-ε4 on brain volume over the lifespan that is captured at baseline.❞
In other words: in all likelihood, having the APOE-ε4 mutation probably means it’s extra important for you to not be sedentary in your lifestyle, and (good news) being non-sedentary is probably disproportionately impactful for you in a positive way, but (bad news) the APOE-ε4 mutation causes such an increased risk already, that it’s difficult to 100% ascertain that statistically, without larger samples starting earlier in life.
You can read the paper in full here:
“What if have to spend a lot of time sitting down?”
A valid question, relevant for many.
For this, check out:
Stand Up For Your Health (Or Don’t) ← our main feature on this also includes more things you can do if you must sit, to make sitting less bad!
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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