Wholewheat Bread vs Seeded White – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing wholewheat bread to seeded bread, we picked the wholewheat.
Why?
First, we will acknowledge that this is a false dichotomy; it is possible to have seeded wholewheat bread. However, it is very common to have wholewheat bread that isn’t seeded, and white bread that is seeded. So, it’s important to be able to decide which is the healthier option, since very often, this false dichotomy is what’s on offer.
We will also advise checking labels (or the baker, if getting from a bakery) to ensure that visibly brown bread is actually wholewheat, and not just dyed brown with caramel coloring or such (yes, that is a thing that some companies do).
Now, as for why we chose the wholewheat over the seeded white…
In terms of macronutrients, wholewheat bread has (on average; individual breads may vary of course) has 2x the protein and a lot more fiber.
Those seeds in seeded bread? They just aren’t enough to make a big impact on the overall nutritional value of the bread in those regards. Per slice, you are getting, what, 10 seeds maybe? This is not a meaningful dietary source of much.
Seeded bread does have proportionally more healthy fats, but the doses are still so low as to make it not worth the while; it just looks like a lot of expressed as a percentage of comparison, because of the wholewheat bread has trace amounts, and the seeded bread has several times those trace amounts, it’s still a tiny amount. So, we’d recommend looking to other sources for those healthy fats.
Maybe dip your bread, of whatever kind, into extra virgin olive oil, for example.
Wholewheat bread of course also has a lower glycemic index. Those seeds in seeded white bread don’t really slow it down at all, because they’re not digested until later.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Carb-Strong or Carb-Wrong?
- Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)
- Gluten: What’s The Truth?
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When oil refineries burn, here’s what happens to your lungs and heart
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The fire at a major oil refinery in the Victorian city of Geelong has now reportedly been extinguished. But with thick smoke from the blaze lingering in the air on Thursday, many residents in Geelong and surrounding areas will understandably be worried.
What is released into the air when a refinery burns? And is the smoke bad for your health?
For most people, serious long-term health effects are unlikely. However, there can be short-term risks, and some groups are more vulnerable than others. So here’s what to look out for and how to stay safe.
Benny Young/Facebook What is in the air when an oil refinery burns?
Smoke from an oil refinery fire is made up of many different pollutants. The exact mix depends on what material is burning, how hot the fire is, and how long it lasts.
Typically, these fires release fine particles, known as PM2.5 and PM10, which are small enough to travel deep into the lungs.
They can also release toxic gases such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide, along with volatile organic compounds including benzene.
For people living further from the fire, fine particles are typically the main concern because they can travel long distances and linger in the air.
What are the health risks?
For most healthy adults living in the area, short-term exposure to these pollutants will cause irritation rather than lasting harm.
You may notice sore or watery eyes, a scratchy throat, coughing, headaches or a feeling of chest tightness. These symptoms are unpleasant but usually settle once air quality improves and exposure is reduced.
This kind of exposure is very different from the long-term occupational exposure experienced by refinery workers or emergency responders, for whom risks of cancer and lung diseases are much higher and better studied.
Who is most at risk?
When air quality worsens, people with existing lung conditions such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are more likely to experience symptom flare-ups.
Smoke particles can irritate already inflamed airways, leading to increased breathlessness and coughing. For those with existing respiratory conditions, this may mean needing to use reliever medications more frequently than normal.
Those with heart disease are also at greater risk as air pollution can place extra strain on the cardiovascular system, increasing the risk of chest pain, irregular heartbeat and heart failure.
Older people are also generally more sensitive to poor air quality because they are more likely to have chronic diseases and their heart and lungs might not work as well as they did when they were young.
Children have the greatest risk of developing health issues in the longer term, as their lungs are still developing. But the risks from an isolated exposure, such as the Geelong fire, are relatively low.
Some studies suggest repeated or prolonged exposure to air pollution during pregnancy may increase the likelihood of adverse outcomes for babies, such as low birth weight. But again, the risk for pregnant people from an isolated incident such as this is low.
These kind of events often make people worry about cancer risk. But based on what we know, being exposed in the short term, from a single fire, does not meaningfully increase your risk of developing cancer – though these kinds of events are difficult to study, so evidence remains limited.
Cancers associated with oil refinery emissions are linked to years or decades of exposure, usually among workers and those in heavily polluted environments.
So while monitoring the air pollution and for any health issues is still necessary, it’s important to keep the risk in perspective.
Continued follow-up of workers directly involved in firefighting or cleanup will be essential, as their exposure levels are likely to be much higher than those in the surrounding community.
How to protect yourself from smoke
There are practical steps people can take to reduce their exposure if smoke or poor air quality persists.
It sounds obvious, but the less time you spend outside in smoke, the lower your risk of health issues cause by smoke inhalation.
Staying indoors with windows and doors closed can significantly reduce your exposure to particles, especially if air conditioning is set to recirculate indoor air.
If you have asthma or other chronic lung diseases, it’s important to keep your reliever close at hand, follow your existing written action plan, and seek medical advice early if symptoms worsen. This can prevent more serious flare-ups.
Well-fitting P2 or N95 masks can reduce inhalation of fine particles when worn correctly. Loose-fitting surgical or cloth masks provide much less protection against smoke.
Residents in and around Geelong concerned about air quality can check real-time monitoring data for the area at the Victorian Environment Protection Authority website.
If your symptoms worsen or persist, you should speak to a health-care professional, and in emergency always call triple 0.
Brian Oliver, Professor, School of Life Sciences, University of Technology Sydney and Peter J. Irga, Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Air and Noise Pollution, University of Technology Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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This Week In Brain News
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While reading this week’s health news, we’ve singled out three brain-related articles to feature here:
Bad breath now, bad brain later?
Researchers found links between oral microbiome populations, and changes in brain function with aging. The short version is indeed “bad breath now = bad brain later”, but more specifically:
- People who had large numbers of the bacteria groups Neisseria and Haemophilus had better memory, attention and ability to do complex tasks
- People who had higher levels of Porphyromonas had more memory problems later
- People with a lot of Prevotella tended to predict poorer brain health and was more common in people who carry the Alzheimer’s Disease risk gene, APOE4.
If you’ve never heard of half of those, don’t worry: mostly your oral microbiome can take care of itself, provide you consistently do the things that create a “good” oral microbiome. So, see our “related” link below:
Read in full: Mouth bacteria may hold insight into your future brain function
Related: Improve Your Oral Microbiome
Weeding out a major cause of cognitive decline
Cannabis may be great for relaxation, but regular use is not great for mental sharpness, and recent use (even if not regular, and even if currently sober) shows a similar dip in cognitive abilities, especially working memory. In other words, cannabis use for relaxation should be at most an occasional thing, rather than an everyday thing.
While the results of the study are probably not shocking, something that we found interesting was their classification system:
❝Heavy users are considered young adults who’ve used cannabis more than 1000 times over their lifetime. Whereas, using 10 to 999 times was considered a moderate user, and fewer than 10 times was considered a non-user.❞
Which—while being descriptive rather than prescriptive in nature—suggests that, to be on the healthy end of the bell curve, an occasional cannabis-user might want to consider “if you have 999 uses before you hit the “heavy user” category, project those 999 uses against your life expectancy, and moderate your use accordingly”. In other words, a person just now starting use, who expects to live another 40 years, would calculate: 999/40 = 24.9 uses per year, so call it 2 per month. A person who only expects to live another 20 years, would do the same math and arrive at 4 per month.
Disclaimer: the above is intended as an interesting reframe, and a way of looking at long-term cannabis use while being mindful of the risks. It is not intended as advice. This health-conscious writer personally has no intention of using at all, unless perhaps in some bad future scenario in which I have bad chronic pain, I might consider that pain relief effects may be worth the downsides. Or I might not; I hope not to be in the situation to find out!
Read in full: Largest study ever done on cannabis and brain function finds impact on working memory
Related: Cannabis Myths vs Reality
Mind-reading technology improves again
We’ve come quite a way from simple 1/0 reads, and basic cursor control! Now, researchers have created a brain decode that can translate a person’s thoughts into continuous text, without requiring the person to focus on words—in other words, it verbalizes the ideas directly. Most recently, the latest upgrade means that while previously, the device had to be trained on an individual brain for many hours, now the training/calibration process takes only an hour:
Read in full: Improved brain decoder holds promise for communication in people with aphasia
Related: Are Brain Chips Safe?
Take care!
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Improving Women’s Health Across the Lifespan – by Dr. Michelle Tollefson et al.
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We say “et al.”, because this hefty book (504 pages) is a compilation of contributions by about 60 authors, of whom, 100% are doctors and about 90% are women.
As one might expect from a book with many small self-contained chapters by such a lot of doctors, the content is very diverse, though the style is consistent throughout, likely due to the authors working from a style sheet, plus the work of the editorial team.
About that content: the focus here is lifestyle medicine, and while much of the advice will go for men too (most people are unlikely to go wrong with “eat more fruits and vegetables and get better sleep” etc), anything more detailed than that (of which there’s a lot) is focussed on women. Hence, we get chapters on optimal nutrition for women, physical activity for women, sleep and women’s health, etc, as well as topics that can affect everyone but disproportionately affect women—ranging from autoimmune diseases to social burdens that affect health in measurable ways. There’s also, as you might expect, plenty about sexual health, pregnancy-related health, menopausal health, and so forth.
The strength of this book is really in its diversity; it’s very much a case of “60 heads are better than one”, and as such, we’re pretty much getting 60 books for the price of one here, as each author brings what they are most specialized in.
Bottom line: if you are a woman and/or love a woman, this book is packed with information that will be of interest and applicable use.
Click here to check out Improving Women’s Health Across The Lifespan, and do just that!
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How Emotions Are Made – by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
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We’ve previously reviewed Dr. Barrett’s (also good) book Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain, and this one is very different, and of more practical use:
The main thrust of the book is: the bioessentialist model of emotions is flawed; there is also no Platonic perfect form of any given emotion, and in fact emotions are constructed by the brain as a learned adaptive response.
She argues this from the dual vectors of on the one hand hard sciences of affective neuroscience and clinical psychology, and on the other hand sociology and anthropology.
In the category of criticism: Dr. Barrett, a very well-known and well-respected cognitive neuroscientist, is not an expert on sociology and anthropology, and some of her claims there are verifiably false.
However, most of the book is given over the psychophysiology, which is entirely her thing, and she explains it clearly and simply while backing everything up with mountains of data.
The usefulness of this book is chiefly: if we understand that emotions are not innate and are instead constructed adaptive (and sometimes maladaptive) neurological responses to stimuli and associations, we can set about rewiring things a little in accord with what’s actually more beneficial to us. The book also outlines how.
Bottom line: if you’d like to be able to not merely manage emotions as they are, but also prune and/or grow them from the stem up, then this book provides a robustly scientific approach for doing that.
Click here to check out How Emotions Are Made, and get more discerning about yours!
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Flu vaccines are now available for 2025. What’s on offer and which one should I get?
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It’s that time of year when flu vaccines are becoming available in Australia. You may have received an email from your GP clinic or a text message from your pharmacy telling you they’re in stock.
So far in 2025 in Australia, there have been more flu notifications compared to the same period in previous years.
Elsewhere, many northern hemisphere countries have reported intense flu activity during the 2024–25 winter season. This has included several deaths in children.
Although it’s difficult to make predictions about the intensity and timing of the upcoming flu season, it’s a good time to start thinking about vaccination.
PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock Who should get vaccinated, and when?
In Australia, flu vaccines are available for everyone over the age of six months. Flu vaccines don’t work well in young infants, but they can be protected if their mothers are immunised during pregnancy.
The National Immunisation Program provides free vaccines for people at higher risk, including specific age groups (adults older than 65 and children between six months and five years), those with chronic medical conditions, pregnant women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
For healthy adults and children outside these groups, a flu vaccine costs around A$20–30. The vaccines are widely available at GPs and pharmacies, and through workplace programs.
Flu vaccines reduce the risk of GP presentation with influenza by around 30–60% and hospitalisation with influenza by about 50–70%.
There’s some evidence the protection from flu vaccines wanes over several months. Ideally, everyone would get vaccinated within a few months of the peak of the flu season. But in reality, we can’t easily predict when this will occur, and since the COVID pandemic, flu seasons have arrived unusually early in the year. So, some time in the next month or so is a good time to get vaccinated.
The flu can be a nasty virus to catch. Kmpzzz/Shutterstock In general, flu vaccines can be given at the same time as most other vaccines, including COVID vaccines, but check with your vaccination provider about whether this is appropriate for you.
Influenza vaccines are regarded as safe. While some people may get a sore arm or fever, these symptoms are usually mild and short lived. Serious side effects, such as Guillain-Barré syndrome, are rare, and are thought to be less common than after influenza infection.
Why do we need a flu vaccine every year?
Influenza is a difficult virus to make vaccines for, as the virus changes frequently, and vaccines generally only provide protection against a limited range of strains. Some studies suggest mutations in the influenza virus are 20 times more common than with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID.
This means, each year, experts need to predict the likely circulating strains in the next season, so vaccines can be manufactured in preparation.
The World Health Organization coordinates two meetings each year – in February to decide on vaccine strains for the following northern hemisphere season, and around September for the southern hemisphere.
Although all current influenza vaccines contain strains from four influenza subtypes (A/H1N1, A/H3N2, B Victoria and B Yamagata), one of the strains appears to have disappeared during the pandemic. So next year’s vaccines will probably drop the B Yamagata strain.
Seasonal flu vaccines don’t provide protection against avian influenza (bird flu) strains, but vaccination is still recommended for people who may be at risk of bird flu, such as poultry workers. This is to reduce the chance that a new virus could result from the combination of both seasonal and avian influenza strains.
Which vaccines are available?
There are a variety of vaccines you may be offered when you book in or turn up for a flu vaccine.
Over the past few years, new types of vaccines have been developed. Some of these attempt to improve the body’s immune response to vaccines. For example, Fluad Quad contains an adjuvant called MF59, an additional substance designed to attract immune cells to the site of vaccination.
Other vaccines, such as Fluzone High-Dose, use a larger dose of the vaccine strains to improve the immune response. These vaccines are recommended for older people, as immune responses tend to decline with age.
Certain vaccines use alternative production methods to try to improve the match between vaccine strains and the circulating strains. Standard flu vaccines are produced using influenza viruses grown in chicken eggs. One weakness of this method is that viral mutations can occur during the production process, known as “egg adaptation”. During some of the seasons between 2014 and 2019, this was shown to reduce the effectiveness of flu vaccines.
The avoid this issue, cell-based vaccines, such as Flucelvax Quad, use influenza vaccine strains grown in mammalian cells rather than eggs.
Flu vaccines are free for certain vulnerable groups, such as children under five. SeventyFour/Shutterstock The key takeaways are:
- older people are recommended to receive an enhanced vaccine (Fluad Quad for >65 years or Fluzone High-Dose for >60 years), with Fluad Quad provided free under the National Immunisation Program
- other people are recommended to receive a standard vaccine (egg-based or cell-based), with vaccines provided free for high-risk groups and children between six months and five years.
Looking to the future
There are several new flu vaccines currently under development. Recombinant vaccines, such as Flublok, use insect cells to produce a specific component of the virus.
With the success of mRNA vaccines for COVID, there is interest in using a similar process for influenza. In theory, this could shorten the time to develop vaccines, for both seasonal influenza and pandemic influenza.
There’s also interest in combination vaccines – for example, a single shot could provide protection against both COVID and the flu.
The “holy grail” of influenza vaccines is one that could provide long-lasting protection against many different strains. Although we’re not there yet, you’re at lower risk of influenza and its complications if you get a flu shot.
Allen Cheng, Professor of Infectious Diseases, Monash University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Tahini vs Hummus – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing tahini to hummus, we picked the tahini.
Why?
Both are great! But tahini is so nutritionally dense, that it makes even the wonder food that is hummus look bad next to it.
In terms of macros, tahini is higher in everything except water. So, higher in protein, carbs, fats, and fiber. In terms of those fats, the fat breakdown is similar for both, being mostly polyunsaturated and monounsaturated, with a small percentage of saturated. Tahini has the lower glycemic index, but both are so low that it makes no practical difference.
In terms of vitamins, tahini has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B9, E, and choline, while hummus is higher in vitamin B6.
This is a good reason to embellish hummus with some red pepper (vitamin A), a dash of lemon (vitamin C), etc, but we’re judging these foods in their most simple states, for fairness.
When it comes to minerals, tahini has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. Meanwhile, hummus is higher in sodium.
Note: hummus is a good source of all those minerals too! Tahini just has more.
In short… Enjoy both, but tahini is the more nutritionally dense by far. On the other hand, if for whatever reason you’re looking for something lower in carbs, fats, and calories, then hummus is where it’s at.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
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