Why We Sleep – by Dr Matthew Walker

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  • We all know sleep is important.
  • We all know that without it, we’ll suffer rapid cognitive decline.
  • We all know approximately what we’re supposed to do to get good sleep.

So what does this book bring to the table? Mostly, deep understanding (written from the perspective of a career in sleep science) presented in such a way as to be applicable, by you, in your life. Stop sabotaging yourself before you even get out of your bed in the morning!

Hustle culture champions early mornings and late nights, and either or both of those might be difficult to avoid. But to make what you’re doing sustainable, you’re going to have to make some informed decisions about looking after your #1 asset—you!

Dr. Walker writes in a clear and accessible fashion, without skimping on the hard science, and always with practical application in mind. All in all, we can’t recommend this one enough.

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  • The Health Fix – by Dr. Ayan Panja
  • The Real Reason Most Women Don’t Lose Belly Fat
    Battling body fat? Learn strategies for both men and women to overcome genetics and achieve sustainable fitness with proper diet, exercise, and recovery.

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  • Inheritance – by Dr. Sharon Moalem

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    We know genes make a big difference to a lot about us, but how much? And, the genes we have, we’re stuck with, right?

    Dr. Sharon Moalem shines a bright light into some of the often-shadowier nooks and crannies of our genetics, covering such topics as:

    • How much can (and can’t) be predicted from our parents’ genes—even when it comes to genetic traits that both parents have, and Gregor Mendel himself would (incorrectly) think obvious
    • How even something so seemingly simple and clear as genetic sex, very definitely isn’t
    • How traumatic life events can cause epigenetic changes that will scar us for generations to come
    • How we can use our genetic information to look after our health much better
    • How our life choices can work with, or overcome, the hand we got dealt in terms of genes

    The style of the book is conversational, down to how there’s a lot of “I” and “you” in here, and the casual style belies the heavy, sharp, up-to-date science contained within.

    Bottom line: if you’d like insight into the weird and wonderful nuances of genetics as found in this real, messy, perfectly chaotic world, this book is an excellent choice.

    Click here to check out Inheritance, and learn more about yours!

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  • 4 Ways Vaccine Skeptics Mislead You on Measles and More

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    Measles is on the rise in the United States. In the first quarter of this year, the number of cases was about 17 times what it was, on average, during the same period in each of the four years before, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Half of the people infected — mainly children — have been hospitalized.

    It’s going to get worse, largely because a growing number of parents are deciding not to get their children vaccinated against measles as well as diseases like polio and pertussis. Unvaccinated people, or those whose immunization status is unknown, account for 80% of the measles cases this year. Many parents have been influenced by a flood of misinformation spouted by politicians, podcast hosts, and influential figures on television and social media. These personalities repeat decades-old notions that erode confidence in the established science backing routine childhood vaccines. KFF Health News examined the rhetoric and explains why it’s misguided:

    The No-Big-Deal Trope

    A common distortion is that vaccines aren’t necessary because the diseases they prevent are not very dangerous, or too rare to be of concern. Cynics accuse public health officials and the media of fear-mongering about measles even as 19 states report cases.

    For example, an article posted on the website of the National Vaccine Information Center — a regular source of vaccine misinformation — argued that a resurgence in concern about the disease “is ‘sky is falling’ hype.” It went on to call measles, mumps, chicken pox, and influenza “politically incorrect to get.”

    Measles kills roughly 2 of every 1,000 children infected, according to the CDC. If that seems like a bearable risk, it’s worth pointing out that a far larger portion of children with measles will require hospitalization for pneumonia and other serious complications. For every 10 measles cases, one child with the disease develops an ear infection that can lead to permanent hearing loss. Another strange effect is that the measles virus can destroy a person’s existing immunity, meaning they’ll have a harder time recovering from influenza and other common ailments.

    Measles vaccines have averted the deaths of about 94 million people, mainly children, over the past 50 years, according to an April analysis led by the World Health Organization. Together with immunizations against polio and other diseases, vaccines have saved an estimated 154 million lives globally.

    Some skeptics argue that vaccine-preventable diseases are no longer a threat because they’ve become relatively rare in the U.S. (True — due to vaccination.) This reasoning led Florida’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, to tell parents that they could send their unvaccinated children to school amid a measles outbreak in February. “You look at the headlines and you’d think the sky was falling,” Ladapo said on a News Nation newscast. “There’s a lot of immunity.”

    As this lax attitude persuades parents to decline vaccination, the protective group immunity will drop, and outbreaks will grow larger and faster. A rapid measles outbreak hit an undervaccinated population in Samoa in 2019, killing 83 people within four months. A chronic lack of measles vaccination in the Democratic Republic of the Congo led to more than 5,600 people dying from the disease in massive outbreaks last year.

    The ‘You Never Know’ Trope

    Since the earliest days of vaccines, a contingent of the public has considered them bad because they’re unnatural, as compared with nature’s bounty of infections and plagues. “Bad” has been redefined over the decades. In the 1800s, vaccine skeptics claimed that smallpox vaccines caused people to sprout horns and behave like beasts. More recently, they blame vaccines for ailments ranging from attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder to autism to immune system disruption. Studies don’t back the assertions. However, skeptics argue that their claims remain valid because vaccines haven’t been adequately tested.

    In fact, vaccines are among the most studied medical interventions. Over the past century, massive studies and clinical trials have tested vaccines during their development and after their widespread use. More than 12,000 people took part in clinical trials of the most recent vaccine approved to prevent measles, mumps, and rubella. Such large numbers allow researchers to detect rare risks, which are a major concern because vaccines are given to millions of healthy people.

    To assess long-term risks, researchers sift through reams of data for signals of harm. For example, a Danish group analyzed a database of more than 657,000 children and found that those who had been vaccinated against measles as babies were no more likely to later be diagnosed with autism than those who were not vaccinated. In another study, researchers analyzed records from 805,000 children born from 1990 through 2001 and found no evidence to back a concern that multiple vaccinations might impair children’s immune systems.

    Nonetheless, people who push vaccine misinformation, like candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dismiss massive, scientifically vetted studies. For example, Kennedy argues that clinical trials of new vaccines are unreliable because vaccinated kids aren’t compared with a placebo group that gets saline solution or another substance with no effect. Instead, many modern trials compare updated vaccines with older ones. That’s because it’s unethical to endanger children by giving them a sham vaccine when the protective effect of immunization is known. In a 1950s clinical trial of polio vaccines, 16 children in the placebo group died of polio and 34 were paralyzed, said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and author of a book on the first polio vaccine.

    The Too-Much-Too-Soon Trope

    Several bestselling vaccine books on Amazon promote the risky idea that parents should skip or delay their children’s vaccines. “All vaccines on the CDC’s schedule may not be right for all children at all times,” writes Paul Thomas in his bestselling book “The Vaccine-Friendly Plan.” He backs up this conviction by saying that children who have followed “my protocol are among the healthiest in the world.”

    Since the book was published, Thomas’ medical license was temporarily suspended in Oregon and Washington. The Oregon Medical Board documented how Thomas persuaded parents to skip vaccines recommended by the CDC, and reported that he “reduced to tears” a mother who disagreed.  Several children in his care came down with pertussis and rotavirus, diseases easily prevented by vaccines, wrote the board. Thomas recommended fish oil supplements and homeopathy to an unvaccinated child with a deep scalp laceration, rather than an emergency tetanus vaccine. The boy developed severe tetanus, landing in the hospital for nearly two months, where he required intubation, a tracheotomy, and a feeding tube to survive.

    The vaccination schedule recommended by the CDC has been tailored to protect children at their most vulnerable points in life and minimize side effects. The combination measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine isn’t given for the first year of a baby’s life because antibodies temporarily passed on from their mother can interfere with the immune response. And because some babies don’t generate a strong response to that first dose, the CDC recommends a second one around the time a child enters kindergarten because measles and other viruses spread rapidly in group settings.

    Delaying MMR doses much longer may be unwise because data suggests that children vaccinated at 10 or older have a higher chance of adverse reactions, such as a seizure or fatigue.

    Around a dozen other vaccines have discrete timelines, with overlapping windows for the best response. Studies have shown that MMR vaccines may be given safely and effectively in combination with other vaccines.

    ’They Don’t Want You to Know’ Trope

    Kennedy compares the Florida surgeon general to Galileo in the introduction to Ladapo’s new book on transcending fear in public health. Just as the Roman Catholic inquisition punished the renowned astronomer for promoting theories about the universe, Kennedy suggests that scientific institutions oppress dissenting voices on vaccines for nefarious reasons.

    “The persecution of scientists and doctors who dare to challenge contemporary orthodoxies is not a new phenomenon,” Kennedy writes. His running mate, lawyer Nicole Shanahan, has campaigned on the idea that conversations about vaccine harms are censored and the CDC and other federal agencies hide data due to corporate influence.

    Claims like “they don’t want you to know” aren’t new among the anti-vaccine set, even though the movement has long had an outsize voice. The most listened-to podcast in the U.S., “The Joe Rogan Experience,” regularly features guests who cast doubt on scientific consensus. Last year on the show, Kennedy repeated the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism.

    Far from ignoring that concern, epidemiologists have taken it seriously. They have conducted more than a dozen studies searching for a link between vaccines and autism, and repeatedly found none. “We have conclusively disproven the theory that vaccines are connected to autism,” said Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia. “So, the public health establishment tends to shut those conversations down quickly.”

    Federal agencies are transparent about seizures, arm pain, and other reactions that vaccines can cause. And the government has a program to compensate individuals whose injuries are scientifically determined to result from them. Around 1 to 3.5 out of every million doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine can cause a life-threatening allergic reaction; a person’s lifetime risk of death by lightning is estimated to be as much as four times as high.

    “The most convincing thing I can say is that my daughter has all her vaccines and that every pediatrician and public health person I know has vaccinated their kids,” Meyerowitz-Katz said. “No one would do that if they thought there were serious risks.”

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

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  • Toxic Gas That Sterilizes Medical Devices Prompts Safety Rule Update

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    Over the past two years, Madeline Beal has heard frustration and even bewilderment during public meetings about ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing gas that is used to sterilize half of the medical devices in the U.S.

    Beal, senior risk communication adviser for the Environmental Protection Agency, has fielded questions about why the agency took so long to alert people who live near facilities that emit the chemical about unusually high amounts of the carcinogenic gas in their neighborhoods. Residents asked why the EPA couldn’t close those facilities, and they wanted to know how many people had developed cancer from their exposure.

    “If you’re upset by the information you’re hearing tonight, if you’re angry, if it scares you to think about risk to your family, those are totally reasonable responses,” Beal told an audience in Laredo, Texas, in September 2022. “We think the risk levels near this facility are too high.”

    There are about 90 sterilizing plants in the U.S. that use ethylene oxide, and for decades companies used the chemical to sterilize medical products without drawing much attention. Many medical device-makers send their products to the plants to be sterilized before they are shipped, typically to medical distribution companies.

    But people living around these facilities have been jolted in recent years by a succession of warnings about cancer risk from the federal government and media reports, an awareness that has also spawned protests and lawsuits alleging medical harm.

    The EPA is expected to meet a March 1 court-ordered deadline to finalize tighter safety rules around how the toxic gas is used. The proposed changes come in the wake of a 2016 agency report that found that long-term exposure to ethylene oxide is more dangerous than was previously thought.

    But the anticipated final rules — the agency’s first regulatory update on ethylene oxide emissions in more than a decade — are expected to face pushback. Medical device-makers worry stricter regulation will increase costs and may put patients at higher risk of infection from devices, ranging from surgical kits to catheters, due to deficient sterilization. The new rules are also not likely to satisfy the concerns of environmentalists or members of the public, who already have expressed frustration about how long it took the federal government to sound the alarm.

    “We have been breathing this air for 40 years,” said Connie Waller, 70, who lives with her husband, David, 75, within two miles of such a sterilizing plant in Covington, Georgia, east of Atlanta. “The only way to stop these chemicals is to hit them in their pocketbook, to get their attention.”

    The EPA says data shows that long-term exposure to ethylene oxide can increase the risk of breast cancer and cancers of the white blood cells, such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma, myeloma, and lymphocytic leukemia. It can irritate the eyes, nose, throat, and lungs, and has been linked to damage to the brain and nervous and reproductive systems. Children are potentially more vulnerable, as are workers routinely exposed to the chemical, EPA officials say. The agency calculates the risk based on how much of the gas is in the air or near the sterilizing facility, the distance a person is from the plant, and how long the person is exposed.

    Waller said she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004 and that her husband was found to have non-Hodgkin lymphoma eight years later.

    A 2022 study of communities living near a sterilization facility in Laredo found the rates of acute lymphocytic leukemia and breast cancer were greater than expected based on statewide rates, a difference that was statistically significant.

    Beal, the EPA risk adviser, who regularly meets with community members, acknowledges the public’s concerns. “We don’t think it’s OK for you to be at increased risk from something that you have no control over, that’s near your house,” she said. “We are working as fast as we can to get that risk reduced with the powers that we have available to us.”

    In the meantime, local and state governments and industry groups have scrambled to defuse public outcry.

    Hundreds of personal injury cases have been filed in communities near sterilizing plants. In 2020, New Mexico’s then-attorney general filed a lawsuit against a plant in Santa Teresa, and that case is ongoing. In a case that settled last year in suburban Atlanta, a company agreed to pay $35 million to 79 people who alleged ethylene oxide used at the plant caused cancer and other injuries.

    In Cook County, Illinois, a jury in 2022 awarded $363 million to a woman who alleged exposure to ethylene oxide gas led to her breast cancer diagnosis. But, in another Illinois case, a jury ruled that the sterilizing company was not liable for a woman’s blood cancer claim.

    Greg Crist, chief advocacy officer for the Advanced Medical Technology Association, a medical device trade group that says ethylene oxide is an effective and reliable sterilant, attributes the spate of lawsuits to the litigious nature of trial attorneys.

    “If they smell blood in the water, they’ll go after it,” Crist said.

    Most states have at least one sterilizing plant. According to the EPA, a handful, like California and North Carolina, have gone further than the agency and the federal Clean Air Act to regulate ethylene oxide emissions. After a media and political firestorm raised awareness about the metro Atlanta facilities, Georgia started requiring sterilizing plants that use the gas to report all leaks.

    The proposed rules the EPA is set to finalize would set lower emissions limits for chemical plants and commercial sterilizers and increase some safety requirements for workers within these facilities. The agency is expected to set an 18-month deadline for commercial sterilizers to come into compliance with the emissions rules.

    That would help at facilities that “cut corners,” with lax pollution controls that allow emissions of the gas into nearby communities, said Richard Peltier, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Stronger regulation also prevents the plants from remaining under the radar. “One of the dirty secrets is that a lot of it is self-regulated or self-policed,” Peltier added.

    But the proposed rules did not include protections for workers at off-site warehouses that store sterilized products, which can continue to emit ethylene oxide. They also did not require air testing around the facilities, prompting debate about how effective they would be in protecting the health of nearby residents.

    Industry officials also don’t expect an alternative that is as broadly effective as ethylene oxide to be developed anytime soon, though they support researching other methods. Current alternatives include steam, radiation, and hydrogen peroxide vapor.

    Increasing the use of alternatives can reduce industry dependence on “the crutch of ethylene oxide,” said Darya Minovi, senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group.

    But meeting the new guidelines will be disruptive to the industry, Crist said. He estimates companies will spend upward of $500 million to comply with the new EPA rules and could struggle to meet the agency’s 18-month timetable. Sterilization companies will also have difficulty adjusting to new rules on how workers handle the gas without a dip in efficiency, Crist said.

    The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates drugs and medical devices, is also watching the regulatory moves closely and worries the updated emissions rule could “present some unique challenges” if implemented as proposed, said Audra Harrison, an FDA spokesperson. “The FDA is concerned about the rule’s effects on the availability of medical devices,” she added.

    Other groups, like the American Chemistry Council and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state’s environmental agency, assert that ethylene oxide use isn’t as dangerous as the EPA says. The EPA’s toxicity assessment has “severe flaws” and is “overly conservative,” the council said in an emailed statement. Texas, which has several sterilizing plants, has said ethylene oxide isn’t as high a cancer risk as the agency claims, an assessment that the EPA has rejected.

    Tracey Woodruff, a researcher at the University of California-San Francisco who previously worked at the EPA, said it can be hard for the agency to keep up with regulating chemicals like ethylene oxide because of constrained resources, the technical complications of rulemaking, and industry lobbying.

    But she’s hopeful the EPA can strike a balance between its desire to reduce exposure and the desire of the FDA not to disrupt medical device sterilization. And scrutiny can also help the device sterilization industry think outside the box.

    “We continue to discover these chemicals that we’ve already been exposed to were toxic, and we have high exposures,” she said. “Regulation is an innovation forcer.”

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

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  • The Health Fix – by Dr. Ayan Panja
  • Midwives Blame California Rules for Hampering Birth Centers Amid Maternity Care Crisis

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Jessie Mazar squeezed the grab handle in her husband’s pickup and groaned as contractions struck her during the 90-minute drive from her home in rural northeastern California to the closest hospital with a maternity unit.

    She could have reached Plumas District Hospital, in Quincy, in just seven minutes. But it no longer delivers babies.

    Local officials have a plan for a birth center in Quincy, where midwives could deliver babies with backup from on-call doctors and a standby perinatal unit at the hospital, but state health officials have yet to approve it.

    That left Mazar to brave the long, winding road — one sometimes blocked by snow, floods, or forest fires — to have her baby. Women across California are facing similar ordeals as hospitals increasingly close money-losing maternity units, especially in rural areas.

    Midwife-operated birth centers offer an alternative for women with low-risk pregnancies and can play a crucial role in filling the gap left by hospitals’ retreat from obstetrics, maternal health advocates say.

    Declining birth rates, staffing shortages, and financial pressures have led 56 California hospitals — about 1 in 6 — to shutter maternity units over the past dozen years.

    But midwives say California’s regulatory regime around birth centers is unnecessarily preventing new centers from opening and leading some existing facilities to close. Obtaining a license can take as long as four years.

    “All they’ve essentially done is made it more dangerous to have a baby,” said Sacramento midwife Bethany Sasaki. “People have to drive two hours now because a birth center can’t open, so it’s more dangerous. People are going to be having babies in cars on the side of the road.”

    Last month, state Assembly member Mia Bonta introduced legislation to streamline the regulatory process and fix what she calls “a broken system” for licensing birth centers.

    “We know that alternative birth centers lead to often better outcomes, lower-risk births, more opportunity for children to be born healthy, and also to lower maternal mortality and morbidity,” she said.

    The proposed bill would remove various bureaucratic requirements, though many details have yet to be finalized. Bonta introduced the bill in its current form as a jumping-off point for discussions about how to expedite licensing.

    “It’s a starting place,” said Sandra Poole, health policy advocate for the Western Center on Law & Poverty, a co-sponsor of the legislation.

    For now, birth centers struggle with a gantlet of rules, only some clearly connected to patient safety. Over the past decade, the number of licensed birth centers in California dropped from 12 to five, according to Bonta.

    Plumas County officials are trying to address one key issue: how far a birth center can be from a hospital with a round-the-clock obstetrics unit. State regulations say it can be no more than a 30-minute drive, a distance set when many more hospitals had maternity units.

    The first-of-its-kind “Plumas model” aims to take advantage of flexibility provisions in the law to address the obstacle in a way that could potentially be replicated elsewhere in the state.

    But the hospital’s application for a birth center and a perinatal unit has been “languishing” with the California Department of Public Health, which is “looking for cover from the legislature,” said Robert Moore, chief medical officer of Partnership HealthPlan of California, a Medi-Cal managed-care plan serving most of Northern California. Asked about the application, a CDPH spokesperson said only that it was under review.

    The goal should be for all women to be within an hour’s drive of a hospital with an obstetrics unit, Moore said. Data shows the complication rate goes up after an hour and even higher after two hours, he said, while the benefit is less compelling between 30 and 60 minutes.

    Numerous other regulations have made it difficult for birth centers to keep their doors open.

    Since August, birth centers in Sacramento and Monterey have had to stop operating because their heating ducts failed to meet licensing requirements. The facilities fall under the same state Department of Health Care Access and Information regulations as primary care clinics, though birth centers see healthy families, not sick ones, and don’t need hospital-grade ventilation, said midwife Caroline Cusenza.

    She had spent $50,000 remodeling the Monterey Birth & Wellness Center to include state-required items, such as nursing and hand-washing stations and a housekeeping closet. In the end, a requirement for galvanized steel heating vents, which would have required opening the ceiling at an unaffordable cost, prompted her heart-wrenching decision to close.

    “We’re turning women away in tears,” said Sasaki, who owned Midtown Birth Center in Sacramento. She bought the building for $760,000 and spent $250,000 remodeling it in a way she believed met all licensing requirements. But regulators would not license it unless the heating system was redone. Sasaki estimated it would have cost an additional $50,000 to bring it into compliance — too much to keep operating.

    She blamed her closure on “regulatory dysfunction.”

    Legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year could ease onerous building codes such as those governing Sasaki’s and Cusenza’s heating systems, said Poole, the health policy advocate.

    The state has taken two to four years to issue birth center licenses, according to a brief by the Osher Center for Integrative Health at the University of California-San Francisco. The state Department of Public Health “works tirelessly to ensure health facilities are able to be properly licensed and follow all applicable requirements within our authority before and during their operation,” spokesperson Mark Smith said.

    Bonta, an Oakland Democrat who chairs the Assembly’s health committee, said she would consider increasing the allowable drive time between a birth center and a hospital maternity unit as part of her new legislation.

    The state last updated birth center regulations more than a decade ago, before hospitals’ mass exodus from obstetrics. “The hurdle is the time and distance standards without compromising safety,” Poole said. “But where there’s nothing right now, we would say a birth center is certainly a better alternative to not having any maternal care.”

    Moore noted that midwife-led births in homes and birth centers are the mainstay of obstetric care in Europe, where the infant mortality rate is considerably lower than in the U.S. More than 98% of American babies are born in hospitals.

    Babies delivered by midwives are more likely to be born vaginally, less likely to require intensive care, and more likely to breastfeed, the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative has found. Midwife-led births also lead to fewer infant emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and neonatal deaths. And they cost far less: Birth centers generally charge one-quarter or less of the average cost of about $36,000 for a vaginal birth in a California hospital.

    If they catered only to private-pay clients, Cusenza and Sasaki could have continued operating without licenses. They must be licensed, however, to receive payments from Medi-Cal and some private insurance companies, which they needed to remain in business. Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid health insurance program, which covers low-income residents, paid for about 40% of the state’s births in 2022.

    Bonta has heard reports from midwives that the key to getting licensed is hunting down the right state health department advocate. “I don’t believe that we should be building resources based on the model of ‘Where’s Waldo?’ in finding a champion inside CDPH,” she said.

    Lori Link, director of midwifery at Plumas District Hospital, believes the Plumas model can turn what’s become a maternity desert into an oasis. Jessie Mazar, whose son was born in September without complications at a Truckee hospital, would welcome the opportunity to deliver her planned second child in Quincy.

    “That would be convenient,” she said. “We’re not holding our breath.”

    This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. 

    USE OUR CONTENT

    This story can be republished for free (details).

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

    This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • Instant Quiz Results, No Email Needed

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    ❓ Q&A With 10almonds Subscribers!

    Q: I like that the quizzes (I’ve done two so far) give immediate results , with no “give us your email to get your results”. Thanks!

    A: You’re welcome! That’s one of the factors that influences what things we include here! Our mission statement is “to make health and productivity crazy simple”, and the unwritten part of that is making sure to save your time and energy wherever we reasonably can!

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  • How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

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    How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

    In Greek mythology, Prometheus suffered the punishment of being chained to a rock, where he would have his liver eaten by an eagle, whereupon each day his liver would grow back, only to be eaten again the next day.

    We mere humans who are not Greek gods might not be able to endure quite such punishment to our liver, but it is an incredibly resilient and self-regenerative organ.

    In fact, provided at least 51% of the liver is still present and correct, the other 49% will regrow. Similarly, damage done (such as by trying to store too much fat there due to metabolic problems, as in alcoholic or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease) will reverse itself in time, given the chance.

    The difference between us and Prometheus

    In the myth, Prometheus had his liver regrow overnight every night. Ours don’t recover quite so quickly.

    Indeed, the science has good and bad news for us:

    ❝Liver recolonization models have demonstrated that hepatocytes have an unlimited regenerative capacity. However, in normal liver, cell turnover is very slow.❞

    ~ Michalopoulos and Bhusan (2020)

    Read more: Liver regeneration: biological and pathological mechanisms and implications

    If it regenerates, why do people need transplants, and/or die of liver disease?

    There are some diseases of the liver that inhibit its regenerative abilities, or (as in the case of cancer) abuse them to our detriment. However, in the case of fatty liver disease, the reason is usually simple:

    If the lifestyle factors that caused the liver to become fatty are still there, then its regenerative abilities won’t be able to keep up with the damage that is still being done.

    Can we speed it up at all?

    Yes! The first and most important thing is to minimize how much ongoing harm you are still doing to it, though.

    • If you drink alcohol, stop. According to the WHO, the only amount of alcohol that is safe for you is zero.
    • Consider your medications, and find out which place a strain on the liver. Many medications are not optional; you’re taking them for an important reason, so don’t quit things without checking with your doctor. Medications that strain the liver include, but are by no means limited to:
      • Many painkillers, including acetaminophen/paracetamol (e.g. Tylenol), and ibuprofen
      • Some immunosuppresent drugs, including azathioprine
      • Some epilepsy drugs, including phenytoin
      • Some antibiotics, including amoxicillin
      • Statins in general

    Note: we are not pharmacists, nor doctors, let alone your doctors.

    Check with yours about what is important for you to take, and what alternatives might be safe for you to consider.

    Dietary considerations

    While there are still things we don’t know about the cause(s) of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, there is a very strong association with a diet that is:

    • high in salt
    • high in refined carbohydrates
      • e.g. white flour and white flour products such as white bread and white pasta; also the other main refined carbohydrate: sugar
    • high in red meat
    • high in non-fermented dairy
    • high in fried foods.

    So, consider minimizing those, and instead getting plenty of fiber, and plenty of lean protein (not from red meat, but poultry and fish are fine iff not fried; beans and legumes are top-tier, though).

    Also, hydrate. Most people are dehydrated most of the time, and that’s bad for all parts of the body, and the liver is no exception. It can’t regenerate if it’s running on empty!

    Read more: Foods To Include (And Avoid) In A Healthy Liver Diet

    How long will it take to heal?

    In the case of alcoholic fatty liver disease, it should start healing a few days after stopping drinking. Then, how long it takes to fully recover depends on the extent of the damage; it could be weeks or months. In extreme cases, years, but that is rare. Usually if the damage is that severe, a transplant is needed.

    In the case of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, again it depends on the extent of the damage, but it is usually a quicker recovery than the alcoholic kind—especially if eating a Mediterranean diet.

    Read more: How Long Does It Take For Your Liver To Repair Itself?

    Take good care of yourself!

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