Give Your Adrenal Glands A Chance

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

In A Rush?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Our adrenal glands often work harder than they should have to, but we can make things better for them

  • Today’s main feature looks at what things overtax the adrenal glands, how to avoid those, and also what specific things to eat (or avoid) for best adrenal health.

• Hair loss is something that affects around half of men and a lot of women—but it doesn’t have to be that way

  • Today’s sponsor Hims is offering well-evidenced hair regrowth treatment options to suit all needs. Check them out!

• Today’s featured recipe is a superfood broccoli pesto, all plant-based, packed with nutrients, with its star ingredients being cancer-fighting and immunity-boosting. Delicious mixed into pasta, enjoyed as a dip, or even just on toast.

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

Pelvic Floor Exercises (Not Kegels!) to Prevent Urinary Incontinence

Dr. Christine Pieton, PT, DPT, a sport & women’s health physical therapist, has advice:

Prefer text? The above video will take you to a 10almonds page with a text-overview, as well as the video!

Saturday Life Hacks

The Hats Of Wrath

Your adrenal glands are two little hat-shaped glands that sit on top of your kidneys (like your kidneys are wearing them as hats, in fact).

They produce adrenaline, as you might have guessed, and also cortisol and aldosterone, which you might or might not have known, as well as some miscellaneous corticosteroids that are beyond the scope of today’s article.

Fun fact! For a long time, doctors thought adrenal glands were much larger than they usually are, because of learning anatomy from corpses that were dissected, but invariably the corpses were those of poor people, especially criminals, whose adrenal glands were almost always overworked and swollen.

You don’t want yours to be like that.

What goes wrong

Assuming you don’t have a rare disorder like Addison’s disease (in which the adrenal glands don’t produce enough of the hormones they’re supposed to), your adrenal glands will usually not have trouble producing enough adrenaline et al.

However, as we learned from the Victorian vagabonds, they can also have no problems producing too much—much like any organ that gets overworked, however, this has consequences.

Hopefully you’re not living a life of stressful crime on the streets, but maybe you have other reasons your adrenal glands are working overtime, such as any source of chronic stress, bad sleep (can’t recharge without this downtime), overuse of stimulants (including caffeine and/or nicotine), and, counterintuitively, alcohol. All these things can tax the adrenal glands considerably.

When this happens, in the extreme we can get Cushing’s syndrome, characterized by the symptoms: hypertension, cortisol-based fat distribution i.e. especially face and abdomen, weakness, fragile easily irritable skin, hair loss and/or hirsutism, paradoxically, and of course general fatigue.

In the non-extreme, we get all the same symptoms just to a lower level, and experience what the medical profession is begging us not to call “Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome” because that’s not an official diagnosis, whereas if it gets a name then they’ll be expected to treat it.

What keeps things going right

Obviously, the opposite of the above, for a start. Which means:

Manage chronic stress; see: How To Manage Chronic Stress

Get good sleep; see: Why You Probably Need More Sleep

Go easy on the caffeine; see: Caffeine Mythbusting

Skip the nicotine; see: Nicotine Benefits (That We Don’t Recommend)!

Avoid alcohol; see: How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol

There are specific vitamins and minerals that support adrenal health too; they are: vitamins B5, B6, B12, C, & D, and also magnesium and zinc.

Good dietary sources of the above include green leafy things, cruciferous vegetables*, nuts and seeds, avocados, olive oil, and if you eat fish, then also fatty fish.

In contrast, it is good to cut down (or avoid entirely) red meat and unfermented dairy.

*Unsure how to get cruciferous vegetables in more often? Try today’s featured recipe, superfood broccoli pesto 😎

Want to know more?

A large part of adrenal health is about keeping cortisol levels down generally (except: for most of us, we can have a little hormesis, as a treat), so for the rest of that you might like to read:

Lower Your Cortisol! (Here’s Why & How)

Take care!

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This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between sesame seeds and poppy seeds—we picked the poppy seeds (click here to read about why), as did only 29% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Recipes Worth Sharing

RECIPE NAME

Cruciferous vegetables have many health benefits of their own (especially: a lot of anticancer benefits). But, it can be hard to include them in every day’s menu, so this is just one more way that’ll broaden your options!

It’s delicious mixed into pasta, or served as a dip, or even on toast:

Click below for our full recipe, and learn its secrets:

One-Minute Book Review

Caffeine Blues: Wake Up to the Hidden Dangers of America's #1 Drug – by Stephen Cherniske

Caffeine use is an interesting and often-underexamined factor in health. Beyond the most superficial of sleep hygiene advice (à la “if you aren’t sleeping well, consider skipping your triple espresso martini at bedtime”), it’s often considered a “everybody has this” drug.

In this book, Cherniske explores a lot of the lesser-known effects of caffeine, and the book certainly is a litany against caffeine dependence, ultimately arguing strongly against caffeine use itself. The goal is certainly to persuade the reader to desist in caffeine use, and while the book’s selling point is “learn about caffeine” not “how to quit caffeine”, a program for quitting caffeine is nevertheless included.

You may notice the title and cover design are strongly reminiscent of “Sugar Blues”, which came decades before it, and that’s clearly not accidental. The style is similar—very sensationalist, and with a lot of strong claims. In this case, however, there is actually a more robust bibliography, albeit somewhat dated now as science has continued to progress since this book was published.

Bottom line: in this reviewer’s opinion, the book overstates its case a little, and is prone to undue sensationalism, but there is a lot of genuinely very good information in here too, making it definitely worth reading.

Click here to check out Caffeine Blues, and remedy yours!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you a relaxing yet energizing weekend,

The 10almonds Team