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Air Purifiers & Sleep
Plus: brain-healthy hazelnut chocolate truffles!
The 10almonds Team
January 26, 2024
Today’s almonds have been activated by:
If your water is chlorinated, then [that is generally recognized as safe, but] if you want to, you can dechlorinate it by “off-gassing”, which means either leaving it open in some vessel (e.g., a pot) for 24 hours, or boiling it for 15 minutes.
One health-related reason you might do this is so that you can use the water for fermenting things (see today’s featured book!), as while the levels of chlorine in water are safe for humans, they are not safe for germs, which are only very small.
Which is great if you’re trying to kill potential pathogens in the water supply, but not great if you’re trying to make kimchi.
⏰ 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:
Brain-healthy foods include nuts and dark chocolate; today’s featured recipe takes advantage of that!
Poor air quality can adversely affect sleep; using an air purifier can improve things!
The improvement is modest, but we think it’s a meaningful difference, especially if combined with general good “sleep hygiene” practices.
Don’t want to cut out wheat, but do want the wheat products you consume to be healthier?
Today’s sponsor, Wildgrain, offers high-quality fresh bread, pastries, and pastas made with zero-bleach flour and no artificial additives!
Read on to learn about these things and more…
👀 WATCH AND LEARN
Lymphoma after ignoring these 6 warning signs (7:12)
Dr. Hansen (an ICU doctor) shares the story of a patient who ignored warning signs of lymphoma and ended up in intensive care.
Learn about the common symptoms of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a type of cancer that affects the body's immune system, and the risk factors associated with it:
Prefer text? The six warning signs are fatigue, fever, night sweats, unexplained weight loss, swollen lymph nodes, and itchy skin—but we do encourage you to watch the video for guidelines on what “counts” and in some cases, how to recognize it.
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖
😋 RECIPES WORTH SHARING
Brain-Healthy Hazelnut Chocolate Truffles
This one is from Dr. Ayesha Sherzai at The Brain Docs, and it’s everything you’d expect from hazelnut chocolate truffles, except that they’re not unhealthy.
On the contrary, they’re filled with a bunch of ingredients to fuel brain health. Check them out!
For all those who asked for more text-based recipes… Enjoy!
❓ MAIN FEATURE
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 😎
❝I've read that air pollution has a negative effect on sleep quality and duration. Since I live next to a busy road, I was wondering whether I should invest in an air purifier. What are 10Almonds's views?❞
Going straight to the science, there are two questions here:
Does air pollution negatively affect sleep quality and duration?
Does the use of an air purify actually improve the air quality in the way(s) necessary to make a difference?
We thought we’d have to tackle these questions separately, but we did find one study that addressed your question directly. It was a small study (n=30 if you believe the abstract; n=29 if you read the paper itself—one person dropped out); the results were modest but clear:
❝The purifier filter was associated with increased total sleep time for an average of 12 min per night, and increased total time in bed for an average of 19 min per night relative to the placebo.
There were several sleep and mood outcomes for which no changes were observed, and time awake after sleep onset was higher for the purifier filter. Air quality was better during the high-efficiency particulate air filter condition.
These findings offer positive indications that environmental interventions that improve air quality can have benefits for sleep outcomes in healthy populations who are not exhibiting clinical sleep disturbances.❞
In the above-linked paper’s introduction, it does establish the deleterious effect of air pollution on a wide variety of health metrics, including sleep, this latter evidenced per Caddick et al. (2018): A review of the environmental parameters necessary for an optimal sleep environment
Now, you may be wondering: is an extra 12 minutes per night worth it?
That’s your choice to make, but we would argue that it is. We can make many choices in our lives that affect our health slightly for the better or the worse. If we make a stack of choices in a particular direction, the effects will also stack, if not outright compound.
So in the case of sleep, it might be (arbitrary numbers for the sake of illustration):
Get good exercise earlier in the day (+3%)
Get good food earlier in the day (+2.5%)
Practice mindfulness/meditation before bed (+2.5%)
Have a nice dark room (+5%)
Have fresh bedding (+2.5%)
Have an air purifier running (+3%)
Now, those numbers are, as we said, arbitrary*, but remember that percentages don’t add up; they compound. So that “+3%” starts being a lot more meaningful than if it were just by itself.
Don’t have an air purifier and want one?
We don’t sell them, but here’s an example on Amazon, for your convenience 😎
*Confession: the figure of 3% for the air purifier wasn’t entirely arbitrary; it was based on 100(12/405) = 80/27 ≈ 3, wherein the 405 figure was an approximation of the average total time (in minutes) spent sleeping with placebo, based on a peep at their results graph. There are several ways the average could be reasonably calculated, but 6h45 (i.e., 405 minutes) was an approximate average of those reasonable approximate averages.
So, 12 minutes is a 3% improvement on that.
Take care!
📊 POLL
We turn the tables and ask you a question…
We’ll then talk about this tomorrow:
What is your assessment of menopausal hormone replacement therapy? |
Gentlemen, we will also touch on testosterone therapy for the “andropause” tomorrow, but no poll for your hormones today (sorry!).
❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE
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Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free
🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE
 | Safe Effective Sleep Aids For SeniorsIs it possible to have "safe" and "effective" in the same product? There are pros and cons to a lot of medicines, and we sort the good from the bad from the downright ugly: |
📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW
Fermenting Everything: How to Make Your Own Cultured Butter, Fermented Fish, Perfect Kimchi, and Beyond – by Andy Hamilton
This is not just another pickling book! This is, instead, what it says on the front cover, "fermenting everything".
Ok, maybe not literally everything, but every kind of thing that can reasonably be fermented, and it's probably a lot more things than you might think.
From habanero chutney to lacto-lemonade, aioli to kombucha, Ukrainian fermented tomatoes to kvass. We could go on, but we'd soon run out of space. You get the idea. If it's a fermented product (food, drink, condiment) and you've heard of it, there's probably a recipe in here.
All in all, this is a great way to get in your gut-healthy daily dose of fermented products!
He does also talk safety, and troubleshooting too. And so long as you have a collection of big jars and a fairly normally-furnished kitchen, you shouldn't need any more special equipment than that, unless you decide to you your fermentation skills for making beer (which does need some extra equipment, and he offers advice on that—our advice as a health science publication is “don’t drink beer”, though).
Bottom line: with this in hand, you can create a lot of amazing foods/drinks/condiments that are not only delicious, but also great for gut health.
What did you think of today's newsletter?We always love to hear from you, whether you leave us a comment or even just a click in the poll if you're speeding by! |
May you sleep soundly at night and live your days well-rested,
The 10almonds Team
