Can We Drink To Good Health?

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:

• Alcohol really is deleterious to pretty much all aspects of health. However…

  • The social interactions that may go with alcohol, are good for our health (as a general rule)

• Red wine contains resveratrol, a polyphenol that can boost heart health

  • However, at the levels contained in red wine, you’d need to drink 100–1000 glasses of wine per day (depending on the wine) to get the dose of resveratrol that were associated with heart health benefits in mouse studies

    • If you’re not a mouse, you might need even more

  • Resveratrol supplements are a thing though!

• Government guidelines on safe alcohol consumption vary from place to place, but the latest WHO guidelines put the figure at zero.

• Juice detoxes and the like don’t do much, but happily most of us have a pair of kidneys and a liver to do the job for us. We do need to take care of them, though!

  • Getting plenty of water and fiber is good

  • Avoiding alcohol is also critical

  • As, of course, is not smoking

  • See today’s video for more!

• Cooking at home gives great health benefits—we know exactly what we’re eating and how it was prepared!

  • If you’d like that but don’t have time for meal prep, you can save time on both meal prep and shopping by taking advantage of 50% off today’s sponsor, Trifecta Nutrition, who will deliver ready-prepped nutrition-optimized meals (the plans are customizable!) to your door.

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

A cleanse won’t detox your body—but here’s what will

Dr. Jen Gunter hits the myths in this short (4:42) video, and explains what we can do to help our body do its thing for us:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

🍷 MAIN FEATURE

Can we drink to good health?

We asked you for your thoughts on alcohol and heart health, and we got quite an even spread of results!

If perchance that’s too tiny to read, the figures were:

• 32% voted for "Alcohol is a relaxant, reduces stress, and can contain resveratrol too. It's good for the heart! 🍷"

• 32% voted for: "Moderate alcohol consumption can be at least neutral for the health, if not positive ⚖️"

• 36% voted for: "Alcohol is bad for pretty much everything, including heart health ✋"

One subscriber who voted for "Alcohol is a relaxant, reduces stress, and can contain resveratrol too. It's good for the heart! 🍷" added the following thoughts:

That’s an interesting point, and definitely many people do see alcohol that way! Of course, that does not mean that one will find no social activities, celebrations, etc, in parts of the world where alcohol consumption is uncommon. Indeed, in India, wedding parties where no alcohol is consumed can go on for days!

But, “we live in a society” and all that, and while we’re a health newsletter not a social issues newsletter, it’d be remiss of us to not acknowledge the importance of socialization for good mental health—and thus the rest of our health too.

So, if indeed all our friends and family drink alcohol, it can certainly make abstaining more of a challenge.

On that note, let’s take a moment to consider “The French Paradox” (an observation of a low prevalence of ischemic heart disease despite high intakes of saturated fat, a phenomenon accredited to the consumption of red wine).

As it happens, a comprehensive review in “Circulation”, a cardiovascular health journal, has suggested the French Paradox may not be so paradoxical after all.

Research suggests it has more to do with other lifestyle factors (and historic under-reporting of cardiovascular disease by French doctors), which would explain why Japan has lower rates of heart disease, despite drinking little wine, and more beer and spirits.

So, our subscriber’s note may not be completely without reason! It’s just about the party, not the alcohol.

One subscriber who voted for "Moderate alcohol consumption can be at least neutral for the health, if not positive ⚖️" wrote:

That is indeed the guideline according to some health bodies!

In other places with different guiding advisory bodies, that’s been dropped down to one a day for everyone (the science may be universal, but how government institutions interpret that is not).

About that wine… Specifically, red wine, for its resveratrol content:

While there are polyphenols such as resveratrol in red wine that could boost heart health, there’s so little per glass that you may need 100–1000 glasses to get the dosage that provides benefits in mouse studies. If you’re not a mouse, you might even need more.

To this end, many people prefer resveratrol supplementation. ← link is to an example product, but there are plenty more so feel free to shop around

A subscriber who voted for "Alcohol is bad for pretty much everything, including heart health ✋" says:

If you haven’t heard these new guidelines, we’ll mention again: every government has its own official bodies and guidelines so perhaps your local guidelines differ, but for example here’s what that World Health Organization has to say (as of January this year):

WHO: No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health

So, whom to believe? The governments who hopefully consider the welfare of their citizenry more important than the tax dollars from alcohol sales, or the World Health Organization?

It’s a tough one, but we’ll always err on the side of the science.

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

Trifecta: Unwind, Recharge, and Reach Your Goals

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Please do check out our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

🌏 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• First genetic marker for MS severity discovered

• Experts call for accelerated development of function-promoting therapies for older adults

• A human protein that holds bird flu viruses at bay

• Know your status: the importance of HIV testing

• Illegal organ trade is more sophisticated than one might think: who's behind it and how it could be controlled

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Getting COMFY: Your Morning Guide to Daily Happiness - by Jordan Gross

It's easy to see how good "morning people" seem to have it; it's harder, it seems, to become one.

And, if we're forced by circumstance to be the morning person we're not? We all-too-easily find ourselves greeting each coming day without the joy that, in an ideal world, we might.

So, is it possible to learn this power? Jordan Gross has it mapped out for it us...

The “COMFY” of the title is indeed an acronym, and it stands for:

• Calm

• Openness

• Movement

• Funny

• You

There's a chapter explaining each in detail, and they're bookended with other chapters explaining more about the whys and the hows.

As you might expect, the key to a good morning starts the night before, but there's also a formula to follow. Of course, you can change it up, mix and match if you like... but this book provides a base framework to build from, which is something that can make a huge difference!

Bottom line: it's a highly enjoyable book to read, and also provides genuine powerful help to bring us the brighter happier mornings we deserve—the set-up to the perfect day!

Click here to check out "Getting COMFY" and perk up your mornings—you deserve it!

May today see you well-prepared for the coming weekend,

The 10almonds Team