Nanotechnology vs Alcohol Damage!

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 is famously not fabulous for the health, but if you’re going to drink, there are things you can do to reduce the harm

  • Today’s main feature introduces a new one: a gel that contains nanotechnology that turns alcohol to vinegar in your gastrointestinal tract, before it can reach your bloodstream and liver

  • (There are still limitations though, so do check out the main feature before celebrating too hard)

• Do you ever wish you could magically focus your hearing on just one thing, when too many things are competing?

  • Today’s sponsor hear.com have a new kind of hearing aid that zooms your hearing in on a person’s speech, without amplifying background noise. It’s a bold claim, so they’re offering a 45-day “try it and see” risk-free trial. Check it out!

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

🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE

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One Health Hack from 20 Different Doctors

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❓️ THIS OR THAT?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between chicken and fish—we picked the fish (click here to read about why), as did 78% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

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🍷 MAIN FEATURE

One Thing That Does Pair Well With Alcohol…

Alcohol is not a healthy thing to consume. That shouldn’t be a controversial statement, but there is a popular belief that it can be good for the heart:

Red Wine & The Heart: Can We Drink To Good Health?

The above is an interesting and well-balanced article that examines the arguments for health benefits (including indirectly, e.g. social aspects).

Ultimately, though, as the World Health Organization puts it:

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

There is some good news:

We can somewhat reduce the harm done by alcohol by altering our habits slightly:

How To Make Drinking Less Harmful

…and we can also, of course, reduce our alcohol consumption (ideally to zero, but any reduction is an improvement already):

How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol

And, saving the best news (in this section, anyway) for last, it is almost always possible to undo the harm done specifically to one’s liver:

How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

Nanotechnology to the rescue?

Remember when we had a main feature about how colloidal gold basically does nothing by itself (and that that’s precisely why gold is used in medicine, when it is used)?

Now it has an extra bit of nothing to do, for our benefit (if we drink alcohol, anyway), as part of a gel that detoxifies alcohol before it can get to our liver:

Gold is one of the “ingredients” in a gel containing a nanotechnology lattice of protein fibrils coated with iron (and the gold is there as an inert catalyst, which is chemistry’s way of saying it doesn’t react in any way but it does cheer the actual reagents on). There’s more chemistry going on than we have room to discuss in our little newsletter, so if you like the full details, you can read about that here:

Single-site iron-anchored amyloid hydrogels as catalytic platforms for alcohol detoxification

The short and oversimplified explanation is that instead of alcohol being absorbed from the gut and transported via the bloodstream to the liver, where it is metabolized (poisoning the liver as it goes, and poisoning the rest of the body too, including the brain), the alcohol is degraded while it is still in the gastrointestinal tract, converted by the gel’s lattice into acetic acid (which is at worst harmless, and actually in moderation a good thing to have).

Even shorter and even more oversimplified: the gel turns the alcohol into vinegar in the stomach and gut, before it can get absorbed into the blood.

But…

Of course there’s a “but”…

There are some limitations:

It doesn’t get it all (tests so far found it only gets about half of the alcohol), and so far it’s only been tested on mice, so it’s not on the market yet—while the researchers are sufficiently confident about it that a patent application has now been made, though, so it’ll probably show up on the market in the near future.

You can read a pop-science article about it (with diagrams!) here:

New gel breaks down alcohol in the body

Want to read more…

…about how to protect your organs (including your brain) from alcohol completely?

We’ve reviewed quite a number of books about quitting alcohol, so it’s hard to narrow it down to a single favorite, but after some deliberation, we’ll finish today with recommending:

Quit Drinking – by Rebecca Dolton ← _{^{you can read our review here}}

Take care!

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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

PlantYou: Scrappy Cooking: 140+ Plant-Based Zero-Waste Recipes That Are Good for You, Your Wallet, and the Planet – by Carleigh Bodrug

This is a book that took "whole foods plant-based diet" and ran with it.

"Whole foods", you say? Carleigh Bodrug has you covered in this guide to using pretty much everything.

One of the greatest strengths of the book is its "Got this? Make that" section, for using up those odds and ends that you'd normally toss.

You may be thinking: "ok, but if to use this unusual ingredient I have to buy four other ingredients to make this recipe, generating waste from those other ingredients, then this was a bad idea", but fear not.

Bodrug covers that too, and in many cases leftover "would get wasted" ingredients can get turned into stuff that can go into longer-term storage one way or another, to use at leisure.

Which also means that on the day "there's nothing in the house to eat" and you don't want to go grocery-shopping, or if some global disaster causes the supply lines to fail and the stores become empty (that could never happen though, right?), you will have the mystical ability to conjure a good meal out of assorted odds and ends that you stored because of this book.

Bottom line: if you love food and hate food waste, this is a great book for you.

Click here to check out Scrappy Cooking, and do domestic magic!

Wishing you a joyfully healthy day,

The 10almonds Team