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Track Your Blood Sugars For Better Personalized Health
Plus: 3 (non-obvious) daily habits for less pain & stiffness
The 10almonds Team
March 14, 2024
Today’s almonds have been activated by:
The Dark Side Of The Salad:
When choosing between different leafy salads, remember that leaves with dark colors (usually dark green or purple) have many more healthy phytochemicals than leaves with lighter colors.
The also usually have more vitamins and minerals, too!
⏰ 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:
Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) have been in use for diabetes management for quite a while, but their benefits to people without diabetes are now coming into the spotlight
Today’s main feature explores how while science is standardized, our bodies are not, and blindly following standard advice with a non-standard physiology can sometimes backfire
There are a few CGMs available, mostly by prescription, but if your doctor is not obliging, there is a [particularly good] one that will be available OTC in a few months.
Skincare is important, but it’s easy to not find time for it.
Today’s sponsor, Tiége Hanley, is offering 10almonds readers 30% off their beautifully simple skincare starter pack
Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive
👀 WATCH AND LEARN
3 Daily Habits for Less Pain & Stiffness (14:47)
Specialist over-50's physiotherapist, Will Harlow, reveals 3 non-obvious daily habits that over-fifties can use for less pain and stiffness throughout life.
In this short video, he explains how these 3 habits target key areas of the body and can prevent problems if done every day:
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖
❓️ THIS OR THAT?
Vote on Which is Healthier
Yesterday we asked you to choose between (air-popped) popcorn, and peanuts (no allergies)—we picked the peanuts (click here to read about why), as did 53% of you!
Now for today’s choice:
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Click on whichever you think is better for you!
YOU MAY HAVE MISSED…
The Pathogens That Came In From The Cold
What To Eat, Take, And Do Before A Workout
🩸 MAIN FEATURE
There Will Be Blood
Are you counting steps? Counting calories? Monitoring your sleep? Heart rate zones? These all have their merits:
About calories: this writer (it’s me, hi) opines that intermittent fasting has the same benefits as caloric restriction, without the hassle of counting, and is therefore superior. I also personally find fasting psychologically more pleasant. However, our goal here is to be informative, not prescriptive, and some people may have reasons to prefer CR to IF!
Examples that come to mind include ease of adherence in the case of diabetes management, especially Type 1, or if one’s schedule (and/or one’s “medications that need to be taken with food” schedule) does not suit IF.
And now for the blood…
A rising trend in health enthusiasts presently is the use of Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs), which do exactly what is sounds like they do: they continually monitor glucose. Specifically, the amount of it in your blood.
Of course, these have been in use in diabetes management for years; the technology is not new, but the application of the technology is.
A good example of what benefits a non-diabetic person can gain from the use of a CGM is Jessie Inchauspé, the food scientist of “Glucose Revolution” and “The Glucose Goddess Method” fame.
By wearing a CGM, she was able to notice what things did and didn’t spike her blood sugars, and found that a lot of the things were not stuff that people knew/advised about!
For example, much of diabetes management (including avoiding diabetes in the first place) is based around paying attention to carbs and little else, but she found that it made a huge difference what she ate (or didn’t) with the carbs. By taking many notes over the course of her daily life, she was eventually able to isolate these patterns, showed her working-out in The Glucose Revolution (there’s a lot of science in that book), and distilled that information into bite-size (heh) advice such as:
That’s great, but since people like Inchauspé have done the work, I don’t have to, right?
You indeed don’t have to! But you can still benefit from it. For example, fastidious as her work was, it’s a sample size of one. If you’re not a slim white 32-year-old French woman, there may be some factors that are different for you.
All this to say: glucose responses, much like nutrition in general, are not a one-size-fits-all affair.
With a CGM, you can start building up your own picture of what your responses to various foods are like, rather than merely what they “should” be like.
This, by the way, is also one of the main aims of personalized health company ZOE, which crowdsourced a lot of scientific data about personalized metabolic responses to standardized meals:
Not knowing these things can be dangerous
We don’t like to scaremonger here, but we do like to point out potential dangers, and in this case, blindly following standardized diet advice, if your physiology is not standard, can have harmful effects, see for example:
Where can I get a CGM?
We don’t sell them, and neither does Amazon, but you can check out some options here:
…and if your doctor is not obliging with a prescription, note that the device that came out top in the above comparisons, will be available OTC soon:
Take care!
YOU MAY HAVE MISSED…
Honey vs Maple Syrup – Which is Healthier?
Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity (book)
❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE
A simple and effective skin care routine you’ll actually stick to.
Despite a hectic schedule, Tiege Hanley offers a guided skin care system that even the busiest of men can manage. Their Essentials routine includes everything you need for healthy and hydrated skin that lasts all day.
Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free
Other Newsletters We Love
Thrive25 favors the notion of functional age over biological age, offers information and advice accordingly, with the shared goal to "live smarter, better, and longer"
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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW
Stretching for 50+: A Customized Program for Increasing Flexibility, Avoiding Injury and Enjoying an Active Lifestyle – by Dr. Karl Knopf
Dr. Knopf explores in this book the two-way relationship between aging and stretching (i.e., each can have a large impact on the other). Thinking about stretching in those terms is an important reframe for going into any stretching program. We’d say “after the age of 50”, but honestly, at any age. But this book is written with over-50s in mind, as the title goes.
There’s an extensive encyclopedic section on stretches per body part, which is exactly as you might expect from any book of this kind. There is also a flexibility self-assessment, so that progress can be measured easily, and so that the reader knows where might need more improvement.
Perhaps this book’s greatest strength is the section on specialized programs based on things ranging from working to improve symptoms of any chronic conditions you may have (or at least working around them, if outright improvement is not possible by stretching), to your recreational activities of importance to you—so, what kinds of flexibilities will be important to you, and also, what kinds of injury you are most likely to need to avoid.
Bottom line: if you’re 50 and would like to do more stretching and less aging, then this book can help with that.
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! |
Wishing you the very best of health in all ways, always,
The 10almonds Team
