The Whys and Hows of Cutting Meats Out Of Your Diet

⏰ 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:

• Knowing more than one language—no matter whether you start learning at 9 months or 90 years—can provide a host of cognitive benefits (see today’s short video for more information!)

• Meat consumption in general, and consumption of red meats and processed meats in particular, are associated with about as many health risks as the Mediterranean Diet is associated with reduced health risks.

  • Yes, that means the excellent (and by default, not completely vegetarian) Mediterranean Diet can still be tweaked to be better (See today’s main feature for some studies about this!)

  • Ways to make skipping the meat easier include:

    • Meatless Mondays

    • “Flexitarianism”

    • Like-for-like substitutions

• Keto and Paleo diets, meanwhile, have been ranked amongst the lowest for heart health

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

The benefits of a bilingual brain—beyond the obvious! | Mia Nacamulli

It’s obvious that knowing more than one language can make certain things easier—like traveling or watching movies without subtitles. But are there other advantages to having a bilingual (or multilingual) brain?

Mia Nacamulli details three types of bilingual brains and shows how—for each of them a little differently—knowing more than one language keeps your brain healthy, complex, and actively engaged:

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

And we’ve recommended it before and we’ll recommend it again… If you’re thinking of dipping your toe into the language-learning pool, or maybe brushing up a language you half-forgot, Duolingo is an amazing habit-based very motivational free language-learning app:

Check out Duolingo for free here!

🌶 MAIN FEATURE

When it’s time to tell the meat to beat it…

Meat in general, and red meat and processed meat in particular, have been associated with so many health risks, that it’s very reasonable to want to reduce, if not outright eliminate, our meat consumption.

First, in case anyone’s wondering “what health risks?”

The aforementioned culprits tend to turn out to be a villain in the story of every second health-related thing we write about here. To name just a few:

• Processed Meat Consumption and the Risk of Cancer: A Critical Evaluation of the Constraints of Current Evidence from Epidemiological Studies

• Red Meat Consumption (Heme Iron Intake) and Risk for Diabetes and Comorbidities?

• Health Risks Associated with Meat Consumption: A Review of Epidemiological Studies

• Associations of Processed Meat, Unprocessed Red Meat, Poultry, or Fish Intake With Incident Cardiovascular Disease and All-Cause Mortality

• Meat consumption: Which are the current global risks? A review of recent (2010-2020) evidences

Seasoned subscribers will know that we rarely go more than a few days without recommending the very science-based Mediterranean Diet which studies find beneficial for almost everything we write about. The Mediterranean Diet isn’t vegetarian per se—by default it consists of mostly plants but does include some fish and a very small amount of meat from land animals. But even that can be improved upon:

• A Pesco-Mediterranean Diet With Intermittent Fasting

• Mediterranean, vegetarian and vegan diets as practical outtakes of EAS and ACC/AHA recommendations for lowering lipid profile

• A Mediterranean Low-Fat Vegan Diet to Improve Body Weight and Cardiometabolic Risk Factors: A Randomized, Cross-over Trial

So that’s the “why”; now for the “how”…

It’s said that with a big enough “why” you can always find a “how”, but let’s make things easy!

Meatless Mondays

One of the biggest barriers to many people skipping the meat is “what will we even eat?”

The idea of “Meatless Mondays” means that this question need only be answered once a week, and in doing that a few Mondays in a row, you’ll soon find you’re gradually building your repertoire of meatless meals, and finding it’s not so difficult after all.

Then you might want to expand to “meat only on the weekends”, for example.

Flexitarian

This can be met with derision, “Yes and I’m teetotal, apart from wine”, but there is a practical aspect here:

The idea is “I will choose vegetarian options, unless it’s really inconvenient for me to do so”, which wipes out any difficulty involved.

After doing this for a while, you might find that as you get more used to vegetarian stuff, it’s almost never inconvenient to eat vegetarian.

Then you might want to expand it to “I will choose vegan options, unless it’s really inconvenient for me to do so”

Like-for-like substitutions

Pretty much anything that can come from an animal, one can get a plant-based version of it nowadays. The healthiness (and cost!) of these substitutions can vary, but let’s face it, meat is neither the healthiest nor the cheapest thing out there these days either.

If you have the money and don’t fancy leaping to lentils and beans, this can be a very quick and easy zero-effort change-over. Then once you’re up and running, maybe you can—at your leisure—see what all the fuss is about when it comes to tasty recipes with lentils and beans!

That’s all we have time for today, but…

We’re thinking of doing a piece making your favorite recipes plant-based (how to pick the right substitutions so the meal still tastes and “feels” the same), so let us know if you’d like that? Feel free to mention your favorite foods/meals too, as that’ll help us know what there’s a market for!

You can do that by hitting reply to any of our emails, or using the handy feedback widget at the bottom!

Curious to know more while you wait?

Check out: The Vegan Diet: A Complete Guide for Beginners ← this is a well-sourced article from Healthline, who—just like us—like to tackle important health stuff in an easy-to-read, well-sourced format

🌎 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Keto, Paleo Diets Rank Low for Heart Health, Report Says

• Spread Happiness: Sharing Positive Emotions Can Help Combat Loneliness and Negativity

• Parkinson's Research: Laser Light Helmet Therapy Helped Improve Motor Function in Patients

• Anxiety and Mood Disorders Linked to More Severe Alcohol Symptoms, Even at Same Levels of Drinking

• Snap a Selfie for the Memory: Why Third-Person Photos Capture Deeper Meaning of Events

• One-Hour Endoscopic Procedure Could Eliminate Need for Insulin for Type 2 Diabetes

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

F*ck You Chaos: Declutter Your Home, Mind, and Finances to Discover Happiness, Calm, Purpose, and Abundance - by Dominika Choroszko

We've all read decluttering books. Some may even have decluttering books cluttering bookshelves. This one's a little different, though:

Dominika Choroszko looks at assessing, decluttering, and subsequently organizing:

• Your home

• Your mind

• Your finances

In other words

• she starts off like Marie Kondo, and...

• phases through doing the jobs of Queer Eye's "Fab Five", before...

• sitting us down with some CBT worksheets, and...

• finally going through finances à la Martin Lewis.

By the time we've read the book, it's as though Mary Poppins has breezed through our house, head, and bank account, leaving everything "practically perfect in every way".

Of course, it's on us to actually do the work, but as many of us struggle with "how" and the ever-dreaded "but where to begin", Choroszko's whirlwind impetus and precision guidance (many very direct practical steps to take) really grease the wheels of progress.

In short, this could be the book that kickstarts your next big "getting everything into better order" drive, with a clear step-by-step this-then-this-then-this linear process.

Get your copy of "F*ck You Chaos" from Amazon today!

Dezirando al vi bonan sanon kaj akran menson,

The 10almonds Team