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Detox: What's Real, What's Not, What's Useful, What's Dangerous?
Plus: Brain Food... Far Beyond Nuts & Greens
The 10almonds Team
June 09, 2023
Today’s almonds have been activated by:
Loading Screen Tip: solve problems early! Prevention is not only better than a cure, but it’s usually easier 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:
Many people look to detox foods/drinks to cleanse their bodies and improve health. Good things to know about this include:
Fiber is great; juicing removes fiber.
Eat your greens (don’t drink them)!
Activated charcoal is the heavy artillery of detoxing
Sometimes it will remove things you didn’t want removed, though
It also won’t help against alcohol, sadly
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
Eating Cherries Every Day Will Do This To Your Body
Key benefits:
🧹 MAIN FEATURE
Detox: What's Real, What's Not, What's Useful, What's Dangerous?
Out of the subscribers who engaged in the poll, it looks like we have a lot of confidence in at least some detox approaches being useful!
Celery juice is most people’s go-to, and indeed it was the only one to get mentioned in the comments added. So let’s take a look at that first…
Celery juice
Celery juice is enjoyed by many people, with many health benefits in mind, including to:
reduce inflammation
lower blood pressure
heal the liver
fight cancer
reduce bloating
support the digestive system
increase energy
support weight loss
promote good mental health
An impressive list! With such an impressive list, we would hope for an impressive weight of evidence, so regular readers might be wondering why those bullet-pointed items aren’t all shiny hyperlinks to studies backing those claims. The reason is…
There aren’t any high-quality studies that back any of those claims.
We found one case study (so, a study with a sample size of one; not amazing) that observed a blood pressure change in an elderly man after drinking celery juice.
Rather than trawl up half of PubMed to show the lacklustre results in a way more befitting of Research Review Monday, though, here’s a nice compact article detailing the litany of disappointment that is science’s observations regards celery juice:
A key take-away is: juicing destroys the fiber that is celery’s biggest benefit, and its phytochemicals are largely unproven to be of use.
If you enjoy celery, great! It (when not juiced) is a great source of fiber and water. If you juice it, it’s a great source of water.
Activated Charcoal
Unlike a lot of greenery—whose “cleansing” benefits mostly come from fiber and disappear when juiced—activated charcoal has a very different way of operating.
Activated charcoal is negatively charged on a molecular level*, and that—along with its porous nature—traps toxins. It really is a superpowered detox that actually works very well indeed.
But…
It works very well indeed. It will draw out toxins so well, that it’s commonly used to treat poisonings. “Wait”, we hear you say, “why was that a but”?
It doesn’t know what a toxin is. It just draws out all of the things. You took medicine recently? Not any more you didn’t. You didn’t even take that medication orally, you took it some other way? Activated charcoal does not care:
Does this mean that activated charcoal can be used to “undo” a night of heavy drinking?
Sadly not. That’s one of the few things it just doesn’t work for. It won’t work for alcohol, salts, or metals:
*Fun chemistry mnemonic about ions:
Cations are pussitive
Anions (by process of elimination) are negative
Onions taste good in salad (remember also: Cole’s Law)
Bottom line on detox foods/drinks:
Fiber is great; juicing removes fiber. Eat your greens (don’t drink them)!
Activated charcoal is the heavy artillery of detoxing
Sometimes it will remove things you didn’t want removed, though
It also won’t help against alcohol, sadly
❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE
Trifecta: Unwind, Recharge, and Reach Your Goals
We’ve written before about how cooking our own food at home means plenty of health benefits. Knowing all the ingredients and the process, we can be assured that what we’re eating is healthy. But what if we don’t have the time or inclination for a mountain of kitchen prep each day?
Trifecta Nutrition focus on delivering, well, nutrition. Tasty, chef-crafted meals, built around a nutritional plan to suit you (the meal plans are customizable).
But where they really excel is in how their expertly portioned, macro-balanced meals take the guesswork (and mathematics!) out of healthy eating.
It’s often said that the best way to “buy happiness” is with purchases that save us time—because what’s more precious than that?
Psst… Get 50% off your first order with code SPLASH50!
Please do check out our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free
🌏 AROUND THE WEB
What’s happening in the health world…
More to come tomorrow!
📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW
Brain Food: The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive Power - by Dr. Lisa Mosconi
We know that we should eat for brain health, but often that knowledge doesn't go a lot further than "we should eat some nuts... but also not the wrong nuts, which would be bad".
However, as Dr. Lisa Mosconi lays out for us, there's a lot more than that!
This book is as much a treatise of brain health in the context of nutrition, as it is a "eat this and avoid that" guide.
Which is good, because our brains don't exist in isolation, and nor do the nutrients that we consume. Put it this way:
We have a tendecy to think of our diets as a set of slider-bars, "ok, that's 104% of my daily intake of fiber, I need another 10g protein and that'll be at 100%, I've had 80% of the vitamin C that I need, and..."
Whereas in reality: much of what we eat interacts positively or negatively with other things, and thus needs to be kept in balance. And not only that, but other peri-nutritional factors play a big part too! From obvious things like hydration, to less obvious things like maintaining good gut microbiota, our brains rely on us to do a lot of things for them.
This book is very easy-reading, though a weakness is it doesn't tend to summarise key ideas much, give cheat-sheets, that sort of thing. We recommend reading this book with a notebook to the side, to jot down things you want to attend to in your own dietary habits.
Bottom line: this is an excellent overview of brain health in the context of nutrition, and is more comprehensive than most "eat this for good brain health and avoid that" books.
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 today see you well-prepared for the coming weekend,
The 10almonds Team