Eat To Avoid (Or Beat) PCOS

Good afternoon 👋 

Do you ever find yourself absent-mindedly opening Facebook for the eleventy-third time today, or rotating through the same three apps in fruitless search of dopamine? The app “One Sec” will invite you to do a breathing exercise (it can be just one breath; you choose in its settings page) whenever you open certain apps, and then give you the choice of proceeding or not. It also has the option of “reinterventions” to do that again if you stay in the app for longer than you planned to (in other words, it stops you getting lost in the eternal scroll, a fate that sounds a lot cooler than it is). It’s much more effective than screentime limits for actually ensuring mindful phone use!

👆 not a sponsor; this writer is just enthusiastic 😉 

In today’s email we cover PCOS, diabetes, and heart health.

Today’s sponsor Lumen is offering a way to learn about and keep track of your body’s metabolism; breathing into the device once per day gives it all the info it needs. It’s quite nifty; check it out!

Recommended Reading

Watch and Learn

TEDx | Sugar Is Not A Treat

Dr. Jody Stanislaw offers a reframe:

Prefer text? The above video will take you to a 10almonds page with a text-overview, as well as the video!

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Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between passion fruit and blueberries—both great options, but there was a clear winner and we picked the passion fruit (click here to read about why), as did just 10% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Bonus (Sponsored) Recommendation

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One-Minute Book Review

Healthy Heart, Healthy Brain: The Personalized Path to Protect Your Memory, Prevent Heart Attacks and Strokes, and Avoid Chronic Illness – by Dr. Bradley Bale & Dr. Amy Doneen

We’ve often written that “what’s good for your heart is good for your brain”, because the former feeds the latter and takes away detritus. You cannot have a healthy brain without a healthy heart.

This book goes into that in more detail than we have ever had room to here! This follows from their previous book “Beat The Heart Attack Gene”, but we’re jumping in here because that book doesn’t really contain anything not also included in this one.

The idea is the same though: it is the authors’ opinion that far too many interventions are occurring far too late, and they want to “wake everyone up” (including their colleagues in the field) to encourage earlier (and broader!) testing.

Fun fact: that also reminded this reviewer that she had a pending invitation for blood tests to check these kinds of things—phlebotomy appointment now booked, yay!

True the spirit of such exhortation to early testing, this book does include diagnostic questionnaires, to help the reader know where we might be at. And, interestingly, while the in-book questionnaire format of “so many points for this answer, so many for that one”, etc is quite normal, what they do differently in the diagnostics is that in cases of having to answer “I don’t know”, it assigns the highest-risk point value, i.e. the test will err on the side of assume the worst, in the case of a reader not knowing, for example, what our triglycerides are like. Which, when one thinks about it, is probably a very sensible reasoning.

There’s a lot of advice about specific clinical diagnostic tools and things to ask for, and also things that may raise an alarm that most people might overlook (including doctors, especially if they are only looking for something else at the time).

You may be wondering: do they actually give advice on what to actually do to improve heart and brain health, or just how to be aware of potential problems? And the answer is that the latter is a route to the former, and yes they do offer comprehensive advice—well beyond “eat fiber and get some exercise”, and even down to the pros and cons of various supplements and medications. When it comes to treating a problem that has been identified, or warding off a risk that has been flagged, the advice is a personalized, tailored, approach. Obviously there’s a limit to how much they can do that in the book, but even so, we see a lot of “if this then that” pointers to optimize things along the way.

The style is… a little salesy for this reviewer’s tastes. That is to say, while it has a lot of information of serious value, it’s also quite padded with self-congratulatory anecdotes about the many occasions the authors have pulled a Dr. House and saved the day when everyone else was mystified or thought nothing was wrong, the wonders of their trademarked methodology, and a lot of hype for their own book, as in, the book that’s already in your hands. Without all this padding, the book could have been cut by perhaps a third, if not more. Still, none of that takes away from the valuable insights that are in the book too.

Bottom line: if you’d like to have a healthier heart and brain, and especially if you’d like to avoid diseases of those two rather important organs, then this book is a treasure trove of information.

Click here to check out Healthy Heart, Healthy Brain, and secure your good health now, for later!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you the very best of health in every way, every day,

The 10almonds Team