These Top Few Things Make The Biggest Difference To Health

⏰ 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:

• In health, as in other things, it is good to invest our effort in the areas where it’ll bring us the greatest results

  • Five top things that affect pretty much everything else are: good diet, good exercise, good sleep, not drinking, and not smoking

  • Within those, there are specific tweaks we can make that have a much bigger impact than others

    • The Mediterranean diet, walking, and HIIT are amongst the top items, but see our main feature for more!

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

What happens if you stop taking caffeine abruptly? (13:41)

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

Caffeinated menu:

• 00:29 | I Used To Self-Mix Supplements

• 02:25 | Mixing The Wrong Supplements Causes Accidents

• 02:54 | Caffeine Mechanism of Action

• 04:12 | Caffeine and Sleep

• 05:09 | Why Caffeine Isn't As "Strong" As Other Stimulants

• 05:52 | How Caffeine Dependency Develops

• 07:09 | Chubbyemu's Caffeine Withdrawal

• 11:15 | Caffeine Withdrawal Pharmacobiology

Prefer text? He does also cite sources/studies/etc and provides links under the video 🤓

Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖

🎯 MAIN FEATURE

The Best Few Interventions For The Best Health

Sometimes at 10almonds we talk about “those five things that affect everything”. They are:

1. Good diet

2. Good exercise

3. Good sleep

4. Not drinking

5. Not smoking

If we were to add a sixth in terms of things that make a huge difference, it would be “manage stress effectively” and a seventh, beyond the scope of our newsletter, would be “don’t be socioeconomically disadvantaged” (e.g. poor, and/or part of some disprivileged minority group).

But as for those five we listed, it still leaves the question: what are the few most effective things we can do to improve them? Where can we invest our time/energy/effort for greatest effect?

Good diet

Best current science consistently recommends the Mediterranean Diet:

The Mediterranean Diet: What Is It Good For?

But it can be tweaked for specific desired health considerations:

Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet

Other most-effective dietary tweaks that impact a lot of other areas of health include looking after your gut health and looking after your blood sugars:

Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)

and

“Let Them Eat Cake”, She Said (10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars)

Good exercise

Most exercise is good, but two of the most beneficial things that are (for most people) easy to implement are walking, and High-Intensity Interval Training:

How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)

Good sleep

This means quality and quantity! We cannot skimp on either and expect good health:

Why You Probably Need More Sleep

and as for quality,

The Head-To-Head Of Google and Apple’s Top Apps For Getting Your Head Down

Not drinking

According to the World Health Organization, the only safe amount of alcohol is zero.

See also:

Can We Drink To Good Health? (e.g. Red Wine & Heart Health)

and

How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol

Not smoking

We haven’t done a main feature on this! It’s probably not really necessary, as it’s not very contentious to say “smoking is bad for everything”.

WHO | Tobacco kills up to half its users who don’t quit

However, as a side-note, while cannabis is generally recognised as not as harmful as tobacco-based products, it has some fairly major drawbacks too. For some people, the benefits (e.g. pain relief) may outweigh the risks, though:

Cannabis Myths vs Reality

Final thoughts

Not sure where to start? We suggest this order of priorities, unless you have a major health condition that makes something else a higher priority:

1. If you smoke, stop

2. If you drink, reduce, or ideally stop

3. Improve your diet

About that diet…

• Worry less about what to exclude, and instead focus on adding more variety of fruit/veg

  • See also: Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)

  • That said, if you’re looking for things to cut, sugar is a top candidate (and red meat is in clear second place albeit some way below)

When it comes to exercise, get your 10,000 daily steps in (actually, science says 8,000 steps is fine), and consider adding HIIT per our above article, when you feel like adding that in. As for that about the steps:

Meta-analysis of 15 studies reports new findings on how many daily walking steps needed for longevity benefit

When it comes to sleep, if you’re taking care of the above things then this will probably take care of itself, if you don’t have a sleep-inconvenient lifestyle (e.g. shift work, just had a baby, etc) or a sleep disorder.

Take care!

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🌍 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Gut microbes may play role in social anxiety disorder, say researchers

• The science of the ideal salad dressing

• Keeping a streak alive can be strong motivation to stick with a chosen activity

• Daily learning test can detect Alzheimer's disease-related changes in memory among cognitively normal older adults

• Researchers find that regret is even rarer than believed among patients who undergo gender-affirming surgery

• Arthritic hands: what works (and what doesn't) to ease the pain?

• Financial ruin is baked into the system: the costs of long-term care

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

The Glucose Goddess Method: The 4-Week Guide to Cutting Cravings, Getting Your Energy Back, and Feeling Amazing – by Jessie Inchausspé

We've previously reviewed Inchausspé's excellent book “Glucose Revolution”. So what does this book add?

This book is for those who found that book a little dense. While this one still gives the same ten "hacks", she focuses on the four that have the biggest effect, and walks the reader by the hand through a four-week programme of implementing them.

The claim of 100+ recipes is a little bold, as some of the recipes are things like vinegar, vinegar+water, vinegar+water but now we're it's in a restaurant, lemon+water, lemon+water but now it's in a bottle, etc. However, there are legitimately a lot of actual recipes too.

Where this book's greatest strength lies is in making everything super easy, and motivating. It's a fine choice for being up-and-running quickly and easily without wading through the 300-odd pages of science in her previous book.

Bottom line: if you've already happily and sustainably implemented everything from her previous book, you can probably skip this one. However, if you'd like an easier method to implement the changes that have the biggest effect, then this is the book for you.

Click here to check out The Glucose Goddess Method, and build it into your life the easy way!

Wishing you a wonderful weekend to finish the year,

The 10almonds Team