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Today’s almonds have been activated by:
❝High Intensity Interval Training workouts are short, you can do them anywhere, and you’ll burn more fat in less time than any other workout❞
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:
Brain health doesn’t get as much attention as heart disease or cancer, when it comes to top killers, but it’s up there.
Today’s main feature covers important ways to make (and maintain) your brain healthy now, to reduce your risk later.
How’s your hydration right now? For most people, at any given time, it’s not great. But it doesn’t have to be that way!
Today's sponsor NativePath is offering a free gift and free shipping with their range of electrolyte and amino acid drink mixes, which are great for your kidneys, bladder, and more.
Today’s featured book is about optimizing lymphatic drainage for beauty, against cancer, and for general health.
Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive
A Word To The Wise
 | Opioids And… Horse Tranquilizers?The use of horse sedatives in humans is spreading, as overdoses become more common: |
Watch and Learn
How Does Alcohol Cause Blackouts?
Sometimes, people who have never experienced an alcoholic blackout wonder: “is it real, or is it just a convenient excuse to avoid responsibility/embarrassment with regard to things done while drunk?”
Here’s the science behind what actually happens:
Prefer text? The above video will take you to a 10almonds page with a text-overview, as well as the video!
Tuesday’s Expert Insights
Future-Proof Your Brain
This is Kimberly Wilson. She’s a psychologist, not a doctor, and/but her speciality is neurophysiology and brain health.
Here’s what she wants us to know…
Avoid this very common killer
As you’re probably aware, the #1 killer in the US is heart disease, followed by COVID, which effectively pushed everything down a place. Thereafter, we see cancer, followed by accidental injuries, stroke, and dementia (including Alzheimer’s).
Over in the UK, where Wilson is from, dementia (including Alzheimer’s disease) is the #1 killer, followed by heart disease and then respiratory diseases (including COVID), and then stroke, then cancer.
As ever, what’s good for the heart is good for the brain, so many of the same interventions will help avoid both. With regard to some of the other differences in order, the reasons are mostly due to differences in the two countries’ healthcare systems and firearms laws.
It’s worth noting, though, that the leading cause of death in young people (aged 15–19) is suicide in the UK; in the US it’s nominally accidental injuries first (e.g. accidental shootings) with intentional suicide in the second spot.
In other words… Young or old, mental health is a serious health category that kills literally the most people in the UK, and also makes the top spots in the US.
Avoid the early killer
Given the demographics of most of our readership, chances are you’ve already lived past your teens and twenties. That’s not to say that suicide is no longer a risk, though, and it’s also worth noting that while mental health issues are invisible, they’re still physical illnesses (the brain is also an organ, after all!), so this isn’t something where you can simply “decide not to” and that’s you set, safe for life. So, please do continue to take good care in that regard.
We wrote about this previously, here:
Avoid the later killer
Wilson talks about how a recent survey found that…
while nearly half of adults say dementia is the disease they fear most,
only a third of those thought you could do anything to avoid it, and
just 1% could name the 7 known risk factors.
Quick test: can you name the 7 known risk factors?
Please take a moment to actually try (this kind of mental stimulation is good in any case), and count them out on your fingers (or write them down), and then…
When you’re ready: click here to see the answer!
How many did you get? If you got them all, well done. If not, then well, now you know, so that's good.
So, with those 7 things in mind, the first obvious advice is to take care of those things.
Taking an evidence-based medicine approach, Wilson recommends some specific interventions that will each improve one or more of those things, directly or indirectly:
Eating right
Wilson is a big fan of “nutritional psychiatry” and feeding one’s brain properly. We wrote about this, here:
As well as agreeing with the obvious “eat plenty of fiber, different-colored plants, and plenty of greens and beans”, Wilson specifically also champions getting enough of vitamins B9, B12, and D, as well as getting a healthy dose of omega-3 fatty acids.
She also recommends intermittent fasting, if that’s a reasonable option for you—but advocates for not worrying about it, if it’s not easy for you. For example, if you are diabetic, or have (or have a history with) some kind of eating disorder(s), then it’s probably not usefully practicable. But for most people, it can reduce systemic inflammation, which means also reducing neuroinflammation.
Managing stress right
Here she advocates for three main things:
Mindful meditation (see: Evidence-Based, No-Frills Mindfulness)
Psychological resilience (see: Building Psychological Resilience)
Mindful social media use (see: Making Social Media Work For Your Mental Health)
Managing money right
Not often we talk about this in a health science publication as opposed to a financial planning publication, but the fact is that a lot of mental distress, which goes on to have a huge impact on the brain, is rooted in financial stresses.
And, of course, it’s good to be able to draw on financial resources to directly fund one’s good health, but that is the secondary consideration here—the financial stress is the biggest issue, and you can’t CBT your way out of debt, for example.
Therapists often face this, and what has been referred to informally by professionals in the field as “Shit Life Syndrome”—and there’s only so much that therapy can do about that.
We’re not a financial publication, but one recommendation we’ll drop is that if you don’t currently have budgeting software that you use, this writer personally uses and swears by YNAB (You Need A Budget), so maybe check that out if you don’t already have everything covered in that regard. It’s not free, but there is a 34-day free trial.
Therapy can be very worthwhile nonetheless
Wilson notes that therapy is like non-invasive brain surgery (because of neuroplasticity, it’s literally changing physical things in your brain).
It’s not a magic bullet and it’s not the right choice for everyone, but it’s worth considering, and even self-therapy can yield benefits for many:
Sleeping right
Sleep is not only critical for health in general and brain health in particular, it’s also most of when our glymphatic system does clean-up in the brain (essential for avoiding Alzheimer’s & Parkinson’s, amongst other diseases):
Want to know more from Kimberley Wilson?
We reviewed a book of hers recently, here:
However, much of what we shared today was sourced from another book of hers that we haven’t reviewed yet but probably will do one of these days:
Enjoy!
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This Or That?
Vote on Which is Healthier
Yesterday we asked you to choose between buckwheat and rye—we picked the buckwheat (click here to read about why), as did 67% of you!
Now for today’s choice:
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Click on whichever you think is better for you!
One-Minute Book Review
The Book of Lymph: Self-Care Practices to Enhance Immunity, Health, and Beauty – by Lisa Levitt Gainsely
The book starts with an overview of what lymph is and why it matters, before getting into the main meat of the book, which is lymphatic massage techniques to improve lymphatic flow/drainage throughout different parts of the body, and in the context of an assortment of common maladies that may merit particular attention.
There’s an element of aesthetic medicine here, and improving beauty, but there’s also a whole section devoted to such things as breast care and the like (bearing in mind, the lymphatic system is one of our main defenses against cancer). There’s also a lot about managing lymph in the context of chronic health conditions.
The style is light pop-science; the science is explained clearly throughout, but without academic citations every few lines as some books might have. The author is, after all, a practitioner (CLT) and/but not an academic.
Bottom line: if you’d like to improve your lymphatic health, whether for beauty or health maintenance or recovery, this book will walk you through it.
Penny For Your Thoughts?
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 best of health in every way, every day,
The 10almonds Team
