Lemon Balm For Stressful Times And More

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Lemon balm shows up in a lot of relaxing/sleep products, but how’s the science for it?

  • Today’s main feature examines the evidence—as it turns out, it’s not only potent against stress and anxiety, but it shows a lot of potential as a cognitive enhancer too!

  • There’s less evidence for its use for sleep—there’s no evidence against it for sleep (that we found); there’s just very little being done in the way of sleep studies for lemon balm (probably because sleep studies are expensive and Big Lemon Balm™ isn’t paying).

• Today’s sponsor Hims is offering their “hard mints”, a refreshing generic of a drug we can’t mention here, to get things up and going with healthy vigor.

• Today’s featured recipe is a very tasty daal that’s easy to prepare and packed with nutrients (macro and micro).

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

10 Healthiest Foods You Should Eat In The Morning

Inspirations to start the day the right way:

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

Research Review Monday

Balm For The Mind: In More Ways Than One!

Lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) is quite unrelated to lemons, and is actually a closer relative to mint. It does have a lemony fragrance, though!

You’ll find it in a lot of relaxing/sleepy preparations, so…

What does the science say?

Relaxation

Lemon balm has indeed been found to be a potent anti-stress herb. Laboratories that need to test anything to do with stress generally create that stress in one of two main ways:

• If it’s not humans: a forced swimming test that’s a lot like waterboarding

• If it is humans: cognitive tests completed under time-pressure while multitasking

Consequently, studies that have set out to examine lemon balm’s anti-stress potential in humans, have often ended up also highlighting its potential as a cognitive enhancer, like this one in which…

Read in full: Anti-Stress Effects of Lemon Balm-Containing Foods

And this one, which found…

The appropriately named “DISS” is the Defined Intensity Stress Simulation we talked about.

Read more: Attenuation of laboratory-induced stress in humans after acute administration of Melissa officinalis (Lemon Balm)

Sleep

There’s a lot less research for lemon balm’s properties in this regard than for stress/anxiety, and it’s probably because sleep studies are much more expensive than stress studies.

It’s not for a lack of popular academic interest—for example, typing “Melissa officinalis” into PubMed (the vast library of studies we often cite from) autosuggests “Melissa officinalis sleep”. But alas, autosuggestions do not Randomized Controlled Trials make.

There are some, but they’re often small, old, and combined with other things, like this one:

A combination of valerian and lemon balm is effective in the treatment of restlessness and dyssomnia in children

This is interesting, because generally speaking there is little to no evidence that valerian actually helps sleep, so if this mixture worked, we might reasonably assume it was because of the lemon balm—but there’s an outside chance it could be that it only works in the presence of valerian (unlikely, but in science we must consider all possibilities).

Beyond that, we just have meta-reviews to work from, like this one that noted:

You see why we don’t try to cover everything here, by the way!

But if you want to read this one in full, you can, at:

An Updated Review on The Properties of Melissa officinalis L.: Not Exclusively Anti-anxiety

Is it safe?

Lemon balm is generally recognized as safe, and/but please check with your doctor/pharmacist in case of any contraindications due to medicines you may be on or conditions you may have.

Want to try some?

We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎

Want to know your other options?

You might like our previous main features:

What Teas To Drink Before Bed (By Science!)

and

Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors

Enjoy!

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This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between broccoli and cauliflower—they’re both great, but there’s a clear winner and we picked the broccoli (click here to read about why)m as did 86% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Recipes Worth Sharing

Delicious Daily Daal

You’re not obliged to eat this every day, but you might want to. The reason we called this one this, is because it’s a super simple recipe which belies how tasty this is. It’s a worthy main, but it can also be served as part of a many-dish setup, or even as a starter. Perfect for your next pot-luck, also!

Click below for our full recipe, and discover how tasty it is:

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One-Minute Book Review

Ageless Aging: A Woman’s Guide to Increasing Healthspan, Brainspan, and Lifespan Hardcover – by Maddy Dychtwald

Maddy Dychtwald, herself 73, has spent her career working in the field of aging. She's not a gerontologist or even a doctor, but she's nevertheless been up-to-the-ears in the industry for decades, mostly as an organizer, strategist, facilitator, and so forth. As such, she's had her finger on the pulse of the healthy longevity movement for a long time.

This book was written to address a problem, and the problem is: lifespan is increasing (especially for women), but healthspan has not been keeping up the pace.

In other words: people (especially women) are living longer, but often with more health problems along the way than before.

And mostly, it's for lack of information (or sometimes: too much competing incorrect information).

Fortunately, information is something that a woman in Dychtwald's position has an abundance of, because she has researchers and academics in many fields on speed-dial and happy to answer her questions (we get a lot of input from such experts throughout the book—which is why this book is so science-based, despite the author not being a scientist).

The book answers a lot of important questions beyond the obvious "what diet/exercise/sleep/supplements/etc are best for healthy aging" (spoiler: it's quite consistent with the things we recommend here, because guess what, science is science), questions like how best to prepare for this that or the other, how to get a head start on preventative healthcare for some things, how to avoid being a burden to our families (one can argue that families are supposed to look after each other, but still, it's a legitimate worry for many, and understandably so), and even how to balance the sometimes conflicting worlds of health and finances.

Unlike many authors, she also talks about the different kinds of aging, and tackles each of them separately and together. We love to see it!

Bottom line: this book is a very good one-stop-shop for all things healthy aging. It's aimed squarely at women, but most advice goes for men the same too, aside from the section on hormones and such.

Click here to check out Ageless Aging, and plan your future!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you the most well-informed start to the week,

The 10almonds Team