The Forgotten System Against Cancer & More

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ 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:

• When did you last think about your lymphatic system? For most people, unless you have a serious disease right now, it’s probably not recently.

  • Today’s main feature outlines what our lymphatic system protects us from constantly, and (importantly!) what we can help it to keep us free from those very many diseases

  • Spoiler: diet and exercise are key—with some kinds being much better than others

• Ever wish you could focus your hearing on just one thing, when too many things are competing?

  • Today’s sponsor hear.com have a new kind of hearing aid that zooms your hearing in on a person’s speech, without amplifying background noise. It’s a bold claim, so they’re offering a 45-day “try it and see” risk-free trial. Check it out!

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

🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

TED-Ed | What Happens To Your Brain During A Migraine (4:49)

Dr. Marianne Schwarz explains:

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

Prefer text? Check out TED-Ed’s text-based resource page 😎

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

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❓️ THIS OR THAT?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between black olives and green olives—a tough choice, we know, but we picked the black olives (click here to read about why)!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

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🦠 MAIN FEATURE

Ask Not What Your Lymphatic System Can Do For You…

Just kidding; we’ll cover that first, as it’s definitely not talked about enough.

The lymphatic system is the system in the body that moves lymph around. It’s made of glands, nodes, and vessels:

• The glands (such as the tonsils and the adenoids) and nodes filter out bacteria and produce white blood cells. Specific functions may be, well, specialized—beyond the scope of today’s article—but that’s the broad function.

• The vessels are the tubes that allow those things to be moved around, suspended in lymph.

What’s lymph? It’s a colorless water-like liquid that transports immune cells, nutrients (and waste) around the body (through the lymphatic system).

Yes, it works alongside your vasculature; when white blood cells aren’t being deployed en masse into your bloodstream to deal with some threat, they're waiting in the wings in the lymphatic system.

While your blood is pumped around by your heart, lymph moves based on a variety of factors, including contractions of small specialized lymphatic muscles, the pressure gradient created by the combination of those and gravity, and the movements of your body itself.

Here’s a larger article than we have room for, with diagrams we also don’t have room for:

Modelling the lymphatic system

To oversimplify it in few words for the sake of moving on: you can most of the time think of it as an ancillary network supporting your circulatory system that unlike blood, doesn’t deal with oxygen or sugars, but does deal with a lot of other things, including:

• water and salt balance

• immune cells and other aspects of immune function

• transports fats (and any fat-soluble vitamins in them) into circulation

• cleans up stuff that gets stuck between cells

• general detoxification

There’s a lot that can go wrong if lymph isn’t flowing as it should

Too much to list here, but to give an idea:

• Arthritis and many autoimmune diseases

• Cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome

• Obesity, diabetes, and organ failure

• Alzheimer’s and other dementias

• Lymphadenitis, lymphangitis, and lymphedenopathy

• Lymphomas and Hodgkin’s disease (both are types of lymphatic cancer)

• Cancers of other kinds, because of things not being cleaned up where and when they should be

Yikes! That’s a lot of important things for a mostly-forgotten system to be taking care of protecting us from!

What you can do for your lymphatic system, to avoid those things!

Happily, there are easy things we can do to give our lymph some love, such as:

Massage therapy (and foam rolling)

This is the go-to that many people/publications recommend. It’s good! It’s certainly not the most important thing to do, but it’s good.

You can even use a simple gadget like this one to help move the lymph around, without needing to learn arcane massage techniques.

Exercise (move your body!)

This is a lot more important. The more we move our body, the more lymph moves around. The more lymph moves around today, the more easily it will move around tomorrow. A healthy constant movement of lymph throughout the lymphatic system is key to keeping everything running smoothly.

If you pick only one kind of exercise, make it High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT):

How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)

If for some reason you really can’t do that, just spend as much of your waking time as reasonably possible, moving, per:

Exercise Less; Move More

For ideas on how to do that, check out…

No-Exercise Exercise!

Get thee to a kitchen

This is about getting healthy food that gives your body’s clean-up crew (the lymphatic system) an easier time of it.

Rather than trying to “eat clean” which can be a very nebulous term and it’s often not at all clear (and/or hotly debated) what counts as “clean”, instead, stick to foods that constitute an anti-inflammatory diet:

Eat To Beat Inflammation

Take care!

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❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

You, Happier: The 7 Neuroscience Secrets of Feeling Good Based on Your Brain Type – by Dr. Daniel Amen

The implicit question "what's your brain type?" makes this book sound a little like a horoscope for science-enjoyers, but really, the "brain type" in question is simply a way of expressing which neurochemicals one's brain makes most and/or least easily.

That's something that a) really does differ from one person to another b) isn't necessarily fixed forever, but will tend to remain mostly the same most of the time for most people.

And yes, the book does cover figuring out which neurotransmitter(s) it might be for you. On a secondary level, it also talks about more/less active parts of the brain for each of us, but the primary focus is on neurotransmitters.

It's easy to assume "everyone wants more [your favorite neurotransmitter here]" but in fact, most people most of the time have most of what they need.

For those of us who don't, those of us who perhaps have to work more to keep our level(s) of one or more neurotransmitters where they should be, this book is a great guide to optimizing aspects of our diet and lifestyle to compensate for what our brains might lack—potentially reducing the need to go for pharmaceutical approaches.

The style of the book is very much pop-science, but it is all well-informed and well-referenced.

Bottom line: if you sometimes (or often!) think "if only my brain would just make/acknowledge more [neurotransmitter], this book is for you.

Click here to check out You, Happier, and discover a happier you!

Wishing you a happy and healthy hump-day,

The 10almonds Team