Osteoarthritis Of The Knee

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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:

• There are two common causes to a protruding belly in someone with low body fat, and today’s featured video gives three ways of fixing that

  • This is, by the way, not purely cosmetic, as it pertains to keeping the organs in the right place!

• Omega-3 fatty acids have a lot of health benefits—including for joints and for the brain—but not all sources are created equal

  • Today's sponsor, NativePath, are offering a convenient, sustainable, and highly bioavailable form—far better than cod liver oil!

• High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) has benefits in the long-term as well as the short-term; it adds healthy life-years!

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

🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Fix Protruding Belly In Three Steps (3:46)

This may seem purely cosmetic, but it’s not—core strength includes keeping your organs in the correct place. In this very short video, Igor explains the two causes and three solutions that will achieve what sit-ups never will:

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🥣 RECIPES WORTH SHARING

Nutritious Chocolate Banana Buckwheat Porridge

This one’s from Sadia at Pick Up Limes. Perfect for breakfast or even an evening treat, frankly this could pass for a dessert. And it is so full of healthy ingredients!

_{For all those who asked for more text-based recipes… Enjoy!}

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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝Very informative thank you. And made me think. I am a 72 yr old white 🇨🇦 woman, have never used ( or even been offered) HRT since menopause ~15 yrs ago. Now I’m wondering if it would have delayed the onset of osteoarthritis ( knee) and give me more energy in general. And is it wise to start taking hrt after being without those hormones for so long?❞

(this was in response to our article about menopausal HRT)

Thanks for writing! To answer your first question, obviously we can never know for sure now, but it certainly is possible, per for example a large-ish (n=1003) study of women aged 45–64, in which:

• Those with HRT were significantly less likely to have knee arthritis than those without

• However, to enjoy this benefit depended on continued use (those who used it for a bit and then stopped did not enjoy the same results)

• While it made a big difference to knee arthritis, it made only a small (but still beneficial) difference to wrist/hand arthritis.

We could hypothesize that this is because the mechanism of action is more about strengthening the bones (proofing against osteoporosis is one of the main reasons many people take HRT) and cartilage than it is against inflammation directly.

Since the knee is load-bearing and the hand/wrist joints usually are not, this would mean the HRT strengthening the bones makes a big difference to the “wear and tear” aspect of potential osteoarthritis of the knee, but not the same level of benefit for the hand/wrist, which is less about wear and tear and more about inflammatory factors. But that latter, about it being load-bearing, is just this writer’s hypothesis as to why the big difference.

The researchers do mention:

What is clear though, is that it does indeed appear to have a protective effect against osteoarthritis of the knee.

With regard to the timing, the researchers do note:

You can read the study here:

Is hormone replacement therapy protective for hand and knee osteoarthritis in women?: The Chingford Study

On whether it is worth it now…

Again, do speak with an endocrinologist because your situation may vary, but:

• hormones are simply messengers, and your body categorically will respond to those messages regardless of age, or time elapsed without having received such a message. Whether it will repair all damage done is another matter entirely, but it would take a biological miracle for it to have no effect at all.

• anecdotally, many women do enjoy life-changing benefits upon starting HRT at your age and older!

(We don’t like to rely on “anecdotally”, but we couldn’t find studies isolating according to “length of time since menopause”—we’ll keep an eye out and if we find something in the future, we’ll mention it!)

Meanwhile, take care!

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We turn the tables and ask you a question…

We’ll then talk about this tomorrow:

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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Fast Exercise: The simple secret of high intensity training: get fitter, stronger and better toned in just a few minutes a day – by Dr. Michael Mosley & Peta Bee

We've written before about the benefits of High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), but there's more to say than we can fit in a short article!

Dr. Michael Mosley, who hates exercise but knows his stuff when it comes to the benefits, teamed up with Peta Bee, who loves exercise and is a science journalist with degrees in sports science and nutrition, to bring us this book.

In it, we learn a lot about:

• the science of HIIT

• what makes it so different from most kinds of exercise

• exactly what benefits one can expect

…in a very detailed clinical fashion (while still remaining very readable).

By "very detailed clinical fashion", here we mean "one minute of this kind of exercise this many times per week over this period of time will give this many extra healthy life-years", for example, along with lots of research to back numbers, and explanations of the mechanisms of action (e.g. reducing inflammatory biomarkers of aging, increasing cellular apoptosis, improving cardiometabolic stats for reduced CVD risk, and many things)

There's also time/space given over to exactly what to do and how to do it, giving enough options to suit personal tastes/circumstances.

Bottom line: if you'd like to make your exercise work a lot harder for you while you spend a lot less time working out, then this book will help you do just that!

Click here to check out Fast Exercise, and enjoy the benefits!

Wishing you a happy and healthy day today and every day,

The 10almonds Team