In Plain English...

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s Key Learnings:

Flying by? Here are some key take-away ideas from today’s newsletter:

• Regular stretching is important! Three weeks in January and then another two in June will not do what even just 5 minutes a day can do.

• Additives in foods and medications can be confusing

• If it ends in -ose it’s a sugar, but sucralose doesn’t behave like it, and gets treated by the body as a dietary fiber instead!

• St. John’s Wort interacts badly with a LOT of medications, including many common antidepressants, birth control pills, and heart medications. Scroll down for more details!

• An eye examination may be used to help identify Alzheimer’s and Alzheimer’s risk

• We want YOU! …to send us ads for health- and productivity related products and services that you’d like us to look into, examine their claims, and break stuff down.

• Calisthenics has many health benefits and can be a very respectable complete home workout without expensive gym equipment (scroll down to learn of some of the benefits)

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Stretch Daily! Here’s Why…

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

Key points:

• 3:12 - What is Fascia?

• 4:46 - Fascial Adhesion

• 7:09 - The Mystery of Back Pain

• 8:33 - Moisture Within Fascia

• 10:22 - What Can We Do? Move.

❓ MAIN FEATURE

It’s Q&A Time!

This is the bit whereby each week, we respond to subscriber questions/requests/etc 😎

Have something you’d like to ask us, or ask us to look into? Hit reply to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom, and a Real Human™ will be glad to read it!

Q: Love to have someone research all the additives in our medicines, (risk of birth control and breast cancer) and what goes in all of our food and beverages. So much info out there, but there are so many variations, you never know who to believe.

That’s a great idea! There are a lot of medicines and food and beverages out there, so that’s quite a broad brief, but! We could well do a breakdown of very common additives, and demystify them, sorting them into good/bad/neutral, e.g:

• Ascorbic acid—Good! This is Vitamin C

• Acetic acid—Neutral! This is vinegar

• Acetylsalicylic acid—Good or Bad! This is aspirin (a painkiller and blood-thinning agent, can be good for you or can cause more problems than it solves, depending on your personal medical situation. If in doubt, check with your doctor)

• Acesulfame K—Generally Neutral! This is a sweetener that the body can’t metabolize, so it’s also not a source of potassium (despite containing potassium) and will generally do nothing. Unless you have an allergy to it, which is rare but is a thing.

• Sucralose—Neutral! This is technically a sugar (as is anything ending in -ose), but the body can’t metabolize it and processes it as a dietary fiber instead. We’d list it as good for that reason, but honestly, we doubt you’re eating enough sucralose to make a noticeable difference to your daily fiber intake.

• Sucrose—Bad! This is just plain sugar

Sometimes words that sound the same can ring alarm bells when they need not, for example there’s a big difference between:

• Potassium iodide (a good source of potassium and iodine)

• Potassium cyanide (the famous poison; 300mg will kill you; half that dose will probably kill you)

• Cyanocobalamine (Vitamin B12)

Let us know if there are particular additives (or particular medications) you’d like us to look at!

While for legal reasons we cannot give medical advice, talking about common contraindications (e.g., it’s generally advised to not take this with that, as one will stop the other from working, etc) is definitely something we could do.

For example! St. John’s Wort, very popular as a herbal mood-brightener, is on the list of contraindications for so many medications, including:

• Antidepressants

• Birth control pills

• Cyclosporine, which prevents the body from rejecting transplanted organs

• Some heart medications, including digoxin and ivabradine

• Some HIV drugs, including indinavir and nevirapine

• Some cancer medications, including irinotecan and imatinib

• Warfarin, an anticoagulant (blood thinner)

• Certain statins, including simvastatin

Q: As I am a retired nurse, I am always interested in new medical technology and new ways of diagnosing. I have recently heard of using the eyes to diagnose Alzheimer’s. When I did some research I didn't find too much. I am thinking the information may be too new or I wasn't on the right sites.

(this is in response to last week’s piece on lutein, eyes, and brain health)

We’d readily bet that the diagnostic criteria has to do with recording low levels of lutein in the eye (discernible by a visual examination of macular pigment optical density), and relying on the correlation between this and incidence of Alzheimer’s, but we’ve not seen it as a hard diagnostic tool as yet either—we’ll do some digging and let you know what we find! In the meantime, we note that the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (which may be of interest to you, if you’re not already subscribed) is onto this:

Read: Cognitive Function and Its Relationship with Macular Pigment Optical Density and Serum Concentrations of its Constituent Carotenoids 

See also:

• Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (mixture of free and paid content)

• Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Reports (open access—all content is free)

Q: As to specific health topics, I would love to see someone address all these Instagram ads targeted to women that claim "You only need to 'balance your hormones' to lose weight, get ripped, etc." What does this mean? Which hormones are they all talking about? They all seem to be selling a workout program and/or supplements or something similar, as they are ads, after all. Is there any science behind this stuff or is it mostly hot air, as I suspect?

Thank you for asking this, as your question prompted yesterday’s main feature, What Does “Balancing Your Hormones” Even Mean?

That’s a great suggestion also about addressing ads (and goes for health-related things in general, not just hormonal stuff) and examining their claims, what they mean, how they work (if they work!), and what’s “technically true but may be misleading* cause confusion”

*We don’t want companies to sue us, of course.

Only, we’re going to need your help for this one, subscribers!

See, here at 10almonds we practice what we preach. We limit screen time, we focus on our work when working, and simply put, we don’t see as many ads as our thousands of subscribers do. Also, ads tend to be targeted to the individual, and often vary from country to country, so chances are good that we’re not seeing the same ads that you’re seeing.

So, how about we pull together as a bit of a 10almonds community project?

• Step 1: add our email address to your contacts list, if you haven’t already

• Step 2: When you see an ad you’re curious about, select “share” (there is usually an option to share ads, but if not, feel free to screenshot or such)

• Step 3: Send the ad to us by email

We’ll do the rest! Whenever we have enough ads to review, we’ll do a special on the topic.

We will categorically not be able to do this without you, so please do join in—Many thanks in advance!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Calisthenics for Beginners - by Matt Schifferle

For those who are curious to take up calisthenics, for its famed benefit to many kinds of health, this is a great starter-book.

First, what kind of benefits can we expect? Lots, but most critically:

• Greater mobility (as a wide range of movements is practiced, some of them stretchy)

• Cardiovascular fitness (calisthenics can be performed as a form of High Intensity Impact Training, HIIT)

• Improved muscle-tone (because these are bodyweight strength-training exercises—have you seen a gymnast's body?)

• Denser bones (strong muscles can't be built on weak bones, so the body compensates by strengthening them)

A lot of the other benefits stem from those, ranging from reduced risk of stroke, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, etc, to improved mood, more energy, better sleep, and generally all things that come with a decent, rounded, exercise regime.

Schifferle explains not just the exercises, but also the principles, so that we understand what we're doing and why. Understanding improves motivation, adherence, and—often—form. Exercise diagrams are clear, and have active muscle-groups highlighted and color-coded for extra clarity.

As well as explaining exercises individually, he includes three programs, increasing in intensity. He also offers adjustments to make exercises easier or more challenging, depending on the current condition of your body.

The book's not without its limitations—it may be a little male-centric for some readers, for instance—but all in all, it's a very strong introduction to calisthenics... Enough to get anyone up and running, so to speak!

Get started with "Calisthenics for Beginners" from Amazon today!

May your road ahead be clear,

The 10almonds Team