The Dangers Of Fires, Floods, & Having Your Hair Washed

Happy Friday 👋 

❝None of us can change the things we’ve done. But we can all change what we do next.❞ ~ Fred Johnson

In today’s email we cover some of the health risks running rampant out there right now, practical nutrition tips to level up your diet, and social prescribing for a Blue Zones lifestyle.

Hearing loss is an (avoidable, fixable) important contributing factor in cognitive decline. Today’s sponsor is offering nearly-invisible dual-processor hearing aids that separate speech from background noise, augmenting the former without raising the latter, for clarity like never before!

Recommended Reading

Watch and Learn

The Most Annoying Nutrition Tips (7 Things That Actually Work)

You can’t out-exercise a bad diet, and getting a good diet can be a challenge depending on your starting point. Here’s Cori Lefkowith’s unglamorous seven-point plan:

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

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This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between sun-dried tomatoes and carrots—the sun-drying was enough to tip the scales of nutritional balance in their favor, and so we picked the sun-dried tomatoes (click here to read about why), as did 43% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Bonus (Sponsored) Recommendation

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One-Minute Book Review

The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging – by Julia Hotz

You may recognize some of the things in the subtitle as being notable elements of the Blue Zones supercentenarians’ lifestyles, but this book looks at numerous quite diverse countries, and people from many walks of life.

What they have in common—and this is mostly a very person-centered book, relying a lot on case studies, with additional references coming from wider sociological data—is social prescribing.

What is social prescribing? That’s what the author (a journalist by general profession) answers comprehensively here, and it’s about looking at the ways medical problems can often have nonmedical solutions. It doesn’t necessarily mean that walking will cure your cancer or art will cure your diabetes, but it does mean that very often a key part of an unhealthy lifestyle is fundamentally something that can be fixed by one or more of: movement, nature, art, service, and belonging.

She looks at social prescribing in its birthplace (the UK, where cheap solutions that are nevertheless evidence-based are very much prioritized), in big countries like Canada and Australia, in aging countries like Singapore and South Korea, and yes, also in the #1 country of pill prescribing, the US.

The structure of the book is interesting, we first have 5 person-centered chapters addressing each of the social prescribing aspects and how they helped in two example case studies for each one, then 5 country-by-country epidemiological chapters looking at the big picture, then 5 person-centered chapters again, this time looking at personalizing social prescribing for oneself (this section of the book being headed “Social Prescribing For You And Me”), looking at what is going on in one’s life and health, which of the 5 elements might be missing, and what tangible goal-oriented benefits can—according to the evidence—be obtained by tending to what one actually needs in terms of social prescribing.

The style is narrative and journalistic, with very little hard science, but very little that’s wishy-washy either. It is, in short, a pleasant and informative read that helps the reader really understand social prescribing, the better to implement it in our own lives.

Bottom line: if you like having extra nonmedical approaches to avoid or alleviate medical problems, then this book will really help you achieve that.

Click here to check out The Connection Cure, and get social prescribing!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

May today see you well-prepared for the coming weekend,

The 10almonds Team