Leaded Or Unleaded Drinks?

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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:

• This week in health news sees some pretty varied topics, but here we present for you, the good, the bad, and the vigorously debated:

  • Today’s main feature covers how gut health can have a big impact on stroke recovery, why there’s lead in a lot of cinnamon products, and what’s going on with assisted dying laws.

• Red light therapy is uncontroversially effective at improving many metrics of skin health (e.g. complexion, feeling, roughness, collagen intensity, and wrinkles); we’ve written about this before at 10almonds.

  • Today’s sponsor, Bon Charge, is offering a Black Friday discount on its red light therapy range, including their flagship red light therapy masks—if you were thinking of getting one, now’s your last chance while the sale is still on!

• Today’s featured book comes with 50 ways to rewire your anxious brain!

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

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

How Does Fat Actually Leave The Body? Where Does It Go?

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

Friday’s Health News Round-Up

Leaded Or Unleaded Drinks?

This week in health news sees some pretty varied topics, but here we present for you, the good, the bad, and the vigorously debated:

One more reason to care about the gut-brain axis

Stroke is a top killer in much of the industrialized world, usually making it into the top-few list on a per-country basis. And, it’s rising in prevalence, too. This is partly because our longevity is increasing so age-related things kill us more often, statistically, than age-unrelated things. But that’s only part of the reason; another is that our lifestyle (on the national level) is becoming more conducive to stroke. Diet is a large contributor to that, and gut health has now been identified as a key factor.

What recent research has shown is that minutes after a stroke occurs, normal gut anatomy is disrupted, and cells responsible for gut barrier integrity are eroded, and bugs from the gut get into the blood, and arrive at the (newly damaged) brain vasculature, where the blood-brain barrier is often also compromised on account of the stroke.

Because of this, critical to reducing post-stroke neuroinflammation (something that makes stroke damage more severe and recovery a lot harder) is improving the gut’s ability to heal itself quickly.

This can be helped with a dose of Insulin-like Growth Factor (IGF-1), but there are other things that can help or hinder, and those other things are modifiable by us as individuals in our lifestyle choices (e.g. a gut-healthy diet with plenty of fiber, and avoiding gut-unhealthy things like sugar and alcohol that feed C. albicans growths that will put roots through your intestines and make holes as they do), because the better/worse your gut barrier integrity is to start with, the easier/harder it will be for your gut to repair itself quickly:

Read in full: Healing the gut can reduce long-term impact of stroke

Related: Stop Sabotaging Your Gut

How about that seasonal lead-spiced hot drink?

Lead contamination in ground spices has become a bit of an issue, ground turmeric has had quite some flak in this regard, and now the spotlight is on cinnamon.

These reports, by the way, do not specify what kind of cinnamon (i.e. cassia vs Ceylon), however, clicking through to assorted sources and then doing our own digging finds that all cinnamon products we found listed as contaminated, were cassia cinnamon. This is unsurprising, as a) it’s cheaper b) it’s the kind most readily found on shelves in the US. That said, when it comes to Ceylon (sweet) cinnamon, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so that doesn’t mean they got the all-clear on lead contamination, but rather, that they haven’t received the same scrutiny as yet.

It’s worth noting that cinnamon sticks have been found to have less contamination than ground cinnamon, though.

It’s also worth noting that since some adulterated products have had lead added deliberately in increase the weight and darken the color, this is more likely to happen to cassia cinnamon than sweet cinnamon because cassia cinnamon is visibly darker, so adding a darkening agent to sweet cinnamon would just make it look like cassia (which no seller would want to do since cassia is the cheaper of the two).

Read in full: Why lead-tainted cinnamon products have turned up on shelves, and what questions consumers should ask ← you can see which specific brands scored well or badly if you click on the third link in that article

Related: Sweet Cinnamon vs Regular Cinnamon – Which is Healthier? ← this also covers toxicity issues, by the way

A matter of life and death

Assisted dying is currently legal in 10/40 US states, and Canada. Over in the UK, it’s being debated (and voted on) in Parliament today, at time of writing.

While bodily autonomy discussions are usually quite straightforward arguments between the very separate camps of

• “my body, my choice” vs

• “they shouldn’t be allowed to do that”,

…this one comes with a considerable middleground, because

• “people should have to right to end things without extra suffering and on their own terms”, and

• “many disabled people fear being placed in a position of having justify why they are not exercising their right to die when it might be cheaper and easier for others if they did”

…are positions with a lot of potential overlap.

In any case, we know most of our readers are in the US, but with a 10/40 split in US states (and some recent controversies in Canada), it’s likely a topic that’ll come up for most people at some point, so it’s good to understand it, and this is as good an opportunity as any:

Read in full: How would the assisted dying bill work and what issues might it create?

Related: Managing Your Mortality ← this talks about psychological/social considerations, as well as end-of-life care, palliative care (which is not quite the same thing!) and euthanasia in various forms, including the unofficial kind that you might want to be aware of if you want to avoid that happening.

Take care!

Our Sponsors Make This Publication Possible

Black Friday Sale Ends Soon

If you’ve been thinking “yes, that red light therapy sounds great, I’ll get one of those”, then now is your chance to do so before Bon Charge’s Black Friday sale (25% off, applied automatically at checkout, no need for a code) ends soon!

To recap: red light therapy is a very uncontroversially well-evidenced way to rejuvenate skin in terms of smoothness, firmness, softness, and collagen density—all measurable in RCTs, and the results are clear: it works.

We’ve only so much room to explain the science here, so instead we’ll mention that we at 10almonds did a main feature about this technology back in April, examining its claims; you can read that here—just remember to come back to actually get yours!

We recommend doing that now if you possibly can, not later, because this sale will end soon, and we don’t want you to miss out:

Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between cashews and peanuts—we picked the peanuts (click here to read about why), as did just 22% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Bonus (Sponsored) Recommendation

About that Black Friday sale on the red light therapy kit—it ends very soon, so you might want to grab yours now while the discount is still on!

One-Minute Book Review

50 Ways To Rewire Your Anxious Brain: How to Use the Neuroscience of Fear to End Anxiety, Panic, and Worry – by Dr. Catherine Pittman & Dr. Maha Zayed-Hoffman

The book is divided into sections:

1. Calming the amygdala

2. Rewiring the amygdala

3. Calming the cortex

4. Resisting cortex traps

…each with a dozen or so ways to do exactly what it says in the title: rewire your anxious brain.

The authors take the stance that since our brain is changing all the time, we might as well choose the direction we prefer. They then set out to provide the tools for the lay reader to do that, and (in that fourth section we mentioned) how to avoid accidentally doing the opposite, no matter how tempting doing the opposite may be.

For a book written by two PhD scientists where a large portion of it is about neuroscience, the style is very light pop science (just a few in-line citations every few pages, where they couldn’t resist the urge), and the focus is on being useful to the reader throughout. This all makes for reassuringly science-based but accessibly readable book.

The fact that the main material comes in the form of 50 very short chapters also makes it a lot more readable for those for whom sitting down to read a lot at a time can be off-putting.

Bottom line: if you experience anxiety and would like to experience it less, this book will guide you through how to get there.

Click here to check out 50 Ways To Rewire Your Anxious Brain, and rewire your anxious brain!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

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

The 10almonds Team