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⏰ 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:

• We cannot just say “happiness comes from within” and ignore outside factors, but in the long-term, happiness (or unhappiness) can be strongly influenced by our daily habits—and those, we can control (see today’s video for a top-10 list of such habits)

• Gastroenterologist-gastronomist Dr. Saliha Mahmood-Ahmed has advice for us, including:

  • Cook from scratch (we have evolved to eat cooked food; we haven’t evolved to eat ready-meals—yet!)

  • Prioritize gut health—as a gastroenterologist, she may be biased, but there’s a solid case for it! (see today’s main feature for a how-to)

  • Instead of calorie-counting, consider a more positive approach to diet, such as adding in one new fruit or vegetable per shopping trip!

• Verb Energy are offering high protein, low sugar snack bars at a very good price (and are today’s sponsor!)

• It is possible—and desirable—to optimize a couple of hours per day for peak cognitive performance (see today’s One-Minute Book Review for details)

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

10 Habits of Consistently Happy People

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

Key ideas:

1. 1:08 They maintain an optimistic outlook

2. 1:58 They don't compare themselves to others

3. 2:38 They exercise gratitude

4. 3:17 They engage the world with kindness

5. 3:53 They maintain active friendships

6. 4:47 They learn to cope

7. 5:25 They are able to forgive

8. 6:06 They pursue goals

9. 6:47 They have an active lifestyle

10. 7:45 They cultivate their inner self

🍽 MAIN FEATURE

Three Critical Kitchen Prescriptions

This is Dr. Saliha Mahmood-Ahmed. She's a medical doctor—specifically, a gastroenterologist. She’s also a chef, and winner of the BBC's MasterChef competition. So, from her gastroenterology day-job and her culinary calling, she has some expert insights to share on eating well!

Dr. Mahmood-Ahmed’s 3 “Kitchen Prescriptions”

They are:

1. Cook, cook, cook

2. Feed your gut bugs

3. Do not diet

Let’s take a look at each of those…

Cook, cook, cook

We’re the only species on Earth that cooks food. An easy knee-jerk response might be to think maybe we shouldn’t, then, but… We’ve been doing it for at least 30,000 years, which is about 1,500 generations, while a mere 100 generations is generally sufficient for small evolutionary changes. So, we’ve evolved this way now.

More importantly in this context: we, ourselves, should cook our own food, at least per household.

Not ready meals; we haven’t evolved for those (yet! Give it another few hundred generations maybe)

Feed your gut bugs

The friendly ones. Enjoy prebiotics, probiotics, and plenty of fiber—and then be mindful of what else you do or don’t eat. Feeding the friendly bacteria while starving the unfriendly ones may seem like a tricky task, but it actually can be quite easily understood and implemented. We did a main feature about this a few weeks ago:

Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)

Do not diet

Dr. Mahmood-Ahmed is a strong critic of calorie-counting as a weight-loss strategy:

Rather than focusing on the number of calories consumed, try focusing on introducing enough variety of food into your daily diet, and on fostering good microbial diversity within your gut.

It’s a conceptual shift from restrictive weight loss, to prescriptive adding of things to one’s diet, with fostering diversity of microbiota as a top priority.

This, too, she recommends be undertaken gently, though—making small, piecemeal, but sustainable improvements. Nobody can reasonably incorporate, say, 30 new fruits and vegetables into one’s diet in a week; it’s unrealistic, and more importantly, it’s unsustainable.

Instead, consider just adding one new fruit or vegetable per shopping trip!

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

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Verb Energy are tasty energy bars that…

• Are high protein, low sugar

  • (they even have a <2g sugar option!)

• Contain 80mg caffeine from organic green tea

  • (so about as much caffeine as an espresso)

There’s a wide variety of flavors, from cookie dough to caramel macchiato, s’mores to chocolate sea salt—see their shop for full list of flavors!

As for price, they do various deals, but to give you an idea, they’re typically just a little over a dollar per bar—so, cheaper than the much more sugary energy bars in your local supermarket!

Click Here To Check Out Verb Energy Bars!

(Psst, use code “STACK” to enjoy 30% off)

🌏 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Obesity undermines COVID-19 vaccines

• Human DNA is everywhere. That's a boon for science, and an ethical quagmire

• Cough syrup can be dangerous for kids, even deadly. Here's why

• Weight loss leads to an increase in skeletal muscle mitochondrial energy production efficiency

• Toxic contaminant in water linked to increase in Parkinson's risk

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done - by Dr. Josh Davis

The brain is an amazing and powerful organ, with theoretically unlimited potential in some respects. So why doesn't it feel that way a lot of the time?

The truth is that not only are we often tired, dehydrated, or facing other obvious physiological challenges to peak brain health, but also... We're simply not making the best use of it!

What Dr. Davis does is outline for us how we can create the conditions for "two awesome hours" of effective mental performance by:

• Recognizing when to most effectively flip the switch on our automatic thinking

• Scheduling tasks based on their “processing demand” and recovery time

• Learning how to direct attention, rather than avoid distractions

• Feeding and moving our bodies in ways that prep us for success

• Identifying what matters in our environment to be at the top of our mental game

Why only two hours? Why not four, or eight, or more?

Well, our brains need recovery time too, so we can't be "always on" and operating and peak efficiency. But, what we can do is optimize a couple of hours for absolute peak efficiency, and then enjoy the rest of time with lower cognitive-load activities.

Bottom line: if the idea of what you could accomplish if you could just be guaranteed two schedulable hours (your preference when!) of peak cognitive performance per day, then this is a great book for you.

Get your copy of "Two Awesome Hours" from Amazon today!

Wishing you a happy and healthy day today and always,

The 10almonds Team