The Ultimate Booster

Plus: the 5-minute stretching routine to stave off hip & back pain

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The 10almonds Team
April 24, 2024

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

Sleepy? Look up! Best if you’re looking up at clear blue sky with lots of sunlight, of course, but even if not, there is a sort of neurological tilt-switch that will trigger you to feel more awake 🙂

⏰ 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:

  • Vaccines are great insofar as they allow us as a population to adapt to pathogens far more quickly than we could without them (thus having a much smaller death toll in the process)

    • However, this also accelerates the “biological arms race” by which pathogens mutate, resulting in the need for endless boosters, as scientists must work around the clock “chasing strains”.

    • Today’s main feature shares the breaking news about a new kind of vaccine that can end that cycle (in our favor) with one “this one defends every strain the virus can make” shot.

  • Have you tried everything for sleep and still find yourself getting to sleep later than you’d like, and/or sleeping less soundly than you’d like?

    • Today’s sponsor Cornbread Hemp is offering 30% of their gummies that combine organic CBD with lavender, valerian, and chamomile, for a synergistic soporific effect that’ll have you peacefully snoozing in no time, guaranteed (literally, they offer a guarantee).

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

🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE

Health Beyond The Waist

One’s waistline (rather than BMI) genuinely is a good general indicator of metabolic health. But even then, body composition is still important:

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

5-Minute Stretching Routine To Stave Off Hip & Back Pain (7:09)

Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖

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❓ MYSTERY ITEM

Ancient Tech, Modern Science

Hint: 😛

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💉 MAIN FEATURE

Winning The Biological Arms Race

The human immune system (and indeed, other immune systems, but we are all humans here, after all) is in a constant state of war with pathogens, and that war is a constant biological arms race:

  • We improve our defenses and destroy the attackers; the 1% of pathogens that survived now “know” how to counter that trick.

  • The pathogens wreak havoc in our systems; the n% of us that survive now have immune systems that “know” how to counter that trick.

Vaccines are a mighty tool in our favor here, because they’re the technology that stops our n% from also being a very low number.

With vaccines, we can effectively pass on established defenses onto the population at large, as this cute video explains very well and very simply in 57 seconds:

The problem with vaccines

The problem is that this accelerates the arms race. It’s like a chess game where we are able to respond to every move quickly (which is good for us), and/but this means passing the move over to our opponent sooner.

That problem’s hard to avoid, because the alternative has always been “let people die in much larger numbers”.

Traditional vs mRNA vaccines

A quick refresher before we continue to the big news of the day:

  • Traditional vaccines use a disabled version of a pathogen to trigger an immune response that will teach the body to recognize the pathogen ready for when the full version shows up

  • mRNA vaccines use a custom-made bit of genetic information to tell the body to make its own harmless fake pathogen and then respond to the harmless fake pathogen it made.

Note: this happens independently of the host’s DNA, so no, it does not change your DNA

Here’s a more detailed explainer (with a helpful diagram) using the COVID mRNA vaccine as an example:

However, this still leaves us “chasing strains”, because as the pathogen (in this case, a virus) adapts, the vaccine has to be updated too, hence all the boosters.

This is a lot like a security update for your computer’s antivirus software. They’re annoying, but they do an important job.

No more “chasing strains”

The press conference soundbite on this sums it up well:

❝Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.❞

You may be wondering: what makes this one effective against any strain?

❝What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad.

It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.

Viruses may mutate in regions not targeted by traditional vaccines. However, we are targeting their whole genome with thousands of small RNAs. They cannot escape this.❞

Importantly, this means it can be applied not just to one disease, let alone just one strain of COVID. Rather, it can be used for a wide variety of viruses that have similar viral functions—COVID / SARS in general, including influenza, and even viruses such as dengue.

How it does this: the above article explains in more detail, but in few words: it targets tiny strings of the genome that are present in all strains of the virus.

Illustrative example: if you wanted to block 10almonds (please don’t), you could block our email address.

But if we were malicious (we’re not) we could be sneaky and change it, so you’d have to block the new one, and the cycle repeats.

But if you were block all emails containing the tiny string of characters “10almonds”, changing our email address would no longer penetrate your defenses.

Now imagine also blocking strings such as “One-Minute Book Review” and “Today’s almonds have been activated by” and other strings we use in every email.

Now multiply this by thousands of strings (because genomes are much larger than our little newsletter), and you see its effectiveness!

Great! How can I get this?

It’s still in the testing stages for now; this is “breaking news” science, after all.

The study itself

…is paywalled for now, sadly, but if you happen to have institutional access, here it is:

Take care!

YOU MAY HAVE MISSED…

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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

The Spectrum of Hope: An Optimistic and New Approach to Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias – by Dr. Gayatri Devi

We've written before about Dr. Devi's work (See: "Alzheimer’s: The Bad News And The Good") but she has plenty more to say than we could fit in an article.

The book is written for patients, family/carers, and clinicians—without getting deep into the science, which it is assumed clinicians will know. the general style of the book is pop-science, and it's more about addressing the misconceptions around Alzheimer's, rather than focusing on neurological features such as beta amyloid plaques and tau proteins and the like.

Dr. Devi explains a lot about the experience of Alzheimer's—what to expect, or rather, what to know about in advance. Because, as she explains, there are a lot of different manifestations of Alzheimer's that are all lumped under the same umbrella.

This means that a person could have negligible memory but perfect language and reasoning skills, or the other way around, or some other combination of symptoms showing up or not.

Which means that any plan for managing one's Alzheimer's needs to be adaptable and personalized, which is something Dr. Devi talks us through, too.

Bottom line: if you are a loved one has Alzheimer's, or you just like to be prepared, this is a great book to prepare anybody for just that.

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Wishing you robust health and happiness,

The 10almonds Team