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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:

• Figuring out what macronutrient balance is best can be very confusing, especially with a lot of conflicting information out there, often from equally reliable-sounding sources

  • Today’s main feature looks into what we need, what things aren’t negotiable and what things give us quite some room for flexibility in our preferences.

• At 10almonds, we know our readers love free things, and convenience.

  • Today’s sponsor, Brad’s Deals, is a free service that offers many price reductions when shopping on Amazon. Check it out; you can thank us later!

• Today’s featured book is about many small science-backed interventions to improve health 5 minutes at a time.

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

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

How Internal Organs Can Be Affected By Spicy Foods (Doctor Explains)

Capsaicin has an array of health-giving properties in moderation, but consumed in immoderation and/or without building up tolerance first, can cause problems—serious health issues such as heart attacks, brain spasms, torn esophagus, and even death can occur:

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

Q&A Thursday

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝I want to learn more about macros. Can you cover that topic?❞

That’s a little broader than we usually go for, given the amount of space we have, but let’s give it a go!

Macronutrients, or “macros”, are the nutrients that we typically measure in grams rather than milligrams or micrograms, and are:

• Carbohydrates

  • …and what kinds, of which usually the focus is on how much is sugars as opposed to more complex carbs that take longer to break down. See also: Should You Go Light Or Heavy On Carbs?

  • …and of the sugars, the interested may further categorize them into sucrose, fructose, etc. See also: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?

• Proteins

  • …of which, the amino acid make-up is generally considered a matter of micronutrients. See also: Protein: How Much Do We Need, Really?

• Fats

  • …and what kinds, i.e. monounsaturated vs polyunsaturated vs saturated. See also: Saturated Fat: What’s The Truth?

  • …and then the interested may further categorize them for their fatty acids / triglycerides profile, etc. See also: What Omega-3 Fatty Acids Really Do For Us

• Fiber

  • …which often gets ignored by people counting macros, as “stuff that doesn’t do anything”, despite it in fact being very important for health. See also: Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)

• Water

  • …which again tends to get disregarded but is very arguably a critical macronutrient. See also: Busting The Myth of “Eight Glasses Of Water A Day”

In terms of how much we need of each, you can read more in the above-linked articles, but:

• General scientific consensus is we need plenty of fiber (30 or 40g per day is good) and water (highly dependent on climate and activity), and there’s a clear minimum requisite for protein (usually put at around 1g of protein per day per 1kg of body weight).

• There is vigorous debate in the general health community about what the best ratio of carbs to fat is.

The reality is that humans are quite an adaptable species, and while we absolutely do need at least some of both (carbohydrates and fats), we can play around with the ratios quite a bit, provided we don’t get too extreme about it.

While some influence is social and often centered around weight loss (see for example keto which seeks to minimize carbs, and volumetrics, which seeks maximise volume-to-calorie ratio, which de facto tends to minimize fats), some of what drives us to lean one way or the other will be genetics, too—dependent on what our ancestors ate more or less of.

Writer’s example: my ancestors could not grow much grain (or crops in general) where they were, so they got more energy from such foods as whale and seal fat (with protein coming more from reindeer). Now, biology is not destiny, and I personally enjoy a vegan diet, but my genes are probably why I am driven to get most of my daily calories from fat (of which, a lot of fatty nuts (don’t tell almonds, but I prefer walnuts and cashews) and healthy oils such as olive oil, avocado oil, and coconut oil).

However! About that adaptability. Provided we make changes slowly, we can usually adjust our diet to whatever we want it to be, including whether we get our energy more from carbs or fats. The reason we need to make changes slowly is because our gut needs time to adjust. For example, if your vegan writer here were to eat her ancestrally-favored foods now, I’d be very ill, because my gut microbiome has no idea what to do with animal products anymore, no matter what genes I have. In contrast, if an enthusiastic enjoyer of a meat-heavy diet were to switch to my fiber-rich diet overnight, they’d be very ill.

So: follow your natural inclinations, make any desired changes slowly, and if in doubt, it’s hard to go wrong with enjoying carbs and fats in moderation.

Learn more: Intuitive Eating Might Not Be What You Think

Take care!

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This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between passion fruit and pomegranate—we picked the passion fruit (click here to read about why), as did just 12% 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

Feel Better In 5: Your Daily Plan to Feel Great for Life – by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

We’ve featured Dr. Rangan Chatterjee before, and here’s a great book of his.

The premise is a realistic twist on a classic, the classic being “such-and-such, in just 5 minutes per day!”

In this case, Dr. Chatterjee offers many lifestyle interventions that each take just 5 minutes, with the idea that you implement 3 of them per day (your choice which and when), and thus gradually build up healthy habits. Of course, once things take as habits, you’ll start adding in more, and before you know it, half your lifestyle has changed for the better.

Which, you may be thinking “my lifestyle’s not that bad”, but if you improve the health outcomes of, say, 20 areas of your life by just a few percent each, you know much better health that adds up to? We’ll give you a clue: it doesn’t add up, it compounds, because each improves the other too, for no part of the body works entirely in isolation.

And Dr. Chatterjee does tackle the body systematically, by the way; interventions for the gut, heart, brain, and so on.

As for what these interventions look like; it is very varied. One might be a physical exercise; another, a mental exercise; another, a “make this health 5-minute thing in the kitchen”, etc, etc.

Bottom line: this is the most supremely easy of easy-ins to healthier living, whatever your starting point—because even if you’re doing half of these interventions, chances are you aren’t doing the other half, and the idea is to pick and choose how and when you adopt them in any case, just picking three 5-minute interventions each day with no restrictions. In short, a lot of value to had here when it comes to real changes to one’s serious measurable health.

Click here to check out Feel Better In 5, and indeed feel better in 5!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you the very best of health in every way, every day,

The 10almonds Team