When Science Brings Hope

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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:

• There’s a lot of bad news out there at present, including in the field of healthcare

  • Today’s main feature brings some some good news from the world of health science, including some actionable things to do!

• 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, this is a great opportunity!

• Today’s featured book goes into depth and detail about the neurophysiology of nutrition and mental health, and what can be done about it.

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

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

6 Kinds Of Drinks That Hasten Dementia

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Friday’s Health News Round-Up

When Science Brings Hope

There’s a lot of bad news out there at present, including in the field of healthcare. So as some measure of respite from that, here’s some good news from the world of health science, including some actionable things to do:

Run for your life! Or casually meander for your life; that’s fine too.

Those who enjoy the equivalent of an average of 160mins slow (3mph) walking per day also enjoy the greatest healthspan. Now, there may be an element of two-way causality here (moving more means we live longer, but also, sometimes people move less because of having crippling disabilities, which are themselves not great for healthspan, as well as having the knock-on effect of reducing movement, and so such conditions yield and anti-longevity double-whammy), but for any who are able to, increasing the amount of time per day spend moving, ultimately results (on average) in a lot of extra days in life that we’ll then get to spend moving.

Depending on how active or not you are already, every extra 1 hour walked could add two hours and 49 minutes to life expectancy:

Read in full: Americans over 40 could live extra 5 years if they were all as active as top 25% of population, modeling study suggests

Related: The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less & Move More

Re-teaching your brain to heal itself

Cancer is often difficult to treat, and brain tumors can be amongst the most difficult with which to contend. Not only is everything in there very delicate, but also it’s the hardest place in the body to get at—not just surgically, but even chemically, because of the blood-brain barrier. To make matters worse, brain tumors such as glioblastoma weaken the function of T-cells (whose job it is to eliminate the cancer) by prolonged exposure.

Research has found a way to restore the responsiveness of these T-cells to immune checkpoint inhibitors, allowing them to go about their cancer-killing activities unimpeded:

Read in full: New possibilities for treating intractable brain tumors unveiled

Related: 5 Ways To Beat Cancer (And Other Diseases)

Here’s to your good health!

GLP-1 receptor agonists, originally developed to fight diabetes and now enjoying popularity as weight loss adjuvants, work in large part by cutting down food cravings by interfering with the chemical messaging about such.

As a bonus, it seems that they also can reduce alcohol cravings, especially by targetting the brain’s reward center; this was based on a large review of studies looking at how GLP-1RA use affects alcohol use, alcohol-related health problems, hospital visits, and brain reactions to alcohol cues:

Read in full: Diabetes medication may be effective in helping people drink less alcohol, research finds

Related: How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol

Take care!

Our Sponsors Make This Publication Possible

The Evidence Is Clearer Than Most People’s Skin

Red light therapy for the skin? You may be wondering how the evidence stacks up for it, and (as we’ve written about previously at 10almonds), this one’s well-established and not remotely controversial; it measurably works, for example (to pick one study out of many similar ones with similar results):

Read in full: A Controlled Trial to Determine the Efficacy of Red and Near-Infrared Light Treatment in Patient Satisfaction, Reduction of Fine Lines, Wrinkles, Skin Roughness, and Intradermal Collagen Density Increase

See also: Table 3

👆table of results from a clinical trial with the same kind of technology. All metrics measured (complexion, feeling, roughness, collagen intensity, and wrinkles) improved significantly compared to control.

Note, with regard to RLT and ELT, these are overlapping bands, of which Bon Charge’s red light at 630nm and near infrared light at 850nm covers two of the best-performing wavelengths.

10 mins 3x per week is enough to see noticeable results, so give it a try!

Best of all, Bon Charge’s Black Friday sale (25% off, applied automatically at checkout, no need for a code) starts tomorrow:

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 celery and rhubarb—we picked the rhubarb (click here to read about why), as did 56% 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— remember it starts tomorrow, so you might want to bookmark it now!

One-Minute Book Review

Unprocessed: How the Food We Eat Is Fuelling Our Mental Health Crisis – by Kimberly Wilson

First, what this is not: hundreds of pages to say “eat less processed food”. That is, of course, also advisable (and indeed, is advised in the book too), but there’s a lot more going on here too.

Though not a doctor, the author is a psychologist who brings a lot of data to the table, especially when it comes to the neurophysiology at hand, what forgotten micronutrients many people are lacking, and what trends in society worsen these deficiencies in the population at large.

If you only care about the broadest of take-away advice, it is: eat a diet that’s mostly minimally processed plants and some oily fish, watch out for certain deficiencies in particular, and increase dietary intake of them where necessary (with taking supplements as a respectable next-best remedy).

On which note, a point of criticism is that there’s some incorrect information about veganism and brain health; she mentions that DHA is only found in fish (in fact, fish get it from algae, which has it, and is the basis of many vegan omega-3 supplements), and the B12 is found only in animals (also found in yeast, which is not an animal, as well as various bacteria in soil, and farm animals get their B12 from supplements these days anyway, so it is arguable that we could keep things simpler by just cutting out the middlecow).

However, the strength of this book really is in the delivery of understanding about why certain things matter. If you’re told “such-and-such is good for the brain”, you’ll up your intake for 1–60 days, depending on whether you bought a supermarket item or ordered a batch of supplements. And then you’ll forget, until 6–12 months later, and you’ll do it again. On the other hand, if you understand how something is good or bad for the brain, what it does (for good or ill) on a cellular level, the chemistry and neurophysiology at hand, you’ll make new habits for life.

The style is middle-range pop-science; by this we mean there are tables of data and some long words that are difficult to pronounce, but also it’s not just hard science throughout—there’s (as one might expect from an author who is a psychologist) a lot about the psychology and sociology of why many people make poor dietary decisions, and the things governments often do (or omit doing) that affect this adversely—and how we can avoid those traps as individuals (unless we be incarcerated or such).

As an aside, the author is British, so governmental examples are mostly UK-based, but it doesn’t take a lot to mentally measure that against what the governments of, for example, the US or Canada do the same or differently.

Bottom line: there’s a lot of great information about brain health here; the strongest parts are whether the author stays within her field (psychology encompasses such diverse topics as neurophysiology and aspects of sociology, but not microbiology, for example). If you want to learn about the physiology of brain health and enjoy quite a sociopolitical ride along the way, this one’s a good one for that.

Click here to check out Unprocessed, and make the best choices for you!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

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

The 10almonds Team