Winter Wellness & The Pills That Increase Your Alzheimer’s Risk

Happy Friday 👋 

Are you a night owl or a morning lark? Evolution has divided us into distinct chronotypes (before industrialization, it was beneficial to the species), but on average, it’s the morning people who live longer and more healthily. So if you can, get earlier nights and earlier mornings!

In today’s email we cover winter wellness & Alzheimer’s risk, spine health, and vitamers.

Hearing loss is an (avoidable, fixable) important contributing factor in cognitive decline. Today’s sponsor is offering nearly-invisible dual-processor hearing aids that separate speech from background noise, augmenting the former without raising the latter, for clarity like never before!

Recommended Reading

Watch and Learn

Correct An Upper Spine Hump (Simple Stretch & Exercise)

Called a neck hump in this video, it can be in the cervical (neck) vertebrae or it can be in the thoracic (upper back) vertebrae. It’s also known as a dowager's hump, buffalo hump, or kyphosis.

However, it can be fixed:

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

Our Sponsors Make This Publication Possible

The Tiny Hearing Device that Turns Noise Into Clarity!

Most hearing aids have one processor. These bad boys have two. They process speech and noise separately.

What does this mean? It means speech gets clearer and crisper—more than ever before. Conversations and listening become effortless. Oh, and they’re so tiny, they’re practically invisible.

No wonder over 425,000 customers love them.

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 chickpeas and mung beans—we picked the chickpeas (click here to read about why), as did 80% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Bonus (Sponsored) Recommendation

Meal planning makes life easier—and you deserve that! Knowing what’s for dinner every night can feel like a small victory in a chaotic week. With Plan to Eat, you can streamline your meal planning, feel prepared, and it only takes a few minutes!

One-Minute Book Review

Your Vitamins are Obsolete: The Vitamer Revolution: A Program for Healthy Living and Healthy Longevity – by Dr. Sheldon Zablow

First, what this is not: a book to tell you “throw out your vitamins and just eat these foods”.

This book focuses mainly on two vitamins in which deficiencies are common especially as we get older: B9 and B12.

So, what does the title mean? It’s not so much that your vitamins are obsolete—that would imply that they were more useful previously, which is not the case. Rather, the most common forms of vitamins B9 and B12 provided in supplements are folic acid and cyanocobalamin, respectively, which as he demonstrates with extensive research to back up his claims, cannot be easily absorbed or used especially well.

About those vitamers: a vitamer is simply a form of a vitamin—most vitamins we need can arrive in a variety of forms. In the case of vitamins B9 and B12, he advocates for ditching vitamers folic acid and cyanocobalamin, cheap as they are, and springing for bioactive vitamers L-methylfolate, methylcobalamin, and adenosylcobalamin.

He also discusses (again, just as well-evidenced as the above things) why we might struggle to get enough from our diet after a certain age. For example, if trying to get these vitamins from meat, 50% of people over 50 cannot manufacture enough stomach acid to break down that protein to release the vitamins.

And as for methyl-B12 vitamers, you might expect you can get those from meat, and technically you can, but they don’t occur in all animals, just in one kind of animal. Specifically, the kind that has the largest brain-to-body ratio. However, eating the meat of this animal can result in protein folding errors in general and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease in particular, so the author does not recommend eating humans, however nutritionally convenient that would be.

All this means that supplementation after a certain age really can be a sensible way to do it—but do it wisely, and pick the right vitamers.

The style of the book is informationally dense, but very readable even for a layperson provided one starts at the beginning and reads forwards, as otherwise one will find oneself in a mire of terms whose explanations one missed when they were first introduced.

Bottom line: if you are over 50 and/or have any known or suspected issues with vitamins B9 and/or B12, this book becomes very important reading.

Click here to check out Your Vitamins Are Obsolete, and get your body what it needs!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

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

The 10almonds Team