Take the 30-day challenge for lifelong lung health: quit smoking, improve posture, exercise, monitor air quality, avoid respiratory infections, and more.
The 10almonds Team
YouTube Channel Wellness Check is challenging us all to do the following things. They’re framing it as a 30-day challenge, but honestly, there’s nothing here that isn’t worth doing for life đ
Here’s the list:
Stop smoking (of course, smoking is bad for everything, but the lungs are one of its main areas of destruction)
Good posture (a scrunched up chest is not the lungs’ best operating conditions!)
Regular exercise (exercising your body in different ways exercises your lungs in different ways!)
Monitor air quality (some environments are much better/worse than others, but don’t underestimate household air quality threats either)
Avoid respiratory infections (shockingly, COVID is not great for your lungs, nor are various other respiratory infections available)
Check your O2 saturation levels (pulse oximeters like this one are very cheap to buy and easy to use)
Prevent mucus and phlegm from accumulating (these things are there for reasons; the top reason is trapping pathogens, allergens, and general pollutants/dust etc; once those things are trapped, we don’t want that mucus there any more!)
Check out the video itself for more detail on each of these items:
Is laziness a myth? Dr. Price dissects the true roots of “laziness” and offers practical solutions for overcoming exhaustion in work, projects, and personal relationships.
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Dr. Jenn Simmons shares vital tips on preventing cancer and inflammation, advocating for lifestyle changes and proactive health management at any age.
Get Abreast And Keep Abreast
This is Dr. Jenn Simmons. Her specialization is integrative oncology, as sheâthen a breast cancer surgeonâgot breast cancer, decided the system wasnât nearly as good from the patientsâ side of things as from the doctorsâ side, and took to educate herself, and now others, on how things can be better.
What does she want us to know?
Start now
If you have breast cancer, the best time to start adjusting your lifestyle might be 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now. We realize our readers with breast cancer (or a history thereof) probably have indeed started alreadyâall strength to you.
What this means for those of us without breast cancer (or a history therof) is: start now
Even if you donât have a genetic risk factor, even if thereâs no history of it in your family, thereâs just no reason not to start now.
Start what, you ask? Taking away its roots. And how?
Inflammation as the root of cancer
To oversimplify: cancer occurs because an accidentally immortal cell replicates and replicates and replicates and takes any nearby resources to keep on going. While science doesnât know all the details of how this happens, it is a factor of genetic mutation (itself a normal process, without which evolution would be impossible), something which in turn is accelerated by damage to the DNA. The damage to the DNA? That occurs (often as not) as a result of cellular oxidation. Cellular oxidation is far from the only genotoxic thing out there, and a lot of non-food âthis thing causes cancerâ warnings are usually about other kinds of genotoxicity. But cellular oxidation is a big one, and itâs one that we can fight vigorously with our lifestyle.
Because cellular oxidation and inflammation go hand-in-hand, reducing one tends to reduce the other. Thatâs why so often youâll see in our Research Review Monday features, a line that goes something like:
âand now for those things that usually come together: antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, and anti-agingâ
So, fight inflammation now, and have a reduced risk of a lot of other woes later.
People are told, correctly but not always helpfully, such things as:
Itâs normal to have less energy at your age
Itâs normal to have a weaker immune system at your age
Itâs normal to be at a higher risk of diabetes, heart disease, etc
âŚand many more. And these things are true! But that doesnât mean we have to settle for them.
We can be all the way over on the healthy end of the distribution curve. We can do that!
(so can everyone else, given sufficient opportunity and resources, because health is not a zero-sum game)
If weâre going to get a cancer diagnosis, then our 60s are the decade where weâre most likely to get it. Earlier than that and the risk is extant but lower; later than that and technically the risk increases, but we probably got it already in our 60s.
So, if we be younger than 60, then nowâs a good time to prepare to hit the ground running when we get there. And if we missed that chance, then again, the second-best time is now:
Of course, anything can happen to anyone at any age (alas), but this is about the benefits of living a fasting lifestyleâthat is to say, not just fasting for a 4-week health kick or something, but making it oneâs ânew normalâ and just continuing it for life.
This doesnât mean ânever eatâ, of course, but it does mean âpractice intermittent fasting, if you canââsomething that Dr. Simmons strongly advocates.
While this calls back to the previous âfight inflammationâ, it deserves its own mention here as a very specific way of fighting it.
Itâs never too late
All of the advices that go before a cancer diagnosis, continue to stand afterwards too. There is no point of âwell, I already have cancer, so whatâs the harm inâŚ?â
The harm in it after a diagnosis will be the same as the harm before. When it comes to lifestyle, preventing a cancer and preventing it from spreading are very much the same thing, which is also the same as shrinking it. Basically, if itâs anticancer, itâs anticancer, no matter whether itâs before, during, or after.
Dr. Simmons has seen too many patients get a diagnosis, and place their lives squarely in the hands of doctors, when doctors can only do so much.
Instead, Dr. Simmons recommends taking charge of your health as best you are able, today and onwards, no matter what. And that means two things:
Knowing stuff
Doing stuff
So it becomes our responsibility (and our lifeline) to educate ourselves, and take action accordingly.
Want to know more?
We recently reviewed her book, and heartily recommend it: