A former baker and battery manufacturer with bad knees, he didn’t begin regular exercise until he was in his 70s, and even now he trains mostly in a shed in his backyard. He started his fitness routine late in life, but now he has rowed a distance equivalent to nearly 10 times around the globe.
I was so impressed that I bought an indoor rowing machine called an “Erg.” Indoor rowing is an effective workout that builds muscle in a short amount of time. This week, reporter Teddy Amenabar and senior video journalist Whitney Shefte created a video tutorial to show you how to get started with indoor rowing. Enjoy!
What you need to know about salty gut
Many adults are consuming too much sodium without even realizing it. Most of the sodium we ingest doesn’t come from the salt we add to our food. About 70% of the salt in our diet comes from ultra-processed and packaged foods, like bread, pizza, potato chips, deli meats, canned soups, and burgers. Health officials recommend that adults limit their sodium intake to no more than 2,300 milligrams per day. This is the equivalent of one teaspoon of salt, but the average American consumes about 3,400 milligrams of sodium per day.
A fact about sodium that many people don’t know is that it can affect the health of your gut microbiome, as Eating Lab columnist Anahad O’Connor wrote this week: Eating too much salt can reduce healthy microbes in your gut and increase bad ones, reducing microbial diversity and decreasing the short-chain fatty acids produced by your gut bacteria.
One striking randomized study asked 145 adults with untreated hypertension to follow either a low-sodium diet or a regular diet for six weeks. Researchers found that when participants ate less sodium, their levels of short-chain fatty acids increased, their blood pressure decreased, and their vascular health improved compared to when they followed a high-sodium diet. The findings suggest that when fed the right diet, gut bacteria produce compounds that help lower blood pressure.
To learn more about salt and the microbiome, read the full report.
This week is Breakfast Instead of Dinner week in the Eat Voraciously newsletter. Written by Julia Turshen, Julia loves eating breakfast instead of dinner for a variety of reasons:
- If your dinner routine is feeling a bit stale, eating breakfast for dinner is a fun way to change things up.
- For parents or guardians, or anyone who cooks for children on a regular basis, serving breakfast for dinner is a great way to get kids to look forward to dinnertime.
- If you’re trying to cut down on meat, swapping dinner for breakfast is an easy way to create a hearty meal that doesn’t rely on meat. Sure, bacon, sausages, ham and smoked fish are great breakfast options, but meat is rarely the focus of breakfast like it is for dinner.
- If you’re trying to save on grocery expenses, eating breakfast instead of dinner will almost always use ingredients that are less expensive than many of the foods typically used for dinner (see meat and fish above).
So far her suggestions include mushroom and asparagus hash, banana pancakes, and a recipe for Tex-Mex Migas from Republic Cantina. Having lived in Texas for years, I was so happy to see Migas on the menu. This dish has been called the “national breakfast” of Texas and has been touted as a hangover cure. The recipe features scrambled eggs with lots of peppers, onions, pico de gallo, and cheese. It’s topped with crumbled crispy tortilla chips and creamy avocado slices and served with flour tortillas. Yummy!
Use this link to sign up for the Eat Voraciously newsletter.
Interested in a poop transplant? Here’s what you need to know.
I’ve heard that fecal microbial transplants can cure gut health issues. What does the latest science say?
Many of my patients who are desperate to overcome their gut health issues don’t mind the “discomfort” of receiving a fecal transplant.
Fecal microbial transplantation, as the treatment’s official name is, involves taking stool from one “healthy” person and transplanting it into the colon of a person with a disease. This can be done through a capsule or a more invasive procedure such as a colonoscopy.
The idea is that transplanting healthy feces into an unhealthy intestine could alleviate certain diseases, but so far our hopes have gotten ahead of the data.
I recently watched the Netflix documentary “Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut,” in which a woman with chronic intestinal symptoms makes her own laxative. In the film, she claims to have taken samples from her boyfriend and her brother. My takeaway: never try this at home.
Studies are underway to see whether fecal transplants could help treat inflammatory bowel disease, depression, obesity, and more. So far, the data on fecal transplants has only been consistently promising for certain cases of rare but very serious intestinal infections called bronchitis. Clostridium difficile. The most common side effects after a fecal transplant are Abdominal discomfortIt occurs in 13-30% of patients, but serious complications are not uncommon. review A study published in PLOS One found that 3.5% of patients died and 2.5% developed infections, though to be clear, most of these are thought to be unrelated to the treatment itself and likely due to the fact that people in these trials were already very sick.
For more information about fecal transplants, Full Column By Trisha S. Pasricha, MD.
Join us for our next live chat
We love hearing from our readers in our weekly live chat. This week we talked about new types of weight loss pills, including Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound. You can read the full conversation here.
Join me next Thursday at 1pm Eastern time as we talk about how to improve intimacy in midlife and beyond. Click on this link to send us your questions and comments.
Here are some things that brought us joy this week.
- A cat roams a university campus for four years and earns a PhD
- Dogs taking on the “put your paws in” challenge are going viral – here’s why.
- Dr Pepper is now as popular as Pepsi, but it remains somewhat of a mystery.
- Group of men runs marathon to raise money for black mental health care
Want to learn more about “joy” snacks? Columnist for Brain Matters Richard Sima explains. yesyou too Read this story as a manga.
Please let us know your thoughts. [email protected]You can also Find us on TikTokas
