You'll find in this page a high level set of health tips coming from resent state of the art research and my personal experience.
Some topics are such as physical exercise are revisited several times in different forms.
Part of my sources of information include the work of Andrew .D .Huberman , R.Sapolsky , Michael Mosley and Anna Lembke.
Stress management
Stress could be defined as a natural physiological reaction to an external stimulation that can a danger or a threat.
It involves the sympathetic nervous system who's main purpose is to mobilize enough energy to the body in order to respond to this external threat or stimuli. Any mammals including us, have this mechanism registered in his brain to be able to efficiently cope with danger occurring in the wild like being chased or chasing other animals for food.
Nowadays, especially in humans, this mechanism is triggered even if there is no immediate danger and it can stay activated for a long period of time disturbing sleep and health in general. It can be anything coming from day to day life like debts, stressful environment at work, bad or ending relationship, traumatisme from an accident, bereavement.... Those results in different kind of feelings going from angriness to helplessness, sadness, anxiety...
Some studies have shown that maintained stress over a long period of time plays a role in auto-immune diseases, increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases and promotes insulin resistance that can lead to diabetes (among other things). On the other hand being able to reduce this kind of stress or finding a way to handle it will be beneficial to anyone's health. Here are some of the thing you can do:
Physical exercise : this a a very good way to cope with stress, because it uses the energy mobilised by the sympathetic nervous system instead letting it damage your arteries through plate deposit . It also makes your body and mind stronger and more resilient to any kind of stress and enforce your immune system. There is a caveat though that sport shouldn't be over practised as it can have deleterious effect if you don't respect proper resting time. The deleterious effect includes, tiredness, more sensibility to injuries and weakened immune response.
Meditation/relaxation: Maintained stress is feed by the control of your prefrontal cortex over your body. Meditation and/or relaxation a couple of minutes a day has the effect to diminish the activity if this brain pathway and then diminish overall stress. Meditation and relaxation involve focusing your attention on your breath. For relaxation one could focus on the softening of the limbs in lying position with closed eyes. In meditation one would be in a seated position with eyes open focused on a external point. Both give the possibility to experience mindfulness which consists in learning to observe and accept your thought without judgement.
Coping: It can happen that you fell in an helplessness cycle where you nurture withdrawal into yourself. This might be because any assessment of your situation is done in an a way that you flee your problems that caused you stress. This should be avoided by facing and challenging your issues instead even if it involves drastic changes and tension in your life.
Cold exposure (through a cold shower for example). Because you voluntarily put you in a stressful situation, it will be beneficial as it improves control over mechanisms involved in the stress response mentioned above. It also secretes the hormone dopamine that plays a role in motivation and mood, but also endorphin like in any sustained physical activities. There are many other benefits including reinforcement of immune system, anti inflammatory effect and strong increase in metabolism implying burning a lot of calories. However it can have habituation and addictive effect if you do it for a long duration (>10 minutes / day and < 10 °C). Meaning that you don't get the same feeling than the first hit of cold unless you decrease the temperature or increase the time you stay in the water. Also It feels great when you do it, but if for some reason you have to stop, you can feel the lack like any drug and it can lower your mood. However, taking sometime breaks with replacements (like fasting) helps to be able to feel again the dopamine boost. Also as for any intense physical activities, when the limits of your body are pushed too hard for too long, the effects will be deleterious as mentioned before as for any prolonged stress response.
Hot exposure for example through hot shower, sauna or exercising in a warm environment, helps the body to relax and then also diminishes the stress response described above. It also can increase the production of growth hormones (improving metabolic functions) when followed by a rapid cool down (through cold shower for example) if done while having relatively low sugar level usually obtained couple of hours after eating.
Socialisation: share your issues with people that you trust and also help them when you can. It has shown to improve overall abilities to cope with stress.
Sun light / outdoor exposure: Go outside regularly on a daily basis even more if you work in an office. Your body needs sun light to regulate is biological rhythm that plays a role in stress management. It also has been shown that exposure to natural environment such as forest has a reducing effect on stress.
Drugs: Before ingesting anything to deal with your stress (this includes food), you should try naturally secreted drugs by activities mentioned above. Physical exercise works very well if you can redirect or transform your anxiety/angriness (or whatever caused you trouble) towards any form of body activities that involve burning energy (cold and hot exposure are also parts of those). The fact that you will be able to take control of your body (and not the other way around) will also be of a great help as it is part as any efficient coping mechanism. As you can imagine, most of the behaviours involving taking drugs to calm your stress down might have a deleterious effects on your health if you cannot control the quantities you ingest. This is very well known for alcohol but also for sugary foods and more generally the ones with high glycaemic indices detailed later in the eating section. Consuming sugar increases serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates mood. Not to mention that you should ingest drugs prescribed by your doctor if you have no other choice because for some reason, you didn't find a way to cope with your stress and have felt in an uncontrollable cycle of disrupted feelings.
Fasting : They're are different ways of fasting that might have different effects. Speaking about fasting from food (not water), recent studies have shown that intermittent fasting (restricting to a 8 hours window for eating each day for example 10 am to 6 pm) might enhance mood and increase the relapse-free survival rate in different forms of cancer. It can also have an irritability and anxiety effect if the fasting period is prolonged over a longer period of time. This effect could be damped if one ingests small amount of salt (NaCl) and sufficient quantity of water. One of the hormone secreted during fast is endorphin which is known to relieve from pain and improve mood.
Beliefs have an impact on your mood or your body. In other words, the placebo effect should never be neglected for its capacity as a mood enhancer. But it is also very true in the other direction where an high anxiety nurtured by a belief maintained over a long period of time might have deleterious effect on your body functions such as tiredness reduce of immune system efficacy.
Honesty: Quite often stress can come from the disconnection between our inner self and the images that we want to project of ourselves. It might take a lot of effort to maintain this image and that can be harmful. Practice telling the truth out loud and express our feelings in the most instinctive way seems to play a role in re-establishing our physiological balance.
Eating
Apart from the common knowledge that everybody should know like, not eating too much, too much sugar, fat or highly processed food, getting vitamins and minerals (especially vitamins D for those living away from the sun light), here are some others :
Try to minimize consumption of high glycaemic index (GI) food for the first thing you eat during a meal, why? High GI food means that it can easily break down in glucose and then fast to increase your blood sugar level which in turns activate your insulin response proportionally. When insulin levels are elevated, such as after consuming a high-carbohydrate meal, it promotes the storage of excess nutrients, including both carbohydrates and dietary fat, as body fat. Insulin inhibits the breakdown of stored fat (lipolysis) and encourages the uptake and storage of fatty acids in adipose tissue. However, GI is not the only important factor. Indeed, research has shown that the amount of carbohydrate you eat, rather than its GI rating, has the biggest influence on blood glucose levels after meals. A more relevant quantity will then be the glycemic load (GL) that combines the GI and the actual percentage of carbohydrates in its calculation. On a long run, if you eat too much of high GI food, you might deregulate your insulin secretion and in the worst case scenario have diabetes. Not to mention this process activates the pain-pleasure pathway that makes you crave for more high GI food by changing your gut bacteria population. Sugar is not to be banished though, and it is necessary in an balanced diet as main source for your brain, but it shouldn't be over-consumed as it is usually the case in western type food. Also if high GL is consumed after low GL food the overall glycaemic boost might be damped. One example of efficient diet with low carbohydrates intake is the Mediterranean diet mainly consisting on eating fats coming from vegetables and fishes (putting the bread aside).
More radically you can diminish the consumption of carbohydrate which includes all the sugary and starchy foods. This kind of diet is known as ketogenic and it involves that the sugar you need is mainly maid of degradation of fats that you ingest. Some of the reported benefices are weight loss, enhancement of the mood or helping with all sort of diseases such irritable bowel syndrome, auto immune or diabetes. However, this also can have side effects including increased levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, fatigue, hunger, and as such shouldn't be done without proper medical advice.
Monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats, particularly omega-3 fats are considered healthier than saturated fats and trans fats. Saturated fats are more likely to increase cholesterol levels and increase the risk of atherosclerosis when consumed in high quantity, but reasonable ingestion would not be harmful. Polyunsaturated fat are not all healthy, one should privilege the anti-inflammatory ones (e.g alpha-linolenic acid) rather than pro-inflammatory (e.g arachidonic acid). Foods derived from animals commonly contain saturated fats (except for fish that usually contains a very small amount), which tend to be solid at room temperature. Fats derived from plants commonly contain monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fatty acids, which tend to be liquid at room temperature. Palm and coconut oil are exceptions. They contain more saturated fats than other plant oils. However, coconut oil contains a unique type of medium chain saturated fat called lauric acid that research shows raises HDL or "good" cholesterol levels, which may lower overall heart disease risk. Trans fats (trans fatty acids) are a different category of fat. They are man-made, formed by adding hydrogen atoms (hydrogenation) to monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fatty acids. Fats may be partially or fully hydrogenated (or saturated with hydrogen atoms). Trans fats are now widely recognized as harmful to health due to their association with heart disease. Many countries have banned or restricted their use.
Avoid consuming food containing emulsifier. Emulsifiers are substances that help mix ingredients that do not naturally combine, such as oil and water, in processed foods. Particularly Carboxymethylcellulose (CMC, E466), Polysorbate 80 (E433) , Rhamnolipids, Sophorolipids and Carrageenans (E407) has been shown to disturbs gut microbiota equilibrium and promotes intestinal inflammation as well as deregulate the feeling of satiety. What was showed was that there was much more ‘leaky gut’ as the mucus lining was "emulsified". The passage of bacteria, but also other molecules getting through the lining, causing more inflammation.” Other emulsifier like soy lecithin have proven to have disruptive impact on in vitro gut bacteria cultures. In vitro studies can provide insights into how substances interact with gut bacteria under controlled conditions, but the results may not always reflect the real-world impact on human health. Gut microbiota disturbance is also one of the reported effects of sweeteners like sucralose, sacharine and aspartam.
Eat slowly, it takes time for the food to go down the small intestines where cells release hormones that tell your brain "I am full". That is why when you eat slow you will eat less. Also leave food on the plate when no longer angry.
Fasting have been shown to have beneficial effects on weight loss, reduction of diabetes incidence, and cholesterol mainly because it helps controlling and then diminishing your food intake. The fast activates the ketosis process mentioned above no matter what we ingested before. It can have side effects such as irritability and tiredness if you extend it for a long period and/or diminish drastically your calorie intake. Ideally it should be easy so that you can maintain your calorie intake that can easily be achieved by skipping the breakfast as it prolongs the night fast. It also can create a disequilibrium in your metabolism when the fasting is only respected for a short period of time (i.e couple of days). Ideally you want about the same amount of calories intake each day throughout the year, or you could compensate by doing more physical exercise while not fasting. The extreme case of under-eating (from what your body needs at minimum) like in anorexia has a strong deregulation effects as it suppresses the secretion of sexual hormones and weaken your body (including your skeleton) in general.
Omega 3 are good for the health. Omega 3 is made of 3 forms of fatty acids: EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid). EPA is a “marine omega-3” because it’s found in fish, DHA (docosahexaenoic acid). DHA is also a marine omega-3 found in fish, and ALA (alpha-linolenic acid). ALA is the form of omega-3 found in plants. Research has shown the most promise with a specific formulation called icosapent ethyl (a purified form of EPA). Some of the benefits include: lowering the triglyceride levels, help you by raising your HDL (good) cholesterol and lowering your blood pressure, lower your risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD). Better ways to ingest it is through the consumption of certain fishes or certain oil such as flax seed or fish oil. What's important is the ratio Omega 6 to Omega 3, it is advised that the latter should be bigger in quantity to take full advantage of the Omega 3.
High intensity physical exercises have a particular strong effect on burning calories and regulating blood pressure as it consumes sugar. Those include any activities that significantly accelerate your cardiac rhythm for example: running fast, push ups, hiking uphill, cycling fast.... Lower intensity physical activities also consume calories but at a lower rate and efficacy and then it should usually be maintained over a longer period to have the same effect. There is a caveat that is if you cannot maintain the same amount energetic expenditure (calories) on a weekly basis, you might end up put on weight unless you also diminish your calories intake.
Filter water from the tape. Whilst water quality is dependant on where you live, we can say that any process for cleaning it involves the utilisation of Disinfection Byproducts (DBPs), also called trihalomethanes. They are formed when chlorine and bromine interact with natural organic materials in water, such as in chlorinated drinking water and chlorine-treated swimming pools. Chronic exposure to DBPs may increase risk of cancer. Also leave the water rest for a certain time in a jar helps to remove some of the minerals coming from the pipes such as copper, iron. Note that not all of the minerals (like calcium and magnesium) have to be removed because they are well absorbed and good for the health.
Salt: daily salt intake (between 4 and 5.99 grams per day for salt) is considered a safe range that allows to balance the blood pressure if water is also ingested from the feeling of thirst it creates. According to this paper, lower or higher quantity would increase the probability of cardiovascular disease. This general statement apply for people with "normal" blood pressure. This might be interpreted carefully and modulated for people with too low or too high blood pressure.
Sleep
In order to get a good quality sleep, you need to respect your biological clock know as circadian rhythm.
Sun light / outdoor exposure: You can efficiently regulate your sleep by sun light exposure early in the morning and latter in the afternoon at the sunset. Whilst it is well known that Ultraviolet light (UV) can be dangerous at a certain dosage (especially UV-B and UV-C), UV-B are also a powerful mood and hormone regulator (for example it triggers sexual hormones production). Outdoor light as a strong effect on the biological clock to trigger readiness and alert mechanism in the morning that improves the immune response. It also appears that artificial light until late at night can disrupt your sleep together with caffeine and physical exercise, not to mention other drugs like alcohol or cannabis.
Physical exercise releases endorphins helping with sleep but shouldn't be done preferably before sleep because it also has an exciting effect during and shortly after it ends. Coffee is also claimed to have a good effect on the mood and energy but should be avoided late in the day.
Cold exposure in the morning (through a cold bath for example) will be beneficial to be more alert, clear and boost your energy levels. Endorphins are also released, apart from the well being effect associated, it also helps sleeping. However exposure of the head can cause constriction of the blood vessels in the nasal passages, which can lead to a sensation of stuffiness or congestion in the nose. This can make it more difficult for air to pass through the nasal passages, leading to a runny nose as the body tries to flush out the congestion and then can disrupt sleep. This is mainly due to differences of temperatures between different parts of the body and can be avoided when immersing the whole body at once.
Relaxation. Apart from the already mentioned respiration techniques, one can alternate phases of contraction (tense) and relaxation (release) of group of muscles or limbs. The phase of contraction should be shorter than the de-contraction ones. Breathing can be held on during contraction and release (free) during relaxation.
Hot exposure latter before sleeping time allows you to relax more efficiently and prepare you for a good night sleep. Hot vapour, such as steam from a hot shower or a humidifier can help to loosen mucus in the nasal passages and relieve congestion and then help for sleep if you have a runny nose.
Eating time 2 to 3 hours before sleep would help having a longer period for your body to dispose waste throughout the night.
Relaxation techniques using breathing or any other displacement of attention can enhance your sleep when done just before. For example breathing slowly and deeply and imagining a place where you remember feeling peaceful or imagining your limbs getting soft. However it is better with your eyes closed as if you focus your vision too long on an external object, it might disrupt your sleep. Listening relaxing script can also help but it is more likely to be efficient if it is adapted to your taste (voice, landscape, sensations...).
Body temperature, when it gets too high you'll be waken up. Your body temperature is supposed to drop a little bit while sleeping and rise again just before you wake up. Then, the room temperature shouldn't be too hot, 17 degrees Celsius should be enough. You also want a good blanket and being able to let your limbs out when you feel too hot. Indeed, it appears that your body temperature can be regulated through your palm hands, feets and the skin of your face.