Category: health

The magical thing eating chocolate does to your brain

In the mid 1970s, psychologist Merrill Elias began tracking the cognitive abilities of more than a thousand people in the state of New York. The goal was fairly specific: to observe the relationship between people’s blood pressure and brain performance. And for decades he did just that, eventually expanding the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study (MSLS) to observe other cardiovascular risk factors, including diabetes, obesity, and smoking. There was never an inkling that his research would lead to any sort of discovery about chocolate.

And yet, 40 years later, it seems to have done just that.

Washington Post

The bizarre story of one of the world’s first modern vegetarians — and how his diet made him an outcast from society

Over two thousand years ago, there was a man who could walk on water and heal the sick. He was a man of inner serenity and great wisdom; he was even said to have died and then reincarnated. His name was Pythagoras.

Kids today learn about Pythagoras in school because of his theorem on right-angeled triangles: you may still recall the equation a² + b² = c². Pythagoras was also the first to suggest that Earth is round and that the light of the moon is reflected.

But there was more to his life’s work than math and astronomy—although walking on water was likely not among his real achievements, just the stuff of legends. People said Pythagoras looked striking: He was very tall and handsome. “God-like,” some said. There was even a rumor that he was actually the son of Apollo and the grandson of Zeus himself. What also made him stand out was the way he dressed: he wore white robes and pants, an unusual style, since practically no one in Greece of the sixth century BCE dressed in trousers. 

Yet his looks and his choice of fashion were not the reason why he became something of an outsider and a laughingstock for many comedy writers. The reason—or at least one of them—was his diet.

Business Insider

Can changing your mealtimes make you healthier?

Many people want to eat more healthily but find it difficult to change their diet. So what happened when Michael Mosley altered not what he ate, but when he ate?

We’ve known for some time that altering the time at which you eat can affect your weight and metabolism. At least if you are a mouse.

Based on mice studies, it seems the secret to improving your health is to restrict the time window within which you eat, and by doing so extend the amount of time you go without food.

A few years ago Prof Satchidananda Panda, from the world-famous Salk Institute in California, showed that mice fed on a high-fat diet, but only allowed to eat within an eight-hour window, were healthier and slimmer than mice that were given exactly the same food but allowed to eat it whenever they wanted.

BBC.com

Why (almost) everything you know about food is wrong

There was a time, in the distant past, when studying nutrition was a relatively simple science.

In 1747, a Scottish doctor named James Lind wanted to figure out why so many sailors got scurvy, a disease that leaves sufferers exhausted and anemic, with bloody gums and missing teeth. So Lind took 12 scurvy patients and ran the first modern clinical trial.

The sailors were divided into six groups, each given a different treatment. The men who ate oranges and lemons eventually recovered — a striking result that pointed to vitamin C deficiency as the culprit.

This sort of nutritional puzzle solving was common in the pre-industrial era. Many of troubling diseases of the day, such as scurvy, pellagra, anemia, and goiter, were due to some sort of deficiency in the diet. Doctors could develop hypotheses and run experiments until they figured out what was missing in people’s foods. Puzzle solved.

Unfortunately, studying nutrition is no longer that simple. By the 20th century, medicine had mostly fixed scurvy and goiter and other diseases of deficiency. In developed countries, these scourges are no longer an issue for most people.

Today, our greatest health problems relate to overeating. People are consuming too many calories and too much low-quality food, bringing on chronic diseases like cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

Vox.com

A neuroscientist says there’s a powerful benefit to exercise that is rarely discussed

The immediate effects of exercise on my mood and thought process proved to be a powerful motivational tool. And as a neuroscientist and workout devotee, I’ve come to believe that these neurological benefits could have profound implications for how we live, learn and age as a society.

Let’s start with one of the most practical immediate benefits of breaking a sweat: exercise combats stress. Exercise is a powerful way to combat feelings of stress because it causes immediate increases in levels of key neurotransmitters, including serotonin, noradrenalin, dopamine and endorphins, that are often depleted by anxiety and depression. That’s why going for a run or spending 30 minutes on the elliptical can boost our moods immediately—combatting the negative feelings we often associate with chronic stressors we deal with every day.

qz.com

Junk food is tricking your brain: The depressing science behind your binging

Eating for the sake of pleasure, rather than survival, is nothing new. But only in the past several years have researchers come to understand deeply how certain foods—particularly fats and sweets—actually change brain chemistry in a way that drives some people to overconsume.

Scientists have a relatively new name for such cravings: hedonic hunger, a powerful desire for food in the absence of any need for it; the yearning we experience when our stomach is full but our brain is still ravenous. And a growing number of experts now argue that hedonic hunger is one of the primary contributors to surging obesity rates in developed countries worldwide, particularly in the U.S., where scrumptious desserts and mouthwatering junk foods are cheap and plentiful.

Salon

The Necessity of Football

Nigerian-born pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu published his controversial paper in the journal Neurosurgery on the brain of Mike Webster, the Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs, who died in 2002. Omalu is the subject of both a recent book and film that share the same blunt title: Concussion. The book, by Jeanne Marie Laskas, expands on her reporting in the 2009 GQ exposé “Game Brain.” (The film, which stars Will Smith as Omalu, will be released by Sony Pictures this Christmas.) Omalu’s article described in detail his discovery that chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), an impact-based head trauma, was killing football players and other athletes who suffered repeated blows to the head. Three doctors with the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee wrote a letter to the editors of Neuroscience alleging Omalu had misunderstood his own findings. But even as the NFL tried to bury his breakthrough, the doctor continued to accumulate data on what head trauma did to the brains of athletes until a former neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers who had known Webster called Omalu to tell him he believed him. As Laskas wrote in GQ, “It was the first time anyone who ever had anything to do with the NFL had validated Omalu’s work.”

New Republic

Sleep study on modern-day hunter-gatherers dispels notion that we’re wired to need 8 hours a day

Modern life’s sleep troubles — the chronic bleary-eyed state that many of us live in — have long been blamed on our industrial society. The city lights, long work hours, commutes, caffeine, the Internet. When talking about the miserable state of our ability to get enough rest, sleep researchers have had a tendency to hark back to a simpler time when humans were able to fully recharge by sleeping and waking to the rhythms of the sun.

It turns out that may not be quite right. In fact, it now appears that our ancestors may not have been getting the doctor-recommended eight hours of sleep, either.

Washington Post