No Carbs at Night

Contrary to popular opinion, a new study shows that athletes who avoid carbs at night not only perform better athletically but also lose more body fat.

B12 and the Brain

How the lack of the vitamin B12 can lead to mental health issues:

Animal protein foods — meat, fish, milk, cheese and eggs — are the only reliable natural dietary sources of B12, and I do get ample amounts of several in my regular diet. But now at age 75, I wonder whether I’m still able to reap the full benefit of what I ingest.

You see, the ability to absorb B12 naturally present in foods depends on the presence of adequate stomach acid, the enzyme pepsin and a gastric protein called intrinsic factor to release the vitamin from the food protein it is attached to. Only then can the vitamin be absorbed by the small intestine. As people age, acid-producing cells in the stomach may gradually cease to function, a condition called atrophic gastritis.

The Great Sugar Cover-Up

An investigative piece from The New York Times:

The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.

The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.

“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA paper.

The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.

Muscle Mass and Aging

At 67 and looking preternaturally younger, Westcott has the same body composition as when he was in his 20s: He’s only about 12 percent fat, compared to an average American man’s 28 percent.

But the key isn’t fat, it’s muscle: His central point is that loss of muscle mass -- whether through inactivity or aging or dieting -- helps lead to many of our ills, from regaining weight to developing diabetes.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, if only we’ll do a modicum of strength training — defined as any exercise that uses resistance to build muscle, from weightlifting to push-ups --  and keep doing it.

Fitness and Lifespan

Being out of shape could be more harmful to health and longevity than most people expect, according to a new, long-term study of middle-aged men. The study finds that poor physical fitness may be second only to smoking as a risk factor for premature death. 

It is not news that aerobic capacity can influence lifespan. Many past epidemiological studies have found that people with low physical fitness tend to be at high risk of premature death. Conversely, people with robust aerobic capacity are likely to have long lives. 

[...] 

The men in the group with the lowest VO2 max had a 21 percent higher risk of dying prematurely than those with middling aerobic capacity, and about a 42 percent higher risk of early death than the men who were the most fit. 

Poor fitness turned out to be unhealthier even than high blood pressure or poor cholesterol profiles, the researchers found. Highly fit men with elevated blood pressure or relatively unhealthy cholesterol profiles tended to live longer than out-of-shape men with good blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

From The New York Times

Social Genomics: Better Longevity

From The New Yorker:

In 2007, John Cacioppo, a professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago, and Steve Cole, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, among others, identified a link between loneliness and how genes express themselves. In a small study, since repeated in larger trials, they compared blood samples from six people who felt socially isolated with samples from eight who didn’t. Among the lonely participants, the function of the genome had changed in such a way that the risk of inflammatory diseases increased and antiviral response diminished. It appeared that the brains of these subjects were wired to equate loneliness with danger, and to switch the body into a defensive state. In historical and evolutionary terms, Cacioppo suggested, this reaction could be a good thing, since it helps immune cells reach infections and encourages wounds to heal. But it is no way to live. Inflammation promotes the growth of cancer cells and the development of plaque in the arteries. It leads to the disabling of brain cells, which raises susceptibility to neurodegenerative disease. In effect, according to Cole, the stress reaction requires “mortgaging our long-term health in favor of our short-term survival.” Our bodies, he concluded, are “programmed to turn misery into death.”

Why Exercise Should Train Your Coordination

Coordination should be a main objective in physical fitness and exercise. When we move in new ways, when we exert ourselves, our muscles produce a protein that creates new cells and connections in the brain that is critical for memory.

We knew working the body was good for the brain, we knew about the concept of muscle memory, but until recently they were theories, but new research is providing the proof.

Move a lot, challenge yourself, push yourself, and always move in new ways.

Exercise and Fats are "Miracle-Gro" for the Brain

In a recent study, researchers explain how exercise boosts the brain's creation of new cells, while also strengthening neural connections.

Part of the explanation was, exercises burns through the body's stores of sugar. What the brain really loves are fats and ketones.

The opposite happens to the brain when sugar stores build and the participant is inactive.