Sturdy legs could mean healthy brains, according to a new study of British twins.
As I frequently have written in this column, exercise may cause robust improvements in brain health and slow age-related declinesin memory and thinking. Study after study has shown correlations between physical activity, muscular health and mental acuity, even among people who are quite old.
But these studies have limitations and one of them is that some people may be luckier than others. They may have been born to have a more robust brain than someone else. Their genes and early home environment might have influenced their brain health as much as or more than their exercise habits. Their genes and early home environment also might have influenced those exercise habits, as well as how their bodies and brains responded to exercise.
In other words, genes and environment can seriously confound experimental results.
That problem makes twins so valuable for scientific purposes. (Full disclosure, I am a twin, although not an identical one.) Twins typically share the same early home environment and many of the same genes, and if they are identical, all their genes are the same.
So if one twin's body, brain and thinking abilities begin to differ substantially over the years from the other's, the cause is less likely to be solely genetic or the early environment, and more likely to be attributable to lifestyle, including exercise habits.
More ...
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/brawn-and-brains/?
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Sunday, November 22, 2015
This diet study upends everything we thought we knew about ‘healthy’ food - The Washington Post
If you've ever tried out the latest diet fad only to find yourself gaining weight and feeling awful and wondered what you were doing wrong, scientists now have an explanation for you.
Israeli researchers, writing in the journal Cell this week, have found that different people's bodies respond to eating the same meal very differently — which means that a diet that may work wonders for your best friend may not have the same impact on you.
Lead authors Eran Segal and Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science focused on one key component used in creating balanced diet plans like Atkins, Zone or South Beach. Known as the glycemic index or GI for short, it was developed decades ago as a measure of how certain foods impact blood sugar level and has been assumed to be a fixed number.
But it's not. It turns out that it varies widely depending on the individual.
The researchers recruited 800 healthy and pre-diabetic volunteers ages 18 to 70 and collected data through health questionnaires, body measurements, blood tests, glucose monitoring and stool samples. They also had the participants input lifestyle and food intake information into a mobile app that ended up collecting information on a total of 46,898 meals they had.
Each person was asked to eat a standardized breakfast that included things like bread each morning.
They found that age and body mass index, as expected, appeared to impact blood glucose level after meals, but so did something else. Different individuals showed vastly different responses to the same food, even though their own responses remained the same day to day.
More ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/11/20/the-diet-study-that-upends-everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-healthy-food/?
Israeli researchers, writing in the journal Cell this week, have found that different people's bodies respond to eating the same meal very differently — which means that a diet that may work wonders for your best friend may not have the same impact on you.
Lead authors Eran Segal and Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science focused on one key component used in creating balanced diet plans like Atkins, Zone or South Beach. Known as the glycemic index or GI for short, it was developed decades ago as a measure of how certain foods impact blood sugar level and has been assumed to be a fixed number.
But it's not. It turns out that it varies widely depending on the individual.
The researchers recruited 800 healthy and pre-diabetic volunteers ages 18 to 70 and collected data through health questionnaires, body measurements, blood tests, glucose monitoring and stool samples. They also had the participants input lifestyle and food intake information into a mobile app that ended up collecting information on a total of 46,898 meals they had.
Each person was asked to eat a standardized breakfast that included things like bread each morning.
They found that age and body mass index, as expected, appeared to impact blood glucose level after meals, but so did something else. Different individuals showed vastly different responses to the same food, even though their own responses remained the same day to day.
More ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/11/20/the-diet-study-that-upends-everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-healthy-food/?
NYTimes: Are Good Doctors Bad for Your Health?
Pretty regularly, I receive an urgent call from a distraught friend or friend of a brother. "Zeke, Mom was at home and her heart stopped. The E.M.T.s are rushing her to XYZ hospital in Miami. Can you help me find the best cardiologist there for her?"
"Get me the best cardiologist" is our natural response to any heart problem. Unfortunately, it is probably wrong. Surprisingly, the right question is almost its exact opposite: At which hospital are all the famous, senior cardiologists away?
One of the more surprising — and genuinely scary — research papers published recently appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine. It examined 10 years of data involving tens of thousands of hospital admissions. It found that patients with acute, life-threatening cardiac conditions did better when the senior cardiologists were out of town. And this was at the best hospitals in the United States, our academic teaching hospitals. As the article concludes, high-risk patients with heart failure and cardiac arrest, hospitalized in teaching hospitals, had lower 30-day mortality when cardiologists were away from the hospital attending national cardiology meetings. And the differences were not trivial — mortality decreased by about a third for some patients when those top doctors were away.
More ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/are-good-doctors-bad-for-your-health.html?
"Get me the best cardiologist" is our natural response to any heart problem. Unfortunately, it is probably wrong. Surprisingly, the right question is almost its exact opposite: At which hospital are all the famous, senior cardiologists away?
One of the more surprising — and genuinely scary — research papers published recently appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine. It examined 10 years of data involving tens of thousands of hospital admissions. It found that patients with acute, life-threatening cardiac conditions did better when the senior cardiologists were out of town. And this was at the best hospitals in the United States, our academic teaching hospitals. As the article concludes, high-risk patients with heart failure and cardiac arrest, hospitalized in teaching hospitals, had lower 30-day mortality when cardiologists were away from the hospital attending national cardiology meetings. And the differences were not trivial — mortality decreased by about a third for some patients when those top doctors were away.
More ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/are-good-doctors-bad-for-your-health.html?
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