The Benefits of Napping

Tired? Time for a quick power nap!



Just keep it under a half-hour, mmmkay?

 [Source: AsapSCIENCE]

A Sip of Soda

Not surprisingly, this infographic doesn't paint a very pretty picture of soda drinking.

(Click for full image)

Still want to hold onto your 2-liter bottle of root beer? Here's another infographic about soda consumption.

[Source: Bits & Pieces]

As Seen on TV

Michelle and the boys were on the local news tonight, which prompted Owen to ask if he's now a considered a "movie star."

Uh, no. Not quite.

Michelle's interview with Dr. Kim Mulvihill was shot when we were down in Texas for the Paleo FX conference back in March. Then, last month, more footage was shot at our house (before it got flooded).

I'm super-proud of my better half and her blog -- but more than anything else, this video makes me wistful for a functioning kitchen and a home that isn't wrecked.

(By the way, this video's just the latest segment on the "caveman diet" that San Francisco's CBS affiliate has produced. Check out the other videos here, and stay tuned for two more segments this week about the Paleo lifestyle.)

"It's Just a Soft Drink."

Correlation ain't the same as causation, but I can't really blame folks for thinking that drinking two gallons of Coke each day had a little something to do with 30-year-old Natasha Marie Harris's heart attack death.

Harris' partner, Chris Hodgkinson, testified at the inquest that Harris drank between 8 and 10 liters -- 2.1 and 2.6 gallons -- of regular Coke every day, according to the Associated Press. 

"The first thing she would do in the morning was have a drink of Coke and the last thing she would do in the day was have a drink of Coke by her bed," Hodgkinson said. "She was addicted to Coke." 

Harris reportedly had some other unhealthy habits. Hodgkinson said she ate little and smoked about 30 cigarettes a day. In the months before her death, she experienced blood pressure problems and lacked energy, he said.

A pathologist testified that Harris's death was caused in part by severe hypokalemia -- a lack of potassium in the blood.

Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency medicine physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, told HealthPop that drinking too much soda can cause hypokalemia because of several factors, one of which is called "fructose induced osmotic diarrhea." Too much fructose and sugar may lead to diarrhea and during diarrhea the body loses potassium. 

What's more, Glatter said, sugar stimulates insulin release which also drives potassium into the body's cells, causing potassium levels in the bloodstream to fall. Then there's the caffeine, which is known as a "beta-agonist," that also drives potassium into cells and away from the blood. 

"So you're getting a double whammy from caffeine as well as the sugar," Glatter told HealthPop. "You're drinking three to nine liters a day of this stuff, you're going to have significant issues." 

"I never thought about it," Hodgskinson told the Herald of soda making Harris ill. "It's just a soft-drink, just like drinking water.

Not quite. Pro tip: You know what's just like drinking water? DRINKING WATER.

[Source]

Sleep or Die: The Infographic

Hey, visual learners: Click here to check out this new infographic by the folks at In Good Measure about the importance of sleep.

[Source]

[Previously: Sleep or Die]

Sleep Like A Caveman?

Over at Conditioning Research, Chris Highcock recently posted about "Paleo Sleep" and a fascinating (albeit twelve-year-old) study of how hunter-gatherers  sleep. Some of the sweeping conclusions about "instinctive" sleeping postures seem a bit too rigid and not particularly applicable to those of us who sleep indoors ("Tribal people do not like lying on the ground in the recovery position while wearing no clothes as the penis dangles in the dust and can get bitten by insects"), but the conclusions offer a lot of food for thought:

• Forest dwellers and nomads suffer fewer musculoskeletal lesions than “civilised” people;

• Nature's automatic manipulator during sleep is the kickback against the vertebrae by the ribs when the chest is prevented from movement by the forest floor;

• Various resting postures correct different joints;

• Pillows are not necessary.

The researchers point to anecdotal evidence that "low back pain and joint stiffness is markedly reduced by adopting natural sleeping and resting postures," and call for more observation and research in this area. This study's a dozen years old, so I wonder what the latest research has to say about optimal sleep postures.

Personally, I've slept on the ground (and hardwood floors) before, and can't say I loved the experience. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to give up sleeping in a bed...but then again, I once said the same thing about eating pizza.

Vegan Bodybuilding?

Our buddy Kevin pointed me to a recent piece in The New York Times about vegan bodybuilders. According to the article, the website veganbodybuilding.com has "more than 5,000 registered users," and vegan bodybuilders have been a "steady, small presence" in the International Natural Bodybuilding Association for years.

This is fascinating. Bodybuilding's not my thing, so I can't profess much knowledge about bodybuilders' diets -- but developing muscle on a vegan diet can't be easy.

“Is it possible to be a good bodybuilder and be a vegan? Yes,” said Jose Antonio, the chief executive of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. “But is it ideal? No.” 

Vegan bodybuilders may face challenges getting sufficient amino acids, found in meats, Antonio said, adding that although protein can be found in vegetables and nuts, they must be consumed in greater quantities to get the same amount as their counterparts in meat. “The amount of rice and beans you need to eat would fill up a Mexican restaurant,” he said. 

Other nutritionists and bodybuilders have argued that a disciplined vegan diet, consisting of things like hemp-based protein supplements, peanut butter, nuts, vegetables and legumes, can yield similar, if not better, results than a meat- or dairy-filled diet. Carefully monitored, vegans can get the same amount of protein with less fat or toxins, they argue. (For a midafternoon snack, [bodybuilder Jimi] Sitko sometimes eats 10 bananas.)

What? Rice? Beans? Peanut butter? And just how does eating 10 bananas provide a bodybuilder with "the same amount of protein with less fat or toxins"?

Of course, there are a good number of athletic folks who say they're thriving on vegan diets (see, e.g., the Old Spice Guy, Mike Tyson, elite ultrarunner Scott Jurek, the folks in the vegan and vegetarian CrossFitters' Facebook group, etc.). While I'm sure many of them choose veganism primarily due to ethical or environmental beliefs (which I won't bother to address again here, other than to point to Lierre Keith's book) -- some also attribute their fitness and athletic successes to veganism itself. But isn't it just as likely (if not more) that these athletes have accomplished their physical achievements despite their veganism? I wonder how much better they'd perform if they started eating some animals.

On the plus side: More meat for me, I guess.

No More Sugarcoating

The Georgia Children’s Health Alliance is running an ad campaign against childhood obesity called Strong4Life, which recently ignited a firestorm of controversy.



The print ads depict glum-looking overweight kids with captions like "He has his father's eyes, his laugh, and maybe even his diabetes," "Fat kids become fat adults," and "Fat prevention begins at home. And the buffet line."

And the videos in the ad campaign are equally stark and in-your-face, like this one:

Some folks have reacted with outrage, arguing that the ads will backfire because they "might actually make people feel worse" about being overweight. (This quote's from Marsha Davis, child obesity prevention researcher from the University of Georgia’s College of Public Health.)

As the L.A. Times pointed out, the Strong4Life Facebook page is filled with comments from horrified parents like this one:

"Horrible! As a 42 year old woman who struggled with anorexia as a teen and now a mother of a 6 year old girl who is taller and thicker than the average children her age and gets picked on by all ages including adults with inappropriate comments you have no idea obviously of the damage this will do with the ad. You will hurt more than you help. Self esteem is built with smiles and no pointing."

Others say that the ad campaign fails to offer any solutions -- other than to shame kids into losing weight.



But the Strong4Life campaign has responded with cold, hard statistics. Children are getting fatter -- and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one-third of American kids today are overweight or obese. Georgia ranks second in the U.S. for childhood obesity, with over 1 million overweight kids.

Strong4Life's position is that the fight against childhood obesity needs to start with awareness. As Linda Matzigkeit, senior vice president of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “We felt like we needed a very arresting, abrupt campaign that said: ‘Hey, Georgia! Wake up. This is a problem."

The organization’s research found that 50 percent of people surveyed didn’t recognize childhood obesity as a problem. What’s more, 75 percent of parents with overweight kids didn’t acknowledge their child as having a weight issue. 

I agree that an awareness campaign isn't enough -- pointing out a problem does no good without offering concrete solutions. But as a first step, perhaps a cold splash of water in the face is exactly what's needed here. After all, the whole "self esteem is built with smiles" thing clearly isn't working.

Then again, without parents injecting their kids with mega-doses of self-esteem, we'd be bereft of awesome reality shows that feature pint-sized beauty queens from Georgia:

The video above is kind of scary-awesome. (Emphasis on "scary.") My favorite line: "A dolla makes me holla, honey-boo-boo!"

What say you? Are these ads unduly harsh and cruel? Or just what the doctor ordered?

The Single Best Thing We Can Do For Our Health?

A fun and engaging video about the benefits of exercise:



Still, I'd argue that sleep is paramount...

[Source]

This Is Not Okay

Yesterday, M showed me this tweet by @SFoodie, the food blog run by SF Weekly:

This made me want to reach into the Internet and throttle the writer for: (1) poor reading comprehension skills, (2) sloppy reporting, and (3) irresponsibly handing people a "science-based" excuse for ignoring a potentially life-threatening health problem.

Let's be perfectly clear: The study referenced in the tweet DOES NOT SAY THAT BEING FAT IS HEALTHY.

The real story? Canadian researchers looked at whether people with high Body Mass Index (BMI) scores are uniformly at high risk for an early death. To test this, they looked at a bunch of people they classified as "obese" BASED ON THE SUBJECTS' BMI SCORES, ranked their health according to the Edmonton Obesity Staging System (EOSS), and compared mortality rates. A subject with an EOSS score of 0 was one who showed no problematic symptoms, while a person with a score of 4 (the highest possible score) was one with severe chronic diseases and disabilities.

The conclusion? Not all folks with high BMIs are at risk of early death.

This is not rocket science, folks. A high BMI tells you absolutely nothing about the state of a person's body composition or health. A muscle-bound person with little body fat might have a very high BMI and a flabby "skinny fat" smoker might have a "normal" one, but it doesn't mean that the former is obese any more than it means that Michael Jackson was a super-healthy fella. Body mass should not be mistaken for body fat. And while the researchers (unfortunately) used "high BMI" interchangeably with "obesity," let's be real: When most people think about obesity, the dictionary definition comes to mind -- and it's all about "excessive accumulation and storage of fat in the body."

Take elite CrossFit firebreather Rob Orlando. His BMI is above 29, which puts him in borderline "obese" territory. But does he look fat to you? Would you use the word "obese" to describe him?



Let's face it: BMIs are completely useless as an indicator of health. And in fact, this is precisely what the Canadian researchers were seeking to show. As a recent CNN article pointed out, "[t]he main question was whether BMI alone could determine who dies early, said Dr. Arya Sharma, the lead author [of the study]." Unsurprisingly, the answer was "no." (Duh.)

You wouldn't know it from the articles written about the study, though. SF Weekly's article, for example, looks like this:

That's right: "[Y]ou can have your cake, eat it, and, um, have some more."

And this wasn't an outlier. Other "respectable" publications wrote headlines like:

• "Being Obese Not Necessarily Bad" (Toronto Sun)

• "Obese And Healthy: Not All Overweight People Need To Worry" (The Huffington Post)

• "Study: It's Okay to be Fat" (Voice of America)

• "Study: Obese People Live as Long as Slimmer People" (WebMD).

• "Obesity Police Busted? Study Says Fat Folks Can Be Healthy"(CBS News)

Similarly, Facebook and Twitter lit up with further distortions of the study's conclusions:

No one's going to spend even a minute on Google to track down the original study. They're not going to hear that BMIs are bunk. But they will take away the message that "being fat can be GOOD for you" -- so why worry?



P.S.: WTF, Barry Sears?

Nurses: Pass on the Freebies

In the immediate wake of Star Wars Day and Cinco de Mayo, it may have escaped your notice that today was National Nurses Day. But don’t fret: National Nurses Week runs through May 12, so go celebrate by giving your favorite nurse a high five.

But once your excitement dies down a bit, stop for a moment to ponder the slings and arrows our nurses endure to help keep us healthy -- including irregular hours, night-shift work, physically and mentally draining responsibilities, and lack of sleep. (Two of our mighty 5 a.m. crew members are nurses, and I'm amazed at how they’re able to blast through CrossFit workouts before heading to the hospital for their shifts.)

All of this excess cortisol is taking its toll on the nursing profession as a whole. In May of 2008, the Journal of American Academy of Nurse Practitioners published a study of “the incidence of overweight and obesity in nursing professionals,” and found that 54 percent of the five thousand nurses surveyed were clinically obese or overweight. More than half of these nurses also stated that they “lack the motivation to make lifestyle changes” despite their excess weight.

Thankfully, Sprinkles Cupcakes, Dunkin’ Donuts and Cinnabon are here to save the day.

According to its Twitter feed, Sprinkles handed out free cupcakes to nurses today.

On Monday, Dunkin’ Donuts is delivering thousands of free donuts to hospitals AND giving away sweet, sweet beverages to nurses.

Cinnabon’s even more generous, offering free sugar bombs to our nation’s nurses all week long.

Did you notice that only purveyors of sugary, grain-based desserts are "celebrating" Nurses Week by giving away their products to nursing professionals? Is it just a coincidence that the manufacturers of the #1 source of calories in the Standard American Diet are trying to shovel their evil concoctions into the mouths of our health professionals?

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I suspect that these junk food peddlers know exactly what they're doing. It's no accident that they've decided to target an industry full of people whose high stress levels have triggered insatiable sugar cravings: They know full well that  nurses are particularly susceptible to sugar binges due to their elevated cortisol levels. And so these companies have decided to leverage Nurses Week as an excuse to distribute free samples and get more folks hooked on their dietary crack.

Well played, sugar-pushers. Well played.

[Previously: Cupcakes are Evil]

Ready for Anything

What exactly is "fitness," and what does it look like?

Surprisingly, there's no universally agreed-upon definition of the word. Dictionaries are no help; most tautologically call it “being fit.” (Some dictionaries also define the term to mean “good health or physical condition,” but this doesn’t ring true to me; after all, “health” really only describes a state in which there’s an absence of illness or physical decline.)

In “Body by Science,” Doug McGuff and John Little use the word “fitness” to mean “the bodily state of being physiologically capable of handling challenges that exist above a resting threshold of activity.” Under this definition, fitness is the ability to engage in physical challenges -- a definition I can get behind.

CrossFit, of course, has its own definition, which incorporates three separate but related standards:

• Proficiency -- through training -- in each of ten general physical skills: cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy;

• Competency in all three metabolic pathways for physical activity: phosphagenic, glycolytic, and oxidative.

• The ability to perform well -- compared to others -- at any and all physical tasks, including unfamiliar and unforeseen ones.

In sum, it's about the ability to tackle "work capacity across broad time, modal, and age domains."

What do these definitions share? An emphasis on one’s ability to use his or her body to DO STUFF.

They're silent, though, about what fitness looks like. And with good reason: We all know that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Just ‘cause someone looks the part doesn’t mean they can actually deliver the goods.

Still, as an article in today's edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer points out, “many of us wrongly associate fitness with a certain look or physical trait.”

"Many people look at [fitness] magazine covers and think that's what they're supposed to look like," says Heather Nettle, an exercise physiologist at the Cleveland Clinic's Sports Health Center.

Fitness models, however, often can’t do the very activities they’re hired to demonstrate. As Slate Magazine’s Josh Levin wrote:

Every booker has a story about a [fitness] model who looked the part but couldn't do a squat, or a guy who lied about his max bench press. It can be especially challenging to find women who can do pull-ups. In some cases, a trainer holds the model up, then runs away quickly so the photographer can snap a shot before she falls.

Contrast that with 26-year-old Jillian Neimeister of CrossFit Cleveland, who was profiled in the Plain Dealer article:

At 5 feet 5 inches and 170 pounds, the former rugby player doesn't have the lean, sculpted look of an athlete or a stereotypically "fit" physique. Her body mass index (BMI, a measurement of the relationship between weight and height) falls at the upper end of overweight, just a hairbreadth from obese.

But anyone who saw Neimeister in action would undoubtedly describe her as fit and athletic. At a recent CrossFit fitness competition, Neimeister blew away even the most ripped of competitors by dead-lifting 345 pounds and doing 27 pull-ups. Last year, she ably completed a half-marathon run with only minimal training.

"I don't feel obese," says Neimeister. "I feel fit. I do get jokes about having a big butt. I'm not a small girl. But I know I could probably beat anyone. I can go out and do whatever I need."

Fitness isn’t about being stick-thin -- it’s about being able to “perform a broad variety of tasks”:

To be fit, in other words, you don't need to be skinny or buff so much as healthy and able to perform a broad variety of tasks. You can also be more fit in one category than another.

Most professional football players, for instance, would fail the weight test instantly. No one questions their fitness, though, because they're so obviously athletic and muscular. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the trim person who never exercises and whose body composition is in fact highly fatty.

"There is such a thing as a skinny fat person," Nettle says. "Looks can be deceiving."

A while back, Krista Scott-Dixon of Stumptuous posted a link to awe-inspiring photographs of elite male and female athletes who look nothing like the fitness models in most magazines. The photos show a wide spectrum of sizes and shapes -- but the one constant is the confidence visible in their faces. As Scott-Dixon wrote: “These are folks who know their bodies have the power to do things -- which is what ‘fitness’ truly is.”

Hear, hear.

[Source]

Sleep Your Way to the Top

Sleeplessness is not a sign of virility.



(Source: Bootcamp Fitness)

No Shortage of Obese Binge-Drinking Women in the U.S.

According to news reports, American women are in a state of "unsatisfactory" health.

More women are binge drinking, saying they downed five or more drinks at a single occasion in the past month, and fewer are being screened for cervical cancer. Over all, more women are obese, diabetic and hypertensive than just a few years ago, and more are testing positive for chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease linked to infertility.

In other words, women are getting to be just as drunk, fat, and STD-ridden as men.

(Source: New York Times, Gawker)

You're Not Too Old for Intense Exercise

A fascinating read in this weekend's New York Times Magazine about aging and exercise:

[Muscle physiologist Tanja] Taivassalo first met [Olga] Kotelko at last year’s world outdoor masters track championships in Lahti, Finland, the pinnacle of the competitive season for older tracksters. Taivassalo went to watch her dad compete in the marathon. But she could hardly fail to notice the 91-year-old Canadian, bespandexed and elfin, who was knocking off world record after world record.

Amazing stuff. Intense exercise appears to be help Kotelko keep performing at a level that (much) younger peers can't.

The Diseases of Civilization

I enjoyed this essay by Kevin Patterson in Maisonneuve, which lends support to Paleo/Primal approaches to nutrition, and also echoes points raised in Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories." (Taubes, by the way, has a new book out next month -- "Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It" -- his long-awaited follow-up for laymen that focuses less on the science of metabolic pathways and more on practical approaches to weight maintenance.)

The gist of Taubes' argument, which Patterson reinforces: Pre-agricultural societies -- even those that subsisted primarily on dietary fat -- didn't develop diseases of metabolic derangement like diabetes, obesity and cancer until they were introduced to all the crap (read: sugar, refined carbohydrates, etc.) offered by Western civilization.

[W]e talked about diabetes among the Pacific Islanders. I told him that the world’s highest prevalence was in Nauru, west of Samoa. Essentially one huge guano deposit, the island has been strip-mined until every vestige of the traditional fishing and taro economy vanished beneath seacans full of Spam, pornography, beer and television sets. Fifty percent of adults have frank diabetes. Among the oldest, an incredible 78 percent. This in a people who, prior to World War II, were lithe fishermen and farmers among whom the disease was unknown. Rule number one: don’t sell your island out from underneath your own feet.

The same process is underway across the Pacific, where the most acculturated islands have the highest rates of obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes. In 2001 I worked in Saipan, which is American soil in the Northern Marianas. The indigenous Chamorro, numbering just over sixty-two thousand, were in an awful state. The dialysis population, all of whose kidneys had failed due to diabetes, was growing at 18 percent per year—doubling every three and half years. The miracle of compound interest would have half the population on dialysis within a generation or two. (The other half, presumably, would find thriving careers as nephrologists.) 

These are the same people Spaniards described as swimming through the ocean like seals to meet their ships, climbing aboard glistening and smiling. Here, and in narratives by other European Pacific explorers, we see a people defined by their incredible capacity for movement—in this instance, through the sea.

Not anymore.

(Image: Melissa Gruntkosky)

Coffee, Tea or Me?

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to gradually phase out my caffeine intake, but it’s been a spectacular failure.

I was actually doing okay for a few days. Despite getting up before dawn and the soporific effects of my long, boring commute, I fastidiously avoided coffee and Diet Coke. Until today.

Today started with a particularly brutal workout, and after getting ready for work, I had back-to-back meetings pretty much from 8 a.m. until now. I’m dead tired, and not looking forward to battling the bumper-to-bumper traffic back home. Before I knew it, I was down in the company café, cradling a big-ass caffeinated beverage.

I guzzled it before my brain even registered any guilt. And I feel better.

But it got me thinking: What exactly does caffeine do to us? Does it impact physical performance, fitness or weight loss?

The “experts” are all over the place on this one.

Some believe that caffeine is an unmitigated disaster. They point out that when caffeine is consumed, it wreaks havoc on your system by:

• Triggering the production of adrenaline, giving you a temporary spike in energy (but causing you to crash later);
• Inhibiting the body’s absorption of adenosine, a hormone that calms your body;
• Increasing your body’s levels of cortisol – the “stress hormone” – which can sabotage your weight loss and other health goals;
• Increasing your dopamine levels, making you physically dependent on the substance.

Mark Sisson has sounded the alarm as well:

As a stimulant, caffeine offers the temporary benefits of improved concentration, enhanced memory and an extra bit of energy. However, this “heightened” state has some unappealing physical effects as well. Obviously, there are the proverbial caffeine jitters and, for a few people who are either caffeine sensitive or who regularly overindulgence, even heart flutterings. But there’s more. Recent caffeine consumption can reduce blood flow to the heart during exercise.

And, apparently, some of us are “slow caffeine metabolizers” (who knew?). Being part of this crowd and partaking of caffeine, some research shows, puts us at increased risk for non-fatal heart attacks. Caffeine has been shown to also raise blood sugar levels in those with type 2 diabetes.

Additionally, caffeine induces heartburn in many people. Given that prescriptions targeting acid reflux are so common these days, we often wonder how much caffeine plays into many people’s symptoms. At a certain point for certain people, caffeine probably isn’t worth it just from that standpoint alone.

But others have staked out the opposite side of the argument, and claim that caffeine actually enhances endurance and helps drive weight loss. According to The London Times,

researchers investigating caffeine’s influence on fitness and sports performance are discovering that an amount considered acceptable by most health experts — only a cup or two a day — is needed to get better results at the gym. They have shown that there are substances in caffeine which trigger the release of body fats into the bloodstream during activity.

Plus, as we all know, caffeine can help stave off fatigue:

A study at the University of South Carolina, published in the American Journal of Physiology (2003), revealed that one or two cups of coffee up to an hour before a gym session can delay or prevent post-exercise tiredness by up to 60 per cent: “People seem to be able to work harder without realising it when they take caffeine before a workout,” says Louise Sutton, the principal lecturer in sport and exercise nutrition at Leeds Metropolitan University.

And the American Journal of Cardiology published a study purporting to show that

caffeine may help to boost nitric oxide (NO) levels, resulting in increased blood flow to muscles. According to a study done by Japanese researchers, when young, healthy males were given 300mg of caffeine pills, the dilation of their forearm blood vessels increased as a result of greater production of NO. As a result, some have taken this to mean that “drinking caffeine before a workout will not only give you a boost in stamina and strength, but it may also lead to a better muscle pump and, over time, greater muscle hypertrophy (growth).”

Who to believe? The more I look into the question of whether caffeine is bad for you, the more I’m convinced that the answer is a resounding “maybe.”

As Robb Wolf explained in one of his Paleolithic Solution podcasts, the answer depends on the dosage of caffeine that’s ingested, as well as the individual’s response to the caffeine’s effects on his/her central nervous system. While caffeine intake may negative affect some folks’ hormone levels and lead to diminished performance and addiction, it may have little effect on others – aside from providing some of the benefits described above.

In other words, I just wasted a crapload of time trying to hunt for an easy answer that doesn't exist.

Oh, well. I've decided to once again try to abstain from caffeine – not because I’ve concluded it’s evil, but because I can save a ton of money by drinking water instead.

Plus, I have a headache now, and caffeine will only make it worse.

Get Smart

Exercise helps keep your brain sharp:

[S]cientists [at Northwestern University] have been manipulating the levels of bone-morphogenetic protein or BMP in the brains of laboratory mice. BMP, which is found in tissues throughout the body, affects cellular development in various ways, some of them deleterious. In the brain, BMP has been found to contribute to the control of stem cell divisions. Your brain, you will be pleased to learn, is packed with adult stem cells, which, given the right impetus, divide and differentiate into either additional stem cells or baby neurons. As we age, these stem cells tend to become less responsive. They don’t divide as readily and can slump into a kind of cellular sleep. It’s BMP that acts as the soporific, says Dr. Jack Kessler, the chairman of neurology at Northwestern and senior author of many of the recent studies. The more active BMP and its various signals are in your brain, the more inactive your stem cells become and the less neurogenesis you undergo. Your brain grows slower, less nimble, older.

But exercise countermands some of the numbing effects of BMP, Dr. Kessler says. In work at his lab, mice given access to running wheels had about 50 percent less BMP-related brain activity within a week. They also showed a notable increase in Noggin, a beautifully named brain protein that acts as a BMP antagonist. The more Noggin in your brain, the less BMP activity exists and the more stem cell divisions and neurogenesis you experience. Mice at Northwestern whose brains were infused directly with large doses of Noggin became, Dr. Kessler says, “little mouse geniuses, if there is such a thing.” They aced the mazes and other tests.

Whether exercise directly reduces BMP activity or increases production of Noggin isn’t yet known and may not matter. The results speak for themselves. “If ever exercise enthusiasts wanted a rationale for what they’re doing, this should be it,” Dr. Kessler says. Exercise, he says, through a complex interplay with Noggin and BMP, helps to ensure that neuronal stem cells stay lively and new brain cells are born.

So don't be stupid: Get up and exercise.

(Source: The New York Times)

Fish Oil: Great for You! Unless It's Not.

Every morning, I pop a big ass fish oil capsule in my mouth. Fish oil offers tons of health benefits: It's a great source of two long-chain essential fatty acids, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA)-- Omega-3 fatty acids that help lower triglycerides and boosts cardiovascular and cognitive health. EPA and DHA balance out Omega-6 fatty acids, keeping inflammation in check.

But boy, does fish oil make my burps taste foul. (Usually, my burps taste awesome!)

And now, according to a recently-filed lawsuit by the Mateel Environmental Justice Foundation, a bunch of over-the-counter fish oil supplements were found to contain toxic levels of polyclorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which may pose cancer risks and cause reproductive problems.

The PCB content varies widely: According to the Foundation, "[t]he lowest level, found in Solgar's Norwegian Cod Liver Oil, was 70 times below the highest, found in Now Foods Salmon Oil."

Toxicity can vary widely in fish oil, depending on what kind of fish is used and the contamination in its habitat waters, scientists say. Older, bigger fish tend to build up more PCBs in their fatty tissues than smaller fish, but habitat is still key. Deciphering which products are safest is not easy for consumers: Not all manufacturers state what kind of fish their oil is derived from, and few state which waters the fish come from.

FANtastic.

Live to 100?

Good news if you're still in elementary school: Danish researchers believe that most people born in developed countries this century will live to be 100. In fact, the researchers claim,

since the 20th century, people in developed countries are living around three decades longer than in the past. Now some believe that this figure could go even higher. If improvements in health continues, "a majority of children born since the year 2000 will celebrate their hundredth birthday," states James Vaupel, of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, in Rostock, Germany.

Tips on how to live to 100 are summarized on the graphic above (click the image to enlarge), though I have to take issue with the advice to "Have a Baby Later in Life." The writer appears to have confused correlation with causation; while it may be true that "those who have babies later in life are almost 15% less likely to die during any age after 50 than those who had babies before age 40," this is likely due to the fact that women who choose to have children later in life are disproportionately wealthier and more educated -- and therefore more likely to be able to afford and enjoy the benefits of healthier lifestyles and better healthcare. There's no evidence to support the "surprising tip" that waiting to have a kid until after age 40 directly causes you to live longer.

(Source: Executive Healthcare)