Regular exercise may slow diseases that cause blindness and decrease the risk of stroke in women

More and more research confirms the health benefits of regular exercise. Now a new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience suggests that moderate aerobic exercise may slow the progression of diseases that destroy the retina of the eye and eventually cause blindness.

What is age-related macular degeneration
Age-related macular degeneration is characterized by a gradual deterioration of the macula, the central part of the retina that helps you perceive fine details in your field of vision. As a result, central vision and sharpness is impaired, problematizing daily tasks like driving and reading. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that the condition currently affects about 1.8 million Americans over 40.

The study
Although several studies in animals and humans point to the protective effects of exercise in neurodegenerative diseases or injury, less is known about how exercise affects vision.
Machelle Pardue, PhD, together with her colleagues Eric Lawson and Jeffrey H. Boatright, PhD, at the Atlanta VA Center for Visual and Neurocognitive Rehabilitation and Emory University, ran mice on a treadmill for two weeks before and after exposing the animals to bright light that causes retinal degeneration. The researchers found that treadmill training preserved photoreceptors and retinal cell function in the mice.

Bottom line
"One point to emphasize is that the exercise the animals engaged in is really comparable to a brisk walk," Pardue says. "One previous study that examined the effects of exercise on vision in humans had examined a select group of long distance runners. Our results suggest it's possible to attain these effects with more moderate exercise."
"This is the first report of simple exercise having a direct effect on retinal health and vision," Pardue said. "This research may one day lead to tailored exercise regimens or combination therapies in treatments of blinding diseases."

More good news coming from another recent study
Another recent study concluded that moderate exercise could decrease the risk of stroke in women by 20% and could offset the increased risk in women taking postmenopausal hormone therapy.
The study found there was no need to run the marathon or do intense strenuous exercise to get the health benefits and the effects can be immediate.

Professor Sophia Wang, lead author of the study, said: "I was surprised that moderate physical activity was most strongly associated with a reduced risk of stroke. More strenuous activity such as running didn’t further reduce women’s stroke risk. Moderate activity, such as brisk walking appeared to be ideal in this scenario."
The study also found that overweight women with diabetes had an increased risk of stroke. Says Prof. Wang, "Physical activity, obesity and diabetes are all highly correlated with one another. Stroke prevention among diabetics is thus a particularly important scientific question to address."

What we CAN do to prevent diseases
The study recommended that women incorporate some type of physical activity into their daily routine and Prof Wang said: "You don’t have to do an extreme boot camp. The types of activities we’re talking about are accessible to most of the population." Power walking and recreational tennis, for example, do not necessarily require special memberships to gyms.

Sources: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/, http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/, http://www.eurekalert.org/, http://www.medicaldaily.com/, http://usaherald.com/43125/,

To savor the flavor, perform a short ritual first

We all have them. Rituals we do before eating, though most of us don't think of them that way.
You may be the type of person who always eats chips in a bowl because they're just not the same out of the packet. Or you might only drink peppermint tea from your favourite striped mug because it tastes better that way.

University of Minnesota psychological scientist Kathleen Vohs's ritual was to shake her sugar packet prior to pouring a little bit in to her espresso. She would then take a sip, realise her coffee wasn't sweet enough, and add the rest of the packet. She did this every time she ordered coffee, despite the fact she always ended up using the entire packet.
Vohs was so intrigued by her own behaviour, she went on to lead a study about food rituals and how they affect perception of taste. The first experiment in the study, published in Psychological Science, involved 52 participants. They were divided into two groups and instructed to either eat a chocolate bar or perform a short ritual before digging in.

The "ritual" group was asked to break the chocolate bar in half before unwrapping one side and eating that part only. Next, they were told to unwrap the second half and eat that.
Tellingly, those who performed these instructions said they enjoyed the chocolate more and were willing to pay more for it than those who simply ate the bar.

 A second experiment instructed participants to eat one carrot each from three separate bags on a table. One group was told to perform an identical set of movements before eating each carrot (in other words, a ritual), while the others were told to do different, random movements before eating each carrot.
Those who did the same movements beforehand enjoyed their carrots most.
In the final two studies, Vohs and colleagues showed that personal involvement in the ritual is paramount — watching someone else methodically mix lemonade doesn’t make it taste any better. Additionally, they found that by engaging in small rituals before eating, it’s possible we pay more attention to our food, which makes us more personally involved in the experience.

This mindfulness may also help us develop more healthy eating behaviours, the researchers suggest. Rituals may also help in portion control, something the University of Minnesota researchers did not address in their experiments. In a small randomized controlled trial at the University of Texas in Austin, researchers found that teaching restaurant diners to focus on awareness of hunger and taste, along with other strategies, was effective at promoting weight management. When you savor food you enjoy it more, and sometimes you eat less.

Food rituals are an important part of cultures around the world, whether it’s singing happy birthday and blowing out the candles before eating cake or blessing food before a meal.
In China, many people slurp rather than bite their noodles, as breaking them is said to shorten one’s life. Champagne has become the traditional beverage for celebratory toasts and breaking the wishbone of a roast turkey or chicken is believed to bring good luck.

However most of the rituals are highly individual; it's a way of making the food our own. So it's not surprising that it helps us enjoy it more. It situates us in the moment, slows the process and helps us become more mindful of what we're doing even with positive implications on diet.



It's also no coincidence that many of the foods we associate with rituals – such as biting the bottom of a Cornetto first, then racing to finish the ice-cream before it becomes a dripping, oozy mess – are treats or snacks. They're almost always sweet and part of our childhoods. It was a way of savouring the treat but it's also a sign that we want to interact with our food more than merely eating it. Eating is a really sensorial experience. We see the shapes, hear the sounds, notice the form food takes, and find ways of engaging with those.

The researchers believe that applying rituals could also help us enhance other areas of our life, such as exercise and relationships. They suggest that rituals may serve as a covert means to get people to do a little more of what makes life worth living.

If you find yourself treating food as fuel and not as an enjoyable experience, consider creating some food rituals to make mealtimes more satisfying:

• set the table
• chew slowly and eat mindfully – focus on the flavours and engage each of your senses
• turn off the TV, computer and other distractions during mealtimes.

  Do you or your family have any culinary rituals that help make food more enjoyable?

Sources: http://www1.umn.edu/, http://www.stuff.co.nz/, http://www.comvita.co.nz/, http://www.goodfood.com.au/, http://well.blogs.nytimes.com

Study shows what foods deposit fat and where it is deposited on your body

If you want to avoid developing an apple shape, then you should eat salmon and walnuts, new research suggests. Swedish researchers discovered that people who eat a lot of polyunsaturated fat gain more muscle - and less fat - than those who eat a lot of saturated fat. People who eat mainly polyunsaturated fat - which salmon and walnuts are rich in - also store less fat around their waists and their internal organs.

This was the first study on humans to show that the fat composition of food not only influences cholesterol levels in the blood and the risk of heart disease, but also where in the body fat will be stored. The findings have recently been published in the American journal Diabetes.

The study
Researchers at Uppsala University studied 39 young adult men and women of normal weight, who ate 750 extra calories a day for seven weeks. The goal was for them to gain 3% of their starting weight. The project received considerable attention when it started in 2011, partly because the extra calories were ingested in the form of muffins with high fat content, baked in the lab by Fredrik Rosqvist, a doctoral candidate and first author of the study.
One half of the subjects were random to eat surplus calories from polyunsaturated fat (sunflower oil), while the other half got their surplus calories from saturated fat (palm oil).  Both diets contained the same amount of sugar, carbohydrates, fat, and protein; the only difference between muffins was the type of fat. The increase in body fat and the distribution of fat in the body was measured using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI scans) before and after the weight gain, as was the muscle mass in the body. Gene activity was measured in the abdominal visceral fat before and after the weight gain with the help of a gene chip that studies several thousand genes at a time.

The findings
Despite comparable weight gains between the two diet groups, the surplus consumption of saturated fat caused a markedly greater increase in the amount of fat in the liver and abdomen (especially the fat surrounding the internal organs, visceral fat) in comparison with the surplus consumption of polyunsaturated fat. Moreover the total amount of body fat was greater in the saturated fat group, while, on the other hand, the increase in muscle mass was three times less for those who ate saturated fat compared with those who ate polyunsaturated fat. The researchers believe their findings also suggest people who eat lots of polyunsaturated fat are less likely to develop heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

Bottom line
Thus, gaining weight on excess calories from polyunsaturated fat caused more gain in muscle mass, and less body fat than overeating a similar amount of saturated fat. Since most of us are in positive energy balance, and consequently gain weight slowly but gradually over time, the present results are highly relevant for most Western populations.
"Liver fat and visceral fat seems to contribute to a number of disturbances in metabolism. These findings can therefore be important for individuals with metabolic diseases such as diabetes. If the results regarding increased muscle mass following consumption of polyunsaturated fat can be confirmed in our coming studies, it will potentially be interesting for many elderly people, for whom maintaining muscle mass is of great importance in preventing morbidity", says Ulf Risérus, associate professor at the Department of Public Health and Caring Science and director of the study.

Not only how much fat your body has matters, but also WHERE the fat is stored
When it comes to the risk of developing diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, it seems more important where in the body the fat is stored than how much fat the body has. Visceral fat, along with a high proportion of fat in the liver, is closely associated with increased risk for developing type-2 diabetes. These fat depots are therefore important targets for new drugs and dietary strategies.
A number of studies have indicated that a higher intake of polyunsaturated fats from plant oils and nuts is associated with a decreased risk of type-2 diabetes, but the reasons for this remain unclear.
The present study proposes a potential explanation for such an association, showing that polyunsaturated fatty acids can affect fat distribution in the body more favorably than saturated fats, probably by regulating increased energy combustion or decreased storage of visceral fat in connection with calorie-rich diets.

Fat affects body's genes
The researchers were also able to see that over-consumption of saturated fats seems to be able to "turn on" certain genes in fatty tissue that increase the storage of fat in the abdomen and at the same time hamper insulin regulation. Polyunsaturated fats, instead, can "turn on" genes in visceral fat that in turn are linked to reduced storage of fat and improved sugar metabolism in the body.

The discovery may also be a contributing factor regarding the tendency of some individuals to accumulate fat in the liver and abdomen. The new findings suggest that the fat composition of the diet, in the long term, might play a role in preventing obesity-related disorders, like type-2 diabetes, at an early stage, before overweight develops.

"This is of great interest, as we lack preventive treatments for fatty liver and visceral fat today. The new findings also support international dietary recommendations, which, among other things, recommend replacing some saturated fat from meat, butter, and palm oil, for example, with unsaturated fats from plant oils and fatty fish", says Ulf Risérus.



Sources: http://www.eurekalert.org/, http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/, http://www.sciencedaily.com/, http://medicalxpress.com/, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health

Why We Can't Stop Liking the Brands We Loved as Kids

One paradox of advertising comes from a powerful inverse relationship between age and money. The people most likely to be swayed by most commercials are impressionable children (who have no money). Meanwhile, it's incredibly difficult to persuade adults (who have all the money) to break from habit and buy a new product.

A new study from the Journal of Consumer Research finds a clever loophole in this paradox. People hold onto a deep fondness for brands, like Kellogg's cereal and other foods with friendly mascots, that they were exposed to as children. The consumer brain is a bag of concrete mix before a person turns 13: anything you can slip in the soft blend is likely to harden, along with our neural networks, by the time we become a money-spending adult. This concrete-mix theory of habit formation was behind efforts to ban cigarette ads targeting young people.

The scientific evidence

In four separate studies, researchers tested subjects' attitudes for Tony the Tiger (the mascot for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes), Play-Doh Pete, Cocoa Puffs, Fruit Loops, and other brands that clogged Nickelodeon commercials and Sports Illustrated for Kids pages. People asked to judge the healthiness of these cereals and foods showed inexplicably warm feelings towards not only the characters but also the nutrition value of their favorite foods as kids.

 The findings

"This research is the first to hypothesize and test a model that explains how childhood exposure to advertising can have effects on product evaluation that persist into adulthood," the authors wrote. They found that, although people tend to be highly critical of promises made in advertisements, they're more likely to positively evaluate a product they learned to love as a child. It's as if their mushy, impressionable child brain returns to block their ability to think like a full-grown adult.

The other side of the coin

One limitation of the research, which the authors are honest enough to admit, is that it's not quite clear what effect is being measured. The fact that childhood exposure to advertising can have effects later in life has helped argue for characters like Smokey the Bear to promote fire safety, Woodsy the Owl to discourage littering, and McGruff the Crime Dog to fight crime. These are all clear efforts to inculcate habits during the soft-concrete period of a person's brain.

But what if what was really being measured in these studies is as simple as plain old nostalgia? Telling a room full of researchers "oh yeah, Frosted Flakes! I love that stuff" is different from actually going to the grocery store to buy fillets, but catching a glimpse of the cereal aisle and stocking up on Fruit Loops for dinner instead. From an unempirical observations of people's lives, it seems that nobody does that. Remembering Fruit Loops fondly might be utterly harmless.

Bottom line

The study however still provides more ammunition for the idea that advertising to children is qualitatively different from advertising to adults. If you want to break a country's bad habits—from smoking tobacco to eating crap—best to start young.

What about YOU?

... are your choices influenced by your childhood experiences or are these experiences only evoking sweet memories? How strong is the power of a habit?
Last but not least: how effective is food marketing? There is no disputing that the goal of food marketing is to influence children’s food choices. Companies clearly believe that marketing works or they wouldn’t spend billions of dollars a year on it.

• According to a comprehensive review by the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine, studies  demonstrate that television food advertising affects children’s food choices, food purchase requests, diets,  and health.

• Parents know from experience that ads and cartoon characters on food packages affect not only which  foods their children ask them to purchase, but which foods their kids are willing to eat.

• Based on an extensive review of the research, the American Psychological Association concluded that until  the age of about 8 years old children are unable to understand the persuasive intent of advertisements.

Studies not only show that advertising does help push children and adolescents toward unhealthy behaviors, but also that it is increasingly difficult to shield them as marketers exploit the Internet and social media. I'm persuaded that in an information-rich world, we need to know the messages children are receiving, and help them decode and understand what the world is trying to sell them.
I'll appreciate those who write their opinion in the comments below.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/, http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/, http://www.foodmarketing.org/

If you think Starbucks coffee is expensive, have a look here... - video slide

LUXURIOUS FOODS - obscenely expensive treats

Taste buds are certainly sensitive things. Mark Twain must have known this, when more than a hundred years ago he waxed lyrical on the watermelon:

“The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world’s luxuries, king by the grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took; we know it because she repented.”

We’ve been praising luxury foods for a long time now. Here are some cases of salivation being worth much, much more than their weight in gold.

Video slide: http://youtu.be/iQJ58XGdKh8

Need some help losing weight? Try playing Tetris game for three minutes!

Tetris is a hugely popular tile matching video game created in Moscow in 1984.
Now psychologists at Plymouth University say the visual stimulation provided by the game could reduce naturally occurring cravings for long enough to ward them off.

Craving is a common problem for people trying to quit junk food, smoking or other drugs. It is unpleasant and makes people feel that they have to wait until the right moment to quit.

Researchers had used visual games to interrupt cravings before, but only when they had induced those cravings first, said Jackie Andrade, a psychology professor at Plymouth University's Cognition Institute in the U.K. For this study, people's cravings happened - or did not happen - naturally. "Naturally occurring cravings might be harder to disrupt because they are triggered by internal states like hunger," Andrade said. "We chose Tetris because we wanted a task that would be interesting, demanding and highly visual."

The study

She and her team had 119 college-aged, primarily female, students describe what, if anything, they were craving, and how badly. Then they instructed the students to play Tetris for three minutes. For half of the students, selected at random, the game worked fine. For the other half, only a load screen and error message displayed and they could not play. Then all of the students filled out the craving questionnaire again. Two thirds of them reported craving something at the beginning of the test: 58 wanted food or a drink, 10 wanted caffeine, and 12 wanted nicotine. The remaining 39 didn't crave anything initially.

Cravings got weaker over time for everyone. But they weakened faster and to a greater extent among participants who played Tetris, the authors wrote in the journal Appetite. For instance, one tool they used measured craving strength on a scale from 1 to 100. Among people who reported initially craving something, the strength of those cravings fell from 59 to 45 for Tetris players, on average, and from 58 to 55 in the comparison group.

Why Tetris

The reason for the lower cravings, said researchers, is that Tetris is a fast-moving visual game that requires attention to shapes and positions. That distracts the part of the brain that produces imagery of the thing you crave and therefore makes it harder to crave. It's an aspect of the game that anyone can test. "Next time you play Tetris, try to visualize a friend's face," said Andrade. "It's not easy to do without your game suffering."
Professor Andrade said the research tested elaborated intrusion (EI) theory, which dictates that imagery is central to craving and a visual task should therefore decrease it. "Feeling in control is an important part of staying motivated, and playing Tetris can potentially help the individual to stay in control when cravings strike," Professor Andrade said.
"It is something a person can quickly access for the most part whether they are at work or at home, and replaces the feeling of stress caused by the craving itself. Ultimately, we are constantly looking for ways to stimulate cravings for healthy activities, such as exercise, but this is a neutral activity that we have shown can have a positive impact."

The psychology of cravings
Craving interferes with other tasks -- it grabs our attention, and our ability to think about other things at the same time. This is because we have a limited capacity in our brains to hold things in attention and work on them. Thinking about a pyramid, for example, and rolling it around in imaginary space requires us to hold the shape in our attention and work on how it would look as it moves.
What this and some other recent studies do, is flip this around. If craving interferes with other tasks, what about using other tasks to interfere with craving? And if craving is linked to imagery, what about using another task that requires similar limited cognitive space -- like this game?

Bottom line
The game also has another quality that makes it particularly useful in distracting cravers, said Andrade: it's fun. That makes it far more likely to be used than trying to play with an imaginary pyramid in your mind's eye.
Any visual or multisensory activity might have the same effect as Tetris, Andrade said. She found in an earlier study that making shapes out of plastic led to a similar outcome. But the researchers did not measure how long the reduction in cravings lasted, and it might not be very long, she said. However, people trying to lose weight could try incorporating Tetris into their lives, Andrade said. It is important that people are motivated to play the game for it to be an effective tool to fight cravings. And as a positive side effect you may actually become a very skillful player!

Click the image to enlarge

Via: Fixr
Sources: http://medicalxpress.com/, http://www.medicaldaily.com/, http://www.theguardian.com/, http://news.discovery.com/, http://www.solarnews.ph/

Looking for a memory booster? There is an Egg-ceptional one...

Eggs are an “egg-ceptional” food in the memory healing diet because they are packed with Lutein and Zeaxanthin - two of the best antioxidants for regeneration - and with omega-3s, the important essential fatty acids (EFA) that protect against cognitive decline and memory loss.
Given this, a new study is underway to investigate whether eggs may be a useful addition to your diet, to help prevent or delay dementia.

The study
In the six-month U.S. study, half of the participants will have two eggs a day, and will be compared with a control group who won't have eggs. Both groups will be tested for memory, reasoning, verbal fluency and attention span - a decline in these is a major risk factor for the development of dementia later in life.
The researchers, from Tufts University in the U.S., expect there will be 'a significant increase' in the mental functioning in the group given eggs.

Diet and prevention of memory loss
The exploration into what role diet plays in dementia may have received a boost after a study last year, where researchers stated that foods rich in omega-3 and vitamin D3 could help boost the body's immune system. Specifically, its ability to clear toxic and deadly plaques which are responsible for damaging the brains of Alzheimer's sufferers.
Study author Dr Milan Fiala said: “We may need to balance supplementation with vitamin D3 and omega-3 fatty acids, depending on each patient. This is a first step in understanding what form and in which patients these substances might work best.”

Since your body can’t produce omega-3s, you must get them from the foods you eat
A French study found that being deficient in omega-3s can lead to anxiety, attention deficit disorder, depression and dementia.  Other omega-3 rich foods included wild salmon and other cold water fish, flaxseeds, pumpkin seeds, walnuts and avocados.

Pastured eggs contain brain-friendly omega-3s
Grass-fed chickens produce eggs high in the omega-3 fatty acids so crucial to keeping brain cells healthy and brain cell membranes flexible. Your brain is 60% fat, half of which is composed of omega-3s, specifically eicosapentaeoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA).
Studies show that EPA and DHA help with brain metabolism by regulating brain cell membranes, promoting brain cell communication and maintaining levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin — all critical to healthy brain function.

Not all eggs are alike
It should come as no surprise that caged hens, which do not run around outside, roll in the dust and eat omega-3-rich grasses, bugs and insects, lay eggs that are low in omega-3s. The eggs of pastured hens, on the other hand, contain as much as 10 times more omega-3s than their caged cousins.

Recommendations for omega-3 consumption
Recently a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition recommended that people consume at least 3-4% of their total daily calories as omega-3 fats. To meet this recommendation, a person consuming 2000 calories per day would have to eat at least 3.5 grams of omega-3 fats.

Don’t buy the cholesterol hype about eggs
Historically, eggs have been considered unhealthy because they contain cholesterol. A large egg contains 212mg of cholesterol, which is a lot compared to most other foods.
However, it has been proven, time and time again, that eggs and dietary cholesterol do NOT adversely affect cholesterol levels in the blood. In fact, eggs raise HDL (the good) cholesterol. They also change LDL cholesterol from small, dense LDL (which is bad) to large LDL, which is benig.
A new meta-analysis published in 2013 looked at 17 prospective studies on egg consumption and health. They discovered that eggs had no association with either heart disease or stroke in otherwise healthy people.  Bottom Line: despite the fear mongering of the past few decades, eating eggs and cholesterol has no association whatsoever with heart disease.

So: don't forget eggs, next time you go shopping!!!

Sources: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/, http://myhealingkitchen.com/medical-conditions/, http://authoritynutrition.com/