Health & Fitness Beyond 40

To Your Health And Pleasure On Valentine’s Day

Guest — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:33:10 +0000

The Aztecs used chocolate as money. This week we use it to demonstrate romantic intent, welcome or not, but another more reliable benefit of chocolate has emerged in recent years: it’s good for us. A study published two years ago in BMC Medicine found that eating dark chocolate can significantly lower one’s blood pressure, but conveniently, only if the chocolate eater has blood pressure higher of 140 over 80. More recently, high chocolate consumption was linked with a 37 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease risk, a 31 percent reduction in diabetes risk and a 29 percent reduction in stroke risk when compared to low chocolate consumption. ABC News reported that the study, conducted by researchers at the University of Cambridge and published in the British Medical Journal, reviewed data collected from more than 114,000 people. Dr. David Katz, director of medical studies in public health at Yale [...]

Original post by Art Jahnke

Health And Pleasure On Valentine’s Day

Guest — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:33:10 +0000

The Aztecs used chocolate as money. Today we use it to demonstrate romantic emotions, welcome or not, but another less uncertain benefit of chocolate has emerged in recent years: it’s good for us. A study published two years ago in BMC Medicine found that eating dark chocolate can significantly lower one’s blood pressure, but conveniently, only if the chocolate eater has blood pressure higher of 140 over 80.
More recently, high chocolate consumption was linked with a 37 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease risk, a 31 percent reduction in diabetes risk and a 29 percent reduction in stroke risk when compared to low chocolate consumption. ABC News reported that the study, conducted by researchers at the University of Cambridge and published in the British Medical Journal, reviewed data collected from more than 114,000 people. Dr. David Katz, director of medical studies in public health at Yale University, advises [...]

Original post by Art Jahnke

Answer to “How Are You?” Predicts Longevity

Guest — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:57:59 +0000

Sure, people who are in good health are likely to live longer than people in poor health, but now comes research from the University of Zurich suggesting that there is a very real correlation between the way people rate their health and the number of years they will live, and that correlation can continue for more than 30 years. A University of Zurich news release reports that the study, which was conducted in Switzerland, found that men who rated their health as “very poor” were 3.3 times more likely to die than men of the same age who rated their health as “excellent”, and the risk of death was 1.9 times higher in women who rated their health as “very poor” than for those who rated it as “excellent”. The risk of death increased steadily from an optimistic to a pessimistic rating: people in “excellent” health had [...]

Original post by Art Jahnke

Fasting Slows Some Cancers

Guest — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:59:40 +0000

How do you stop cancer cells from thriving? Stop feeding them. That’s the suggestion of research conducted with mice at the University of Southern California, where scientists have found that five out of eight cancer types in mice responded to fasting, slowing the growth and spread of tumors. A USC news release reports that the combination of fasting cycles plus chemotherapy was either more or much more effective than chemo alone. Multiple cycles of fasting combined with chemotherapy cured 20 percent of mice with a highly aggressive type of children’s neuroendocrine cancer that had spread throughout the organism and 40 percent of mice with a more limited spread of the same cancer. In mice, the study, published in Science Translational Medicine, found that fasting cycles without chemotherapy could slow the growth of breast cancer, melanoma, glioma and human neuroblastoma. In several cases, the fasting cycles were as [...]

Original post by Art Jahnke

Physical Activity Is Exciting, Literally

Guest — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:47:46 +0000

Exciting news about physical activity: it’s exciting. Literally. Research conducted at Penn State University shows that people who are more physically active report greater levels of excitement and enthusiasm than people who are less physically active, and wait, there’s more exciting news: people also are more likely to report feelings of excitement and enthusiasm on days when they are more physically active than usual. A Penn State news release reports that the researchers asked 190 students to keep daily diaries describing free-time physical activity and sleep quantity and quality, as well as their mental states, including perceived stress and feeling states. Participants were told to record only those episodes of physical activity that occurred for at least 15 minutes and to note whether the physical activity was mild, moderate or vigorous. The researchers then separated the participants’ feeling states into four categories: pleasant-activated feelings exemplified by excitement [...]

Original post by Art Jahnke

Dear Mike: What About One Meal a Day?

Guest — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:23:26 +0000

While I use the term “2 Meals” around here for the most part, many people have asked me what about only “1 Meal” a day for weight loss?
This concept has been somewhat popular since the book Warrior Diet by Ori Hofmekler came out many years back. In it Ori talks about “under-eating” during the day and using the dinner hour as the “feast”:
Eat One Main Meal at Night:
There is evidence that humans are nocturnal eaters, inherently programmed for undereating and toiling during the day, followed by overeating and relaxing at night.

I already talked about in an old post here how many revered past civilizations full of healthy, athletic, and intelligent people only were eating enough to nourish their bodies and not having “the most important meal of the day” (well by modern standards that is).
Throughout history you can easily find that people would (and many cultures still do) use the [...]

Original post by "2 Meal" Mike

Surprising News About Where Your Salt Comes From

Guest — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:41:19 +0000

Researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control have some surprising news about our top ten sources of salt. No, most of the salt we eat does not come from salty snacks like potato chips. That’s actually number ten on the source of salt list. Number one is something that Americans eat a great deal of: bread and rolls. Reporting on the CDC research, Time magazine warns that the average American’s daily sodium intake is 3,266 mg a day, far greater than the recommended daily limit of 2,300 mg. The nearly 90 percent of Americans who eat too much salt are at greater risk of developing hypertension, a risk factor for heart disease and stroke. The researchers also found that most of the salt we eat –75 percent–comes from food eaten in restaurants or prepared for take-out. So what exactly are Americans’ biggest sources of salt? Here [...]

Original post by Art Jahnke

Exercise Takes Your Body To The Cleaners

Guest — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:48:22 +0000

One more thing exercise does: it takes out the trash. Writing in the New York Times’ Well column, Gretchen Reynolds reports on research conducted at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas that suggests that exercise encourages cells in our bodies to clean up the kind of cellular waste and debris whose buildup may contribute to aging. Like much of the research that is reported here, these experiments studied two groups of mice. One group had a cell cleaning system that functioned poorly, and one group had a normal healthy cell cleaning system, the kind that allows our bodies to eliminate waste and useless debris from cells through a process called autophagy. The Texas researchers tricked out the mice so that the membranes involved in autophagy would glow when they were active. When the mice were put on a treadmill for 30 minutes, the cleaning [...]

Original post by Art Jahnke

Walnuts Cut Prostate Cancer Risk

Guest — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:10:21 +0000

Walnuts, of all things, appear to slow the growth of prostate cancer tumors–in mice at least. Researchers at the University of California at Davis have found that mice genetically programmed to develop prostate cancer had smaller, slower growing tumors if they consumed a diet containing walnuts. A U.C. Davis news release reports that when researchers at the school, working with colleagues at the USDA Western Regional Research Center in Albany, Calif., studied tumor size in mice fed different diets for 9, 18 and 24 weeks, they found that the mice that ate the human equivalent of 2.8 ounces of whole walnuts daily, gained weight at the same rate as mice fed a soybean oil diet formulated to match the nutrients, fat levels and fatty acid profiles of the walnut diet. At 18 weeks, however, the tumor weight of the walnut-fed group was approximately half that of the [...]

Original post by Art Jahnke

Exercise And Erections? The Answer Is Yes

Guest — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:29:52 +0000

Does exercise really combat erectile dysfunction? According to research conducted at Emory University, the answer is yes, she said, yes. An Emory news release reports that researchers gave 78 men under the age of 40 two surveys: the Paffenbarger Physical Activity Questionnaire, which translates patient-reported physical activity into weekly energy expenditure to determine whether a participant is sedentary or active, and the International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF), a 15-question tool for the measurement of erectile function. When they compared the responses, the researchers found improved erectile function correlated with increased exercise, as did higher rates of sexual dysfunction in sedentary men. Want more? Read an abstract from the study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Original post by Art Jahnke