Miracle meal or rotten swindle? The truth about #superfoods
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23130850-100-miracle-meal-or-rotten-swindle-the-truth-about-superfoods/ Praises kale & blueberries; pans quinoa & baobab
Nice site w/ rankings of vitamins
Here’s the vit. D rankings:
01 Carlson Labs Vitamin D3 A
02 Nutrigold Vitamin D3 Gold 1000 IU A
03 Nutrigold Vitamin D3 Gold 2000 IU A
04 Nature Made Vitamin D3 A
05 Nature’s Way Vitamin D3 A
06 Nordic Naturals Vitamin D3 A
07 NOW Foods Vitamin D3 A
08 Solgar Vitamin D3 A
09 GNC Vitamin D3 A
10 Thorne Research Vitamin D A
Here’s the mulitvitamin rankings:
01 Garden of Life Vitamin Code For Men A
02 Garden of Life Vitamin Code Perfect Weight A
03 Nature’s Way Alive Max Potency Multivitamin A
04 Rainbow Light Men’s One A
05 Garden of Life Vitamin Code For Women A
06 NOW Foods Adam Men’s Multivitamin A
07 NOW Foods Eve Women’s Multivitamin A
08 GNC Mega Men A
09 Carlson Labs Super 2 Daily A
10 Rainbow Light Women’s One A
11 GNC Mega Men Energy & Metabolism A
12 Optimum Nutrition Opti-Men A
13 TwinLab Daily One Caps A
14 Garden of Life Vitamin Code Raw One For Men A-
15 Controlled Labs Orange TRIad A-
https://labdoor.com/rankings/multivitamins
Very critical of centrum!
should be betw 60 & 100 but could be lower if you exercise
http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Conditions/More/MyHeartandStrokeNews/All-About-Heart-Rate-Pulse_UCM_438850_Article.jsp#.Vu2bLRIrKwQ
Cutting sugar [in #diet w same kcal] improves [kid's] health in…10 days [LDL down 10; DBP, 5; triglycerides, 33] http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/cutting-sugar-improves-childrens-health-in-just-10-days
QT:{{"
“On average, the subjects’ LDL cholesterol, the kind implicated in heart disease, fell by 10 points. Their diastolic blood pressure fell five points. Their triglycerides, a type of fat that travels in the blood and contributes to heart disease, dropped 33 points. And their fasting blood sugar and insulin levels – indicators of their diabetes risk – likewise markedly improved.”
"}}
What Is a #Tree Worth?
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-is-a-tree-worth Study on Toronto shows 10 more trees/block =+1% in wellness =$10k/person =being 7yrs younger
QT:{{”
“That is the riddle that underlies a new study in the journal Scientific Reports by a team of researchers in the United States, Canada, and Australia, led by the University of Chicago psychology professor Marc Berman. The study compares two large data sets from the city of Toronto, both gathered on a block-by-block level; the first measures the distribution of green space, as determined from satellite imagery and a comprehensive list of all five hundred and thirty thousand trees planted on public land, and the second measures health, as assessed by a detailed survey of ninety-four thousand respondents. After controlling for income, education, and age, Berman and his colleagues showed that an additional ten trees on a given block corresponded to a one-per-cent increase in how healthy nearby residents felt. “To get an equivalent increase with money, you’d have to give each household in that neighborhood ten thousand dollars—or make people seven years younger,” Berman told me.
…
You can produce an attenuated version of the same effect simply by looking out a window, or (for experimental convenience) at a picture of a nature scene. Over the past few years, Berman and his colleagues have zeroed in on the “low-level” visual characteristics that distinguish natural from built environments. To do this, they broke down images into their visual components: the proportion of straight to curved edges, the hue and saturation of the colors, the entropy (a statistical measure of randomness in pixel intensity), and so on. The view of an arboretum, for instance, tends to have higher color saturation than that of a street corner, indicating that “the colors in nature are more of the ‘purer’ version of those colors,” Berman said. Even when images are scrambled so that there are no recognizable features, like trees or skyscrapers, to betray what they represent, their low-level visual characteristics still predict how much people will like them.”
“}}
Exploring Why Some…Get Fitter Than Others
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/why-some-people-get-fitter-than-others Now, SNP & expression chips on exercising mice; in future, on people
Is the Secret to Longevity Available from this
Website?http://www.technologyreview.com/news/534636/the-anti-aging-pill NAD-replenishment pill w/ co-factor precursor + antioxidant
(NB: I’ve advised Elysium.)
QT:{{”
““NAD replacement is one of the most exciting things happening in the biology of aging,” says Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, who has coauthored scientific papers with Guarente but is not involved in Elysium. “The frustration in our field is that we have shown we can target aging, but the FDA does not [recognize it] as an indication.”
Other experts said while NAD may decline with age, there is limited evidence that aging can be affected by restoring or increasing NAD levels. “There is enough evidence to be excited, but not completely compelling evidence,” said Brian K. Kennedy, CEO of the
California-based Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
Guarente says Elysium’s pill includes a precursor to NAD, called nicotinamide riboside, which the body can transform into NAD and put to use. In addition, the pill contains pterostilbene, an antioxidant that Guarente says stimulates sirtuins in a different way. Both ingredients can already be found in specialty vitamins. “We expect a synergistic effect [from] combining them,” he says.”
“}}
America’s Epidemic of Unnecessary Care
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande QT: Facing a doctor, what are you going to fear: doing too little or too much?
Annals of Health Care MAY 11, 2015 ISSUE
Overkill
An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially. What can we do about it?
BY ATUL GAWANDE
QT:{{”
Still, when it’s your turn to sit across from a doctor, in the white glare of a clinic, with your back aching, or your head throbbing, or a scan showing some small possible abnormality, what are you going to fear more—the prospect of doing too little or of doing too much?” …
“Right now, we’re so wildly over the boundary line in the other direction that it’s hard to see how we could accept leaving health care the way it is. Waste is not just consuming a third of health-care spending; it’s costing people’s lives. As long as a more thoughtful, more measured style of medicine keeps improving outcomes, change should be easy to cheer for. Still, when it’s your turn to sit across from a doctor, in the white glare of a clinic, with your back aching, or your head throbbing, or a scan showing some small possible abnormality, what are you going to fear more—the prospect of doing too little or of doing too much?”
“}}
Juxtaposed recently in @nytimes Consensus on Coffee’s Benefits v Caffeine…Poses Deadly Risks
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/upshot/more-consensus-on-coffees-benefits-than-you-might-think.html http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/caffeine-powder-poses-deadly-risks-2
Caffeine Powder Poses Deadly Risks
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/caffeine-powder-poses-deadly-risks-2/
Bright light outdoors is good — but stay in the shade to avoid skin cancer.
The #myopia boom http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120 Was attributed to books; now epidemiological & lab evidence suggests not enough daylight for kids
QT:{{"
“Rose’s team tried to eliminate any other explanations for this link — for example, that children outdoors were engaged in more physical activity and that this was having the beneficial effect. But time engaged in indoor sports had no such protective association; and time outdoors did, whether children had played sports, attended picnics or simply read on the beach. And children who spent more time outside were not necessarily spending less time with books, screens and close work. “We had these children who were doing both activities at very high levels and they didn’t become myopic,” says Rose. Close work might still have some effect, but what seemed to matter most was the eye’s exposure to bright light.
See the light
Some researchers think that the data to support the link need to be more robust. Most epidemiological studies have estimated children’s time outdoors from questionnaires — but Christine Wildsoet, an optometrist at the University of California, Berkeley, says that such data should be treated with caution. In a small, pilot study of wearable light sensors, she found that people’s estimates often do not match up with their actual exposure. And Ian Flitcroft, a myopia specialist at Children’s University Hospital in Dublin, questions whether light is the key protective factor of being outdoors. He says that the greater viewing distances outside could affect myopia progression, too. “Light is not the only factor, and making it the explanation is a gross over-simplification of a complex process,” he says.
Yet animal experiments support the idea that light is protective. Researchers first demonstrated this in chicks, a common lab model for studying vision. By fitting chicks with goggles that alter the resolution and contrast of incoming images, it is possible to induce the development of myopia while raising the birds under controlled conditions in which only light intensity is changed. In 2009, Regan Ashby, Arne Ohlendorf and Frank Schaeffel from the University of Tübingen’s Institute for Ophthalmic Research in Germany showed that high illumination levels — comparable to those encountered outside — slowed the development of experimentally induced myopia in chicks by about 60% compared with normal indoor lighting conditions. Researchers elsewhere have found similar protective effects in tree shrews and rhesus monkeys.”
"}}