“Keep your eye fixed on the way to the top, but don’t forget to look right in front of you. The last step depends on the first. Don’t think you’re there just because you see the summit. Watch your footing, be sure of the next step, but don’t let that distract you from the highest…
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Soft Drinks May Cause Menopausal Hip Fractures
A study published this month in the journal Menopause looked into the relationships between carbonated soft drink consumption, osteoporosis (hip and lumbar spine) and incidental hip fractures. For almost 12 years Kremer et al. followed over 72,000 postmenopausal women from the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study. The results showed no associations between soft drink consumption…
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Excess Dietary Salt Leads To Cognitive Impairment
Faraco et al. recently discovered mechanisms by which salt-rich diets can lead to cognitive dysfunction in mice. An increase in dietary salt led to a deficiency of nitric oxide in cerebral blood vessels. As nitric oxide is a vasodilator, the reduced levels resulted in decreased cerebral blood flow. In addition, nitric oxide deficiency causes the…
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Loving-Kindness Meditation Slows Aging
A recent study by Le Nguyen et al. published in Psychoneuroendocrinology has looked at the effect of loving-kindness meditation on telomore length. Loving-Kindness is a Buddhist meditation that focuses on sending good wishes and kindness to ourselves and others by silently repeating a series of mantras. Telomeres sit at the end of chromosomes and protect…
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Meditation and the Brain
Meditation can be defined as “a family of mental training practices aimed at monitoring and regulating attention, perception, emotion and physiology” (Fox and Cahn, 2019). As with other forms of learning, meditation has the potential to change the brain (neuroplasticity). Fox and Cahn (2019) reviewed decades of meditation research in a paper entitled “Meditation and…
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Paleo Diet May Be Bad For Cardiovascular Health
Research published earlier this month in the European Journal of Nutrition questions the health benefits of the Paleolithic diet. The Paleo diet claims to mimic the diet of our ancestors. It’s high in meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds but avoids dairy, legumes and grains. Genoni et al. studied a group of about 100 people…
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Vagus Nerve Stimulation Reduces Rheumatoid Arthritis Symptoms
Genovese et al. recently presented the results of their research at the Annual European Congress of Rheumatology. They implanted mini neurostimulators in 14 rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients that had failed to respond to anti-rheumatic medication. In the treatment groups, the vagus nerve was stimulated daily for 12 weeks. The results showed that stimulation of the…
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Atherosclerosis and Low Back Pain
Atherosclerosis is well-known for its role in the development of coronary heart disease and stroke. The vascular occlusion that it causes leads to the infarction of heart and brain tissue. But coronary and cerebral blood vessels are by no means the only vessels that become clogged by atheromatous plaques. In 1993, Kauppila et al., from…
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High Cholesterol Can Cause Tendon Pathology
A recent literature review by Yang et al. suggests that high blood cholesterol is a risk factor in the development and progression of tendon pathology. They found that cholesterol levels were directly correlated with the severity of tendon problems. There is evidence that elevated cholesterol levels lead to inflammatory, structural and mechanical changes in tendons…
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Higher Fibre Intake Improves Health
Last month Reynolds et al. published an article in The Lancet that looked into the relationship between carbohydrate quality and health. They carried out a series of systematic reviews and meta-analyses that evaluated around 135 million person-years of data from 185 prospective studies as well as 58 clinical trials with 4635 adults. They found that…