Having Trouble Sleeping?

Tone up your hand-eye coordination with this BBC Science & Nature game: Sheep Dash!

Then learn a little more about sleep from the BBC over here.

Diet, Lifestyle and Sleep

By Nedeltcheva AV et al: “The barriers to maintaining healthy body weight are complex and include physiologic, psychological, and social factors” according to an editorial in an Annals study.

“If your goal is to lose fat, skipping sleep is like poking sticks in your bicycle wheels,” Penev said. “Cutting back on sleep, a behavior that is ubiquitous in modern society, appears to compromise efforts to lose fat through dieting. In our study it reduced fat loss by 55 percent.”

“Perhaps sleep should be included as part of the lifestyle package that traditionally has focused on diet and exercise…” Continue reading »

Grow Your Brain

“Walking for 3 hours per week for only 3 months caused so many neurons to grow that it actually increased the size of people’s brains.”

Increase your production of brain cells with chocolate, tea, blueberries & meditation; decrease brain cells with sugar, nicotine, narcotics, alcohol & stress.

DNA + Lifestyle = New DNA

By Dr. David Katz, Director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center

We have long known that lifestyle has a powerful influence on health across a wide array of outcomes. It is not news to you that eating well, being active, controlling your weight, managing stress and not smoking, for instance, can influence your fate.

But we have tended to think in terms of “nature versus nurture” — with lifestyle and genetic influences on health as independent and potentially competing forces. This study, and others like it, ostensibly change the game. They suggest that lifestyle and genetics are not independent after all, but interact. Even our genes are influenced by lifestyle choices. We can, it seems, nurture nature.

To a Preventive Medicine specialist like me, this is of profound importance. Complacency and fatalism are enemies of disease prevention. For many people, the notion that their medical destiny is written in their genes is a disincentive to take matters into their own hands.

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Pre-Reversing Alzheimer’s

By Jean Carper, Author: ‘100 Simple Things You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s and Age-Related Memory Loss‘

“I have discovered a large contingent of Alzheimer’s researchers who are extremely positive about prevention and not counting on an elusive drug to stymie the growing Alzheimer’s epidemic of aging baby boomers.(…) There is a plethora of upbeat dialogue in the scientific community that does not grab headlines because it’s not about big money and a magic cure. It’s primarily about what people can do to change their own trajectory toward Alzheimer’s.

Contrast the recent disturbing headlines in the New York Times about Alzheimer’s drugs and diagnosis with the June, 2010 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. It is a special issue devoted to finding ways to prevent Alzheimer’s. [In it[ Dr. Jack de la Torre boldly asserts that (…) “Alzheimer’s is incurable, but it is preventable,” he says. “We need to identify and lower Alzheimer’s risk factors in people when they are still cognitively normal and long before irreversible symptoms appear.”

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