Researchers say people who went to bed earlier improved their mental wellbeing and physical performance.
Monday 10 June 2019 11:31, UK
People felt less stressed when they went to bed early
"Night owls" can re-adapt their body clocks in just three weeks to help them become early birds, a new study says.
Researchers say tweaks to the sleeping patterns of people who usually go to bed late could significantly improve their wellbeing.
People taking part in the study said they felt less stressed and depressed and did not feel as sleepy during the day when they tweaked their sleeping times.
Some 22 "night owls", whose average bedtime was 2.30am, with a wake-up time of 10.15am, took part in the study by Birmingham and Surrey Universities, and Monash University in Australia.
Over three weeks, those taking part were told to:
:: Wake up 2-3 hours earlier than usual and get plenty of outdoor light in the morning
:: Eat breakfast as soon as possible
:: Exercise only in the morning
:: Eat lunch at the same time every day and eat nothing after 19:00
:: Cut out caffeine after 15:00
:: Have no naps after 16:00
:: Go to bed 2-3 hours earlier than usual and limit light in the evenings
:: Maintain the same sleep and wake-up times every day
The results, published in the journal Sleep Medicine, showed an increase in cognitive (reaction time) and physical (grip strength) performance during the morning, while peak performance times moved from evening to afternoon.
Study co-author Dr Andrew Bagshaw, from the University of Birmingham's Centre for Human Brain Health, said: "Having a late sleep pattern puts you at odds with the standard societal days, which can lead to a range of adverse outcomes - from daytime sleepiness to poorer mental wellbeing.
"We wanted to see if there were simple things people could do at home to solve the issue.
"This was successful, on average allowing people to get to sleep and wake up around two hours earlier than they were before.
"Most interestingly, this was also associated with improvements in mental wellbeing and perceived sleepiness, meaning that it was a very positive outcome for the participants.
"We now need to understand how habitual sleep patterns are related to the brain, how this links with mental wellbeing and whether the interventions lead to long-term changes."
People who go to bed late suffer poorer mental wellbeing and often struggle to fit into work and school schedules that are out of sync with their preferred sleep patterns, say researchers.
Lead researcher Dr Elise Facer-Childs, from Monash University's Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, said: "By acknowledging these differences and providing tools to improve outcomes we can go a long way in a society that is under constant pressure to achieve optimal productivity and performance."
In the quest to remain young, many have turned to supplements, such as fish oil and vitamin B12, to stave off dementia or to simply remember where we put the car keys. And with population projections indicating an increase in Alzheimer's disease across the world, researchers are looking for ways to prevent cognitive decline and a possible health crisis. The Alzheimer's Association estimates that 16 million people could have the disease by 2050.
Nutritional epidemiologist Martha Clare Morris and her team at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center found that people who ate one to two servings of leafy green vegetables each day experienced fewer memory problems and cognitive decline, compared with people who rarely ate spinach. In fact, Morris estimates that veggie lovers who ate about 1.3 servings a day had brains that were roughly 11 years younger, compared with those who consumed few greens, like spinach or kale.
The study involved 960 people, all between 58 and 99 and without dementia. Everyone enrolled in the study was part of the Memory and Aging Project, which has been ongoing since 1979 at the Knight Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Washington University. As part of their involvement in that project, participants completed questionnaires about their dietary habits over nearly five years. Questions included assessments of how often people consumed salad, spinach, kale, collards or other greens. Participants also took yearly thinking and memory skills tests to gauge cognitive ability.
Then researchers divided the subjects into groups depending on their consumption. Those who ate the most leafy greens averaged about 1.3 servings per day, while those who consumed the fewest greens averaged 0.1 servings a day. Scientists followed up with participants for 10 years and discovered that the rate of decline for those who ate the most greens was the equivalent to being 11 years younger in terms of brain age.
Of course, people who eat a lot of salad are likely to have other healthy behaviors that could influence memory, but these findings took into account other factors associated with cognition, like education, physical activity, alcohol consumption, obesity and depression
The study was published Wednesday in the journal Neurology.
But it’s not just leafy greens that could keep our memories alive. According to co-author Martha Morris, the nutrients found in these vegetables that may be responsible for the brain-boosting benefits are found in other food sources too.
“Some of the nutrients already have excellent scientific evidence, such as vitamin E, a potent antioxidant which has been demonstrated in carefully controlled animal models to protect against neuron loss, oxidative stress and inflammation, and the accumulation of amyloid plaques,” she told Newsweek in an email. “Other [qualities] of the nutrients are newly identified.”
Morris cites nitrate, vitamin K and kaempferol as potential contributors to brain health that warrant further examination.
Because this study was observational, the data provide no concrete evidence of a causal relationship between spinach and brain health. For now, the connection is only a correlation and does not extend to younger, nonwhite or Hispanic people. But adding a serving of spinach into your diet is never a bad idea.
“Daily consumption of leafy greens may be a simple and effective way to protect against loss in memory and other cognitive abilities,” Morris said.
Her research used half a cup of cooked spinach as a single serving, which would have about 3.35 milligrams of vitamin E, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. Other good sources of the nutrient are almonds and some oils, like sunflower and safflower.
A salad a day keeps brains 11 YEARS younger, boosts memory and could help prevent dementia, new study suggests
Older adults who eat at least one serving of leafy greens or salad daily showed slower memory declines There was a difference of more than a decade of mental aging between those who ate salad and those that did not The findings suggest that balanced diets are critical in preventing dementia in older people
PUBLISHED: 21:05 GMT, 20 December 2017 | UPDATED: 09:37 GMT, 21 December 2017
Eating greens or salad every day boosts our memory, according to new research.
The findings suggest that eating about one serving per day of green, leafy vegetables may be linked to a slower rate of brain aging - the equivalent of keeping our brain 11 years younger.
The Rush University study found that people who ate at least one serving of green, leafy vegetables a day had a slower rate of decline on tests of memory and thinking skills than people who never or rarely ate such vegetables.
Salad eaters' brains functioned as though they were more than a decade younger than those of people who did not eat their greens, according to the research team.
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For older people, eating one salad a day was linked to slower mental decline in a new study
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Study author Professor Martha Clare Morris, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said: 'Adding a daily serving of green, leafy vegetables to your diet may be a simple way to foster your brain health.
'Projections show sharp increases in the percentage of people with dementia as the oldest age groups continue to grow in number, so effective strategies to prevent dementia are critical,' she said.
The study, published online by the journal Neurology, involved 960 people with an average age of 81 who did not have dementia and were followed for an average of 4.7 years.
The participants completed a questionnaire about how often they ate certain foods and had their thinking and memory skills tested yearly during that time.
The survey asked how often and how many servings they ate of three green, leafy vegetables: spinach, with a serving being a half cup of cooked spinach; kale, collards or greens, half cup cooked; and lettuce salad, with a serving of one cup raw.
The participants were divided into five equal groups based on how often they ate green, leafy vegetables.
The people in the top serving group ate an average of about 1.3 servings of greens per day. Those in the lowest serving group ate on average 0.1 servings per day.
Overall, the participants' scores on the thinking and memory tests declined over time at a rate of 0.08 standardized units per year.
Over 10 years of follow-up, the rate of decline for those who ate the most leafy greens was slower by 0.05 standardized units per year than the rate for those who ate the least leafy greens.
That is the difference of about 11 years worth of change, according to the study authors.
They said the results remained valid after accounting for other factors that could affect brain health such as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, education level and amount of physical and cognitive activities.
But Professor Morris noted that the study doesn't prove that eating green, leafy vegetables slows brain aging, it only shows an association.
She also warned that the study cannot rule out other possible reasons for the link.
Professor Morris added that because the study focused on older adults and the majority of participants were white, the results may not apply to younger adults and people of other races.
Now, a new breakthrough study adds one more major health scourge to the list.
It found that a diet high in sugar increases your Alzheimer’s risk. For the first time, researchers have uncovered a direct molecular link between sugar and the brain-robbing illness.2
Researchers from the University of Bath and King’s College, both in England, analyzed cadaver brain samples. They compared tissue from people who had Alzheimer’s when they died to those who didn’t have it.
Scientists knew that previous research had shown that sugar can damage proteins in cells. This happens through a process called glycation. This is when a sugar molecule bonds to and disrupts the function of a protein.
The researchers found that in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, glycation damages an enzyme called macrophage migration inhibitor factor (MIF). MIF is crucial to Alzheimer’s prevention. It stops the buildup of abnormal proteins in the brain, which are the hallmark of the disease.
When the enzyme can’t function properly because of glycation from high sugar intake, proteins accumulate and Alzheimer’s sets in.3
Professor Jean van den Elsen is with the University of Bath’s department of biology and biochemistry. He is one of the study’s authors.
“Normally MIF would be part of the immune response to the build-up of abnormal proteins in the brain,” he said. “We think that because sugar damage reduces some MIF functions and completely inhibits others, that this could be a tipping point that allows Alzheimer’s to develop.”4
Researchers say they hope treatments can be developed that keep MIF functioning to prevent Alzheimer’s. Their study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Beware of Sugar Weasel Words
In the meantime, the new study makes it more important than ever to avoid sugar.
Dr. Omar Kassaar of the University of Bath is a co-author of the study. “Excess sugar is well known to be bad for us when it comes to diabetes and obesity,” he said. “But this potential link with Alzheimer’s disease is yet another reason that we should be controlling our sugar intake.”
That’s not as easy as it sounds. Big Sugar has worked furiously for decades to make sure food labeling laws allow them to hide sugar under many different names.
Most of us know that “high fructose corn syrup” is another name for sugar. But there are dozens of other food label weasel words used to hide added sugar.
Have you heard of drimol, flo malt, sucrovert, or versatose? They are all sugar aliases used on labels to fool consumers.
For a list of 80 names the food industry uses to hide sugar, go here.
And if you’re worried about Alzheimer’s, there’s something else you should know… The decades of research on this brain-healing herb is impressive to say the least… And you can get it now for just pennies a day.
Doctors Now Have Warning: If You Use Aluminum Foil, Stop It Or Face Deadly Consequences For a long time, aluminum foil has been a kitchen staple. Open up anyone’s utility drawer and you’re bound to find a roll of the silver thinly printed metal. Why? Because it is extremely useful and effective for many kitchen and household tasks.
Foil is often used to cover your casserole and other oven-ready dishes. But now research is showing that if you cook with aluminum foil, you could be exposing yourself to some pretty serious health risks.
In the article below, we will present you with the facts on cooking with aluminum foil. Learn what can happen and then make the decision to use it or not for yourself. But the research is pretty clear…
Simply put, if you cook with aluminum foil, you are playing with your health.
The first thing you need to know is that aluminum is bad for your brain. It is a neurotoxic heavy metal that has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease for years.
Exposing yourself to this metal can lead to mental decline. Prepare to suffer in terms of coordination, bodily control, memory, and balance. Sadly, many who suffer from poisoning with this neurotoxin, the damage is permanent. You could experience gaps in memory that can create a divide between you and your loved ones if this chemical does the worst it can.
Besides damaging your brain, cooking with aluminum foil can also negatively affect your bones. This metal can build-up inside your bones. This is bad because it competes with calcium for space inside your bones and often wins out over the essential mineral. Although an aluminum skeletal frame sounds like something from science fiction, are bodies are made for fact – not fiction. So, it simply won’t work well for us. You need calcium to prevent your bones from breaking in a fall.
From here on out, the risk of cooking with aluminum continues to grow. It is also bad for your lungs. Breathing in aluminum particles has been proven to lead to respiratory problems, like pulmonary fibrosis. Even if you grill with aluminum foil, you could be breathing in these particles and slowly destroying your lungs.
Aluminum cans have long been hailed as being risky. But for some reason, tin foil was overlooked for years. No longer...
If you accidentally ingest aluminum flakes, you risk these problems. While you’re not eating a ball of rolled up foil, when you cook with aluminum at high temperatures, parts of the metal are going into your food. High temperatures can create cracks in the metal causes particles to break off into your food.
Even if the minuscule pieces don’t break off, chemical leeching of aluminum can happen if you cook with certain spices or use lemons.
Dr Essam Zubaidy, a chemical engineering researcher at the American University of Sharjah, discovered that just one meal cooked with tin foil can leach 400 mg of aluminum.
“The higher the temperature, the more the leaching. Foil is not suitable for cooking and is not suitable for using with vegetables like tomatoes, citrus juice or spices.”
The World Health Organization warns people not to ingest more than 60 mg of aluminum daily.
The takeaway: If you cook with aluminum, you’re risking your health.
Birth control pills are among the most popular forms of contraception in the US, but new research highlights their risks to women's mental health. Artificially manipulating your sex hormones with the synthetic hormones in hormonal contraception could have serious adverse effects, including depression. October 20, 2016
Story at-a-glance
Women who used hormonal birth control had a 40 percent increased risk of developing depression after six months compared to women who did not
The risk of developing depression after hormonal contraception use was greatest among adolescents
The use of hormonal birth control was also associated with subsequent use of antidepressant drugs
By Dr. Mercola
Birth control pills are the most popular form of contraception among U.S. women. They're taken by 16 percent of this population, while just over 7 percent use long-acting reversible forms of contraception, such as a hormonal intrauterine device or implant.
What these pills, devices and implants have in common is that they're forms of hormonal birth control — that is, they contain or release synthetic forms of hormones, such as estrogen and progestin (a form of progesterone), which work to prevent pregnancy in various ways.
The problem is that these sex hormones also affect mood and other biological processes and artificially manipulating them can lead to many unintended consequences in your body, some of them uncomfortable and some quite serious, including altering your mental health.
Birth Control Pills Linked to Depression
Researchers from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark analyzed data from more than 1 million women over a period of 14 years. None of the women, who were between 15 and 34 years of age, had been diagnosed with depression at the start of the study.1
However, the analysis showed that women who used hormonal birth control had a 40 percent increased risk of developing depression after six months compared to women who did not. The risk was greatest among adolescents.
The use of hormonal birth control was also associated with subsequent use of antidepressant drugs. Certain types of hormonal contraception had varying risks. Specifically, the use of:
Progestin-only pills led to a 1.3-fold higher rate of antidepressant use
Combined birth control pills led to a 1.2 higher rate
Transdermal patch led to a 2-fold increased risk
Vaginal ring led to a 1.5-fold increased risk
Anecdotal Reports Suggest Hormonal Contraceptives Lead to Mood Changes
Lead study supervisor, Dr. Øjvind Lidegaard, a professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, told CNN:2
"We have known for decades that women's sex hormones estrogen and progesterone have an influence on many women's mood.
Therefore, it is not very surprising that also external artificial hormones acting in the same way and on the same centers as the natural hormones might also influence women's mood or even be responsible for depression development."
Despite this knowledge, many health care professionals are reluctant to suggest that the risks of hormonal birth control may be too steep for some women, especially those with a history of depression.
While scientific validation has yielded some conflicting results, one report in the Oxford Medical Case Reports journal detailed two cases of women with a history of depression who developed depressive symptoms after treatment with hormonal contraceptives (the combined oral contraceptive pill, progestin-only pill and combined contraceptive vaginal ring).3
Case Reports Detail Onset of Depressive Symptoms After Use of Hormonal Contraceptives
In one case, a 31-year-old woman experienced gradual improvement of her depressive symptoms after she stopped using the vaginal ring. However, "a sudden and acute worsening occurred" shortly after she started using a combined birth control pill.
About a month later, she again experienced a worsening of symptoms "almost simultaneously with the initiation of treatment with combined contraceptive vaginal ring." The researchers noted:4
"HC [Hormonal contraception] was again interrupted, with a subsequent clear improvement in depressive symptoms. The patient remained stable without depression for the following [six] months."
In the second case, a 33-year-old woman developed depressive symptoms shortly after starting a progestin-only birth control pill. Her symptoms disappeared completely within one week of stopping the pill. The researchers concluded:5
"Caution should be used when starting up treatment with HC in women diagnosed with depression, since it might in some cases lead to worsening of the depressive symptoms.
Likewise, attention should be paid to the pre-existing use of HC in women who develop depression, as discontinuation of HC might in some cases be sufficient to treat the depression."
Hormonal Contraceptives Are Linked to Glaucoma and Other Health Risks
Women who used oral contraceptives for longer than three years were more than twice as likely to have been diagnosed with glaucoma, a leading cause of vision loss and blindness, according to one study.6
The results were so striking that the researchers recommended women taking the pill for three or more years be screened for glaucoma and followed closely by an ophthalmologist.
It might seem unusual that contraceptives could affect your vision, but it's important to understand that there are body-wide repercussions of artificially manipulating your hormones.
Most birth control pills, patches, vaginal rings and implants contain a combination of the derivatives of the hormones estrogen and progestin. They work by mimicking these hormones in your body to fool your reproductive system into producing the following effects:
Preventing your ovaries from releasing eggs
Thickening your cervical mucus to help block sperm from fertilizing an egg
Thinning the lining of your uterus, which makes it difficult for an egg to implant, should it become fertilized
However, your reproductive system does not exist in a bubble. It is connected to all of your other bodily systems, and therefore hormonal contraception is capable of altering much more than your reproductive status.
According to one report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 30 percent of women who have used the pill and nearly half of women using other hormonal contraception methods stopped their use due to "dissatisfaction," which was most often caused by side effects.7 Potential health risks include:
Thinner bones:Women who take birth control pills have lower bone mineral density (BMD) than women who have never used oral contraceptives.
Heart disease:Long-term use of birth control pills may increase plaque artery buildups in your body that may raise your risk of heart disease.
Fatal blood clots: Birth control pills increase your risk of blood clots and subsequent stroke.
Impaired muscle gains: Oral contraceptive use may impair muscle gains from resistance exercise training in women.
Long-term sexual dysfunction: The pill may interfere with a protein that keeps testosterone unavailable, leading to long-term sexual dysfunction including decreased desire and arousal.
Migraines
Weight gain and mood changes
Yeast overgrowth and infection
The Pill May Be a Libido Killer
About 15 percent of women taking oral contraceptives report a decrease in libido, likely because they lower levels of sex hormones, including testosterone.8 One study also found seven times the amount of the libido-killing sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) was present in women who took oral contraceptives compared to women who never used the pill.
Even though SHBG levels declined in women who had stopped taking the pill, they still remained three to four times higher than they were in women with no history of using oral contraceptives, which suggests oral contraceptives may kill a woman's libido for the long-term. Researchers concluded:9
"Long-term sexual, metabolic, and mental health consequences might result as a consequence of chronic SHBG elevation [in women who take, or have taken, oral contraceptives]."
Synthetic Hormones in Drinking Water May Be Increasing Cancer Rates in Men
It's not only women who are at risk from synthetic hormones contained in hormonal contraceptives. An analysis of data from 100 countries found oral contraceptive use is associated with prostate cancer, which may be due to exposure to synthetic estrogens excreted by women that end up in the drinking water supply.10
While it's been argued that only a small amount of additional estrogen is excreted by a woman using this form of contraception, this "small amount" is compounded by millions of women, many of whom use the pill for long periods of time. Also, synthetic estrogen and progestin does not biodegrade rapidly and is far harder to remove through conventional water purification systems, resulting in greater accumulation in the environment.
While this study did not prove cause and effect — that is, it did not prove that environmental estrogen from women's oral contraceptive use causes prostate cancer in men — it did find a significant association between the two that deserves further investigation, especially in light of estrogen's well-established role in a wide range of cancers and the prevalence of hormonal contraceptive use.
Non-Hormonal Methods of Contraception
Women and men looking for reversible non-hormonal options of contraception may be surprised to learn that there are many options. Conventional health care providers typically steer patients toward the popular hormonal options, but they are far from the only ones.
Barrier methods, which work by preventing the man's sperm from reaching the woman's egg, include the diaphragm, cervical cap, sponge and male and female condoms. None of these are foolproof, which is why many couples use them in combination with fertility awareness-based methods.
Fertility awareness involves knowing when a woman's fertile period occurs each month, and then avoiding sexual intercourse during (and just prior to) this time (or using a barrier method if you do).
When used consistently and correctly, fertility awareness is highly effective at preventing pregnancy; fewer than 1 to 5 women out of 100 will become pregnant using fertility awareness in this manner.11 In order to track fertility, a number of methods can be used by women, including tracking basal body temperature, mucus production, saliva indicators and cervical position.
Many women use a combination of methods, and there are also commercially available ovulation monitors that can be used in conjunction with the other methods. Ninety-nine percent of U.S. women of reproductive age have used at least one contraceptive method at some point in their lifetime, with 88 percent choosing hormonal options.12
However, you may be relieved to learn that you don't have to subject yourself to the risks of hormonal contraception, or learn to live with the side effects, in order to take control of your reproductive health. An experienced holistic health care provider can help you choose the best non-hormonal contraception options for you.
