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As his Alzheimers looms, Charles and Pam Ogletree take one last walk in love – The Boston Globe
Posted: October 27, 2019 at 9:50 am
His name is Charles J. Ogletree Jr., and he was, not long ago, a dazzling, dominating legal mind, a theorist and scholar internationally revered for his brilliance and compassion. He inspired generations of students as a Harvard Law School professor, including the young Barack and Michelle Obama. He was a crusader for civil rights, the founder of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, and a prolific author who investigated police conduct in black communities and the role of race in capital punishment, long before the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
For decades, his schedule was booked solid; there were weeks when his wife, Pam, barely saw him. He gave speeches around the world, and offered guidance at historic moments, as when apartheid ended in South Africa and he helped to draft that countrys brand-new constitution. He mentored young lawyers, analyzed high-profile cases on national TV, and still somehow found time for pro bono casework, aiding unknown defendants in gritty Boston courts.
He was only 60 when his wife began to notice subtle changes in his speech. He was 62 when he was diagnosed with Alzheimers disease. Three years ago, at 63, Ogletree went public with his battle. He named his nemesis and vowed to fight it, the way hed fought injustices so many times before. He is fighting still, holding onto what is left. But so much of who he was has been taken from him: Reading and writing. Traveling the world. Debate and discussion and his first great passion, fishing.
The losses happen without ceremony. One day things are possible, another they are gone.
They had told themselves they would not dwell on that. I want to focus on what I have, Charles told Pam when he was diagnosed, not on what Im losing, or on what I had. They pledged to stay in the moment, savor it. To spend their time living.
And so as his world closes in, she pushes back. She plays the music he loved, tells him the old stories. In almost any kind of weather, they go walking. Charles always liked to walk, she says, but now he walks as if his life depends on it.
They have walked together by the sea at Worlds End in Hingham, and on flat sand beaches in Nahant and Duxbury. They walked at Great Meadows in Concord, and beside the granite ledges on Rockports Halibut Point. Charless pace has slowed in recent years; he might drag a leg, or stumble. Still, he presses on, walking 2 miles, 3 miles, 4.
Pam lets him set the pace, and she stays beside him. She marvels at his will and determination. For all he has surrendered, his walk still concedes nothing. He walks like a man trying to get somewhere.
. . .
FROM THE FIRST DAYS of their acquaintance, she could see how it would be: Charles the bright light at the center of the room, drawing people in and bringing them together. As soon as they arrived at Stanford University for their freshman year, he began to stand out as a leader. Pam admired his ease with people, the way he seemed to throw his arms around every one of the 70 black students in their class of 1,500, making each feel special. She was so different from him, so introverted and reserved, it thrilled her to be pulled into his lively circle, where they were good friends before becoming something more.
It was 1971 when they met as freshmen. Pamela Barnes had been a top student at Compton High School, in Southern California. Charles had grown up desperately poor in the segregated town of Merced, Calif., where his father, a farmhand, had a fifth-grade education. When a high school guidance counselor recognized Charless potential, and encouraged him to apply to Stanford, the young man resisted. He had never heard of the campus two hours from his home and thought the counselor meant the town of Stamford, in Connecticut.
Once enrolled, he quickly came into his own. He cut a bold figure, with his flat hat and colorful clothes, Pam recalled, and he was soon involved in everything, editing a student newspaper, joining the student government, and organizing activists to protest the trial of Angela Davis. It was there, closely watching the famous case unfold, that he first became transfixed by legal strategies and arguments. Later, as he considered where to continue his studies, it was Pam who urged him to apply to Harvard Law School.
Their life together followed the path of his career, first in Cambridge, where he graduated from Harvard Law in 1978, then in Washington, D.C., where he won cases and a stellar reputation as a public defender in the 1980s, and finally back in Cambridge again when he was hired to teach at Harvard. They had two children, a son and a daughter. Pam earned an MBA and had her own career, running academic enrichment programs, launching a charter school, and later, serving as president and CEO at the nonprofit agency Childrens Services of Roxbury.
Her work for disadvantaged families went on quietly. Charles, meanwhile, became a kind of intellectual celebrity in the 1990s, a sought-after TV legal analyst who once predicted O.J. Simpsons acquittal. He investigated Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas for the NAACP, and represented Anita Hill during Thomass ground-shifting 1991 Senate confirmation hearings. When friends and colleagues asked for help, he always said yes, his wife said, in keeping with his belief that he had been blessed, and should strive to give back.
He still squeezed in Boy Scout camping trips with his son, and fishing trips with old friends on Marthas Vineyard. At the pinnacle of his career, his wife said, there was so much going on, so many people around him. ... It was hard, sometimes, to even know him.
Pam always imagined things would slow down one day. The requests would come less frequently, his schedule would ease, and they would have more quiet time together.
She never imagined that when they did, the man she loved would already be slipping away.
. . .
THE DAY THEY first were told that Charles had Alzheimers disease, in May 2015, the couple was so flattened by the blow, it was hours before they could speak about it. The meeting at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston felt like surgery without the benefit of anesthesia, Pam later wrote in her journal. There were no buffers ... no words of hopefulness, just blunt, sharp words like widespread cognitive decline. The clinician offered no treatment possibilities, Pam recalled.
For a year or two, Pam and other family members had observed small changes in Charles, memory gaps and shifts in the complexity of his language, most pronounced when he was tired or stressed. Like most people, they thought Alzheimers struck older people, in their 70s and 80s. Charles seemed still in his prime, so devoted to his work he had never thought of stopping. On sabbatical that spring, he was preparing to write another book, Pam says, this time about the Obama presidency.
She had pushed him to undergo the extensive cognitive testing that led to his diagnosis out of concern that something might be wrong. But she had never thought it could be Alzheimers, a disease with no cure, and few prospects even for new drugs to ease its symptoms. Both Ogletrees struggled to accept the outcome and sought a second opinion at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge in late 2015. Those tests confirmed the first finding, devastating them again.
The future loomed suddenly before them as a threat. Pam left her job soon after his diagnosis, determined to make the most of their time together. Charles kept working, and struggled with denial, Pam said. Concerned that he was overburdening himself, she encouraged him to be more open about his condition, and by the summer of 2016, he was ready to speak publicly. Announcing his Alzheimers diagnosis for the first time at a national church conference, he said his deeply rooted, lifelong faith in God allowed him to feel grateful instead of angry.
I want to be a spokesperson, he told the Globe at the time. I want to tell people, dont be afraid of it.
This was something else he could do for others, challenging the shame and stigma of brain illness. But it was a relief for him, too, to let the truth come out, says Pam. He didnt have to fight so hard anymore to hide what was happening to his famous mind.
. . .
PAM HAD MOVED THEM toward acceptance, but that did not mean they would surrender to the illness. She had prayed long and hard to find direction, and found something that felt like an answer. An online ad led her to a West Coast Alzheimers expert, Dr. Dale Bredesen, who championed a holistic treatment regimen for his patients. He believed the roots of Alzheimers lay in a complex web of interconnected factors, not simply from protein fragments, or plaque that built up in the brain. Bredesen claimed some patients could gain back lost ground by overhauling their diet and exercise habits, and by addressing their past exposure to toxins.
The key to success under Bredesens plan is early treatment, even before symptoms become evident. Charles Ogletree was well beyond that point. But the couple craved some means of fighting back, and some way to fuel their days with optimism. By early 2017, they had gone all in with Bredesen, signing up for blood screenings and a costly four-day retreat where they were schooled in the use of physical activity and a ketogenic diet, which largely cuts out carbohydrates and replaces them with fat, to trigger the bodys natural defenses.
At the retreat, alongside other families, the Ogletrees were flooded with relief. Charles would go up to the front of the class every day and take copious notes, Pam said. He was so motivated, and so hopeful to be on a path. Back at home, he started work with a personal trainer while she took charge in the kitchen, stripping their diet of sugar and processed foods. Determined to try every way they could to fight his symptoms, they tested their homes air quality, and removed mold from their basement.
In her journal from those months, Pam recorded the progress she saw: a resurgence of Charless personality, his optimism and outgoing nature that had waned. He engaged with people more, she says, joked with them, and began to talk about a wider range of subjects.
That upturn, she says, was worth every step theyd taken. Yet they understood that his disease would not be vanquished. Cruelly, it reared up after a lull, as if to remind them of its silent progress. In June 2017, on a nine-day trip to Italy with Pam, Charles was gloriously happy, she recalled, drinking in every word of history and culture. In Venice on the last day of the tour, Pam paused to photograph a picturesque canal. When she turned back to their group, Charles was gone.
For 14 hours, Pam searched the storied city, combing through the twists and turns of its maze-like alleys. She called police, her children, the embassy; she felt numb with terror as night fell. Finally, near the bus station, their guide found him sitting on a bench, shopping bags nearby, calm but with a vaguely worried air.
Flying home to Boston the next day, Pam grieved silently for another loss: She knew, after what had happened, this would be their last trip overseas together.
. . .
WHAT SHE NOW WANTS most is to keep him close: to care for him at home for as long as she can manage.
For the moment, it seems within her grasp. Most of the time, he is easygoing, though there are restless mornings when he paces through the house, flipping switches on and off, trying to escape an unease he cannot name.
Pam knows how quickly things can change. There was a time, late last year, when she thought she might have to let him go, to live in a place with more support, after his symptoms took a brief aggressive turn. Cooking dinner in their kitchen one evening last December, on a day when she could tell he was unsettled, she was startled when he pushed her, knocking over a jar, and then swung a hand at her when she asked him to stop. Alarmed, she called 911.
The responding officers spoke quietly to Charles, calmly asking him to come with them to the hospital. He resisted and was physically combative. In the hallway, overcome by fear and guilt, Pam could not bear to watch as the officers restrained her husband. At Cambridge Hospital, where he was confused but calm, they spent four days in the emergency room, waiting for a bed to open up at McLean Hospital in Belmont. Doctors there adjusted his medication, and the aggression disappeared, allowing him to go home again.
It felt to Pam like a reprieve, and she tried, in its wake, to anchor herself even more firmly in the present.
They still pray together many mornings, Pam kneeling on a sofa cushion on the floor in the living room while Charles sits and listens on the couch beside her. He no longer pipes up with addenda to her prayers, but he seems attentive, even calmed by what she says.
In the beginning, she prayed for him to get better. Now she prays more often for acceptance.
For a long while, he resisted his growing dependence on her, for simple tasks like washing and dressing that had so long been his own. In time he gave in to that change, too that they would do these things together now, as they had done so much else, for almost 50 years.
Pam welcomed his acquiescence, but it scared her, too. If he comes to a point where hes completely peaceful ...
She paused in their quiet living room in Cambridge, morning sunlight falling on her face.
Im trying to hold onto him for as long as I can.
It is impossible to be sure how much he remembers, or what is left of his sense of self. Sometimes she reminds him, playfully. I know you! she exclaims, her voice warm and bright. Youre Charles James Ogletree, from Merced, California! He might look her way, or nod in response. But she thinks his name, and hers, are often lost to him.
Something else remains, though, that matters more to her: He knows who she is to him, and has always been. The one who loves him and takes care of him. The one who is always there beside him, when he falls asleep at night and wakes up in the morning.
. . .
THE TRAITS THAT define her husband are still there, the compassion and empathy and sociability. Pam knows this because she sees it for herself, brilliant flashes of Charless old self emerging.
One afternoon last spring, when Pam picked him up at his day program, he noticed a young man in the parking lot beside them, helping his father into the car.
Charles rolled down his window and spoke to the young stranger. Youre doing a great job, he told him kindly.
Pam was startled, but the gesture was familiar. That was always Charles, she said. Always encouraging people.
Friends came rarely, but a few had stayed with them. They called sometimes and spoke to Charles as he mostly listened. His dearest friend had visited last March, unsure if Charles would know him. But Charles lit up and hugged him, both in tears. You and I go way back, Charles said. We fished together.
Pam lives for those extraordinary, unexpected moments. When he allows her to hug him, or smiles, it feels like a gift. One night this fall, he turned to her abruptly. Are you all right? he asked with concern. I just want to make sure youre all right.
Youre a tough woman, he told her another day, in a tone that was clearly complimentary.
She copies his infrequent words down in her journal, sustenance to nourish her in the silences. Sometimes, the notes have an ominous quality, as when he noticed a cemetery one day. Dead people are over there, he said. Then he hugged his wife. Youll be all right, he told her.
They tried, last winter, to fly south to visit their daughter in Maryland, but the prospect of the airport security check proved too much for Charles, upsetting him so badly they had to abandon the trip. After that and after he went missing again, more than once, out for a walk on his own before she could stop him she knew it was time to consider leaving Cambridge. The pretty yellow house where they had lived for 30 years was a comfort, with his favorite chair, familiar neighbors, and his favorite breakfast place around the corner. But it was also a constant reminder of the past the setting for a life they had long since left behind.
Pam closed on a new house in August, in Maryland near their daughter and young granddaughter, and began the overwhelming task of packing up. It felt, some days, almost impossible. When she tried to sort through Charless library, containing hundreds of books, to choose those that could be discarded, she found volume after volume 150 in all lovingly inscribed by their authors to her husband.
By mid-October, she had thinned their possessions. Boxes stood stacked against the walls, ready for their November departure. She knew Charles sensed the upheaval ahead, and she knew it would be hard on him. She prayed the things she sought in their new home would help him, too: the closeness of loved ones, the awakening of a fresh start, and beautiful new places for them to go and walk.
. . .
THEIR TIME FOR WALKS near home is dwindling. So on a cloudy, windy Wednesday afternoon this month, they headed out from their house in Cambridge to nearby Danehy Park, one of their favorite walking spots.
Charles wore blue jeans, a gray fleece pullover, and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. He looked fit and trim and his pace was steady. Inside the park, pathways branched in several directions. Sweetheart, Pam asked him, do you want to go this way? But he had chosen his path already, bearing right and up a gentle slope without a word.
Here, on their walks, he could still take the lead. In most other places, it was difficult. He still wanted to buy things for himself, at the food stands where they sometimes stopped on weekend drives or the Shaws supermarket near their house. But clerks grew impatient when he became confused. Pam could step in to smooth things over, but that pained her, too; it felt like taking more of his personhood from him.
She wished the world understood his illness better. Everyone knew cancer patients might lose their hair, or become nauseous or exhausted. No one seemed to understand Charles when his disease flared into view, when he grew agitated at the airport, or forgot how to pay for his own protein bar.
There was so much darkness in his world, she craved the moments when she saw him happy. Several times during the summer in flagrant violation of their ketogenic diet she brought him a scoop of vegan strawberry ice cream from a shop in nearby Porter Square. He savored every spoonful, scraped the bowl clean, and clutched the empty paper cup in his hand all night.
Months later, the memory of his rapture was still enough to move his wife to tears.
She walked beside him now through the park in Cambridge, past toddlers twirling on the playground and teenagers giggling on a bench. He tucked his hands into his pockets, his face expressionless. She talked to him about their children and grandchildren, and pointed out a tree resplendent in its autumn yellows.
What they have now is different, and some would say poorer, but to Pam it is in some ways purer. Everything superfluous has gone away all posturing and ego; the petty resentments common to all marriages, leaving a connection deeper and truer than language.
It feels like I love him more now, she said one day this fall.
In the park, the wind was rising, the silvery sun no longer burning through the clouds. Sirens passed, above the chirp of crickets, as Pam asked Charles if it was time to go and find the car. No, came his unspoken answer, as he kept on walking; he was not ready yet to stop.
They turned back into the park together. She put her arm in his as they headed uphill.
Jenna Russell can be reached at jenna.russell@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @jrussglobe.
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As his Alzheimers looms, Charles and Pam Ogletree take one last walk in love - The Boston Globe
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Genetically modified foods safer and better; Another view to ‘Engineered vegetables’. – Lankaweb
Posted: October 27, 2019 at 9:48 am
[Full version of the article that appeared in the Island, 22nd October, 2019]
A reader named Vegetarian (The Island 15th Oct.) had written asking if outsized vegetables are some type of engineered vegetables? Jayantha Samarasinghe (JS) has replied (21st October), alluding to a science fiction story by Arthur Clarke to argue that it is best to NOT eat such engineered vegetables.
JS advises that this story demonstrates how a subtle difference can trigger a serious problem. Clarkes story is not based on a subtle difference, but a huge difference, as big as the left foot not fitting into the right shoe. SJ says, there was a plan to set up a lab in Sri Lanka to detect genetically engineered food imports scuttled by people who benefit in selling such food.
SJs advise that we must avoid engineered food and eat natural food, is as fictional as the Arthur Clarke story. SJ is also equally wrong when he implies that genetically modified (GM) food has been produced by people (scientists) who benefit by selling such food, and that it is worse in every sense (including nutritionally, i.e. compared to natural food.
Certainly, if SJ can do it, eating his home grown food is an excellent idea. However, it is not practicable to feed the 22 million population in Sri Lanka, or the seven billion globally. SJ may have a choice of foods, but many can only sleep hungry as they dont have food, leave aside the choices that people like SJ have.
If we use the traditional varieties of rice used decades ago, grown according to traditional methods (e.g. organic farming), it yields 1.1-1.5 metric tonnes of paddy/hectare, and giving two harvests (Yala and Maha). Modern hybrids, developed by scientists at Batalagoda, Kundasale and other research stations, produce yields like 6 to 10 metric tonnes per hectare. That is how Sri Lanaka has managed to feed its population that grew exponentially since world war I. But those unsung scientists get no benefit in selling such food., or any recognition. In fact, they are often blamed unreasonably as being in the pockets of multi-national companies.
Modern varieties use less water and yield harvests in shorter time e.g. in three months. So, to produce one kilo of rice takes less water, less land, less tilling and less erosion. If modern pesticides are used, no tilling is needed, cutting down erosion to a minimum and boosting harvests.
If old goma and geri-katu agriculture is used, together with the admonition to not to use pesticides, the harvests are open to attack from epidemics of pests. In Sri Lanka, the attack of the senaa (army) caterpillar recently is a notable example. Venerable Ratana, who champions the Toxin-free agriculture claimed that he can kill them all using organic pesticides if he were given the responsibility of combating the army caterpillar. Leave aside the ethics of a Buddhist monk taking over such a task, such technical matters should be the concern of agricultural scientists. Furthermore, such pesticides, often based on Neem (Kohomba) have been used from time immemorial and so plants and pests have developed resistance to them. Pests develop resistance even modern pesticides and they need to be constantly modified as organisms evolve.
The claim that there are harmful amounts of pesticide residues on vegetables is a canard spread by the Organic Food lobby. Sensitive chemical analyzes show, say, 10-100 parts per billion of Roundup or some such pesticide on cabbage. This is potentially harmful if you eat about 200 kilos of cabbage daily. If SJ were to test the vegetables grown in his garden, he will find much larger amounts (parts per thousands) of noxious chemicals in his vegetables, coming from the motor vehicular traffic on the busy roads in Mahanuwara, and from the dust laden acid rain that falls on his vegetables, even if he lives far away from any traffic!
There is a phenomenon known as bio-accumulation of toxins in plants. Plants take up toxins from the ground and concentrate them hundreds of times. So, if the same plant material is composted again and again, higher and higher levels of toxins accumulate in the soil. In the old days, people moved to a different chena and continued their cultivation. But today people dont have the luxury of moving from the Parana-hena to the Aluth-hena periodically, to grow ones crops. So a partial solution to the problem is crop rotation, or leaving the land fallow for a few years.
Grasses and straw accumulate toxins from the soil, and so cow-dung is richer in toxins than the soil. The soil naturally contains small amounts of cadmium, lead, arsenic and other noxious elements. These come to the soil from naturally occurring minerals, from urban waste like discarded batteries, electronic parts, paints, vehicle exhaust, burning of plastic, car-repair garages etc.
Most of the soya bean safely eaten all over the world is GM soya invented decades ago by scientists and commercialized. Canola oil produced by Canadian scientists has been, and is used safely all over the world for decades. Genetic engineering is simply plant breeding equipped with the information about the genetic code available from DNA analysis of the plant genome. In the old days, before DNA, people used hit and run hybridization, and so it took long years by farmers to develop useful varieties. Even the traditional varieties such as heenati, nilnaadu etc., are NOT natural varieties. The natural varieties are grass-like wild rices, which are the actual ancestors of traditional rices. The same story goes for fruits and vegetables.
The larger-sized vegetables that I have seen in markets are simply cultivars of standard varieties, grown with adequate application of mineral fertilizers, instead of relying on the old cow dung and geri-katu agriculture which often does not provide enough nutrients to crops. Traditional agriculture takes up a lot of land, water, digging-tilling causing erosion. Organic farmers do not usually analyze their soils for N, P, K etc. or toxins. Essential minerals may be lacking in their soil. The scientifically farmed vegetables are more fully grown and can be large if they are from larger-size cultivars.
There are self-styled patriots and heroes who agitate against multinationals claiming that agri-businesses seek profits. Companies need profits to survive. These activists claim to save the environment by agitating against the pollution coming from agrochemicals. The overuse of agro-chemicals is simply a consequence of the uncontrolled free-market introduced by politicians, and not intrinsic to agrochemicals, which are as necessary as the vitamins and drugs that most people need. Most soils get depleted of their N, P and other minerals on repeated farming, and hence adding the right amount of fertilizer, organic or mineral, is essential to good farming practice. A ton of organic fertilizer may be necessary for what is done with just one kilo of mineral fertilizer.
The self-styled green heroes agitating against GM foods have caused enormous harm and retarded progress. They are mostly driven by unreasoned and unsubstantiated fear. They fear that GM is toxic, and that GM-product companies will control the farmers by controlling GM seed supplies. That surely is a matter of legislation and not science. Do we stop the imports of cars or pharmaceuticals, saying that car companies or big-pharma can control our destinies?
Household compost pits and urban garbage dumps emit methane, a green-house gas much worse than CO2, adding to the environmental burden coming from organic farming.An excellent example of a false prophet causing much damage to South Asians is Shiva Vandana. She campaigned against golden rice in India. Most early-blindness cases in Asia are due to lack of Vitamin A in the diet. Carrots contain carotene a source of Vitamin A. Most Asians eat rice, but little of carotene containing foods. So, a simple solution is to hybridize rice with carrots. This cannot be done by plant hybridization. But it is very simple to take the relevant carrot gene and add it to the rice DNA, giving a new golden coloured, known now as golden rice. Although golden rice was produced by scientists decades ago, opposition to GM foods by the likes of Shiva Vandana has prevented its release in India. Health officials estimate that millions of people could have been spared of blindness if this rice had been licensed. The anti-GM protesters have spread fear among the public and lobbied politicians (who are equally ignorant of genetics). People fear what they do not understand, and especially when it is claimed that GM is a tool of subjugation of poor nations by global conglomerates. However, the most recent news is that the Indian government is after decades of delay set to approve the sale of golden rice.
The bottom line is, please cultivate your garden if you can, but avoid using urban waste and even household waste, unless you are sure that it is free of contaminants, road-side pollution etc. Avoid excessive composting, and instead use a mixture of mineral fertilizers and humus if needed. But be informed that genetically modified foods are as safe and often better for you (and the environment) than traditional varieties.
[The author worked as the head of the science department of a Quebec technical college, and retired recently.]
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Genetically modified foods safer and better; Another view to 'Engineered vegetables'. - Lankaweb
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LETTER: Hold that burger | Regional-Perspectives | Opinion – The Guardian
Posted: October 26, 2019 at 5:46 pm
Re: Red meat, science and buffets (Oct. 5 column by Sylvain Charlebois).
Charlebois makes much of the Annals of Internal Medicine study which claims to have evidence that red and processed meats arent as unhealthy as most doctors are now saying.
There are, however, cogent criticisms of that study:
From a Sep. 30 Washington Post article, by Laura Reiley: Another critic of the study, Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the Annals of Internal Medicine study also ignored solid science in the arena.
. Willett says the panels conclusions and recommendations do not reflect the studys findings. Their meta-analyses of large cohorts showed that dietary patterns with a moderate reduction in red and processed meat consumption were associated with lower total mortality by 13 per cent. If a drug brought down the number of deaths to that degree, he says, it would be heralded as a success.
.... Bonnie Liebman, director of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says one of the studys chief flaws is its reliance on the Womens Health Initiative study, a huge analysis of 48,000 women that had half the participants eating their regular diet and half eating a low-fat diet, which in many cases led to a half-an-ounce difference in meat consumption per day in the two groups, about a fifth of a hamburger. No surprise, there wasnt much difference in outcomes. Because of its size, the womens study may have skewed the overall results of the Annals of Internal Medicine report.
In other words, the study to which Mr. Charlebois refers did in fact show a 13 per cent reduction in mortality from a moderate reduction (note:not elimination) of red and processed meat in the regular diet. But the study doesnt support the conclusion that even those eating, say, 15 servings a week of red meat (the U.S. average), or more, can safely carry on.
Neil Bell, Baddeck
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LETTER: Hold that burger | Regional-Perspectives | Opinion - The Guardian
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Adele Swears By This Diet and Exercise Regimen – Showbiz Cheat Sheet
Posted: October 26, 2019 at 5:45 pm
Singer Adele has been looking great recently, losing 14 pounds since her split from her husband, Simon Konecki, earlier this year. The singer has always had a curvy figure and a firm attitude of body positivity.
Ive never wanted to look like models on the cover of magazines, she told People in 2012. I represent the majority of women and Im very proud of that.
They say looking good is the greatest form of revenge. If that is true, Adeles vengeance is complete.
An insider at the time of the couples separation told E! News, Their marriage was clearly working for a very long time. Whenever she was out at big openings and special events, he was usually with her, and they looked really just happy together and in love. They were into the marriage pretty much until they decided this just isnt working anymore.
Adele had already made her health a priority before the birth of her son, Angelo, in 2012, and lost weight at that time as well. The multiple-Grammy winner has always looked beautiful, but her current additional weight loss has given her a healthful glow.
I was trying to get some stamina for my tour, so I lost a bit of weight. She told Vogue magazine in 2016: Now I fit into normal, off-the-shelf clothes which is a really big problem for me!
Adele has never been one to enjoy dieting and exercise but got serious about her health with the birth of her son Angelo, now 6 years old.
Recently, she has been following a diet that works for her and that has given her results. Its called the Sirtfood Diet and while it includes whole, lower-calorie food, proteins, fruits, and green juices, its pretty strict. Followers of the diet are only allowed 1000 calories in the first few days of the diets first phase. The final days of the first phase allow followers to have up to 1500 calories.
Clearly, its not for the faint of heart, but judging by Adeles results, it works.
Its taken Adele time to get used to the idea of exercising regularly. She opened up to Rolling Stone in 2015 about her exercise routine at the time.
I mainly moan. Im not, like,skippingto the f***ing gym. I dont enjoy it. I do like doing weights {and] dont like looking in the mirror. Blood vessels burst on my face really easily, so Im so conscious when Im lifting weights not to let them burst in my face. And if I dont tour, youll catch me back down at the Chinese.
A source told Us Weekly in Julythat the Rolling in the Deep singer started a fitness regimen after hiring a personal trainer in L.A. She does 60-minute sessions that include cardio, circuit training, and Pilates. Shes found a routine thats working for her and is enjoying it more.
Read more: 15 Celebrities Who Went on Extreme Diets for a Movie Role
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Why Isnt There a Diet That Works for Everyone? – The New York Times
Posted: October 26, 2019 at 5:45 pm
On the ultraprocessed diet, the subjects on average consumed 500 more calories a day and gained two pounds. A possible reason: The participants levels of PYY, a hormone that suppresses appetite, were lower on it, while the levels of ghrelin, a hunger-stimulating hormone, were higher. Because the nutrients were constant, the researchers theorize, the processing itself may somehow trigger the hormonal changes. In a paper published in Cell Metabolism in May, they write that limiting consumption of ultraprocessed food may be an effective strategy for obesity prevention and treatment.
The results seemed to reinforce a general, even obvious consensus among nutrition researchers and yet they generated criticism anyway, much of which highlights fundamental challenges in designing dietary experiments. One charge leveled against Halls study, for example: It was too short to observe metabolic and behavioral changes that often take place more than two weeks after a new diet is started. But as Hall points out, it would have been hard to recruit people to live longer under such strict conditions. Whats more, outside the lab, subjects often fail to stick to a diet precisely, and their habits are so variable that it can be tricky to tell for sure whether the meal plan in question is having an effect. Yet its impossible to say whether a diet that works in the lab will succeed unless you can study it in real life. I do think there are ways to get accurate data in free-living people, Dr. Lydia Bazzano, an epidemiologist at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, says. If you cant, were all sunk.
At stake is the question of how government agencies and other institutions should deploy limited resources to address a catastrophic national health problem. How should dietary research be conducted in order to ultimately produce results that will be most useful to the public? For instance, most clinical trials are set up, as Halls was, to answer an either-or question say, Does this diet cause weight loss? traditionally by comparing an experimental group with a control. But in nutrition, the answer is often it depends. To try to understand how multiple factors might influence a diets success, Mayer-Davis and others are working on sequential, multiple assignment, randomized trials (SMARTs), whose subjects, in her words, move from one treatment to another one to another one over time, depending on how theyre doing. In a continuing 10-month N.I.H.-funded pilot study, one of the first to use this method to assess dietary strategies, she and colleagues randomly assigned volunteers between 19 and 30 with Type 1 diabetes who are overweight to one of three diets: a low-fat plan or a low-carbohydrate plan, both of which were low in calories, or a Mediterranean-style plan. At three and six months, if they dont like the diet, havent lost 2 percent body weight from their last check-in or are having trouble maintaining their blood-sugar levels, they will move to a different plan. Afterward, statistical analyses will determine what characteristics, including those related to lifestyle, were associated with success, or a lack thereof, for each treatment. Eventually, researchers hope, that sort of information will allow clinicians or even a smartphone app to create a personalized diet.
Of course, even personalized diets would still need to be adhered to, and this raises another quandary. Fundamentally, especially in the Western world, our diet is fairly unhealthy, Corby Martin of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, at Louisiana State University, says. With really broad strokes we could improve our health by making modifications to our diet that everyone could make. So why havent we? And what are we more likely to follow: a diet that is more personalized than past ones have been or, as in Halls formulation, more general?
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When the Menu Turns Raw, Your Gut Microbes Know What to Do – The New York Times
Posted: October 26, 2019 at 5:45 pm
It was a challenge unlike any other the chef-turned-graduate student had faced: Vayu Maini Rekdal had to create a menu where every ingredient could be eaten either raw or cooked. No pickling was allowed, nor fermented toppings like soy sauce or miso. Nothing could be processed in any way, so things like tofu were out. And the more sweet potatoes he could serve up, the better.
It was extremely challenging, said Mr. Rekdal, a chemistry graduate student at Harvard.
Rising to the occasion, Mr. Rekdal concocted chia seed breakfast puddings that could be cooked or chilled. He made raw and cooked pea-sweet potato-tahini patties. And for three days, eight volunteers dined on the unusual menu, providing stool samples to assist in research that could eventually help illuminate the evolution of the human microbiome.
The work was led by Rachel Carmody, a professor of human evolution at Harvard, and Peter Turnbaugh, a professor of microbiology at the University of California, San Francisco. They were studying the gut microbiome, the collection of microbes that live in our intestines and influence our immune system and various other parts of our biology, as well as help us digest food.
They had discovered that mice, eating a diet of starchy foods like sweet potatoes, developed vastly different microbiomes, depending on whether their food had been cooked or served raw. A switch from one to the other provoked a rapid shift in their guts microbial inhabitants.
Now, they wanted to see if the same was true with humans.
The results of the experiment appear in a paper published last month in Nature Microbiology. Although the sample size was small, and the effect was not as strong as in mice, peoples microbiomes do seem to shift on a raw diet, and very rapidly. While the human study was very short, it raises intriguing questions about whether starting to eat cooked food, eons ago, shaped the evolution of the organisms that live inside us, and whether our bugs may have helped us survive times of scarcity.
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As a graduate student, Dr. Carmody found that mice fed cooked diets quickly grew plump. Cooking alters the structure of many molecules, making more energy available to the mice. But she was also interested in the microbial community living in the mouse gut, which helps digest food and interacts with its hosts biology in a variety of ways.
In the new paper, she and her collaborators found that feeding mice meat that was raw or cooked changed little about their microbiomes. But with sweet potatoes, meant to stand in for tubers that early humans might have eaten, it was a different story.
Cooking produced significant changes, affecting the kinds of microbes that thrived and which genes they used.
The scientists traced the effect to the sweet potatos starches, which are difficult for mammals to digest raw but become more easily digestible once cooked. Depending on which kind of starch molecules arrive in the large intestine, different groups of microbes might take on the disposal job and subsequently surge in numbers.
Like any ecosystem, if you dramatically change foodstuffs coming into it, some species will thrive over others, Dr. Carmody said.
The researchers also found that raw sweet potatoes inflicted an impressive amount of damage on the microbiome of the mouse gut, similar to what occurs in mice fed an antibiotic. That may result from antimicrobial compounds in the sweet potato, which may be inactivated by cooking.
If cooking, at least of starches, can alter the ecology of the gut, then have humans been shaping our microbiomes ever since we learned to put prehistoric tubers in the fire? If our ancestors did eat these kinds of foods, and switched to cooking them, it may be that some tasks that used to be handled by gut microbes were no longer necessary, says Stephanie Schnorr, a biological anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the study. As a result, the bacteria might have lost the related genes or gained new roles.
The ability of the guts microbial residents to shift themselves so dramatically even in the short term may have had other benefits for their hosts. If microbiomes can retool themselves on little notice to handle changes in diet, they may have helped early humans cope with lean days where tubers were the only foods or times when only meat was on the menu.
The microbiome could essentially help us, within 24 hours, maximize our ability to digest nutrients even on a low-quality diet, Dr. Carmody said.
Still, the extent to which humans and their live-in digestion engines evolved together is debated. Mice given human microbiomes are generally healthy, suggesting that a host and its microbes dont fit together like a lock and key, honed by eons of mutual evolution. However, in some situations, like when a mouse gets sick, it is more likely to recover when it has its own microbiome. That may imply that there has been some co-evolution between the organism and its microbiome, Dr. Carmody said.
The interaction between host and microbes is complex, and longer studies with more people eating a raw or cooked diet would be necessary to probe how such a dietary change affects the microbiome and its host in the longer term.
People actually did enjoy the menu, by and large, Mr. Rekdal said, which included salads of mushrooms, sweet potato and cauliflower, either roasted or raw, and smoothies of cooked or raw fruit in addition to the puddings and patties. Some of the raw items werent wildly popular, but he has received many requests for the chia pudding recipe.
He sees the study as helping advance our understanding of cooking, a particularly ancient kind of applied chemistry.
Its a form of science, he said, that humans have been practicing for thousands and thousands of years.
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Weight loss: Ditch the gym AND fad diets Ant Middletons easy tips to get in shape – The Sun
Posted: October 26, 2019 at 5:45 pm
FROM putting recruits through their paces in SAS Who Dares Wins to climbing Mount Everest - Ant Middleton knows a thing or two about fitness.
The ex-military man, 38, has also starred on the front cover of Men's Health and has made a career out of pushing his body to its limit.
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Here, Ant, who is the face of Garmin, talks us through his top tips to getting in shape - without splurging your hard-earned money on an expensive gym membership.
He told The Sun Online the key is balance when it comes to both dieting and exercise.
As someone who does most of his exercise in the harsh outdoors, Ant says it's a myth that the gym is the only place you can get fit.
In an exclusive interview, Ant says: "You also dont need a gym membership to stay in shape, just go out into the garden or a local park and do some circuits training.
"Anything that raises your heart rate will help keep you in shape."
It may sometimes be tricky to fit a workout into your busy week, but Ant says making a plan for your fitness schedule can really make a difference.
He also emphasises not to worry if you do miss out on exercise days sometimes.
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Ant says: "This is obviously not always possible but if you plan to work out seven days a week, you will probably end up working out four days a week which is definitely enough to stay in shape.
"If you plan for four days and it doesnt work out, because life just does get in the way sometimes (!), you will start to miss out on exercise days."
He may look as though he's solid protein, but Ant urges those wanting to lose weight to focus on "balance".
"I think you just need to listen to your body, I personally eat a lot of carbs and protein but this isnt necessarily right for everyone," he tells The Sun Online.
"As long as you have a balanced diet, you cant really go too wrong."
Ant is keen to emphasise the importance of working on your mental as well as your physical health.
Ant, who runs Mind Over Muscle day camps across the country, says: "Physical and physiological simulation comes hand in hand, if one suffers it tends to have a detrimental effect on the other.
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"We must challenge ourselves psychologically on a daily basis, as well as physically at least every other day, even if it just walking the dog or walking to the shop for that pint of milk.
"Physical activity has always been part of my life and once it becomes routine in your life thats when it becomes a lifestyle and you cant do without it."
Dieting can not only be draining but also have a negative impact on your mental health if you're trying to lose weight.
"I lead a sustainable lifestyle and tend not to diet, even when I lose extreme weight," Ant says.
"I let my body gradually build its way back up to the weight that I function efficiently at on a day to day basis."
Ant says if you're trying to shed the pounds or boost your fitness, not to rush.
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He says: "Its all a gradual process, these extreme weight drops and gains arent good for the body so I let natural run its course."
Ant recommends investing in a fitness watch which can help you track your progress.
Ant says he's a fan of the Garmin Fenix 6 watch as it means he can plan running routes wherever he is in the country.
The watch also comes with other features including full topographic maps and GPS, as well as PacePro which gives you a full view of elevation changes when out running or training.
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Ant says: "I have had a relationship with Garmin for the past 15 years, since I was in the military to now, the brand is always evolving and changing with the times which is something I love about it.
"One feature that has always helped with my training is the GPS system.
"It means I can go on a run wherever I am in the country and they will create a route for me, so handy when you are on tour and still trying to keep fit."
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Not Just Blood PressureDietary Salt Linked to Tau Phosphorylation – Alzforum
Posted: October 26, 2019 at 5:45 pm
25 Oct 2019
Too much salty food wreaks havoc on the cardiovascular system, raising blood pressure, damaging small blood vessels, and limiting perfusion into the brain. But is this why salt increases the chances of cognitive impairment? Not so fast. At this years Society for Neuroscience meeting, held October 1923 in Chicago, Giuseppe Faraco from Costantino Iadecolas lab at Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute of Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, reported that learning and memory deficits in mice chowing on a high-salt diet correlated with phosphorylation of tau, not with damage to the brains blood vessels. The study, published October 23 in Nature, links reduced nitric oxide in blood vessel walls to activation of kinases that modify tau. The findings present a new twist in the well-known link between cardiovascular disease and risk for cognitive decline.
Admittedly, at eight to16 times the norm, the amount of salt the mice consumed exceeds all but the very highest equivalents in which people might indulge. Still, researchers found the results thought-provoking. However artificial the diet, this highlights that salt has effects independent of high blood pressure and that salt is a risk factor in its own right, said Joanna Wardlaw, University of Edinburgh. Wardlaw thinks the mechanism may explain some clinical observations. Weve seen in studies of small stroke that despite treating high blood pressure, people continue to get worse clinically and on their brain scans, she told Alzforum. We need to think about the role of other common risk factors, including dietary salt.
Li-Huei Tsai and Joel Blanchard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found the Columbia groups work fascinating. They illustrate that neuronal cells and the cerebrovasculature have dynamic molecular and biochemical interactions that clearly influence neurodegenerative pathologies, they wrote to Alzforum (full comment below). Faraco found the salt-induced reduction in nitric oxide (NO) boosted levels of p25, which activates the kinase Cdk5. Tsai has linked p25/Cdk5 to neurodegeneration (Dec 1999 news).
Pickled. AT8 immunostaining detects phosphorylated tau in the brains of mice fed a high-salt diet (right), but not in brains of mice on normal chow (left). [Courtesy of Giuseppe Faraco et al., Nature.]
The NO link most intrigued Zvonimir Katusic, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, as well. Susan Austin in Katusics lab found that knocking out endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) increases processing of A precursor protein and impairs learning and memory, and most recently that it boosts p25 and phosphorylation of tau (Austin et al., 2010; Austin et al., 2013; Katusic and Austin et al., 2016). In Chicago, Austin reported that microglia from eNOS knockouts ramp up production of ADAM17, the primary sheddase for TREM2, and tone down production of the anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10. It appears release of NO by the endothelium is an important control mechanism for the brain, said Katusic.
The plot gets thicker. The effect of high salt may not start in the endothelial cells of the brain, but in immune cells of the gut. Last year Faraco reported that a high-salt diet elicits a flood of interleukin-17 from T helper cells in the intestine. That IL-17 lead to a dearth of endothelial NO and impaired memory (Jan 2018 news). The IL-17 reduced cerebral blood flow by about 25 percent, but Faraco considers this insufficient to cause the memory impairment. Since tau pathology has been linked to cerebrovascular disease, he decided to see if a high-salt diet affected the microtubule binding protein.
Faraco put normal C56/Bl6 mice on a diet comprising 8 percent NaCl. This is 16 times the normal amount of salt in mouse chow; seawater is about 3.5 percent NaCl. The mice ate as much food as usual, but over the next 36 weeks, levels of phosphorylated tau rose. AT8 immunoreactivity peaked after 24 weeks, RZ3 immunoreactivity after 36 weeks. These antibodies recognize tau phosphorylation at serine 202/threonine 205 and threonine 231, respectively. Hyperphosphorylation of tau was detected in both male and female mice, and in mice on a 4 percent NaCl diet, albeit only AT8 staining in that case. Faraco found similar tau changes when he fed 8 percent salt to Tg2576 mice, which model amyloidosis. Levels of A were unaffected.
What about neurofibrillary tangles? Faraco found none in any of the mice, but levels of insoluble tau released by formic acid did increase slightly in the cortices and hippocampi of mice on the high-salt diet.
In parallel with the tau phosphorylation, C57/Bl6 mice began having learning and memory problems. They struggled to recognize novel objects in their cages and had trouble finding the escape route in the Barnes maze. The deficits modestly correlated with AT8 binding in the cortex and hippocampus.
Was hyperphosphorylation of tau to blame? The authors tested this in two ways. They administered anti-tau antibodies to wild-type mice on high salt, and they fed high salt to tau knockouts. In both cases the animals performed as well as mice on normal chow, despite hypoperfusion of the brain, suggesting that indeed it was the tau that drove the cognitive decline due to the salt and not reduced blood flow.
Given Katusics prior data suggesting links between endothelial NO and tau phosphorylation, Faraco tested if he could stop the protein modification with L-arginine, a precursor in NO production. This suppressed both tau phosphorylation and the learning and memory deficits. In addition, elevated p-tau in eNOS knockouts could not be boosted further by high salt, supporting the idea that suppression of endothelial NO was behind the tau modification.
Delving more deeply into the mechanism, Faraco found that the salty food elevated calpain activity in the brain. Calpain cleaves p35 to p25; in keeping with this, the levels of the smaller peptide rose, as did activity of Cdk5, the tau kinase. All told, the data suggest that by triggering IL-17 production in the gut, high salt triggers loss of endothelial NO, which in turn leads to phosphorylation of tau and cognitive impairment.
Precisely how NO is suppressed remains to be seen. Katusic emphasized that the gas easily diffuses. Since cells in the brain are rarely more than 15 micrometers away from a blood vessel, NO could be an important signaling molecule. Faraco found no gross changes in astrocytes, microglia, or neurons in mice on high salt, as judged by GFAP, Iba1, and NeuN staining, but agreed it would be important to study downstream effects on these cells.
In her SfN talk, Austin reported that NO affected on microglia more profoundly. In cultures of the cells from eNOS knockout mice, she found not only an increase in ADAM17, but also decrease in cell surface TREM2. Mutations in this microglial receptor increase risk for Alzheimers and frontotemporal dementia. The sensor plays a central role in microglial homeostasis (Nov 2012 news; Oct 2012 news; Aug 2019 news). Austin also found that eNOS-/- microglia, either cultured or isolated from brain by cell sorting, make less TNF and IL-10, pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines, respectively, while at the same time ramping up phospholipase A2, which mobilizes arachidonic acid, a precursor for inflammatory molecules.
We are slowly developing this concept that vascular mechanisms independent of perfusion affect cognitive impairment, said Katusic. Tsai and Blanchard agreed. Further unraveling these mechanisms will undoubtedly be a promising endeavor that will strengthen our understanding of how dietary habits influence susceptibility to age-related cognitive decline, they wrote.
For his part, Faraco is using RNA-Seq to study what happens in the endothelial cells to reduce NO. It will be interesting to examine interactions with other genetic and dietary risk factors, such as high-fructose or high-fat diets, he said. He thinks it will be important to identify the tau species responsible for the effects on cognition. We need to go much more deeply into the mechanism of neuronal dysfunction.Tom Fagan
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Pathogenic tau and cognitive impairment are precipitated by a high-salt diet – National Institutes of Health
Posted: October 26, 2019 at 5:45 pm
News Release
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
NIH-funded mouse study links high sodium consumption with a group of dementias.
High levels of dietary salt can activate a pathway in the brain to cause cognitive impairment, according to a new study. The paper, which was published in Nature, shows that this effect is not due to a loss in blood flow to the brain as originally thought, but rather to clumps of a protein linked to several forms of dementia in humans. The research was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health.
This study continues the important story of the effects of a high-salt diet on the brain, said Jim Koenig, Ph.D., program director at NINDS. This work in mice reveals a new target for therapies aimed at brain blood vessel dysfunction.
In a previous research study, scientists led by Costantino Iadecola, M.D., director and chair of the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, showed that mice that ate a diet high in sodium began to show symptoms of dementia due to changes that occurred in the gut. The diet also produced a drop in the flow of blood to the brain, which they thought would be the cause of the dementia symptoms. However, when they looked more closely, they found instead that a buildup of a protein called tau in the brain was the cause.
This result was completely unexpected, said Dr. Iadecola. We knew that a high-salt diet produced dementia-like symptoms in mice, and we went in thinking the culprit would be reduced blood flow to the brain. It turned out that wasnt the case at all.
The original link found between high salt diets and brain blood flow was a decrease in the production of nitric oxide (NO) in cells making up blood vessels in the brain, caused by a reduction in the function of the enzyme eNOS. Blood flow in the brain increases when NO is present; however, NO generated from blood vessel cells has several other functions in the brain. These include being part of a molecular pathway connected to tau that, in the absence of sufficient NO, can modify tau protein in a way that causes it to clump together to form aggregates.
In a family of diseases called tauopathies, it is these tau aggregates that interfere with the proper function of brain cells, which can lead to cognitive impairment and eventually dementia. When mice consumed the high-salt diet in this study, their brains also showed evidence of tau aggregates that coincided with reduced cognitive abilities.
The researchers further showed that tau was the important factor behind these effects by studying mice that had their gene for tau deleted. These mice showed a similar drop in brain blood flow, but because they could not make tau protein, they did not form tau aggregates, nor did they show a decrease in their cognitive abilities. Similar results were observed with an antibody against tau.
The take-home message here is that is that while there is a reduction in blood flow to the brains of mice that eat a high-salt diet, it really is tau that is causing the loss in cognitive abilities. The effect of reduced flow really is inconsequential in this setting, said Dr. Iadecola.
He noted this result could have been predicted. After eating a high amount of sodium, the mice had about a 25% decrease in blood flow. This drop is similar to what is seen in people after drinking a cup of coffee. Evidence suggests it actually takes about a 50% drop before the brain can no longer compensate and cognitive effects are seen.
Although Dr. Iadecola points out that the salt content consumed by the mice in this study is eight to 16 times higher than normal and is likely to be more than a person would consume in a single day, their findings provide important links between diet, the blood vessels of the brain, and cognition.
Our results highlight the importance of thinking beyond blood flow when treating disorders affecting the brains blood vessels, said Dr. Iadecola.
This work was supported by NINDS (NS089323, NS095441), the Cure Alzheimers Fund, the American Heart Foundation, and the Feil Family Foundation.
This news release describes a basic research finding. Basic research increases our understanding of human behavior and biology, which is foundational to advancing new and better ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease. Science is an unpredictable and incremental process each research advance builds on past discoveries, often in unexpected ways. Most clinical advances would not be possible without the knowledge of fundamental basic research.
NINDSis the nations leading funder of research on the brain and nervous system.The mission of NINDS is to seek fundamental knowledge about the brain and nervous system and to use that knowledge to reduce the burden of neurological disease.
About the National Institutes of Health (NIH):NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov.
NIHTurning Discovery Into Health
Faraco G. et al. Dietary salt promotes cognitive impairment through tau phosphorylation. Nature. October 23, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1688-z
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Jodie Prenger weight loss: Actress & Pointless star shed an impressive 8st with this trick – Express
Posted: October 26, 2019 at 5:45 pm
Jodie Prenger showed off her singing abilities when she won the chance to play Nancy in a West End production of Oliver! on the TV show, I'd Do Anything. She has since appeared in shows such as Spamalot and Shirley Valentine as well as making a guest appearance in Waterloo Road. Tonight she's a contestant on hit BBC show, Pointless Celebrities. Jodie previously took part in weight loss reality show The Biggest Loser which saw her shed an incredible 8st 7lb in just six months. What did she do to slim down?
When taking part in the show, she shrunk from 18st 2lb to a much healthier 9st 9lb and a size 10.
Although she has not kept all the weight off, Jodie picked up some healthy habits which have kept her trim.
Jodie was initially put through an intense fitness routine where she carefully monitored her diet and exercised for up to three hours a day.
The singer admitted she has gained around three stone back but she has accepted the routine was not sustainable.
Jodie said: Ive never ever been thin but, for most of my life, its been one of the things that I wished for.
It was only after doing the show that I realised that I was never ever going to be able to keep that amount of weight off and have a life.
She managed to find a balance which helped her keep a healthy lifestyle without being too restricted.
Its true that I lost eight-and-a-half-stone in six months by eating three meals a day and exercising more than three hours a day. There was no magic pill," the actress added.
I went from not being able to run a mile to jogging 12 miles a day and I proved to myself that it can be done.
But I found it hard to keep weight off, and its never helped that I am partial to a cheeseboard and a bottle of Prosecco.
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