Health News: Stress Vs Health Food Choices

If you’re trying to lose weight, kick off your diet by relaxing. Stress tinkers with your brain chemistry in ways that make it hard to make healthful food choices and maintain self-control, a new study finds.

Study volunteers who endured a somewhat stressful experience were 24% more likely to choose unhealthful snacks afterward compared with volunteers who hadn’t experienced stress. And researchers think they know why: Brain scans showed that the stressed people had altered neurological connectivity between regions of the brain that process tastiness, make value judgments and plan for long-term goals.

“Being able to regulate and control your decision-making involves this complex interplay between different areas of your brain,” said Todd Hare, a neuroscientist at the University of Zurich and the senior author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Neuron. “There’s not just one region or node [of the brain] that turns on and off to establish self-control; they have to all sync up and work in unison. Stress disrupts that synchrony.”

To figure this out, Hare and his colleagues enlisted 51 male volunteers, all of whom had said that they were trying to eat better and stay fit but that they occasionally indulged in some junk food.

Half the men were randomly selected to undergo a moderately stressful experience: immersing their hands in ice water for three minutes while a researcher videotaped them. The other men put their hands in room-temperature water for three minutes, with a researcher in the room but without a video camera rolling. Afterward, all the participants filled out a questionnaire to rate their level of stress during the experience. Continue.

Telomeres and Reversing Aging – Part 2

Inflammation is the underlying cause to the aging process. As we age, our immune system produces what is known as “low-grade” inflammation.

For many, inflammation is simply understood as a trajectory of biomarkers, for example the appearance of IL-6 or C-reactive protein (CRP), associated with a disease. However, inflammation is a very complex response to an injury, infection, or other stimulus, in which many different cells types and secreted factors orchestrate protective immunity, tissue repair, and resolution of tissue damage. Whereas acute inflammation limits tissue damage and resolves, chronic prolongation of the inflammatory state leads to progressive tissue damage. A central question, then, is how do we describe and begin to understand the mild pro-inflammatory state of aging. Luigi Ferrucci (NIA, NIH)

Inflammation is correlated with Diabetes II, obesity and cardiovascular disease, several cancers, frail bones, etc. So, what is the connection to telomeres?

There are several considerations in relating telomere biology to aging. First, physiologically there is overlap between the shortest telomere length of young children and the longest telomeres of the elderly. Most telomere shortening occurs early in life, in association with growth, and when the rate of disease in general is low. The paradigmatic telomere syndrome of dyskeratosis congenita is not at all typical of progerias, inherited syndromes in which patients appear old and suffer diseases of aging such as premature atherosclerosis or dementia. Furthermore, the organ damage of dyskeratosis congenita is not very similar to normal aging of marrow, lungs, and liver. The marrow becomes mildly hypocellular in older individuals, but stem cell numbers may actually increase, and blood counts remain stable; and neither the liver nor lungs normally become fibrotic with advanced age, as they often do in dyskeratosis congenita patients. Although in adults, relatively short leukocyte telomeres have been associated with cardiovascular events—a common morbidity of the aging population—the clinical correlations have not been consistent, and may be related to overall reactive oxygen species exposure. Rodrigo Calado and Neal Young – The Scientist, May, 2012

Epigenetics and Inflammation

Epigenetic or phenotype modifications are done through gene expression. The most well known of these is DNA methylation. The methylation pathway is the super highway for inflammation.

Methylation is the process of adding a carbon and three hydrogen atoms to a molecule. Neurotransmitters and proteins get methylated. The body uses methylation to create T-cells to kill viruses, bacteria, and cancers. It is a series of over 100 reactions in the body that are responsible for production of dopamine, growth factors, and glutathione. Glutathione helps with removal of heavy metals. When methylation is impaired, B-cells will be high and you will have ongoing inflammation. Viruses create cytokine storms which also propogate inflammation. You simply cannot heal while you are inflamed. Once methylation is corrected, inflammation generally reduces.

Here is a graphic of how cigarette smoke impairs methylation:

DNA methylation is the most studied epigenetic modification, capable of controlling gene expression in the contexts of normal traits or diseases.

Healthy function of telomeres requires adequate methylation. The important point to understand is that an adequate supply of methyl donors is needed for telomeres to work properly, just like your car needs gasoline.

In Part 3 we will examine epigenetic factors to help fix methylation pathways as a key component to the aging process and the various testing options for methylation and other related diagnostics.

Genetics: The Milk Revolution

In the 1970s, archaeologist Peter Bogucki was excavating a Stone Age site in the fertile plains of central Poland when he came across an assortment of odd artefacts. The people who had lived there around 7,000 years ago were among central Europe’s first farmers, and they had left behind fragments of pottery dotted with tiny holes. It looked as though the coarse red clay had been baked while pierced with pieces of straw. More from nature.com.