click here for this edition’s table of contents
Diet
1) Eat spicy food. Live longer.
2) Addictions come in many forms.
“Cravings for gambling, food, sex and drugs all seem to activate the same brain networks, according to new research published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology.”
3) 10 portions of fruit and vegetables a day will help you live longer
4) Mushrooms are the best. They’re the 3rd food kingdom we rarely think about. They’re biologically distinct and nutritionally unique. Eat more of them. It s good for everything.
5) I will always support coffee research.
“These results suggest that caffeine has a specific benefit for memory during students’ non-optimal time of day – early morning.”
And they’re now finding it helps to block chronic inflammation.
6) Diet and mental health are very interconnected.
“New research finds that increasing fruit and vegetable consumption may improve psychological well-being in as little as 2 weeks.”
7) Over 90% of serotonin is produced in the gut. How you eat affects your mental health. One method of improving gut and mental health is using probiotics:
“According to researchers, probiotics can help relieve symptoms of depression, as well as be beneficial in helping to treat IBS.”
8) Drinking more water is one of the easiest things we can do to improve our health. Here’s 7 benefits, plus ways to help others gain access to clean water.
9) This is a phenomenal concise summary of the dangers of processed foods by Robert Lustig. Here’s just one of the many gems:
“Furthermore, 11 nutritional properties distinguish processed food. (1) Too little fiber. When fiber (soluble and insoluble) is consumed within food, it forms a gelatinous barrier along the intestinal wall.This delays the Intestine’s ability to absorb nutrients,instead feeding the gut microbiome. Attenuation of the glucose rise results in insulin reduction. Attenuation of fructose absorption reduces liver fat accumulation.”
10) Medicine is better understood through a historical lens. The Case Against Sugar.
“Thinking of obesity as an energy-balance disorder is as meaningless as calling poverty a money-balance problem”
“obesity is not an energy-balance disorder but a disorder of excess fat accumulation and so, clearly, a hormonal and metabolic disorder – the result of an ‘endocrine disturbance’, as it was phrased in the 1930s by Eugene Du Bois, then the leading American authority on metabolism. By this logic, the foods we eat influence fat accumulation not because of their caloric content but because of their macronutrient content, the proteins, fats and carbohydrates they contain. This paradigm attends to how organisms (humans, of course, in particular) orchestrate the careful ‘partitioning’ of the macronutrient fuels they consume, determining whether they will be burned for energy or stored or used to rebuild tissues and organs.”
“By this way of thinking, refined sugars are indeed toxic, albeit over the course of years or decades. We get fat and diabetic not because we eat too much of them – although that is implied tautologically merely by the terms ‘overconsumption’ and ‘overeating’ – but because they have unique physiological, metabolic and hormonal effects that directly trigger these disorders”
“Bauer argued that fat cells are clearly being driven by these factors to hoard excessive calories as fat, and this in turn would deprive the rest of the body of the energy it needed to thrive. In this hormonal/regulatory conception, excessive fat-accumulation causes hunger and physical inactivity, not the other way around.”
“if insulin is a fat-forming hormone and Type 2 diabetes is a disorder of insulin resistance, it then follows that high circulating levels of insulin in the blood, rather than insulin deficiency, could be the cause of the disease and obesity as well.”
“Perhaps the obese get that way not because they eat too much or exercise too little, but because they have elevated levels of insulin or their fat tissue is excessively sensitive to the insulin they secrete”
“The sugars and refined grains that make up such a high proportion of the foods we consume in modern Westernised diets trigger the dysregulation of a homeostatic system that has evolved to depend on insulin to regulate both fat accumulation and blood sugar. Hence, the same dietary factors – sugars and refined grains – trigger both obesity and diabetes. By focusing on the problems of eating too much and exercising too little, public health authorities have simply failed to target the correct causes.”
11) Obesity is one thing. Diabetes is another. The sugar epidemic is going to cause ALOT of problems in the future. Not only for our health, but also for our economics.
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