Occasional Fasting Boosts Mental Health & Longevity

March 29, 2012 at 1:03 am (Food and drink, Global Events, Health and wellness, News and politics)
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Health Freedom Alliance » Occasional Fasting Offers Boost in Mental Health and Longevity.

Occasional Fasting Offers Boost in Mental Health and Longevity

March 29, 2012

Longevity is not only rooted in what we put in our bodies but also how we regulate our intake.  There is a Japanese proverb, “hara hachi bunme” or “Stop eating when you are 80% full”.  It has certainly benefited the people of Japan who have a life expectancy of 86 years for women and 79 for men versus 80 and 75 respective years for American.

Taking this a step further and fasting occasionally is recently been shown to offer benefits of not only longevity, but also boost the health of your brain according to a group of American scientists. -Intelligentactile

Starving* yourself on alternate days can make you live longer, according to scientists.

A group of Americans have said that fasting on and off can boost brain power and help to lose weight at the same time.

The National Institutes for Aging said their research was based on giving animals the bare minimum of calories required to keep them alive and results showed they lived up to twice as long.

The diet has since been tested on humans and appears to protect the heart, circulatory system and brain against age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s.

‘Dietery energy restriction extends lifespan and protects the brain and cardiovascular system against age-related disease,’ said Mark Mattson, head of the laboratory of neurosciences at the NIA and professor of neuroscience at John Hopkins University in Baltimore.

‘We have found that dietary energy restriction, particularly when administered in intermittent bouts of major caloric restriction, such as alternative day fasting, activates cellular stress response pathways in neurones,’ he said to the Sunday Times.

In one set of experiments, a group of mice were only fed on alternate days while others were allowed to eat daily.

Both groups were given unlimited access to food on the days they were allowed to eat and eventually consumed the same amount of calories.

Professor Mattson said he found the mice fed on alternate days were more sensitive to insulin and needed to produce less of it.

High levels of the hormone, which is produced to control sugar levels after a meal or snack, are usually associated with lower brain power and are at a higher risk of diabetes.

The brains from both sets of rodents were then examined and Professor Mattson said he found the calorie restricted diets appeared to improve the function of brain synapses.

These are the junctions between brain cells which promote the generation of new cells and make them more resistant to stress.

Previous research has found that starving* yourself for a few days can help in the fight against cancer.

Scientists found that depriving healthy cells of the food they need sends them into a survival mode, making them highly resistant to stress and damage caused from chemotherapy.

Experts have described the behaviour similar to animals waiting out the winter by hibernating.

*(resting the gut)

Link: http://healthfreedoms.org/2012/02/24/occasional-fasting-offers-boost-in-mental-health-and-longevity/

By PAMELA OWEN

Source:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2103286/The-secret-long-life-Starve-alternate-days-boost-brain-power-shed-weight.html#ixzz1mzNxCADA

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Diagnosing Autism At A Younger Age Could Lead To Earlier Interventions

October 16, 2011 at 10:32 pm (Global Events, Health and wellness, News and politics)
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Medical News Today
Diagnosiing Autism At A Younger Age Could Lead To Earlier Interventions
16 Oct 2011

Autism is normally diagnosed between the ages of 2 and 3. But new research is finding symptoms of autism spectrum disorders in babies as young as 12 months. If children could be diagnosed earlier, it might be possible to help them earlier – and maybe even stop them from developing autism, according to the author of a new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“In the field, there’s this new excitement,” says Brooke Ingersoll of Michigan State University. “We’re starting to get a picture of what autism looks like in the first years of life.” Because autism normally isn’t diagnosed until a child starts to show delays in talking and other milestones that typically occur after age 2, it’s been difficult to look at what children are like in the first years of life. Until recently, psychological scientists have only been able to learn about the children’s behavior as an infant and toddler by asking their parents, and sometimes looking at home movies.

But now results are coming in from studies that followed large numbers of children from 6 months to age 3, when a formal diagnosis could be determined. Some children later developed autism and others didn’t. “The group of children that eventually develop autism spectrum disorders looks different from typically-developing kids,” Ingersoll says. At 12 months, children who will later develop autism are less likely to show “joint attention behaviors” – paying attention to both a toy and another person, for example. They are also less likely to imitate. At this point, it is difficult to use this information to diagnose individual children this young; there’s such a large spectrum of normal behavior that the differences often only emerge when scientists compare a lot of children. But experts are now able to diagnose autism spectrum disorders at 18 to 24 months – much earlier than autism used to be diagnosed.

If young children have problems with social behaviors, it may then explain some of the later problems in autism – if they don’t imitate, for example, that could help explain why they have difficulty with language later, Ingersoll says. “If there’s some early disruption in these mechanisms that are involved in social learning, the children have many fewer opportunities to learn about their environment,” she says.

Because social learning is so important, some psychological scientists are trying to develop ways to work with toddlers who show early signs of autism. For example, several interventions have been developed to teach joint attention and imitation in very young children with ASD. In one such intervention, reciprocal imitation training, a therapist might play with the child by imitating what he is doing, then encourage him to imitate her. “We try to teach them, imitating other people is this great social thing,” Ingersoll says. These techniques are also taught to parents to practice at home to expand opportunities for learning.

Early results have been good, although the studies on several of these interventions won’t be finished for a few years, Ingersoll says. “I think there’s a lot of hope that if we can figure out the right behaviors early enough, and intervene early enough, we may be able to prevent the development of autism.”

Article URL: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/236003.php

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Foods That May Help Block Alzheimer’s Disease

October 9, 2011 at 10:51 pm (Food and drink, Health and wellness)
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Foods That May Help Block Alzheimer’s Disease.

Ginger, Blueberries, Rhubarb May Help Slow Down Alzheimer’s
By Tomoko Okada, MS, RD, CNSC, CDN on Sep 29, 2011

Alzheimer’s Disease
FYI Health Tip

Foods like ginger, rhubarb and cinnamon may keep Alzheimer’s away.

Can certain foods help slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease? With a progressive loss of brain function that slowly destroys memory and thinking capability, Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia.

Alzheimer’s is said to result from the deposit of proteins called amyloid-beta protein peptides that are produced as a result of genetic mutations and eventually form plaques in the brain. Many substances, including various food products, are thought to block the buildup of amyloid-beta peptides and have shown promising results in studies using laboratory animals.

Researchers in Canada conducted a study to further confirm previous results of various substances showing the ability to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, but this time, using two different tests using synthetic forms of peptides, as well as brain tissues of mice and humans who had died of Alzheimer’s disease.      (Read more)

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