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Study shows eating prunes daily can help prevent bone loss
Penn State University, November 3, 2022
People often eat prunes to boost their digestive health, but a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows that consuming a handful of prunes a day may also help prevent bone loss when you are older.
Researchers from Penn State University reported that women in their 60s who consumed prunes had significantly less bone loss in their hips in a year compared to those who didn’t eat the dried fruits. This suggests that prunes can help reduce inflammation in the body, which is a key driver of bone loss.
The researchers recruited 235 women for the study. The volunteers had an average age of 62 and had already gone through menopause.
The participants were split into three equal groups:
One group didn’t consume prunes.
Another group consumed at least 50 grams (g) of prunes a day, or four to six pieces daily.
The last group consumed 100g of prunes, or 10 to 12 pieces daily.
The volunteers ate the “Improved French” prune variety. All of their diet included calcium and vitamin D3 supplements, which can also help prevent bone loss.
The research team used scans to measure bone density in the hip, neck and hip socket at the start of the study, after six months and after one year. They found that the hips of the non-eaters had an estimated 1.1 percent loss of bone density a year after the study began.
Meanwhile, the bone density of those who consumed four to six prunes a day barely shifted.
The result was similar for the group that ate more prunes, but the researchers noted that any protective effect could be masked because of its much higher dropout rate.
Blood tests also showed that the women who consumed prunes had significantly lower inflammation levels than those who did not. There was no significant documented difference in bone mass in the spine or hip socket between the groups one year after the study began.
Tracing tomatoes’ health benefits to gut microbes
Ohio State University, November 7, 2022
Two weeks of eating a diet heavy in tomatoes increased the diversity of gut microbes and altered gut bacteria toward a more favorable profile in young pigs, researchers found.
After observing these results with a short-term intervention, the research team plans to progress to similar studies in people, looking for health-related links between tomatoes in the diet and changes to the human gut microbiome – the community of microorganisms living in the gastrointestinal tract.
“It’s possible that tomatoes impart benefits through their modulation of the gut microbiome,” said senior author Jessica Cooperstone, assistant professor at The Ohio State University.
The tomatoes used in the study were developed by Ohio State plant breeder, tand co-author David Francis, and are the type typically found in canned tomato products.
Ten recently weaned control pigs were fed a standard diet and 10 pigs were fed the standard diet fine-tuned so that 10% of the food consisted of a freeze-dried powder made from the tomatoes.
Fiber, sugar, protein, fat and calories were identical for both diets. The control and study pig populations lived separately, and researchers running the study minimized their time spent with the pigs – a series of precautions designed to ensure that any microbiome changes seen with the study diet could be attributed to chemical compounds in the tomatoes.
Results showed two main changes in the microbiomes of pigs fed the tomato-heavy diet – the diversity of microbe species in their guts increased, and the concentrations of two types of bacteria common in the mammal microbiome shifted to a more favorable profile.
This higher ratio of the phyla Bacteroidota (formerly known as Bacteriodetes) compared to Bacillota (formerly known as Firmicutes) present in the microbiome has been found to be linked with positive health outcomes, while other studies have linked this ratio in reverse, of higher Bacillota compared to Bacteroidota, to obesity.
Tomatoes account for about 22% of vegetable intake in Western diets, and previous research has associated consumption of tomatoes with reduced risk for the development of various conditions that include cardiovascular disease and some cancers.
But tomatoes’ impact on the gut microbiome is still a mystery, and Cooperstone said these findings in pigs – whose gastrointestinal tract is more similar than rodents’ to the human GI system – suggest it’s an avenue worth exploring.
New study examines how breathing shapes our brains
Aarhus University (Denmark), November 8, 2022
“Breathe in… Breathe out…” or “take a deep breath and count to ten.” The calming effect of breathing in stressful situations is a concept most of us have met before. Now Professor Micah Allen from the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University has come a step closer to understanding how the very act of breathing shapes our brain.
The researchers synthesized results from more than a dozen studies with rodent, monkey, and human brain imaging, and used it to propose a new computational model that explains how our breathing influences the brain’s expectations.
“What we found is that, across many different types of tasks and animals, brain rhythms are closely tied to the rhythm of our breath. We are more sensitive to the outside world when we are breathing in, whereas the brain tunes out more when we breathe out. This also aligns with how some extreme sports use breathing, for example professional marksmen are trained to pull the trigger at the end of exhalation,” explains Professor Micah Allen.
The study suggest that breathing is more than just something we do to stay alive, explains Micah Allen.
“It suggests that the brain and breathing are closely intertwined in a way that goes far beyond survival, to actually impact our emotions, our attention, and how we process the outside world. Our model suggests there is a common mechanism in the brain which links the rhythm of breathing to these events.”
Stabilizing our mind through breathing is a well-known and used tactic in many traditions such as yoga and meditation. The new study sheds light on how the brain makes it possible. It suggests that there are three pathways in the brain that control this interaction between breathing and brain activity. It also suggests that our pattern of breathing makes the brain more “excitable”, meaning neurons are more likely to fire during certain times of breathing
Close friends linked to a sharper memory
Northwestern University School of Medicine, November 1, 2022
Maintaining positive, warm and trusting friendships might be the key to a slower decline in memory and cognitive functioning, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study.
SuperAgers—who are 80 years of age and older who have cognitive ability at least as good as people in their 50s or 60s—reported having more satisfying, high-quality relationships compared to their cognitively average, same-age peers, the study reports.
Previous SuperAger research at the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center (CNADC) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine has focused on the biological differences in SuperAgers, such as discovering that the cortex in their brain is actually larger than their cognitively average, same-age peers.
“You don’t have to be the life of the party, but this study supports the theory that maintaining strong social networks seems to be linked to slower cognitive decline,” said senior author Emily Rogalski, associate professor at Northwestern’s CNADC.
Motivation is affected by oxidative stress, but nutrition can help
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Novembre 7. 2022
In life, motivation can be the difference between success and failure, goal-setting and aimlessness, well-being and unhappiness. And yet, becoming and staying motivated is often the hardest step, a problem which has prompted much research.
How does stress affect our capacity for motivation?” asks Professor Carmen Sandi at EPFL’s School of Life Sciences. “If that is the case, could nutritional interventions that can affect metabolite levels be an effective vehicle to improve motivated performance?”
The researchers focused on an area deep into the brain called the “nucleus accumbens”, which is known to play a major role regulating functions like reward, reinforcement, aversion, and not least, motivation.
The idea behind the study was that the brain itself—like all tissues in our body—is subjected to constant oxidative stress, as a result of its metabolism.
The brain then is often subjected to excessive oxidative stress from its neurometabolic processes—and the question for the researchers was whether antioxidant levels in the nucleus accumbens can affect motivation. To answer the question, the scientists looked at the brain’s most important antioxidant, a protein called glutathione (GSH), and its relationship to motivation.
What they found was that higher levels of GSH in the nucleus accumbens correlated with better and steady performance in the motivation tasks.
“N-acetylcysteine, the nutritional supplement that we gave in our study can also be synthesized in the body from its precursor cysteine,” says Sandi. “Cysteine is contained in ‘high-protein foods’, such as meat, chicken, fish or seafood. Other sources with lower content are eggs, whole-grain foods such as breads and cereals, and some vegetables such as broccoli, onions, and legumes.”
“Of course, there are other ways beyond N-acetylcysteine to increase GSH levels in the body, but how they relate to levels in the brain—and particularly in the nucleus accumbens—is largely unknown. Our study represents a proof of principle that dietary N-acetylcysteine can increase brain GSH levels and facilitate effortful behavior.”
Purple corn found to improve libido in males
University of Tlaxcala (Mexico), November 1, 2022
Purple corn (Zea mays) has been used as an aphrodisiac since the time of ancient Mexico. A study published in the journal Journal of Evidence-Based Integrative Medicine sought to understand the mechanisms behind this plant’s effect.
The researchers suspected that purple corn extract stimulated the ejaculatory response in males.
They used an animal model composed of male rats able to copulate and male rats whose spinal cord had been transected. Three doses of purple corn extract (25, 50, and 75 mg/kg) were administered to the animals.
The rats’ copulating behavior was noted before and after the administration of the extracts. In the control group, the researchers noted no change in the animals’ mount latency and the number of mounts performed. All doses, however, increased the number of intromissions performed by male animals. Ejaculation latency was decreased
In the spinal group, the researchers successfully used the extract to stimulate an increase in the number of discharges of the ejaculatory motor patterns.
According to the researchers, these are proof that purple corn extract has aphrodisiac effects.