Resveratrol may be an effective intervention for lung aging
The Saban Research Institute (Los Angeles), February 22, 2022
In a study by The Saban Research Institute of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, researchers demonstrate, for the first time that inhaled resveratrol treatments slow aging-related degenerative changes in mouse lung. Lung aging, characterized by airspace enlargement and decreasing lung function, is a significant risk factor for chronic human lung diseases. The study is published online in the journal Thorax. Resveratrol (RSL), a chemical found in red wine, is an antimicrobial chemical substance produced by plants to protect against infection and stress-related changes. RSL prophylaxis by inhalation was a novel measure taken by the research team as a potential approach for slowing age-related deterioration of lung function and structure by preserving alveolar epithelial type 2cells (AEC2) which line alveoli (the tiny air sacs in the lungs through which the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide takes place) and produce surfactant which is vital for efficient breathing.
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Plant product shows promise in mouse model of Parkinson’s Disease
University of California, Davis, February 22, 2022
A natural product from the dried root of a pea-family plant, potentially combined with an enzyme inhibitor discovered in the laboratory at the University of California, Davis, may provide hope in alleviating neuroinflammation in Parkinson’s disease. The team found that a soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) inhibitor combined with kurarinone, a compound from the dried root of Sophora flavescens, reduced neuroinflammation in an animal model with Parkinson’s disease. The dried root, also known as kushen, has been used for hundreds of years in traditional Chinese medicines.
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Tai Chi may reduce stroke risk
Chinese University of Hong Kong, February 22, 2022
Weekly Tai Chi exercise sessions may reduce stroke risk by lowering high blood pressure and increasing the good cholesterol, or high-density lipoprotein (HDL), according to research presented at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference. Researchers studied how Tai Chi compared to brisk walking for reducing stroke risk in 246 adults with known stroke risk factors, including high blood pressure. Participants were randomly assigned to a group that participated in two 60-minute Tai Chi sessions each week; a walking group that walked briskly for 30 minutes every day; or a control group, which was told to maintain the activities they were doing before the study. At three months into the assigned activities, researchers found: The Tai Chi group had notably greater reductions of 10.25 mm Hg in systolic (upper number) and 6.5 mm Hg in diastolic (lower number) blood pressure measurements than those in the control group.
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Postmenopausal women who increased intake of collagen peptides demonstrated improved bone mineral density, study finds
Kapodistrian University (Greece)
A randomized trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Densitometry found that the addition of collagen peptides to a standard bone-supporting regimen of calcium and vitamin D3 was associated with greater improvements in measures of bone health compared to calcium and vitamin D3 alone.1 Collagen is important for bone health because it enables bones to absorb energy and have some flexibility – such that they don’t instantly fracture when they are highly stressed. “It is known that the mechanical integrity of the collagen network in human bone deteriorates with age, and such adverse changes correlate with the decreased toughness of the aged bone,” authors Kalliopi Lampropoulou-Adamidou of National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and colleagues wrote. The study included 45 postmenopausal women with osteopenia,. All participants received 500 mg of calcium and 10 mcg of vitamin D3 (400 IU) daily for one year and 23 women also received 5 grams per day of collagen peptides, the building blocks of collagen. After one year of treatment, women who received collagen peptides plus vitamin D and calcium experienced significant improvements in parameters related to bone mineral content and bone density in the trabecular portion of their tibia while the group receiving only vitamin D and calcium did not. Bone mineral density and mineral content also improved in the cortical bone (outer more solid portion) of the tibia among collagen peptide-intake participants compared to the calcium/vitamin D group. The group that received the collagen peptides also had greater bone density of their lower spine and changes suggestive of slight improvements in markers of bone turnover.
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Wokeism Is a Cruel and Dangerous Cult
Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—of those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda.
Victor Davis Hanson (Stanford University)
January 23, 2022
Wokeism has been described by its critics as the omnipresent use of race—and to a lesser extent, gender—to replace meritocracy and thus ensure equality of result. What follows from implementing that ideology are reparatory actions to reward those of the present by atoning for the injustices done to others in the past. Some see it as an update of 1960s cultural Marxism fads. Others scoff that it is just a return to 1980s-style political correctness. Still more see it as the logical successor to 1990s-type race, class, and gender obsessions—albeit with a shriller and more dangerous Jacobin, Soviet, and Maoist twist. Wokeism’s hysteria also invites comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism. But few have described wokeism as the cruel creed that it is. Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. It is nihilist and destroys everything it touches. It tears apart foes and friends alike, whether by fueling media-driven hatred of Donald Trump or faux-deification of the disaster that is now Joe Biden. Woke’s Victims Defunding law enforcement and defaming police resulted in record numbers of murders in 12 U.S. cities. A wave of violent crime is even hitting America’s suburbs. Without much fear of arrest, indictment, conviction, and incarceration, emboldened violent career criminals for the past year have robbed, assaulted, and killed the innocent with impunity. The victims at the bus stop, the subway, or in the furniture store do not seem to warrant media or progressive attention, much less sympathy. They are the ignored—the unnamed, and the forgotten collateral damage from the grand experiment of redefining crime as a social construct. The guilty are the elite academics, activists, and billionaires like George Soros who are untouched by what they birthed. We have all seen videos of the vast expanse of flotsam and jetsam strewn by train thieves along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Yet the Wild West mess is still more than just the concrete manifestations of Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón’s unhinged efforts to excuse criminals from legal consequences. The packages thrown along the ground by thugs and gangsters represent, among other things, lost COVID-19 test results of the ill. Presumably, they unknowingly are waiting still by the window for the delivery of results that never arrive. The package in the dirt was, perhaps, a key tractor part eagerly awaited, in vain, by the broke farmer in the Central Valley. The mess included the life-saving medicines shipped to the sick that disappeared. And our elected leaders did what in response? Governor Gavin Newsom apologized for using the insensitive word “gangs” to describe those who plunder, loot, and trash railcars. Always In Search of Targets It is a cruel thing to indoctrinate children with the lie that they are innately guilty of oppression due to their skin color. One accurate definition of racism is collective ill-treatment of an individual due to his innate appearance—on the pretext that such bias is deserved, given the target is deemed mentally, spiritually, or morally inferior because of said traits. But that, in a nutshell, is the essence of critical race theory: the destruction of all human traits and unique characteristics, as demonized individuals are reduced to stereotyped, faceless members of a collective. The Forgotten Broken Eggs of the Woke Omelet Equity in our Orwellian world is not equality, but payback. Again, it is the idea of making the current generation pay for the supposed sins of the long dead of centuries past. Aside from the destruction of merit by the substitution of racial criteria, millions from a discarded generation will have doors slammed on their careers—simply because of the color of their skin. And they will never forget that. The woke do not even make the effort to admit that class matters as much as, or more than, race. By doing so, they doom millions of poor white and Asian students, who managed in poverty to achieve excellent grades and test scores, from being admitted to top-tier schools. Their actual achievement, despite their absence of wealthy, college-educated, or well-connected parents, means little. Once a morally bankrupt society—for naïve, utopian, or ignoble reasons—begins to calibrate graduation ceremonies, dorm space, roommate selection, achievement, and grading standards based on race, then it not only will lose its standard of living, but it will deserve to. And it may have a future date with the violence of Rwanda, Iraq, or the Balkans. Power, Not “Equity,” Is the Creed In sum, wokeness is not about kindness, equality, fairness, or morality. It is the power agenda of the elite of all races. For differing reasons, they rig the game in their own interests, without a care about who suffers. Rich white people assume that they possess the money, the influence, the networking skills, and the connections to navigate around the very exclusionary rules they make for others. For them, there are seldom costs. But they win apparent psychological gain at feeling spiritually superior while driving a Range Rover. They get high on the sense of power they wield to engineer the lives of millions deemed less important than they. And to the degree they feel guilty about their own monopoly of wealth and leisure, such transient superficial remorse is alleviated by abstract caring for the “other.” If they can ensure that 50 percent of TV commercials highlight African Americans, then they worry little about the nation’s existential crisis of 800 blacks murdered in Chicago last year. And no such television execs have a clue—or likely a concern—about how to stop it. The woke take out a medieval contract that all their material indulgences can be balanced by virtue-signaling caring for the less fortunate—although always at someone else’s expense. Woke = Wealthy Careerists And for the millions of the affluent, elite nonwhite? The resurgence of racial obsessions conveniently destroys the old idea of class, even though now it is the far more precise calibration of inequality. For all the woke talk about “constructs” of gender, race is somehow alone exempted and declared innate, definable, and immutable. One’s appearance becomes the permanent victimized refuge—even of NBA multibillionaires and billionaire rappers alike. A Ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren can desperately seek to leverage a career in becoming Native American, apparently as if they were almost trapped in their own white bodies. Yet they can still not manage to construct such assumed identities in the manner of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner. If race is now the sole immutable barometer of who is a victim, who a victimizer, then LeBron James, Jay-Z, Kayne West, Chris Rock, Michelle Obama, and Oprah Winfrey are always to be among the eternally oppressed. The enormous influence, power, status, and wealth they wield never negates their victimhood, despite a nation three generations into affirmative action. In the immoral calculus of woke, the poor white or Southeast Asian offspring of poorly paid high-school dropouts constitute “the privileged.” And a multimillionaire racist like the TV anchorwoman Joy Reid claims to be the perpetual victim, not the inner-city African American retiree who in 2021 has lost local police protection. No wonder the woke elite and the affluent leftists fixate on race, given they are now the ruling class. Otherwise, their own privilege would be the obvious target of the once-beloved “Revolution.” So, they fear that by their own prior left-wing standards, they too could end up on the wrong side of their moral Maginot Line. Wokeism’s obsessions with ferreting out “white privilege” are a way for rich people to head off (so to speak) the fate of Marie Antoinette. Totalitarian Wokeism A final note. We know wokeism is both contrary to human nature and antithetical to democracy and constitutional government. Without public support, it has instead embraced an entire array of cruel, Soviet, and Maoist means to achieve its own self-interested ends. Woke talk about “racists” eerily emulates Soviet boilerplate about “counterrevolutionaries.” Today’s wokeist spouts things that could come right out of the mouth of the novelist Boris Pasternak’s character Army Commissar Strelnikov, or Mao’s Little Red Book concerning “suppression of counterrevolutionaries.” No wonder the woke, so-called “humanists” are the first to resort to Trotskyization and iconoclasm. They are masters of censoring, blacklisting, scapegoating, deplatforming, ritual humiliation, doxxing, cancel-culture, ostracism, and disbarring. Wokeism’s logic is the eternal one of the bully Jacobin with his guillotine lists of the revolutionary unpure, the 19th-century lynch mob storming the frontier jail, the Red Guards hounding the counterrevolutionary, and the forced mental hospitalizations of the Soviet Union. But above all, wokeism is a cruel cult—created by and for the careerist benefit of the privileged.