Health & Wellness
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Residents of Montacute claim growing their own fruit and vegetables is the secret to longevity
The Somerset village has been found in a national study of three million pension records to have the longest life expectancy in the country.
The 680 residents will, on average, live until at least 89.
Montacute scored the highest with a mortality score of 6.4 while Bootle, in Merseyside, scored the lowest with 15.3.
The study, by international business consultancy Watson Wyatt, analyzed the records to break down life expectancy for older people in the UK by postcode.
If you drink Slim-Fast and suffer from diarrhea, cramps and vomiting, now there's a new reason for such effects, beyond the simple fact that Slim-Fast is made primarily from processed milk and sugar water: All Slim-Fast beverages have just been recalled by the manufacturer due to possible contamination by
Bacillus cereus.
A recall
notice posted on the FDA website explains, "The recall involves all Slim-Fast RTD products in cans, regardless of flavor, Best-By date, lot code or UPC number."
"The probability of serious adverse health consequences is remote," says the FDA. But they mean from the bacteria. The possibility of serious adverse health consequences from the other ingredients in Slim-Fast is a whole different matter (see below).
A Colorado-based company is now offering U.S. consumers the option of being buried in a fully biodegradable casket made out of banana sheaves and bamboo.
"As more and more American families and communities look for eco-friendly solutions to everything in life, Ecoffins provides fitting tributes to those choosing to honor their environmentally conscious lifestyle at the time of their death," says the company, Ecoffins USA, on its Web site.
According to Ecoffins USA's marketing director, Joanna Passarelli, the coffins have proved particularly popular in New Mexico, where there is strong support for eco-friendly ceremonies. Passarelli says that the company has also found interest among Jewish and Muslim communities.
Jewish and Muslim tradition discourages anything that would prevent the body from returning quickly naturally to the earth, such as embalming or cremation. This sentiment is shared with supporters of natural burial.
Juggling boosts brain development in surprising ways. This type of hands-on learning accelerates the growth of nerve connections in the brain's white as well as grey matter.
Researchers at the University of Oxford provided juggling training materials to 24 people who agreed to practice half an hour daily for six weeks. Using diffusion tensor imaging, a type of scan that shows the structure of the brain's white matter, these novice jugglers were scanned before and after the training period. The same scans were also performed on a control group of 24 people who did not attempt to learn juggling.
Previous studies conducted by the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, found that juggling increases the brain's grey matter, where nerve cell bodies are contained. Grey matter gets all the attention in learning studies. It has proven connections to memory, language, focus---all the important details involved in thinking. But this project looked instead at the brain's white matter, where densely packed nerve fibers conduct impulses from the cell bodies.
A recent study
published in the November 2009 issue of
Archives of Neurology revealed that the greater muscle strength a person has, the more likely he or she is to maintain proper cognitive function over time. The study examined 970 men and women and found that those individuals who ranked in the top ten percent for muscle strength were 61 percent less likely to develop progressive cognitive degeneration when compared to those in the bottom ten percent.
Dr. Patricia Boyle, the author of the study, and her research colleagues from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago examined men and women between the ages of 54 and 100, testing their strength in nine different muscle categories. The study patients were followed for a period of four years in which their cognitive capabilities were examined along the way. The stronger patients were found to have maintained the best brain function.
The research team performed a similar study back in June that investigated the link between motor decline and participation in social activities. The report revealed a significant increase in cognitive degeneration among those who participated the least in social activities.
All those swine flu warnings have made a difference: People are washing their hands more, whipping out hand sanitizer and giving the stink-eye to coughers in their proximity.
But for people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, all the talk about germs has been ominous. People who treat those affected with OCD are seeing an uptick in those seeking help.
"We've gotten more calls this year - there is no doubt. And a large percentage of those callers talk about H1N1 contamination," says Ellen Sawyer, executive director of the education and support organization OCD Chicago.
If you watch TV or ever flip through a glossy magazine, you are bound to have seen ads conjured up by Big Pharma working with slick advertising agencies. As it turns out, what they are selling isn't necessarily health -- or the truth. They are pushing pills, even if they have to twist the facts a bit about what their drugs do, who needs them and why. Now a
new study just published in the
American Journal of Public Health concludes this prescription drug direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) carries significant risks for the public.
Currently, some members of Congress, including Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California), are calling for stricter FDA regulations of DTCA because the ads can lead to inappropriate prescribing. They also portray what may be a non-medical problem (such as over-active bladder, the latest "malady" discovered by Big Pharma) as a treatable medical illness requiring side-effect-laden medication.
An Interview with Uffe Ravnskov MD, PhD.
Part 1: The Cholesterol Hypothesis
Q: When did you begin to suspect that the cholesterol theory of atherosclerosis might be wrong? What led you to this conclusion? Before then, had you believed in the cholesterol theory? Was this part of your training?
UR: I have never thought that it was true. I heard about it for the first time in 1962 shortly after having got my MD. My biochemical knowledge was still intact at that time and I knew that cholesterol was one of the most important molecules in our body, indispensable for the building of our cells and for producing stress and sex hormones as well as vitamin D. The idea that cholesterol in the blood should kill use if its concentration is a little higher than normally, as they wrote in the Framingham paper, seemed to me just as silly as to claim that yellow fingers cause lung cancer.
Irina Galushko
RTSat, 05 Dec 2009 14:39 UTC
The message is clear - we are all going to die from swine flu. It spreads fast, it is dangerous, and it must be feared - says the World Health Organization.
But worry not - there is a way to save yourself. Just get a flu shot - and purchase a remedy for the deadly virus. Those are the instructions from the WHO.
However, the WHO may find itself coughing up explanations, as more and more scientists and health researchers, and even journalists, are starting to question the organization's motives behind raising the alert so quickly.
© Stockphoto/Mads Abildgaard
A Rutgers University, Newark and Collége de France, Paris research team has pinpointed for the first time the mechanism that takes place during sleep that causes learning and memory formation to occur.
It's been known for more than a century that sleep somehow is important for learning and memory. Sigmund Freud further suspected that what we learned during the day was "rehearsed" by the brain during dreaming, allowing memories to form. And while much recent research has focused on the correlative links between the hippocampus and memory consolidation, what had not been identified was the specific processes that cause long-term memories to form.
