For grownups, drifting off for an afternoon snooze is often easier said than done. But many of us have probably experienced just how simple it can be to catch those zzz's in a gently rocking hammock. By examining brain waves in sleeping adults, researchers reporting in the June 21 issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, now have evidence to explain why that is.

The study finds that napping on a slowly swinging bed really does get us to sleep faster. To the researchers' surprise, rocking also changes the nature of our sleep, encouraging deeper sleep.

"It is a common belief that rocking induces sleep: we irresistibly fall asleep in a rocking chair and, since immemorial times, we cradle our babies to sleep," said Sophie Schwartz of the University of Geneva. "Yet, how this works had remained a mystery. The goal of our study was twofold: to test whether rocking does indeed soothe sleep, and to understand how this might work at the brain level."

With a good night's rest increasingly losing out to the Internet, e-mail, late-night cable and other distractions of modern life, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that too little or erratic sleep may be taking an unappreciated toll on Americans' health.

Beyond leaving people bleary-eyed, clutching a Starbucks cup and dozing off at afternoon meetings, failing to get enough sleep or sleeping at odd hours heightens the risk for a variety of major illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, recent studies indicate.

"We're shifting to a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week society, and as a result we're increasingly not sleeping like we used to," said Najib T. Ayas of the University of British Columbia. "We're really only now starting to understand how that is affecting health, and it appears to be significant."

A large, new study, for example, provides the latest in a flurry of evidence suggesting that the nation's obesity epidemic is being driven, at least in part, by a corresponding decrease in the average number of hours that Americans are sleeping, possibly by disrupting hormones that regulate appetite. The analysis of a nationally representative sample of nearly 10,000 adults found that those between the ages of 32 and 49 who sleep less than seven hours a night are significantly more likely to be obese.

Abstract: Learn about the myth of "the mind-body connection" and how diet can powerfully impact mental health and cognitive performance, including a discussion of strategies for improving memory and cognitive function at any age using "Primal principles" and how to slow (maybe even reverse) the process of brain aging.

Today's post is a guest blog from current Cressey Performance intern, Tyler Simmons. I had a super busy week, so when Tyler brought up this topic at CP the other day, I jumped at the opportunity to get him to write about it. You won't be disappointed.

Many people don't know this, but before 1979, there were no public health guidelines for what foods our citizens should eat. So where would we be now without a food pyramid?

In the 1950s, a researcher named Ancel Keys developed a theory that certain dietary fats were a major cause of heart disease. Although the support for this theory was weak, it would eventually become the basis of nutritional recommendations for the entire country. This eventually morphed in to the theory that dietary cholesterol and saturated fat cause heart disease, and for the public it was easy to make the jump that these also cause weight gain and obesity.

So the US government decided to step in for the benefit of the uneducated masses and save us from imminent death and obesity.

The result? Since 1979, when the McGovern Committee made the first "Dietary Guidelines for Americans," we've been encouraged to eat less animal fat, less cholesterol, and more grains. And, we were pretty successful at it; Americans adopted our new food guidelines and embraced a low-fat way of eating for the last 30 years. Here's a chart of how are diets have changed over the last 100 years:
We did a pretty good job. We've eaten less fat, less beef, less pork, and less dairy (fear the butter!) At the same time, we've eaten more chicken, more shortening, and drastically more soy oil (healthy fat right?).

Study considers the plight of kids raised by moms dealing with hardships

Disadvantaged, unhealthy mothers are much more likely to have sickly children than are disadvantaged moms who are relatively healthy - and this is not only due to genetics, suggests new research to be presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Relying on nationally representative data from the 2007 and 2008 National Health Interview Surveys, the study finds that children whose mothers are both in poor health and disadvantaged (determined by a combination of family income, race/ethnicity, family structure, and mother's level of education) experience a significantly greater number of health issues - such as having fair or poor overall health and suffering from asthma - than children whose mothers are disadvantaged but relatively healthy.

"Mothers who experience frequent or serious health problems may have a harder time monitoring their children or performing day-to-day caretaking tasks, including taking their children to regular medical checkups," said study co-author Jessica Halliday Hardie. "Maternal health problems can also place emotional and material burdens on children and heighten their stress and anxiety. Finally, to care for herself, an unhealthy mother may have to use financial resources that could otherwise benefit her children."

The general consensus nowadays is that smoking cigarettes is harmful to health, and that it can lead to heart disease and cancer. But what about pure nicotine derived directly from the tobacco plant? According to a new study published in The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB Journal), the nicotine alkaloid may actually provide neurological protection in the brain, and effectively prevent the onset of diseases like Parkinson's.

Patrick P. Michel, co-author of the study from the Institut du Cerveau at de la Moelle Epiniere, Hopital de la Salpetriere in Paris, France, and his colleagues tested their theory on two groups of mice -- one group was normal, and the other one had been genetically engineered without alpha-7 subtype, the nicotine receptor. The team first took brain tissue samples from the two groups and cultured them in such a way as to encourage the loss of dopamine neurons, which is what typically occurs as Parkinson's develops.

On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called "Sugar: The Bitter Truth," which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.

The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig's impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a "toxin" or a "poison," terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely "evil." And by "sugar," Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal - technically known as sucrose - but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig's help what he calls "the most demonized additive known to man."

I hear and read about lots of people making kale smoothies, consuming raw nuts, and munching salads consisting of raw broccoli. So, I decided to take a look at some research to see what the nutritional costs were to eating raw foods. The truth is, it's better for your body to consume primarily cooked or lacto-fermented vegetables. Breaking down the cellular structure of vegetables through these methods grately increases the digestibility and nutrient absorption of nutrients in vegetables. Much of the research I've found suggests several reasons why cooking might increase the energy available from meat. These include increasing food intake through positive effects on palatability related to texture and flavor, rendering proteins more digestible through denaturation, lowering the cost of digestion through food softening, and reducing immune upregulation by eliminating foodborne pathogens. Given that textural changes are at least partially responsible for the proposed positive effects of cooking on intake, digestibility, and the cost of digestion, non-thermal processing methods that manipulate texture, such as pounding, may likewise be effective in improving the net energy value of meat.

Foods have been heat-treated for many centuries, since our ancestors learned, by trial and error, to master fire for cooking purposes approx. 700,000 years ago, to modify the taste and preserve nutritional properties of foods. The invention and continuous development of food treatment has had a substantial, if not major impact on the intellectual, societal and economic development of mankind. The health benefits of fermentation have been known for centuries. In 76 A.D., the Roman historian Plinio advocated the use of fermented milks for treating gastrointestinal infections.

Cooking destroys toxins.

The first and most important beneficial effect of food processing is that it destroys unwanted compounds and micro-organisms. Pathogenic bacteria are killed when exposed to heat. Cooking also inactivates anti-nutritional factors such as protease inhibitors and other natural toxins. The second effect is enhanced digestibility of food and bioavailability of nutrients. For example, gelatinization of starch makes possible its hydrolysis by amylase enzymes. Destruction of cell walls in vegetables improves the bioavailability of compounds such as carotenoids and polyphenols. Nuts and seeds contain many anti-nutrients in their raw state. Soaking your nuts overnight will increase the bioavailability of the nutrients in nuts and seeds.

Gary Taubes is a science and health journalist, and author of several books, including Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, and Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. While his earlier work focused on physics, in recent years his interests have turned toward medicine and nutrition. Here he discusses the research upon which his books are based, and reveals the truth behind several common health- and diet myths.

Sources

Video Transcript

Half a million children in Britain are suffering from liver disease because they are obese, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.

Doctors say obesity levels are now so high that children are commonly suffering signs of disease more commonly associated with alcohol abuse, meaning many will go on to develop cirrhosis, with some requiring liver transplants.

Government estimates say around 500,000 children below the age of 15 are suffering from "non alcoholic liver disease" which is caused by a build-up of fat within liver cells, which stops the organ functioning properly.

The condition increases the risks of heart disease, strokes and type 2 diabetes, and can lead to cirrhosis - scarring of the liver - which is often not detected until it is too late.