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Ilona Meagher

Wired Science | City Life Could Change Your Brain for the Worse - 0 views

  • A study of German college students suggests that urbanite brains are more susceptible to stress, particularly social stress, than those of country dwellers.
  • Meyer-Lindenberg’s findings, published June 23 in Nature, are a neurological investigation into the underpinnings of a disturbing social trend: As a rule, city life seems to generate mental illness. Compared to their rural counterparts, city dwellers have higher levels of anxiety and mood disorders. The schizophrenia risk of people raised in cities is almost double. Literature on the effect is so thorough that researchers say it’s not just correlation, as might be expected if anxious people preferred to live in cities. Neither is it a result of heredity. It’s a cause-and-effect relationship between environment and mind.
  • cities are hyper-social places, in which residents must be constantly on guard, and have mathematically more opportunity to experience stressful interaction. Too much stress may ultimately alter the brain, leaving it ill-equipped to handle further stress and prone to mental illness.
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  • The city kids displayed heightened levels of activity in two brain regions: the amygdala, which is central to processing emotion and stress, and the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, which regulates the amygdala. In short, city brains had disproportionately amplified responses to social stress. They’d become sensitized.
  • Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues initially tested 16 male and 16 female college students
  • The larger the city in which a student lived, the more active their amygdala. The longer they’d lived in a city as a child, the more active their cingulate cortex. In other studies, the cingulate cortex has been described as especially sensitive to early-life stress, with alterations linked to adult psychological problems.
  • Communication between the cingulate cortex and amygdala also seemed to be less efficient in city dwellers.
Ilona Meagher

Nutritional Blogma | Choose foods, not nutrients - 0 views

  • We should move toward food-based instead of nutrient-based dietary guidelines.
  • we should be promoting whole foods, not specific nutrients which push consumers toward processed products
  • While nutritional science at the nutrient and molecular level is fascinating and making incredible progress, I think the most effective way to reverse health epidemics is to focus on education about foods and changing the nutritional environment.
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  • shifting to real foods over processed ones will bring dramatic improvements in health
  • Cultures that have not developed often enjoy low rates of chronic disease.  Consuming diets with whole foods generally leads to a pretty balanced macronutrient intake anyway, which lowers the need to worry about details.  I like the rule of going mostly for foods that don’t have nutrition facts panels at all- those that are generally toward the outside of grocery stores.
Ilona Meagher

NYT | Your Brain on Computers - Overuse of Digital Devices May Lead to Brain Fatigue - 0 views

  • Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.
  • The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.
  • “Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”
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  • At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.
Ilona Meagher

Futurity | 'Bendable' brain adapts to what eyes see - 0 views

  • The human brain never stops adapting to its environment in a quest to formulate what the mind perceives based on what the eyes see, according to a new study. The research adds credence to the notion that adult brains can be retrained following trauma or surgery or even from the effects of aging or eye misalignment, says Jan Brascamp, a research associate working with Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. Details appear in the July 29 issue of Current Biology.
Ilona Meagher

NPR | Study: Most Plastics Leach Hormone-Like Chemicals - 0 views

  • Most plastic products, from sippy cups to food wraps, can release chemicals that act like the sex hormone estrogen, according to a study in Environmental Health Perspectives. The study found these chemicals even in products that didn't contain BPA, a compound in certain plastics that's been widely criticized because it mimics estrogen.
  • The testing showed that more than 70 percent of the products released chemicals that acted like estrogen. And that was before they exposed the stuff to real-world conditions: simulated sunlight, dishwashing and microwaving, Bittner says.
  • Early reaction to the study was mixed. Some scientists wondered about the test's reliability. Others noted that wine and many vegetables also can act like estrogen. And a few observed that Bittner has a financial interest in the testing lab and in a company involved in making plastic products that don't release estrogenic chemicals.
Ilona Meagher

Health News | City cycle schemes save lives, cut CO2: study - 0 views

  • Public bicycle sharing schemes such as Barcelona's "Bicing" program or London's "Boris Bikes" save lives and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a study on Friday.
  • Researchers at the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Barcelona found in a study, however, that around 9,000 tons of carbon dioxide pollution are averted and some 12 lives saved each year by Barcelona's scheme, which was introduced in March 2007.
  • From this they estimated the number of deaths associated with traveling by bike compared with driving for three main factors -- physical activity, road traffic incidents and exposure to air pollution. They also estimated the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.Looking at the Barcelona "Bicing" scheme, they calculated an annual increase of 0.13 deaths from air pollution and 0.03 deaths from traffic accidents among cyclists compared with car users.But as a result of high levels of physical activity, 12.46 deaths were avoided, making a total of 12.28 deaths avoided among cyclists every year, the researchers said. They also estimated a reduction in carbon emissions of over 9 million kg or 9,000 tons per year, the equivalent to flying 1,800 people to Sydney and back from london.The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends adults should do at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week and says this could be done by walking for 30 minutes five times per week or by cycling to work every day.
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  • Barcelona's scheme was launched in March 2007 and by August 2009, more than 182,000 people had subscribed to it -- 11 percent of the city's population. The average distance traveled by Bicing on a working day was 3.29 km (2.04 miles), taking an average of 14 minutes, according to the study's findings.The researchers said this initial assessment suggested it was important "to encourage cities to change car use by cycling and stimulate the implementation of bike sharing systems in cities to improve the health of the population."
Ilona Meagher

EurekaAlert | Exercise may help prevent brain damage caused by Alzheimer's disease - 0 views

  • Regular exercise could help prevent brain damage associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, according to research published this month in Elsevier's journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. "Exercise allows the brain to rapidly produce chemicals that prevent damaging inflammation", said Professor Jean Harry, who led the study at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in the United States. "This could help us develop a therapeutic approach for early intervention in preventing damage to the brain."
  • exercise before the onset of damage modifies the brain environment in such a way that the neurons are protected from severe insults.
  • exercise could be used to affect the path of many human conditions, such as neurodevelopmental disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. In addition, as a chemical model of neuronal damage was used, it also raises the possibility that exercise could offer protection against the potentially harmful effects of environmental toxins.
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