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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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09 Dec 2022
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The U.S. diet is deadly. Here are 7 ideas to get Americans eating healthier

The data are stark: the typical American diet is shortening the lives of many Americans. Diet-related deaths outrank deaths from smoking, and about half of U.S. deaths from heart disease – nearly 900 deaths a day – are linked to poor diet. The pandemic highlighted the problem, with much worse outcomes for people with obesity and other diet-related diseases.

“We’re really in a nutrition crisis in this country.” says Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.

Now, there’s growing momentum to tackle this problem. The Biden administration will hold the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health on September 28th, and will announce a new national strategy. This comes more than 50 years after a landmark White House conference that helped launch today’s major federal food assistance programs.

“The 1969 conference was transformative,” Mozaffarian says. The programs it ushered in, like the WIC program, have helped feed millions of low-income families.

But this hasn’t been enough to solve the dual problems of food insecurity and diet-related disease. Food policy leaders say it’s time to think anew and build on what we’ve learned. The U.S. can’t “fix” hunger by just feeding people cheap, high-calorie, processed foods – the food that’s so abundant in our food supply, they say. Instead, it’s got to find ways to nourish people with healthy, nutrient-dense foods.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm and thinking about food more broadly and how we can fix this crisis,” Mozaffarian told NPR. He’s co-chair of an independent task force that includes doctors, chefs, food policy and business experts, as well as farming and health advocates, who are helping form the agenda at upcoming the White House conference.

In a new report, they’ve proposed a wide-ranging set of recommendations to end hunger, advance nutrition and improve health. Here are seven big ideas they’re excited about.

 

Treat food as medicine

There’s a growing movement to integrate food and nutrition into health care, by providing healthy meals and groceries to patients to help prevent or manage diet-related illness. The task force wants to see this kind of work expand.

“We should pay for food-based interventions that are effective,” Mozaffarian says.

For example, there’s mounting evidence that providing prescriptions for fruit and vegetables can spur people to eat better and manage weight and blood sugar. The idea is for health care systems or insurers to provide or pay for healthy groceries, combined with nutrition education, to help patients change their eating habits. It is being piloted around the country.

“Produce prescription programs help improve diet quality and food security,” says task force member Dr. Hilary Seligman, a food insecurity expert and professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, noting that they can help with diet-related diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes.

Another idea is to offer medically tailored meals aimed at helping people who are already sick reverse chronic disease. Currently the federal government is running pilot programs that let Medicaid or Medicare pay for the meals in several states.

Focus on quality of calories, not just quantity

The U.S. food supply is awash in cheap calories. And when you’re on a tight budget or relying on benefits like SNAP (food stamps), processed foods like chips and soda can set you back less than fresh produce. Of course, eating processed foods also contributes to cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and other chronic illnesses, warns Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association.

Brown says federal food assistance programs have helped to address hunger. “However, many U.S. food policies and programs focus on improving access to sufficient quantities of food,” she says. Instead, it’s time to modernize these policies and focus on the quality of food, “so people have access to enough nutritious food.”

The task force wants to see food programs redesigned to nudge people towards healthier options. The report points to the GusNIP nutrition incentive program – which, in select communities – gives SNAP participants more money to buy fruit and vegetables. It’s a similar concept to the Double Bucks program which doubles the value of SNAP benefits when used to buy produce at farmers markets and other venues.

“It is important to scale up these efforts to ensure that everyone has access to healthy food options,” says task force member Angela Odoms-Young, a nutrition professor at Cornell University.

The task force recommends that Congress establish a nationwide produce incentive program for all SNAP participants. “These types of programs can help promote equity,” Odoms-Young says, noting that people of color disproportionately suffer from chronic illnesses.

Expand access to dietary and lifestyle counseling

The Affordable Care Act mandates that diet counseling be covered by insurers as a preventive care benefit for those at higher risk of chronic disease. The exact details of who is eligible for which services are left up to an advisory group of doctors and health care providers, as well as insurers, and many patients who would benefit may not have access to this service.

“The vast majority of Americans should be getting preventative behavioral lifestyle treatment,” Mozaffarian says. Too often, he says, doctors prescribe drugs for conditions before recommending or trying lifestyle changes. “Doctors go right to the drug,” he says. “I think that’s a big problem.”

The task force recommends that Congress expand Medicare and Medicaid coverage for medical nutrition therapy to people with high blood pressure, prediabetes, celiac disease, HIV/AIDS, cancer and other diet-related conditions. It also calls for expanded coverage of cooking classes and nutrition assistance, as well as coverage of the Diabetes Prevention Program, delivered by telehealth.

This behavior-change program has been shown to be more effective than medicine in reducing the onset of Type 2 diabetes among people at high risk.

Support food entrepreneurs

People who start food businesses can help nourish their communities and create jobs. The task force calls on the federal government to pass policies that boost new healthy food enterprises, including providing new loans and grants to food and nutrition-related companies centered on health, equity, and sustainability. The idea is to focus especially on businesses owned by people of color and other marginalized groups.

“We don’t need more businesses creating diabetes and obesity,” says Tambra Raye Stevenson, who runs Wanda, a non-profit group that aims to build a pipeline and platform for a million Black women and girls to become local food leaders. “We need entrepreneurs that provide teaching kitchens, community gardens, healthy food retails, wellness studios, nutrition services, healthy consumer products, and urban agricultural centers,” she says.

She points to food entrepreneurs like Amanda Stephenson who opened a specialty food market in an underserved neighborhood in Washington, DC, Fresh Food Factory, and Mary Blackford of Market 7 who is planning a food hall that features Black-owned food and lifestyle businesses. “They are our food she-roes making a positive impact and providing healthy food access for our children and other women,” says Stevenson.

In the lead up to next month’s White House conference, groups like Food Tank, a food think tank, have organized listening sessions with food researchers and entrepreneurs. “For food to be more accessible and affordable, we need entrepreneurs that use science and technology,” says Danielle Nierenberg of Food Tank. She points to innovators like Journey Foods, which is helping entrepreneurs bring nutritious foods and snacks to market.

Increase the number of new farmers growing healthy foods using regenerative farming techniques

If all Americans began to eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables each day, there would be shortages. That’s because corn and soybeans are grown on most cropland in the U.S.. Now, there’s growing recognition of the need for more specialty crops – including fruits, vegetables, and nuts.

The task force recommends that Congress create a Farmer Corps to support new farmers, building on the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Development Program. The idea is to provide new farmers with paid internships and apprenticeships to learn about sustainable farming, and funding to cover a living wage and housing. It also is pushing for loans to go to farmers growing with sustainable practices.

Growing the same crop, season after season, as many farmers do, can make lands less productive over time, and deplete nutrients from the soil.”The unfortunate reality is that today we subsidize conventional practices that degrade the soil,”says David Montgomery, a professor at the University of Washington and the author of What Your Food Ate, who attended a listening session.

“What we need to sustain agriculture is to incentivize restoring healthy soils and train more farmers to be successful doing that,” he says.

Make school meals free for all students

School meals have been a fixture in U.S. schools ever since President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act back in 1946. For decades, the federal government has reimbursed schools for meals they serve, and low-income students can qualify for free or reduced priced meals. Research has shown that low-income children who participate have better health.

Yet, many families who are eligible for free or reduced-priced meals may not receive them, sometimes due to the paperwork, bureaucracy or stigma of participating or enrolling. Amid the pandemic, school meals have been offered for free to all students. Now, the task force says this should be a permanent change.

“Without access to free meals at school, many children go without food at all during the day, and many more do not have access to the nutritious foods they need to thrive,’ says Seligman, of UC, San Francisco. She notes that school meals help not only with kids’ nutrition, but they also reduce absenteeism and improve academic outcomes.

Establish a federal ‘food czar’

In order to turn ideas like these into action, the task force recommends the creation of a new role in the federal government, a national director of food and nutrition, a food czar figure, if you will. The new director would help streamline and coordinate the many disparate efforts already underway. The U.S. government spends more than $150 billion each year on food and nutrition related programs, and the health care system also spends billions on treatment of diet related diseases.

“This spending is fragmented across 200 separate actions and 21 different departments and agencies without harmonization or synergy,” the task force concludes. Now, they conclude, it’s time for a new approach.

 

 

Original article here

06 Dec 2022
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A Nobel Prize-Winning Psychologist Says Most People Don’t Really Want to Be Happy

We think we want to be happy. Yet many of us are actually working toward some other end, according to cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics.

Kahneman contends that happiness and satisfaction are distinct. Happiness is a momentary experience that arises spontaneously and is fleeting. Meanwhile, satisfaction is a long-term feeling, built over time and based on achieving goals and building the kind of life you admire. On the Dec. 19, 2018 podcast “Conversations with Tyler,” hosted by economist Tyler Cowen, Kahneman explains that working toward one goal may undermine our ability to experience the other.

For example, in Kahneman’s research measuring everyday happiness—the experiences that leave people feeling good—he found that spending time with friends was highly effective. Yet those focused on long-term goals that yield satisfaction don’t necessarily prioritize socializing, as they’re busy with the bigger picture.

Such choices led Kahneman to conclude that we’re not as interested in happiness as we may claim. “Altogether, I don’t think that people maximize happiness in that sense…this doesn’t seem to be what people want to do. They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness,” he says.

In an October 2018 interview with Ha’aretz (paywall), Kahneman argues that satisfaction is based mostly on comparisons. “Life satisfaction is connected to a large degree to social yardsticks–achieving goals, meeting expectations.” He notes that money has a significant influence on life satisfaction, whereas happiness is affected by money only when funds are lacking. Poverty creates suffering, but above a certain level of income that satisfies our basic needs, wealth doesn’t increase happiness. “The graph is surprisingly flat,” the psychologist says.

In other words, if you aren’t hungry, and if clothing, shelter, and your other basics are covered, you’re capable of being at least as happy as the world’s wealthiest people. The fleeting feelings of happiness, though, don’t add up to life satisfaction. Looking back, a person who has had many happy moments may not feel pleased on the whole.

The key here is memory. Satisfaction is retrospective. Happiness occurs in real time. In Kahneman’s work, he found that people tell themselves a story about their lives, which may or may not add up to a pleasing tale. Yet, our day-to-day experiences yield positive feelings that may not advance that longer story, necessarily. Memory is enduring. Feelings pass. Many of our happiest moments aren’t preserved—they’re not all caught on camera but just happen. And then they’re gone.

Take going on vacation, for example. According to the psychologist, a person who knows they can go on a trip and have a good time but that their memories will be erased, and that they can’t take any photos, might choose not to go after all. The reason for this is that we do things in anticipation of creating satisfying memories to reflect on later. We’re somewhat less interested in actually having a good time.

This theory helps to explain our current social media-driven culture. To some extent, we care less about enjoying ourselves than presenting the appearance of an enviable existence. We’re preoccupied with quantifying friends and followers rather than spending time with people we like. And ultimately, this makes us miserable.

We feel happiness primarily in the company of others, Kahneman argues. However, the positive psychology movement that has arisen in part as a result of his work doesn’t emphasize spontaneity and relationships. Instead, it takes a longer view, considering what makes life meaningful, which is a concept that Kahneman claims eludes him.

Kahneman counts himself lucky and “fairly happy.” He says he’s led “an interesting life” because he’s spent much of his time working with people whose company he enjoyed. But he notes that there have been periods when he worked alone on writing that were “terrible,” when he felt “miserable.” He also says he doesn’t consider his existence meaningful, despite his notable academic accomplishments.

Indeed, although his contributions legitimized the emotion as an economic and social force and led to the creation of happiness indices worldwide, the psychologist abandoned the field of happiness research about five years ago. He’s now researching and writing about the concept of “noise,” or random data that interferes with wise decision-making.

Still, it’s worth asking if we want to be happy, to experience positive feelings, or simply wish to construct narratives that seems worth telling ourselves and others, but doesn’t necessarily yield pleasure. Meet a friend and talk it over with them—you might have a good time. 

 

 

Original article here

27 Nov 2022
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This is what’s happening to your brain in the middle of a conflict

A few months ago, I was introduced over email to a consultant, who I’ll call Brad. The person who made the introduction thought Brad would make a good contributor to Harvard Business Review, where I work as an editor. I receive a good number of these introductions, and when this one came in, I was particularly overwhelmed with requests. Brad asked if we could get on the phone to talk. I courteously declined and let him know that an editor would be in touch about the draft he submitted.

A few weeks later, he asked again. Again, I sent what I thought was a polite response explaining that because of the demands on my time, I wouldn’t be able to have a call with him. Then I got this email from Brad: “We’re all busy but human connection is the most important thing. I’m going to take my writing elsewhere. I can’t handle the ego.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d dealt with a frustrated would-be author. But this one got to me. I reread his note a few times, my heart rate increasing and my shoulders and neck tensing. Initially, I thought that it was all Brad’s fault. That soon morphed into self-doubt. I started to wonder if he was right. Then, I took a few deep breaths and did what I thought was right: I deleted the email.

After hitting delete, Brad’s email kept popping into my mind. When I was making dinner that night, I thought about the line “I can’t handle the ego.” And at 3:00 a.m. the next morning, instead of falling back to sleep, I was still thinking about it, and beating myself up for not being able to let it go.

When interacting with someone challenging, our brain wants to protect us from harm. In the process, however, it often holds us back. I decided to let Brad’s email go, shrug it off, and move on. But my brain was hooked on the interaction.

Our brains on conflict

When we experience or perceive a potential rupture in our relationship with another person, our brain reacts as if we’re in actual danger. It prepares our body to respond to that perceived threat while attempting to make sense of what we’re experiencing.

On each side of our brain, behind the optical nerves, there’s an amygdala. One of its functions is to detect fear and then prepare the body to respond appropriately. So, when you perceive a threat, the amygdala begins to react by signaling the release of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.

These instinctual responses save time and energy and often do keep us safe. If you’re standing in the middle of the road and there’s a car bearing down on you, it would be dangerous if your brain paused to think. You need it to react instinctively and tell your body to get out of the street as quickly as possible.

How mental space prevents amygdala hijack

The more you can observe your instinctive reactions when your mind senses a threat, the better you’ll get at separating the stories your brain cooks up from what’s actually happening. Once you’ve created a little space from a vexing episode, you can then reappraise it. Psychologists have found that reappraisal—reassessing an emotional situation in a more positive or neutral light, or as a challenge instead of a threat—helps people focus and make more considered decisions about how to proceed.

Pay attention to your stress levels  

When stress is running high, you become more susceptible to the pitfalls of an amygdala hijack. Having a simple list of questions on hand for fraught situations could be the difference between losing your cool and finding a productive way forward. Here’s a mental checklist that I use when I notice that I’m going into an amygdala hijack:

  • Am I hydrated?
  • Am I hungry?
  • How did I sleep last night?
  • What else am I worried about?
  • Do I have any big projects or deadlines weighing on my mind?
  • Are any of my important relationships with friends or family strained right now?
  • When was the last time I did something that I enjoyed?

Monitoring your mental resources in this way can help you gain perspective. Throughout 2020, I had to remind myself regularly that the cognitive load of living through a pandemic made me much more prone to interpret the behavior of those around me as threatening, mostly because I already felt threatened. And when you’re in survival mode, you don’t have the reserves to tolerate additional stress.

The power of time 

Often, getting a good night’s sleep is exactly what you need to change your mindset. Alice Boyes, the author of The Anxiety Toolkit, helped me understand that while our initial response to a coworker talking over us in a meeting (again) or not following up on a task they promised to get done may be intense, those negative emotions don’t usually persist.

Let’s go back to my incident with Brad. I noticed the following day when I woke up that I cared less about what had happened. I didn’t really think about it during the day. Each day passed, and I thought about it less and less. As I’m writing this now, I actually care almost not at all—almost.

Give yourself time away from thinking about issues you’re having with a coworker. Consider taking a break. Get outside or listen to your favorite song—anything that pulls your attention away from your colleague for a bit. Then return to the interaction later and see if you have a different point of view once you’ve gotten out of the amygdala hijack.

That’s not to say you should completely ignore conflict or pretend it doesn’t bother you. Boyes says that thinking about challenging situations can actually be helpful, as long as your mind is focused on problem-solving and not rumination or perfection.

Our minds can often work against us in these moments of conflict. But we can use the same brain science in our favor. One way to do this is to remind ourselves that the other person may be going through the same thing. It might not be their intention to hurt you, lash out at you, or make your life miserable—perhaps they’re in an amygdala hijack and aren’t thinking clearly. Seeing an adversary as a person with a brain that works in the same—sometimes flawed—way that yours does can be the first step toward creating a better relationship.

 

 

Original article here

17 Nov 2022
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Our Buildings Are Making Us Sick

 

 

For years, Alan, a designer in Vermont, had a persistent, hacking cough that kept him up at night, and every winter, a near-constant series of sore throats and colds. He visited his doctor’s office, got diagnosed with reflux, and took reams of antibiotics for suspected sinus infections. But the cough always came back, so intransigent it permanently hoarsened his voice.

One spring, his doctor hired him to design an addition to his home. Alan invited him to his office to review the plans. “He just walked in the door, took one whiff, and said, ‘Whoa, that’syour problem,” recalled Alan, who requested we only use his first name.

The sharp air — a combination of off-gassing from an ammonia-based blueprint copier and fumes from two construction workshops that shared the building — was, to the doctor’s nose, immediately and unambiguously toxic. Later, a pulmonologist who looked at the insides of Alan’s lungs with a tiny camera said they looked like he’d survived a chemical fire.

But Alan himself barely noticed the smell anymore. “It was like the frog that’s boiled,” he said. Major problems in our environments can go entirely unnoticed if they happen gradually enough.

Although he’s been out of his old office space for a few years now, Alan still has a cough. He gets sick less often these days, but will probably have to take inhaled steroids for the rest of his life. “The damage was done,” he said.

There’s a version of Alan’s story that’s playing out again and again, all over the US. Whether we notice it or not, the air we breathe indoors can make us sick. For most of us, it’s not an industrial printer that’s contaminating the air: It could be the pollution from our ovens and stoves or the chemicals off-gassed from everyday household cleaners, or it could be the respiratory diseases exhaled by others we share our spaces with. Our indoor air can become toxic without us realizing it — but indoor spaces aren’t always designed with this in mind.

The technology and the human knowledge necessary to improve indoor air exist. But despite decades’ worth of science linking dirty indoor air with threats to human health, the public has simply learned to tolerate poor indoor air quality and all the downstream problems that follow in its wake. We are the frog that’s boiled.

The people who design, maintain, and manage the air inside America’s buildings now have a chance to make things right. The Covid-19 pandemic, spread by an airborne pathogen, prompted demands for a paradigm shift in the way we think about air quality. Now more than ever, it’s clear what we have to gain from improving indoor air quality: Not only could doing so help mitigate the next pandemic, but it could also lead to other large-scale improvements in health and productivity — and even bring the US closer to its climate goals. And it could help build a more equitable society, as rural and low-income Americans are most vulnerable to the negative health effects of air quality and crumbling infrastructure.

At the same time, cost, environmental concerns, a lack of enforceable indoor air standards, and the slow-changing nature of culture are formidable obstacles to scaling up air quality improvements inside the US’s aging building stock.

The past few years have seen a surge of new science, new air filtration technologies, and new political will to do something about it, but these advances will only make a difference if policymakers create regulations to ensure progress reaches the people and places that need it.

In its March announcement of a Clean Air in Buildings Challenge, the White House urged states, local governments, and schools to use any of the half-trillion dollars they got through the American Rescue Plan to improve buildings’ indoor air, signaling that the issue is increasingly one of national priority. But a challenge isn’t an imperative; there’s no law requiring buildings to participate.

How the indoors got so stuffy

Humans have been using fresh air to cure and prevent disease for as long as we’ve understood diseases to be something other than punishment from the gods. But where we encounter clean, fresh air has changed with time and technology.

In the early 1900s, buildings were generally constructed of wood, stone, clay bricks, and other natural materials that generally did not emit airborne toxins — and they were drafty, often allowing outdoor air to circulate whether people wanted it or not. Over the course of the next century, the building blocks of modern construction changed: Plastics were the future, and new or renovated buildings began incorporating contemporary materials like synthetic carpets and glues, pressed wood products, and vinyl into their designs — and with them, a variety of toxic compounds they silently emitted.

Meanwhile, the global energy crisis of the 1970s incentivized architects and engineers to design buildings that were increasingly airtight — why pay money to heat a building just to see that heat escape out a crack around a window? That, in turn, required new approaches to controlling their interior climates. Mechanical systems for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) became more common, as did open-plan layouts to allow for better air circulation.

Every day, people entered sealed buildings held together with solvents, adhesives, particleboard, drywall, and all of the chemicals that came with them. Reports of “office illness” crept into the media, and in the early 1980s, the World Health Organization coined the term “sick building syndrome” to describe the constellation of symptoms caused by the invisible byproducts of modern construction.

The structures intended to keep people safe were instead becoming threats to their health in a variety of ways. Bad lighting was causing headaches and eye irritation; noise and vibration were leading to nausea and dizziness. And all sorts of airborne contaminants were causing a host of respiratory illnesses.

Among the most insidious of those airborne pollutants are volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like formaldehyde and benzene, gaseous and sometimes odorless chemicals that were (and occasionally still are) found in everything from compressed wood to body lotion. Particulate matter — bits of residue thrown off from unvented heaters, candles, cigarettes, and other sources — was also a key offender. These pollutants can cause mild symptoms like eye and nose irritation but are also strongly associated with asthma, worsened respiratory and cardiovascular illness, low birth weight and several types of cancer. And they were all over the buildings that were making so many people sick.

It wasn’t just the buildings’ and furnishings’ byproducts making inhabitants ill. If people became sick in one of these sealed-up buildings, the airborne pathogens they spewed could linger, spreading respiratory infections. When HVAC systems didn’t adequately clean the air or the airflow in a building wasn’t carefully managed, disease-causing molds, bacteria, and viruses could spread not only from buildings to people, but from people to people. Under the right conditions, certain building features could intensify the transmission of disease.

Buildings have gotten better — but not better enough

The worst offenses against many of our senses are relatively easy to detect: Most people can tell when lighting is bad or when a building’s bowels groan too loudly. But our capacity for sensing bad air is less finely tuned.

We certainly can tell when the air is too hot or too cold for our liking. But we’re much less likely to notice the air we’re breathing has high levels of carbon dioxide — indicating we’re breathing a lot of other people’s expelled air — or contains dangerous VOCs. When we get headaches after a day in a stuffy conference room or a nagging cough that starts a few minutes after we walk into the building, how often do we wonder if the problem is in the air?

Our sense of smell is only good for detecting indoor air quality on the really extreme end of bad, said Ian Cull, a Chicago-based environmental engineer who specializes in indoor air quality. We might notice the rancid or stale smell of mold, but there’s a lot we can’t detect. “We can probably, with our nose, tell the D minuses and the F’s,” he said, “but from an A plus to a C minus, you don’t really know.”

In the 1990s, a wave of lawsuits holding architects and engineers liable for health problems related to poorly built or maintained buildings led to massive overhauls of construction codes. The new codes created restrictions for the materials architects and engineers could use in buildings and HVAC systems. “Buildings were afraid of litigation,” said Sachin Anand, an engineer who leads a Chicago-based sustainable building firm. So most of them made meaningful changes that ultimately led to much healthier indoor climates all over the US.

By the early 2000s, complaints of sick building syndrome — and concerns about indoor air quality more broadly — had faded from the public eye.

Health problems related to bad indoor air still existed — it was just hard to prove in any individual’s case that their built environment, and not some other factor, led to a particular illness. Research accumulated linking indoor air pollution to worse cardiovascular disease; cognitive decline in older adults; higher rates of chronic respiratory diseases, lung infections, and cancers; and infectious diseases including measles, tuberculosis, chickenpox, influenza, and SARS. In schools, high levels of multiple pollutants and carbon dioxide were tied to lower academic and cognitive performance and worsened respiratory health for students — with the worst consequences accruing to children of color and low-income children.

Still, there were no national requirements to improve building designs that force hundreds of people to share the same air space. Huge numbers of students, office workers, nursing home residents, and apartment dwellers were stuck regularly breathing poor-quality air. It wasn’t clear exactly how many were breathing bad indoor air because there was no broadly accepted definition of “regularly” and “poor-quality.” (This is still true today.) And while people complained about how annoying and paradoxically antisocial designs like open-concept offices are, they rarely protested the health risks of these kinds of layouts.

This was the state of things when Covid-19 arrived. The virus exploded, and almost instantly showed itself to be particularly good at infecting people in indoor spaces with poor ventilation and poor air filtration — like in many open offices, classrooms, and restaurants.

It took much longer than it should have for health authorities to publicly acknowledge that aerosols — tiny flecks of fluid, like those created when people cough or sneeze — could transmit SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, through the air. But scientists were quicker to the draw, and the public’s awareness of the new dangers of sharing airspace changed overnight.

“We’re in a place where people know that indoor air quality is important, but they’re just uncertain as to what to do,” said Cull.

Brett Singer, an environmental scientist and indoor air quality expert at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, agreed.

“Covid was a big wake-up call,” he said. “Whether it’s going to be a sustained concern that’s going to allow us to make the kind of structural and cultural changes that we need is an open question.”

The three most important tools on the indoor air quality workbench

As the coronavirus turned lives and economies upside down, newly formed companies flooded the market hawking air filtration technologies. Some were evidence-based, but many, like air cleaners that emit the pollutant ozone, not so much.

So what’s a building operator to do? The tools available for managing indoor air quality generally fall into three categories, each with its own pros and cons.

  • Ventilation involves replacing a building’s stale air with fresh air, whether by opening doors or windows or by engineering an HVAC system to suck in air from outside. Cull said there are dose-response gains to increasing ventilation, meaning, “The more outdoor air you bring in, the better health benefits and productivity benefits you get,” he said.

On the flip side, ventilation is costly, especially during seasonal temperature extremes; it consumes a lot of energy — and dollars — to heat or cool a large volume of air. For that reason, cost-conscious building operators sometimes ventilate buildings less in the peak of winter or summer.

  • Air cleaning purifies the air by removing particulate matter — including viruses, molds, and bacteria — either systemwide through an HVAC system or by using standalone air cleaners in individual rooms. Those standalone cleaners are cheaper upfront than a full HVAC overhaul (which can run into the millions of dollars in a large building), and their filters can be more easily upgraded to catch smaller infectious particles.

However, filtration doesn’t remove volatile organic compounds from the air — that requires ventilation. And standalone units can be prohibitively noisy. Cull said that in schools, many of which spent millions of dollars on these units, teachers often kept them on the lowest setting “just for the acoustics,” greatly reducing their effectiveness.

Air cleaning can also involve treating air with ultraviolet radiation, which is an effective tactic for reducing the recirculation of disease-causing germs along with air in an HVAC system. However, UV systems can be expensive, and they require careful attention to ensure they’re used safely.

  • Source control, finally, involves removing or avoiding things that emit chemicals or other contaminants — like certain building materials or furnishings, noxious cleaners, and cigarettes. Appliances that combust gas, like gas stoves, are often the worst offenders in the modern-day home.

Source control is the most cost-effective strategy overall, said Cull. However, it still requires profit-motivated contractors to choose building materials that don’t emit volatile organic compounds, or to switch a building’s utilities from gas to electric — a move that brings big indoor air quality benefits. All those solutions can be costly or challenging.

It takes a building-by-building adjustment in each of these categories to achieve healthier buildings while minimizing financial costs and climate impacts.

But making that adjustment is not straightforward.

One of the biggest challenges comes before any of these tools are deployed. In the US, the EPA doesn’t regulate indoor air, and there’s no federal standard for indoor air quality. That means there’s no minimum for building managers to strive for, and no way for inhabitants to know what’s in the air they’re breathing.

Still, there is guidance telling engineers and architects how to design buildings with air quality in mind.

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers — ASHRAE, a professional association whose guidance outlines minimum standards for acceptable indoor air quality — updated its recommendations after the pandemic began.

ASHRAE’s standards include minimum ventilation rates that a building’s HVAC system should have, and measures that should be taken to prevent contaminants from entering inhabitants’ air supply. But it doesn’t include a requirement to check whether any of those controls are working.

Broadly speaking, there’s still no standard for assessing indoor air quality as a whole — only individual measurements quantifying its components. Effective sensors to detect carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter are available on the retail market, but there’s no widely approved composite score that communicates indoor air quality the way the Air Quality Index does for outdoor air quality. No simple parameter captures the safety of a building’s air in a way that’s meaningful to the public; no unambiguous reporting metric exists to facilitate accountability.

Without this, building owners have little incentive to improve bad air, said Cull.

He imagines something akin to the health department score many restaurants have to post up front: “The restaurant owner doesn’t want to have that sign, but it’s a requirement to post that they got a B minus for hygiene and cleanliness,” he said. Perhaps building operators should be doing the same for the air they offer inside.

What’s keeping us from having clean indoor air in every US building right now?

Besides the lack of meaningful standards or regulation, the upfront cost of improving indoor air quality is one of the biggest obstacles to achieving it.

At a minimum, gold-standard building designs involve electric utilities rather than gas, and an HVAC system powered to drive a full fresh air exchange of the building’s air four to six times an hour. They also clean the air using high-efficiency filters. Achieving that standard is an expensive project, usually in the range of several million dollars for a high-occupancy building.

Building operators with large budgets and a lot of motivation can and do spend that kind of money to make the changes they need to make.

Steve Hanon leads campus operations at Avenues, a private K-12 school with multiple international campuses. He spared no expense to ensure that the HVAC systems in the school’s newest campuses are being built to the highest standard. He says what made that possible was that the school’s leadership has prioritized it.

Making things easier: “We’re a premium school,” said Hanon; annual tuition is nearly $63,000.

American public schools are in a very different position. In schools with disproportionately high numbers of low-income students, resources for making capital improvements are often scarce, and facilities — including HVAC units — are disproportionately out of date. In a recent workshop, Hannah Carter, who manages school air quality projects at the US Green Building Council, said these schools often lack adequate facilities staff to keep up with needed changes, and may be less likely to get guidance on improving their air quality from federal sources. “It’s definitely an equity issue,” she said.

Public schools’ facility budgets are usually fixed, and except in the richest districts, relatively modest, making it prohibitively expensive to achieve the gold standard. And while federal grants like those available through the American Rescue Plan and the CARES Act are meant to make premium upgrades attainable, they don’t always work the way they’re supposed to.

Consider the case of the Milford School District in southern New Hampshire. Buildings and grounds director Bill Cooper knew that one of the highest-impact changes he could make would be to replace the five aging HVAC units that served the high school.

When Cooper heard federal dollars were available for school districts to make improvements aimed at mitigating Covid-19 transmission, he jumped at the opportunity to get funding. But he quickly found there were enormous obstacles to clear: He had to get a detailed set of plans approved by the state fire marshal’s office, which required bringing in an engineer to make each unit’s drawings and plans to an exhaustive level of detail. “That’s a lot of work,” said Cooper.

With a small staff already stretched thin, he demurred, instead opting to make do with a pallet of box fans — what amounts to a temporary and seasonally imperfect fix.

He’ll replace the HVAC units somewhere down the line on the district’s own dime, when red tape is less of an issue. “You have to jump through all these hoops,” Cooper said.

Although the price tag may prevent many building operators from making initial investments in permanent and effective air quality solutions, Joseph Allen, an environmental health expert who founded the Healthy Buildings program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, argues that the payoffs outweigh these investments by several orders of magnitude. In a 2015 publication modeling costs and benefits of doubling office buildings’ ventilation rates, Allen and his co-authors found businesses had a lot to gain from relatively small investments in workers’ air quality.

The benefits: lower rates of absenteeism and sick leave, lower health care costs (as a result of lower incidence of health care use due to influenza, pneumonia, and other respiratory infections), and higher productivity due to better cognitive performance and productivity. “When we do the economic analysis,” said Allen, “we show that the cost is on the order of tens of dollars per person per year — against benefits of six to seven thousand dollars per person per year.”

But there’s a wrong-pockets problem here: Most of the savings Allen points to don’t end up accruing to the building owner, who ultimately bears the cost for improving the building. While investments in a building’s engineering can lead to a higher resale or rental value — gains that do end up in the owner’s pockets — that profit can take a long time to be realized, and most building operators want to see a return on their investment in three to five years, said Cooper, the school facilities director.

It’s not just the price tag that’s holding back change 

Many of the interventions that lead to cleaner indoor air consume additional energy — often, a lot of additional energy. And in the US, coal still supplies about a fifth of the nation’s electricity. It’s not ideal to create more outdoor air pollution in pursuit of cleaner indoor air.

Fortunately, it’s entirely possible to have healthy buildings that use very little energy, Singer, the environmental scientist, said. When it comes to indoor air quality, climate and health priorities “are absolutely compatible, but attention needs to be paid to both in order to accomplish that,” he said.

Among the clean air building strategies that reduce climate impacts are HVAC tune-ups to improve energy efficiency, and novel technologies like energy recovery ventilation, which uses the warmth or chill of exhausted stale air to heat or cool fresh air being brought into a system.

Older strategies — perhaps the oldest ones — also work: opening windows is an incredibly cheap, effective, and climate-neutral way of increasing ventilation.

But these strategies only help if they’re used. Anand, the sustainable building engineer, said because windows that don’t open and close are cheaper than those that do, many high-occupancy buildings have inoperable windows.

That trend highlights one of the biggest barriers to industry-wide change: culture. Although plenty of strategies exist to overcome cost and climate concerns in the service of healthier indoor air, getting decision-makers to choose to construct and run buildings differently means asking many people to realign their priorities, with the impediments often clearer than the incentives.

When Tom White, who works for an affordable housing nonprofit in the Bay Area, switched one apartment building’s utilities from gas to electric, he encountered resistance from all sides. White said the choice rankled both the workers putting in the new electric conduits and the pipefitters who lost out on work setting up the building for gas. “It’s like, ‘Why would we want to change when we have all of this energy just sitting in the pipe right there?” he said.

If a change like this is so challenging to make even in California, with its climate-forward political culture and many green building incentives, how much harder is it to make in states where fossil fuels run the table?

Everyday people need to be empowered to demand cleaner indoor air 

The pandemic has made Americans perhaps more aware than ever of the links between clean indoor air and their health.

But what they still lack is leverage. Even after a global pandemic made filtration and ventilation household words; even after the business case for healthier buildings was made clear in books and the press; even with mountains of data on one side, there is little regulatory recourse people can use to back up their demands for better indoor air.

We shouldn’t need carrots and sticks to make our workplaces, schools, residences, nursing homes, and places of worship safe, and to engineer them to better protect us from common pollutants or the next pandemic. Our health should be enough of an incentive. But for indoor air quality to become a business priority in the US, we’re going to need something with more teeth.

People need a clear path for demanding better when buildings fail them. They deserve transparent standards for indoor air, with metrics they can easily understand and use to make their own decisions. And they require policymakers to provide enough support — and consequences — for building owners to ensure they meet those standards.

“The cost of fixing that HVAC system to work properly, to provide good ventilation and filtration,” said Singer, is not the critical barrier. “The key barrier is not the cost. The barrier is the knowledge, the infrastructure, the culture.”

 

Original article here

07 Nov 2022
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4 Laws of Muscle

At a conference in 2012, Luc van Loon was presenting some exciting data from a newly published study. After a heroic research effort that took 2.5 years and 500,000 euros, he and his colleagues had managed to shepherd a large group of frail, elderly subjects through a six-month strength-training program. Those who had taken a daily protein supplement managed to pack on an impressive 2.9 pounds of new muscle. Success! Old people could be strong!

But van Loon, an “extraordinary professor” (his actual title) of exercise physiology and nutrition at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, wasn’t celebrating. On his phone was a photo one of his students had just sent him of a large plate stacked high with bulging cubes of raw beef. In total, there were 3.1 pounds of beef—a graphic visualization of the muscle lost in just one week by subjects of a bed-rest study the student had just completed.

“I usually put this in more obscene language,” van Loon says, “but you can mess up a lot more in one week than you can improve in six months of training.”

Over the past decade and a half, van Loon has emerged as one of the world’s most rigorous and innovative researchers on the intricacies of how we build muscle. But he has now come to believe that, from a health perspective, how we lose muscle is at least as important. At a conference in Rhode Island in 2017, hosted by the New England chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine, van Loon laid out the key lessons he and other researchers in the field have gleaned. For anyone who seeks to push their limits, or who plans to get old, here are the highlights.

You Are What You Just Ate 

If you really want to understand how protein contributes to new muscle, you need to be able to follow the individual components—amino acids—on their journey inside your body. Starting in 2009, van Loon and his colleagues developed a technique that involved infusing 40,000 euros’ worth of amino acids, specially “labeled” using a rare and trackable isotope, into a cow. Then they milked the cow and, 24 hours later, slaughtered it. The result: milk and beef that can be tracked with painstaking precision as it progresses from a person’s mouth to their biceps by taking frequent samples of blood and biopsied muscle tissue in the hours after a meal.

In one of the resulting studies, the researchers found that substantial amounts of the “glowing cow” protein was incorporated into muscles within just two hours of ingesting it. As the study’s title proclaims, you are, quite literally, what you just ate. Just over 50 percent of the protein made it into the subjects’ circulation within five hours, with the rest presumably taken up by tissues in the gut or not absorbed. During the same period, 11 percent of the ingested protein was incorporated into new muscle.

Overall, van Loon points out, we break down and rebuild 1 to 2 percent of our muscle each day, meaning that you completely rebuild yourself every two to three months. This is a message, van Loon hopes, that might persuade people to think a little more carefully about what they put in their mouths.

If You Exercise First, You’re More of What You Just Ate

We often think of amino acids as the “building blocks” of muscle. That’s true, but the amino acids derived from protein actually play a dual role in muscle growth: In addition to being a source of raw materials, protein acts as a signaling molecule, triggering the growth of new muscle. One amino acid in particular, leucine, seems to be the most potent anabolic signaler, but you need all the amino acids together to effectively build muscle.

There are a bunch of subtleties here, like the optimal dose of protein. In healthy adults, a dose of about 0.25 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight seems to max out the protein synthesis signal from a given meal. That’s about 20 grams of protein if you weigh 175 pounds. So it makes sense to hit that target three or four or even five times a day.

That’s why van Loon and his team decided to experiment with a pre-bedtime dose of protein to see if they could boost muscle synthesis as you sleep. Their initial proof-of-principle study involved snaking a tube down the nose and into the stomachs of their subjects and flushing in 40 grams of protein while they slept. It worked—and van Loon, to his bemusement, soon started getting calls from sports coaches asking where they could get nasogastric tubes. (You can just eat the protein before you go to sleep, he explained to them.)

But the best way to augment protein’s muscle-signaling capacity is simple: Exercise before you eat, and your muscles become more sensitive to protein’s signals. “You can’t study food without exercise, and you can’t study exercise without food,” van Loon says. “There’s a synergy between them.”

If You’re Inactive, You’re Less of What You Just Ate

Unfortunately, there are also factors that make your muscles less sensitive to protein signaling. Getting older is one of them, which is why older adults seem to need a larger dose of 0.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, rather than 0.25, to max out their rates of protein synthesis.

But is it really age that causes this “anabolic resistance”? Or is it simply a consequence of our unfortunate habit of becoming less physically active as we age? Van Loon’s bed-rest study piqued his interest in the rapid and devastating effects of inactivity, particularly in hospital settings, where people are often confined to bed for five to seven days. According to the “catabolic crisis” model of aging, we don’t lose our muscle mass at a steady and predictable rate. Instead, much of the loss takes place during short periods of time—a week in bed after a fall or a knee replacement, say—during which we lose massive amounts of muscle that we never fully get back.

Van Loon advocates some simple fixes—like never, ever feed someone in a hospital bed unless it’s absolutely necessary. Make them get up, and ideally make them shuffle down the hallway to get food. Same for watching TV. Even this tiny amount of muscle contraction, he says, will enhance muscle synthesis when the patient eats. Similarly, since you don’t eat as much when you’re in bed, the proportion of protein in the meal should be higher to ensure sufficient muscle synthesis signals.

Of course, some people really can’t get out of bed—so van Loon did some wild-sounding experiments. In one, he immobilized one leg of his volunteers with a cast for five days, then drilled a hole in the cast to apply neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) to half of those volunteers. The immobilization caused a 3.5 percent reduction in the cross-sectional area of the quadriceps; twice-daily electrical stimulation prevented this loss.

In another study, van Loon tried the technique on actual comatose patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. Biopsies showed that these patients were seeing a 20 to 30 percent reduction in the size of their muscle fibers during their hospital stays. “Basically the people are melting in front of your face,” he says. So van Loon zapped one leg but not the other with NMES twice a day for a week—and again warded off atrophy. The approach is nowhere near as good as even the most basic exercise, he says, but it appears to be better than nothing.

Chew Your Food

Okay, this one doesn’t really rank up there as an Eternal Law of Muscle. But it’s cool. In one of the “glowing cow” studies, van Loon and his colleagues compared ground beef to steak. The ground beef was absorbed more quickly, with 61 percent of the tracer amino acid in the ground beef appearing in the bloodstream within six hours versus just 49 percent for the steak.

How significant this is remains a bit unclear (rates of muscle protein synthesis weren’t significantly different in the study), but it’s worth noting—particularly because we tend to get less good at chewing our food as we get older. In fact, van Loon says, studies in the 1960s found that people who retained more of their own teeth tended to have more muscle. Bizarrely, body position also matters: When you eat lying down, you slow down protein digestion and likely reduce the synthesis of new muscle protein.

So, as van Loon told the conference in Rhode Island, the overall body of research boils down to one simple message: Your mum was right. Eat three protein-rich meals a day, get plenty of exercise, and—I’m not going to warn you again!—sit up straight and chew your damn food. With your mouth closed.

 

 

Original article here

29 Oct 2022
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8 Tips For Living In The New Reality

 

I believe that the new reality is here now … that it’s liveable in wonderful ways, all while the old reality is seemingly crumbling around us. Here are some tips for brilliant living in the new ….

  1. Seek breathtaking beauty in the world around you. In nature, in your home, in the mirror, in the skies, everywhere! This kind of beauty rushes through you with an intake of breath, leaving you in an exhilarated state of feeling, with your cells and brains vibing excitedly. And that excitement calls great stuff towards you.
  2. Put yourself in FLOW. This is easily done. Think of something you love. Fall wildly in love with the world and the universe. Then align yourself to the right and brilliant flow state that will put your life in sync in the ways it’s meant to be. You’ll feel it as an energetic torrent of great energy that bursts through you and out into the world around you. If all else fails, tell the Universe you’re ready to be up to great things and then watch the energy move through you to source all that into play.
  3. Get yourself into the high vibe and stay there. Find what lights you up and do that loads. Be excited about the future. Allow yourself to feel the thrill of being alive on this glorious planet. Contribute to the things that matter to you. And don’t get distressed by the demise of the old ways. Give them grace. Send them love. And then BE THE NEW in every way you can.
  4. There’s a point where you ‘tip over the vibrational horizon’ and here you discover a world of synchronicity, a world of effortless, magical co-creation, a world of kindness and greatness all wrapped up in a wonderful package where reality can thrive for all life everywhere. This is exactly how the new reality occurs. We are interconnected here in a new design of interwoven collective creation and it is brilliant to be a part of.
  5. Laugh a lot and smile loads. Be full of certainty that the world is turning out brilliantly for us all. This is not about positive thinking. This is about you powering up the new reality with every laugh, every smile, every good thought and every dib of certainty you can muster. For you see, reality responds to the power of our collective beliefs. So believe brilliantly for us all.
  6. Make miracles with your life. Yes, that’s right. Make miracles. It’s easier than you might think. Don’t let the word daunt you. Miracles are sitting right there in the air around you just waiting for you to invite them onto your dance floor. Know your body is capable of wondrous things. Call genius into your creations. Source effortless and limitless abundance in everything you do. For that is the natural state of the world you see. Abundance, genius, ideas, possibilities … they are all there ripe for the plucking from the very air you breathe.
  7. Be bigger and bolder than you ever imagined you could be. By that I mean ‘be up to big things’, even if you do them from your couch and garden. Big things don’t necessarily mean loads of effort and weighty visions. It means be for greatness, for quantum leaps, for miracles in the world today and then find your own instinctive, genius way to make that so for us all.
  8. And finally, you could choose to become the ALL, the Universe, the Earth, the Oceans, Source … anything really. It’s amazing when you discover how freeing it is to be more than you already are. To find yourself in the experience of awe, wonder and Life power of the greater becoming of us all. There you discover an intelligence beyond our own individual brains. New kinds of power await us there … Life power, Source power, Universal power … powers that exhilarate and elevate life, powers that remake the world and source a brilliant new reality for us all.

 

About the Author:

 

Soleira Green is a visionary author, quantum coach, ALLchemist & future innovator. She has been creating leading edge breakthroughs in consciousness, quantum evolution, transformation, innovation, intelligence and more over the past 25 years, has written and self-published eleven books, and taught courses all over the world on these topics.

 

17 Oct 2022
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Longevity Linked to Proteins That Calm Overexcited Neurons

 

A thousand seemingly insignificant things change as an organism ages. Beyond the obvious signs like graying hair and memory problems are myriad shifts both subtler and more consequential: Metabolic processes run less smoothly; neurons respond less swiftly; the replication of DNA grows faultier.

But while bodies may seem to just gradually wear out, many researchers believe instead that aging is controlled at the cellular and biochemical level. They find evidence for this in the throng of biological mechanisms that are linked to aging but also conserved across species as distantly related as roundworms and humans. Whole subfields of research have grown up around biologists’ attempts to understand the relationships among the core genes involved in aging, which seem to connect highly disparate biological functions, like metabolism and perception. If scientists can pinpoint which of the changes in these processes induce aging, rather than result from it, it may be possible to intervene and extend the human life span.

So far, research has suggested that severely limiting calorie intake can have a beneficial effect, as can manipulating certain genes in laboratory animals. But recently in Nature, Bruce Yankner, a professor of genetics and neurology at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues reported on a previously overlooked controller of life span: the activity level of neurons in the brain. In a series of experiments on roundworms, mice and human brain tissue, they found that a protein called REST, which controls the expression of many genes related to neural firing, also controls life span. They also showed that boosting the levels of the equivalent of REST in worms lengthens their lives by making their neurons fire more quietly and with more control. How exactly overexcitation of neurons might shorten life span remains to be seen, but the effect is real and its discovery suggests new avenues for understanding the aging process.

Genetic Mechanisms of Aging

In the early days of the molecular study of aging, many people were skeptical that it was even worth looking into. Cynthia Kenyon, a pioneering researcher in this area at the University of California, San Francisco, has described attitudes in the late 1980s: “The ageing field at the time was considered a backwater by many molecular biologists, and the students were not interested, or were even repelled by the idea. Many of my faculty colleagues felt the same way. One told me that I would fall off the edge of the Earth if I studied ageing.”

That was because many scientists thought that aging (more specifically, growing old) must be a fairly boring, passive process at the molecular level — nothing more than the natural result of things wearing out. Evolutionary biologists argued that aging could not be regulated by any complex or evolved mechanism because it occurs after the age of reproduction, when natural selection no longer has a chance to act. However, Kenyon and a handful of colleagues thought that if the processes involved in aging were connected to processes that acted earlier in an organism’s lifetime, the real story might be more interesting than people realized. Through careful, often poorly funded work on Caenorhabditis elegans, the laboratory roundworm, they laid the groundwork for what is now a bustling field.

A key early finding was that the inactivation of a gene called daf-2 was fundamental to extending the life span of the worms. “daf-2 mutants were the most amazing things I had ever seen. They were active and healthy and they lived more than twice as long as normal,” Kenyon wrote in a reflection on these experiments. “It seemed magical but also a little creepy: they should have been dead, but there they were, moving around.”

This gene and a second one called daf-16 are both involved in producing these effects in worms. And as scientists came to understand the genes’ activities, it became increasingly clear that aging is not separate from the processes that control an organism’s development before the age of sexual maturity; it makes use of the same biochemical machinery. These genes are important in early life, helping the worms to resist stressful conditions during their youth. As the worms age, modulation of daf-2 and daf-16 then influences their health and longevity.

These startling results helped draw attention to the field, and over the next two decades many other discoveries illuminated a mysterious network of signal transduction pathways — where one protein binds another protein, which activates another, which switches off another and so on — that, if disturbed, can fundamentally alter life span. By 1997, researchers had discovered that in worms daf-2 is part of a family of receptors that send signals triggered by insulin, the hormone that controls blood sugar, and the structurally similar hormone IGF-1, insulin-like growth factor 1; daf-16 was farther down that same chain. Tracing the equivalent pathway in mammals, scientists found that it led to a protein called FoxO, which binds to the DNA in the nucleus, turning a shadowy army of genes on and off.

That it all comes down to the regulation of genes is perhaps not surprising, but it suggests that the processes that control aging and life span are vastly complex, acting on many systems at once in ways that may be hard to pick apart. But sometimes, it’s possible to shine a little light on what’s happening, as in the Yankner group’s new paper.

Get Plenty of REST

Figuring out which genes are turned on and off in aging brains has long been one of Yankner’s interests. About 15 years ago, in a paper published in Nature, he and his colleagues looked at gene expression data from donated human brains to see how it changes over a lifetime. Some years later, they realized that many of the changes they’d seen were caused by a protein called REST. REST, which turns genes off, was mainly known for its role in the development of the fetal brain: It represses neuronal genes until the young brain is ready for them to be expressed.

But that’s not the only time it’s active. “We discovered in 2014 that [the REST gene] is actually reactivated in the aging brain,” Yankner said.

To understand how the REST protein does its job, imagine that the network of neurons in the brain is engaged in something like the party game Telephone. Each neuron is covered with proteins and molecular channels that enable it to fire and pass messages. When one neuron fires, it releases a flood of neurotransmitters that excite or inhibit the firing of the next neuron down the line. REST inhibits the production of some of the proteins and channels involved in this process, reining in the excitation.

In their new study, Yankner and his colleagues report that the brains of long-lived humans have unusually low levels of proteins involved in excitation, at least in comparison with the brains of people who died much younger. This finding suggests that the exceptionally old people probably had less neural firing. To investigate this association in more detail, Yankner’s team turned to C. elegans. They compared neural activity in the splendidly long-lived daf-2 mutants with that of normal worms and saw that firing levels in the daf-2 animals were indeed very different.

“They were almost silent. They had very low neural activity compared to normal worms,” Yankner said, noting that neural activity usually increases with age in worms. “This was very interesting, and sort of parallels the gene expression pattern we saw in the extremely old humans.”

When the researchers gave normal roundworms drugs that suppressed excitation, it extended their life spans. Genetic manipulation that suppressed inhibition — the process that keeps neurons from firing — did the reverse. Several other experiments using different methods confirmed their results. The firing itself was somehow controlling life span — and in this case, less firing meant more longevity.

Because REST was plentiful in the brains of long-lived people, the researchers wondered if lab animals without REST would have more neural firing and shorter lives. Sure enough, they found that the brains of elderly mice in which the Rest gene had been knocked out were a mess of overexcited neurons, with a tendency toward bursts of activity resembling seizures. Worms with boosted levels of their version of REST (proteins named SPR-3 and SPR-4) had more controlled neural activity and lived longer. But daf-2 mutant worms deprived of REST were stripped of their longevity.

“It suggests that there is a conserved mechanism from worms to [humans],” Yankner said. “You have this master transcription factor that keeps the brain at what we call a homeostatic or equilibrium level — it doesn’t let it get too excitable — and that prolongs life span. When that gets out of whack, it’s deleterious physiologically.”

What’s more, Yankner and his colleagues found that in worms the life extension effect depended on a very familiar bit of DNA: daf-16. This meant that REST’s trail had led the researchers back to that highly important aging pathway, as well as the insulin/IGF-1 system. “That really puts the REST transcription factor somehow squarely into this insulin signaling cascade,” said Thomas Flatt, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Fribourg who studies aging and the immune system. REST appears to be yet another way of feeding the basic molecular activities of the body into the metabolic pathway.

A Biological Balancing Act

Neural activity has been implicated in life span before, notes Joy Alcedo, a molecular geneticist at Wayne State University who studies the connections between sensory neurons, aging and developmental processes. Previous studies have found that manipulating the activity of even single neurons in C. elegans can extend or shorten life span. It’s not yet clear why, but one possibility is that the way the worms respond biochemically to their environment may somehow trip a switch in their hormonal signaling that affects how long they live.

 

 

The new study, however, suggests something broader: that overactivity in general is unhealthy. Neuronal overactivity may not feel like anything in particular from the viewpoint of the worm, mouse or human, unless it gets bad enough to provoke seizures. But perhaps over time it may damage neurons.

The new work also ties into the idea that aging may fundamentally involve a loss of biological stability, Flatt said. “A lot of things in aging and life span somehow have to do with homeostasis. Things are being maintained in a proper balance, if you will.” There’s a growing consensus in aging research that what we perceive as the body slowing down may in fact be a failure to preserve various equilibria. Flatt has found that aging flies show higher levels of immune-related molecules, and that this rise contributes to their deaths. Keeping the levels in check, closer to what they might have been when the flies were younger, extends their lives.

The results may help explain the observation that some drugs used for epilepsy extend life span in lab animals, said Nektarios Tavernarakis, a molecular biologist at the University of Crete who wrote a commentary that accompanied Yankner’s recent paper. If overexcitation shortens life span, then medicines that systematically reduce excitation could have the opposite effect. “This new study provides a mechanism,” he said.

In 2014, Yankner’s laboratory also reported that patients with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s have lower levels of REST. The early stages of Alzheimer’s, Yankner notes, involve an increase in neural firing in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that deals with memory. He and his colleagues wonder whether the lack of REST contributes to the development of these diseases; they are now searching for potential drugs that boost REST levels to test in lab organisms and eventually patients.

In the meantime, however, it’s not clear that people can do anything to put the new findings about REST to work in extending their longevity. According to Yankner, REST levels in the brain haven’t been tied to any particular moods or states of intellectual activity. It would be a “misconception,” he explained by email, “to correlate amount of thinking with life span.” And while he notes that there is evidence that “meditation and yoga can have a variety of beneficial effects for mental and physical health,” no studies show that they have any bearing on REST levels.

Why exactly do overexcited neurons lead to death? That’s still a mystery. The answer probably lies somewhere downstream of the DAF-16 protein and FoxO, in the genes they turn on and off. They may be increasing the organism’s ability to deal with stress, reworking its energy production to be more efficient, shifting its metabolism into another gear, or performing any number of other changes that together add up a sturdier and longer-lived organism. “It is intriguing that something as transient as the activity state of a neural circuit could have such a major physiological influence on something as protean as life span,” Yankner said.

 

Original article here

19 Sep 2022
Comments: 0

The Work of Radical Frugality

 

There are some people who are frugal by nature, some who practice frugality as a mandate of their faith, and some, like myself, who embrace frugality by necessity. I live within a limited income as a bulwark against a consumer culture and capitalist agenda that would prefer we consume our way to oblivion—both ours and the planet’s. We are in a quagmire given the conundrum of the capitalist agenda, a system that requires endless consumption and growth to survive, and a planet that is begging we cease. Personally, I’d rather take my instruction from Mother Earth.

Of course, there are those who might disregard my call for frugality. They are the ones who, despite all efforts, will never be able to live within their means even if they wanted to. The working poor are just that—working one, two, or three jobs and still unable to make ends meet. For them and us, advocating for workers’ rights, fair wages, and enacting legislative policies aimed at economic equality is vital. But this is not an either-or position: We can be advocates of economic parity while at the same time turning down the heat on a historically rapacious capitalist economy by becoming producers and consumers in the home economy.

Over the years, I have taught and written about living in a home economy. But this is less a throwback to some 1950s-era domestic ideal than an approach toward undermining an American psyche and economy that has thrown us into unnecessary debt, encouraged us to buy our way to happiness, and all but driven us from our homes.

By “home,” I am not referring to a physical space alone, though we are being driven, evicted, and displaced from our homes more and more these days, which is why we have become homeless in both form and function. I’m talking about the transiency and dependency that defines and supports the capitalist consumer culture. With neither the skills nor the inclination to stay in place or do for ourselves, we turn to the marketplace for our needs. (Not for nothing, there is an irony to all this talk of place-making when no one wants to stay in place anymore.) This dependency has a long history. It is not for naught that we have become, for all intents and purposes, indentured servants, living on credit and owing our soul to the company store. This is how the system is intended to work. The indentured make docile workers, and Amazon would be happy to bring you into its fold.

Beyond that, there is value and comfort in the making of a home. My respect for “home,” or the type of work that living in a home economy suggests, is due, in part, to my childhood. Growing up as the daughter of two immigrant parents who moved to New York following World War II, I understood, or saw, what utility born of frugality looked like. My father worked as a tailor and my mom worked to make a home in a railroad flat shared with relatives and boarders, and later in our own apartment in the Bronx.

Together, my parents sewed our clothes, made curtains and bedspreads, mended, repaired, cooked every meal at home, and basically did for themselves or did without. But, more significantly, they offered a sense of home, security, and comfort that was tangible to me as a child; one that I have carried forward as an adult. And yet, despite all my skills, my knowledge, and my refusenik underpinnings, I do not have what my parents had. In fact, many of us do not have this: the relationships bound by the need and a commitment to make a self-sufficient home.

It was the ancient Greeks who first coined the term “economics,” or “oikonomia,” as a system of household (oikos) management (nomia). So economics refers to the management system that serves your home. What that home is may vary—the planet, your body, the marketplace, or where you live—but knowing how you define it should determine how you manage it. It is overly simplistic to think that home economics deals exclusively with making cupcakes or jam. It is the serious effort toward creating a management system that works to support the needs of your home.

For me, this includes working in and with seasons, putting up the harvest, avoiding packaging, and cooking my meals from the “stores” I have at season’s end. It includes doing without or making do by repairing, mending, and being grateful for the blessings I have been given, and, of course, being frugal—radically frugal. But it also means living in community with what I call the “new farm family,” that distillate of days gone by when generations lived and worked together to care for each other, and an ethic and lifestyle I embraced following my time as a small-business owner.

Running a business these days requires the sort of branding and niche marketing that can feel more competitive than cooperative. Besides that, as a one-time small-business owner, I know how beholden we are to institutions (banking, insurance, etc.) and goods that either come from, or are regulated by, international markets or organizations. Moreover, if you calculate the amount of carbon used on the build-outs and equipment required to launch and run most businesses, you’ll quickly understand how unsustainable “local” can be.

Still, I understand the theory of “buy local.” Shopping locally allows our dollars to circulate more within the community, and to support the people and businesses we care about. But this is no panacea, particularly when attempting to live within your budget.

As I like to point out, many people are lucky to be earning $15 an hour, but we are living in a $100-an-hour world. Every time we step out and into the marketplace, we are faced with the costs of goods and services that have outpaced our income.

I’m not advocating for cheaper goods, however. We haven’t been paying the true cost of anything for quite some time. Still, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know where living outside your income will lead. We can’t spend money we do not have to support local businesses, but if we don’t take part in the local economy, we tend to feel guilty.

Which is why, when a friend of mine still running a small business once told me, “Your frugality is killing my business,” I was heartsick. I knew what she was saying. It is not easy to be a business owner these days, but I’m very careful with my “disposable” income, and, well, with a planet begging for limits to growth (or no growth), I can’t help wondering when we will begin to take it seriously, and how we will respond.

One of our responses can be the type of collective living that this new farm family implies. And yet, we moderns have become addicted to an ethos of independent living, uprooting ourselves from our home communities to chase better jobs or schools elsewhere. We do not “need” each other as we once did. Our modern anything-anytime consumer culture has made our need to rely upon others near-obsolete.

This is why living collectively seems such a challenge. Mired in the mindset of independence, collective living is seen by many as primarily a means to keep rent cheap, which makes it fickle, temporary, and resistant to the larger commitment of turning down the heat on this capitalist monster. Without asking or learning the functional and emotional skills necessary to live in a home economy, our experiment in collectivity will do little to effect permanent change.

In speaking of farm families, however, I admit to waxing poetic on a lifestyle that, from a historical perspective, was more complex and compromised. Farmers were victimized, in the Great Depression and afterward, as the capitalist system demanded bigger economies of scale. “Get big or get out” was the call, and many farmers perished in attempting to take it on. More soberly, many landowners in this romanticized past were responsible for the displacement and genocide of cultures that only today we are willing to acknowledge, even if we’re not doing more than speaking about it.

But survival is an impartial taskmaster. The plight of the immigrants coming to America isn’t pretty. Neither is the story of slavery or genocide or the feeding frenzy of those who came from England to gain access to land and resources for the crown. Dang it if Jefferson’s “nation of farmers,” a rallying cry for many small farmers today, has not been overly simplified for easy reading.

But there is a movement of young farmers returning to the land, and they, too, are attempting the audacious act of living outside the tethers of the capitalist system. This makes us bedfellows in a movement, which is what home economics is really about: an effort to stand up against an economy that is doing its best to steal the best this life has to offer, a place to call home, in both form and function.

But believing in the virtues of a home economy will not magically change our values, nor will it immediately bestow the skills or intention for living in the seasons or turn us into people who would rather make, repair, sow, grow, or stow our foods than buy them from the store.

And it will not immediately turn us into capitalist refuseniks, or even someone who wants to save whatever resources and time we have to support the efforts of young farmers.

But with time, our lives as consumers in the capitalist economy will appear frail when compared to a life in the home economy. And eventually, we’ll come to understand that this is about more than making cupcakes. A lot more.

 

 

Original article here

 

 

 

12 Sep 2022
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How Do Strong Muscles Keep Your Brain Healthy?

 

We’ve often thought about muscle as a thing that exists separately from intellect—and perhaps that is even oppositional to it, one taking resources from the other. The truth is, our brains and muscles are in constant conversation with each other, sending electrochemical signals back and forth. In a very tangible way, our lifelong brain health depends on keeping our muscles moving.

Skeletal muscle is the type of muscle that allows you to move your body around; it is one of the biggest organs in the human body. It is also an endocrine tissue, which means it releases signaling molecules that travel to other parts of your body to tell them to do things. The protein molecules that transmit messages from the skeletal muscle to other tissues—including the brain—are called myokines.

Myokines are released into the bloodstream when your muscles contract, create new cells, or perform other metabolic activities. When they arrive at the brain, they regulate physiological and metabolic responses there, too. As a result, myokines have the ability to affect cognition, mood, and emotional behavior. Exercise further stimulates what scientists call muscle-brain “cross talk,” and these myokine messengers help determine specific beneficial responses in the brain. These can include the formation of new neurons and increased synaptic plasticity, both of which boost learning and memory.

In these ways, strong muscles are essential to healthy brain function.

In young muscle, a small amount of exercise triggers molecular processes that tell the muscle to grow. Muscle fibers sustain damage through strain and stress, and then repair themselves by fusing together and increasing in size and mass. Muscles get stronger by surviving each series of little breakdowns, allowing for regeneration, rejuvenation, regrowth. As we age, the signal sent by exercise becomes much weaker. Though it’s more difficult for older people to gain and maintain muscle mass, it’s still possible to do so, and that maintenance is critical to supporting the brain.

Even moderate exercise can increase metabolism in brain regions important for learning and memory in older adults. And the brain itself has been found to respond to exercise in strikingly physical ways. The hippocampus, a brain structure that plays a major role in learning and memory, shrinks in late adulthood; this can result in an increased risk for dementia. Exercise training has been shown to increase the size of the hippocampus, even late in life, protecting against age-related loss and improving spatial memory.

Further, there is substantial evidence that certain myokines have sex-differentiated neuroprotective properties. For example, the myokine irisin is influenced by estrogen levels, and postmenopausal women are more susceptible to neurological diseases, which suggests that irisin may also have an important role in protecting neurons against age-related decline.

Studies have shown that even in people with existing brain disease or damage, increased physical activity and motor skills are associated with better cognitive function. People with sarcopenia, or age-related muscle atrophy, are more likely to suffer cognitive decline. Mounting evidence shows that the loss of skeletal muscle mass and function leaves the brain more vulnerable to dysfunction and disease; as a counter to that, exercise improves memory, processing speed, and executive function, especially in older adults. (Exercise also boosts these cognitive abilities in children.)

There’s a robust molecular language being spoken between your muscles and your brain. Exercise helps keep us fluent in that language, even into old age.

 

 

Original article here

04 Sep 2022
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Diet for a Hotter Climate: Five Plants That Could Help Feed the World

Over the course of human history, scientists believe that humans have cultivated more than 6,000 different plant species. But over time, farmers gravitated toward planting those with the largest yields. Today, just three crops – rice, wheat and corn – provide nearly half of the world’s calories.

That reliance on a small number of crops has made agriculture vulnerable to pests, plant-borne diseases and soil erosion, which thrive on monoculture – the practice of growing only one crop at a time. It has also meant losing out on the resilience other crops show in surviving drought and other natural disasters.

As the impacts of the climate crisis become starker, farmers across the world are rediscovering ancient crops and developing new hybrids that might prove more hardy in the face of drought or epidemics, while also offering important nutrients.

“You hear all the statistics like, ‘We’ve lost 90% of our varieties’. It’s only recently that I realized the greatest sadness isn’t that we’ve lost that diversity. It’s that we don’t even know that we’ve lost that diversity,” says Chris Smith, founder of the Utopian Seed Project.

Here’s a look at five crops, beyond rice, wheat and corn, that farmers across the world are now growing in hopes of feeding the planet as it warms:

Amaranth: the plant that survived colonization 

From leaf to seed, the entirety of the amaranth plant is edible. Standing up to eight feet tall, amaranth stalks are topped off with red, orange or green seed-filled plumes. Across Africa and Asia, amaranth has long been eaten as a vegetable – whereas Indigenous Americans also ate the plant’s seed: a pseudo-cereal like buckwheat or quinoa.

While amaranth leaves can be sautéed or cooked into a stir-fry, the seed is commonly toasted and then eaten with honey or milk. A complete protein with all nine essential amino acids, amaranth is a good source of vitamins and antioxidants.

In the Americas, Spanish colonizers banned the Aztecs and Maya from growing amaranth when they arrived on the continent. However, the plant continued to grow as a weed and many farmers saved amaranth seeds, passing them down for generations, until their descendants were allowed to grow it again.

Today, Indigenous farmers in Guatemala, Mexico and the US are collaborating to grow this drought-resistant crop. Like fonio, an African grain, amaranth is not a new crop, but one that is experiencing a resurgence as communities adapt to the climate crisis. “Everything that’s new was old once,” said Matthew Blair, a professor at Tennessee State University and co-president of the Amaranth Institute.

Amaranth has found its way into European kitchens, with Ukraine coming in as the crop’s largest producer on the continent.

Fonio: the drought-resistant traditional grain

For thousands of years, farmers across West Africa have cultivated fonio – a kind of millet that tastes like a slightly nuttier couscous or quinoa. Historically, fonio is considered to be Africa’s oldest cultivated cereal and was regarded by some as the food of chiefs and kings. In countries such as Senegal, Burkina Faso and Mali, fonio would be served on holy days, like at weddings and during the month of Ramadan.

Today, attention is increasingly focused on fonio for its resilience and health benefits. As the climate continues to change, fonio’s drought resistance and ability to grow in poor soil has made it a standout crop in water-scarce regions. It also has important nutritional value as a low glycemic, gluten-free grain – making it a good source of amino acids for people with diabetes or gluten intolerance.

While Europeans once called fonio “hungry rice”, European companies are now manufacturing their own fonio. The Italian company Obà Food helped introduce fonio to the EU in December 2018. And in the US, the Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam sources fonio from the aid organization SOS Sahel for his brand Yolélé, also the name of his cookbook celebrating West African cuisine.

Cowpeas: the fully edible plant

In the 1940s, more than 5m acres of cowpeas were grown in the US – the majority, as their name suggests, for hay to feed livestock. But long before cowpeas – also called southern peas or black-eyed peas – came to the Americas, they were grown for human consumption in West Africa. Although cowpea production has declined in the US in recent decades, the crop is hugely important in much of Africa. Nigeria is the world’s largest cowpea producer.

As scientists look for alternative crops, Blair said it was important to identify ones where the entire plant is edible. Although historically people have mostly eaten cowpeas’ seeds, the leaves and pods are also a good source of protein.

Because cowpeas are highly drought tolerant, they’re also a good candidate as the climate changes. At Tennessee State University, Blair is part of a team studying the introduction of cowpeas to Latin America, as an alternative to beans, like pinto and black beans, with similar flavor profiles that may soon become more difficult to grow.

Taro: adapting the tropical crop for colder climes

In the tropics of Southeast Asia and Polynesia, taro has long been grown as a root vegetable, not unlike the potato. But as rising temperatures threaten cultivation of the crop in its natural habitat, farmers in the continental US are trying to adapt the tropical perennial to grow as a temperate annual, because it cannot survive the cold of US winters.

At the Utopian Seed Project in North Carolina, founder Chris Smith and his team have been experimenting with tropical crops, looking for ways to help the plants survive the winter. Today, they’re growing eight varieties of taro, including ones sourced from Korea, the Philippines, Hawaii, China and Puerto Rico.

“We want to introduce taro because we truly believe that that will give us a more secure food system,” Smith says. “But the beautiful byproduct is that that also allows us to engage with foods that are traditionally from either Indigenous or peasant farming communities. And I think it really gives those traditionally underserved populations an opportunity to engage with the food system that they don’t usually get.”

Like fonio, amaranth and cowpeas, taro isn’t a new crop – it’s just new to the US food system. Which is why the Utopian Seed Project isn’t just learning how to grow taro, but also teaching people how to cook it. “These crops are just foods that are embedded in cultures around the world in a way that they’re not embedded here,” Smith said. “It takes work to build that community and desire for that crop.”

Kernza: the crop bred for the climate crisis

While many alternative crops are just plants that were grown somewhere else in the world generations ago, others have been cultivated specifically to withstand climate change.

In the 1980s, researchers at the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute identified a wheat-like grass called intermediate wheatgrass as a perennial cereal crop that could be developed as a substitute for annual grains like wheat. The goal was to minimize the environmental impacts of grain production.

In 2019, the Kansas-based Land Institute, a non-profit research organization focused on sustainable agriculture, introduced Kernza, a cereal crop developed from intermediate wheatgrass and trademarked to ensure farmers know they’ve bought seeds from the official breeding program. Although researchers are still working to improve the grain’s yield, farmers in Minnesota, Kansas and Montana are today growing nearly 4,000 acres of Kernza.

“Growers immediately understand the benefits of perennials on their landscapes,” said Tessa Peters, director of crop stewardship at the Land Institute, “and for those working in grain-producing areas, Kernza is very appealing.”

 

 

Original article here