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22 May 2024
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Dementia cases are on the rise — avoid these 12 risks to keep your brain healthy

A global mental health crisis is on the horizon — dementia.

It is a condition that can be caused by a number of diseases that gradually destroy nerve cells and damage the brain, resulting in a decline in cognitive functions, according to the World Health Organization.

With the advancement of medicine, science and technology, people are living longer lives and the world’s aging population is growing at an unprecedented rate, raising the risk of a larger cohort of people living with dementia.

“As the global population of older adults continues to rise, the number of people living with dementia is also expected to grow, reaching approximately 139 million dementia cases by the year 2050,” according to a recent report. As of 2023, there were more than 55 million people with dementia globally, according to the WHO.

By 2050, the population of people aged 65 and older will double to 2.1 billion, according to the World Health Organization.

Dementia risks

“Dementia is currently the seventh leading cause of death and one of the major causes of disability and dependency among older people globally,” according to the WHO, with nearly 10 million new cases of dementia every year.

Although there is no cure for the condition, according to research published in 2023 by the WHO, psychologists and researchers are working to prevent its onset.

While age is still the strongest known risk factor for dementia, researchers have found a set of 12 “potentially modifiable risk factors,” according to The Lancet Commission’s 2020 report:

  • Less education
  • Hypertension
  • Hearing impairment
  • Smoking
  • Obesity
  • Depression
  • Physical inactivity
  • Diabetes
  • Low social contact
  • Excessive alcohol consumption
  • Traumatic brain injury
  • Air pollution

“Together the 12 modifiable risk factors account for around 40% of worldwide dementias, which consequently could theoretically be prevented or delayed,” according to The Lancet.

While socioeconomic status and education levels can impact the onset of dementia, particularly in early life, several other risks can be avoided, according to the study.

“What we currently know is — what’s good for your heart is good for your brain, and that’s because there are a lot of vascular risk factors for dementia,” Timothy Singham, clinical psychologist and adjunct senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore, told CNBC Make It.

So, a lack of physical exercise, eating unhealthy foods, not getting enough sleep, drinking alcohol excessively as well as smoking puts a strain on your brain and risks developing future impairments, just like these pose a risk to one’s heart, said Singham.

While a healthy body can mitigate dementia risks, a healthy mind is no less important.

“We do know [that] people who have cumulative mental health symptoms during their lifetime, actually [have] an increased risk of dementia,” said Singham.

“If we see symptomatic improvement [to one’s mental health] throughout the life course, then that can decrease your chances of having dementia eventually.”

How to cut risks

Here are five key “protective factors” or things people can do to help prevent the onset of dementia:

  • Regular physical activity
  • Eating healthy
  • Building a healthy support network
  • Having good sleep hygiene
  • Find ways to regulate stress and emotions

It can be easy to get wrapped up in the quick pace of daily life, so it’s important to take breaks.

“Your mental health suffers really quickly if you’re not — physically active, you don’t get to breathe, you don’t get to see nature much, you’re cooped up in the office or at home all day,” Singham said.

Additionally, it is crucial to build a healthy support network, not just online, but also in-person.

“I think a lot of young people are [leaning on their] online social networks — but we need to not give up the face-to-face [meetups] with friends,” Ng Ai Ling, deputy director and principal counsellor at Viriya Community Services told CNBC Make It.

“The other thing I would encourage young people to do is have a very disciplined, good sleep hygiene because our brains really really need to rest,” Ng said. She suggests getting at least seven hours of sleep every night.

Lastly, finding ways to regulate emotions and stress is crucial. Finding professional help when required or leaning on your support network are ways to protect your mental health, in addition to the daily upkeep of maintaining a healthy diet, exercise and sleep.

Loved ones’ struggle

As dementia cases continue to rise, mental health professionals expect its impact to extend beyond just those who are directly affected.

“The caregiver themselves are struggling to understand the illness — you lose someone to the illness, and the person who you used to be able to relate to and communicate [with] is no longer the same,” Ng said.

Caregivers and loved ones may risk developing mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and insomnia, Ng explained.

“Suddenly — someone you’re familiar with, and that person is forgetting you, and [they are] unable to perform as [they did] before the illness … There is this emotional distress that you go through,” she said.

Given the challenging situation, it is also important for people around a dementia patient to take care of their own mental and physical health as well, experts said.

 

 

Original article here

 

19 May 2024
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What We Get Wrong About Manifesting

 

 

For years, I allowed my environment to dictate the terms of my life, and I didn’t believe I could produce any meaningful change. This is so often the case when we experience trauma: the pain and shock of the experience take on an exaggerated authority in our minds that is difficult to challenge and frightening to confront. This pain is powerful enough to alter not only our own genes, but, as researchers in the field of epigenetics have discovered, the genes of subsequent generations.

Our minds and bodies organize around preparations to prevent a similar trauma from happening in the future, and in the process, our consciousness becomes caught in reacting to a frightening and unreliable external world, rather than envisioning the changes we can make. In the process, we give away the energy, attention, and focus we ourselves possess to make a real difference in our own lives; we are distracted away from our own power. And without knowing it, we trade our innate self-agency for magical thinking.

It’s a raw deal. And there is oftentimes no one to blame. The good news is that we now have insights into how powerful our mind is and most importantly through neuroscience how we can create the life we want. Fundamentally, we are claiming our self-agency and recognizing the power of neuroplasticity. In lay terms, we are manifesting.

The world can indeed be starkly unfair, and this unfairness can shatter a person’s dreams. And as unfair as I once perceived the world to be, I know today that countless other human beings in this world are treated with greater injustice, on both the individual and systemic levels. The societies they live in have created structural roadblocks to their ability to manifest, whether due to their race, social class, religion, sexual orientation, gender expression, or other arbitrary criteria. Manifesting is not a cure or a fix for all suffering. Like all human activity, it is often limited by countless factors beyond our control and reality, regardless of our intention.

Thus, I see manifesting as, at its heart, a practice of well-being, engagement with the world and living a good life. By practicing it, we cultivate “dispositional optimism,” defined as a generalized tendency to expect good outcomes across important life domains. Research has shown a staggering number of health benefits associated with dispositional optimism, from improvements in cardiovascular health, to how quickly wounds heal, to slower disease progression.

Where some may believe that the only measure of a successful manifestation is the material results it delivers, I consider this view to be misguided. The true gift of visualizing our intention again and again is to go through life with a buoyant sense that things will work out for us which liberates us to be both responsive and resilient no matter what our external circumstances bring.

For years, manifesting has long been confined to the same New Age territory as astrology, visions of angels, and reincarnation, full of pseudoscience and platitudes. But, in fact, the practice of manifestation dates back thousands of years. Much of what we associate today with manifesting derives from the Vedic scriptures of the Hindu tradition. In the Mundaka Upanishad, for example, it states, “Whatever world a man of pure understanding envisages in his mind and whatever desires he cherishes, that world he conquers and those desires he obtains” (3.1.10). The Buddha similarly commented on the powerful ability of thoughts to shape our experience of the world when he said, “Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking and pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness.”

Until recently, it was not possible to scientifically study the concrete processes by which the brain turns intention into reality. But significant developments in brain imaging have revolutionized our ability to watch the brain transform on a cellular, genetic, and even molecular level. We can now speak about manifestation in terms of cognitive neuroscience and the function of large-scale brain networks. This has allowed us to demonstrate that manifesting is neither a get-rich-quick scheme nor a misguided wish-fulfillment system, but part of the brain’s extraordinary ability to change, heal, and remake itself known as “neuroplasticity.”

Neuroplasticity is the general umbrella term for the brain’s ability to modify, change, and adapt both structure and function throughout life and in response to experience. This superpower, molded by experience, repetition, and intention, enables the brain to form new circuits, and to prune away old ones which no longer serve us. By redirecting our attention, we can literally change our brains, creating more gray matter in the very areas that help us learn, perform, and make our dreams come true. As the brain adapts, it makes alterations which can produce dramatic and positive effects on everything from Parkinson’s disease, to chronic pain, to ADHD. And the same neuroplasticity is the engine by which we change our minds and brains through the power of our intention to manifest the reality we envision through practice.

Manifesting is essentially the process of intentionally embedding the thoughts and images of the life we desire into our subconscious allowing various cognitive brain networks to be activated and work in sync. We are all manifesting the intentions stored within our minds in some form already in an untrained and uninformed way and the results are often haphazard, vague, and unfocused at best. To manifest consciously, we must reclaim our inner power to direct our attention. In the process, we must also learn how to harness that power by understanding how it involves us as a species, the physiological mechanisms that allow us to do so as well as the obstacles and false beliefs that limit our power. When we consciously direct our attention towards our desired goals, the images we evoke become important to the brain. The way the images get installed is through a process called “value tagging,” the brain’s way of deciding what is significant enough to be imprinted at the deepest levels of the subconscious.

When we practice visualization, we conjure powerful positive emotions, and these cue the “selective attention” system like a filing clerk to tag the images we desire as highly valuable and associate them with our reward system. Visualization works because, amazingly, the brain does not distinguish between an actual physical experience and one that is intensely imagined.

Once the images are installed in our subconscious, our brain works like a bloodhound to seek opportunities to bring them about in reality, putting the full force of our conscious and subconscious minds behind the search. As the opportunities arise, we notice them and respond, taking the necessary action to further our goal. We repeat this process many, many times and then, we let go of the attachment to the outcome and let things take their natural course.

 

 

 

Original article here

17 May 2024
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Boredom Makes Us Human  

 

 

In a recent article in the Financial Times, Markham Heid shares with us a peculiar life crisis. At 41, he has built what many would regard as the good life: he has a family; he is healthy, productive, and creative; he has time to travel, read, exercise, and see friends. Yet, he feels that “something is off.” He gives this state a variety of names, including mid-life melancholy, ennui, and despair. He also diagnoses it in others all around him. To fight against it, some of his friends have turned to ayahuasca retreats, others to fitness. What renders Heid’s malaise somewhat strange is that it does not seem to arise from anything specific. If Heid had lost his job, had no time for himself, or was struggling in his marriage, some of these feelings would seem less puzzling.

In the history of philosophy, there have been many attempts to understand such powerful but objectless feelings. Boredom, anxiety, and despair are some of the descriptions these moods have received. In the novel Nausea, the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre describes someone who mysteriously experiences that feeling whenever they are confronted with ordinary objects, like a pebble on the beach. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger describes an uncanny unease we may feel when we are bored and searching desperately for distractions. The Danish philosopher Sшren Kierkegaard speaks of a silent despair in the background of our lives, a sense of discord or dread of an unknown something that can grab us momentarily.

Sadly, the philosophical descriptions of such moods have often been misunderstood as sombre or romantic moments of existential reflection where we recognize our mortality or the meaninglessness of life. Pictured in this way, these moments are bound to stay isolated from the anxiety, despair, and melancholy that we face in our ordinary life and seek help for. But if we look beyond the existentialist cliches, the philosophical ideas on such moods can offer a new way forward. What could Heid have learnt from the philosophers?

Moods of nothing

Despite Heid’s references to Heidegger, we do not read anything about the philosopher’s own ruminations of a very similar experience of flatness: a feeling that all things (and we ourselves) sink into indifference; a sense that things around us slip away or we slip away from ourselves; a malaise related to a vacant stillness. What is remarkable, for Heidegger, is that such intense affects arise despite the fact that nothing may have changed in our lives: one is still surrounded by the same people, events, and activities, but these do not engage us as they used to. It is this feature that makes him describe what he calls “anxiety” as a mood generated by nothing in particular.

This makes such feelings doubly unwelcome. Most of us can tolerate negative emotions if we see them as instrumental to something desirable—we do not run to a therapist to treat a fear if we think that it holds us back from doing something obviously risky. But unlike fear, what Heidegger calls anxiety and what Heid’s article describes do not protect us from anything specific. No wonder why Sigmund Freud called anxiety a “riddle.”

But this view is too simplistic for Heidegger. It risks concealing both the value and meaning of the feelings he describes. First, the human emotional life is much more complex than a simple battle between positive and negative feelings, or useful and useless emotions. Second, objectless moods can teach us something significant not about specific risks or problems in our lives but about the fact that we have a life to live at all. Learning from them can allow us to find what Heidegger describes as a sense of peace and joy within the malaise.

What’s missing?

Heid says that “some essential aspect of life is missing or not sufficiently represented.” He ends up attributing his melancholy to the lack of new experiences. Kierkegaard calls this the illusion of “crop rotation,” the idea that changing the soil frequently can save us from boredom and despair.

But what really drives such moods is not the need for new experiences. It is not even the particulars of our individual lives or the culture we belong to, but that we have been given a life to live in the first place, the taste of possibility that comes with being alive. The kinds of questions that arise are not questions like “have I married the right person?” “will parenthood enrich my life?” or “do I have enough hobbies?” It is the more fundamental questions like “what does it mean to be human?” “what am I supposed to do with the fact that I was given a life?” and “what kind of life is possible for me?” that best explain our human tendency for anxiety, despair, or boredom.

This is why such moods are likely to appear as a mid-life crisis. With many of our life goals fulfilled, we start to wonder what life is for, what is possible for human existence, and what we are doing for it. Humans are inherently ambivalent toward possibility, attracted but also repelled by it. On one hand, we can experience it as a radical openness, an appreciation of our life as a gift. On the other, the open-endedness of possibility, the sense that one could always be doing more with their life, can create a great sense of agony about who we are and how we should go on.

Throwing us out of our everyday lives, such moods make us ponder existence itself. They are cases where who we are and what we are for becomes an issue for each one of us. These questions never assume a final answer. Hovering over our lives, they can always leave us with a sense of unease. Recognizing that these questions are there, and that they matter, can at least allow us to know what may be missing, even when all is good.

 

 

Original article here

13 May 2024
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What Dinner Will Look Like in the Next 100 Years, According to Scientists (and Sci-Fi Authors)

 

Dr. Morgaine Gaye sweeps a hand over her blonde faux-hawk and smiles at me through oversize purple-tinted glasses. If she doesn’t look the part of a self-proclaimed “food futurologist,” I don’t know who does. The future, she tells me in her rapid-fire British accent, is all about Air Protein, a product that uses high-tech fermentation to turn carbon dioxide into chicken or whatever you want, really. Tens of millions of dollars are being invested into alternative proteins and air just might be one of the keys to feeding the world’s 9.8 billion people by 2050.

That’s nearly 2 billion more people than we (fail to) feed today, and an overwhelming amount of that growth, the UN predicts, will be in sub-Saharan Africa, where desert conditions make farming a challenge. Then there’s that pesky issue of climate change. If the planet warms 2.7 degrees by 2040, as experts project, the implications could be devastating. Ongoing droughts, flooding, extreme weather, it’s all on the table. What may not be on the table: California avocados, predicted to go all but extinct by 2050.

The good news is that the food industry is already planning for those pressures, as Amanda Little investigates in her revelatory book The Fate of Food. “I don’t know that there’s a future in which we’re all looking at a plate of wafers injected with specialized nutrients,” she says. “That just sounds like a culinary hell nobody wants to inhabit.” It’s the seeds, farming practices, technology, water, distribution, and behind-the-scenes innovations that are going to change the contents of our plates. She’s rooting for the avocados (though they might have to be grown indoors…and cost $20 a pop).

To take a look at what the future of food might look like, we talked to experts to come up with menu predictions for the future. For the years 2023 and 2024, scientists offered their insights on how food might change. But for 100 years from now—the year 2122—we spoke with people who were unafraid to make some bold claims: science fiction writers. See it all below.

2032: 10 Years

Within the next decade, grocery stores will stock cell-cultured proteins. Stem cells are collected, put into bioreactors, and fed nutrients like glucose so that they grow into animal-free chicken, beef, pork, and even duck (as opposed to the meat alternatives we have today, which are very good imitations made with plant products). These proteins don’t need room to graze and expel methane, don’t waste uneaten parts of an animal, and are less likely to contain bacteria like salmonella. This is the beyond-Beyond burger.

The Menu

  • Upside Foods’ cell-cultured hamburger, concocted in a lab in Berkeley, CA.
  • Animal-free American cheese made with protein powder brand Perfect Day’s patented cow-free whey protein.
  • Bun baked with Kernza wheat, a hearty grain with long roots that retain water and rejuvenate the soil.
  • Good old-fashioned pickles aren’t going anywhere—don’t panic.
  • Hummus made with genetically edited chickpeas that can withstand extreme heat and drought.
  • Food-waste-eliminating upcycled barley croutons fortified with algae powder (it’s nutrient-dense and a great binder, plus algae draws out more CO2 in the air than trees do).
  • Side salad with romaine lettuce from an indoor vertical farm, which can bring local produce to densely packed city centers (where populations are predicted to double by 2050) without the need for farmland or even sun.
  • Hidden Valley Ranch dressing, still the reigning ranch champ, but hopefully from a compostable squeeze bottle by then
  • A squeaky-clean glass of locally (hyper-) filtered, recycled, delicious sewage water. In the next decade much of the world will experience shortages of fresh water and its cost will increase, especially in dry climates that already import water, like California.

 

2042: 20 Years

Personalized nutrition was the phrase I heard most from food industry experts, like the head of R&D at PepsiCo, which recently launched a sweat patch to tell you when you need more Gatorade (often). What 23andMe did for genetics, we’ll see in the nutrition and gut-health departments. Imagine a wristwatch that pings you when your sodium’s high. Cool! Creepy!

The Menu

  • Sustainably farmed, zero-waste salmon. Yes, we already have this, but the demand for proteins is predicted to increase 40 percent by 2050. Farmed salmon has a long way to go to be safer and less ridden with sea lice (don’t ask), but if people eat more fish than beef by 2042, we’ll be doing the planet a lot of good.
  • Protein-enhanced lentils—hey, the watch said you needed it—in a coconut milk broth seasoned with local greenhouse peppers because extreme weather in Latin America has made the imported ones too expensive.
  • Iced coffee made from medium-acidic, very tasty Coffea stenophyllabeans that can withstand warmer temperatures. Experts predict some 60 percent of coffee species could go extinct in the next 20 years due to extreme weather, deforestation, and human development.
  • Air fryers are out. Countertop 3D-printing ovens that transform shelf-stable foods into hot dishes are IN! This one baked you a tasty peach cobbler from canned peaches that were genetically edited for “low-chill” conditions (peaches need time in the cold to develop to their full potential, and warmer winters are already ruining entire crops).
  • Topped with crème fraîche (pricey but worth it) made of cream from a nearby midsize regenerative farm, which we’ll need to revive our soil and ensure a more reliable food supply. Certain staples of the American diet—meat, poultry, dairy—will forever remain in demand.

 

2122: 100 Years

Four science fiction writers with buzzy, brilliant books out this year muse on what they think we’ll be eating one hundred years from now. Thankfully, no one said Soylent Green.

The Menu

  • Cricket tartare (Portland-biodome-raised, certified organic) on a bed of Mariana Trench plankton from the deepest point in the Pacific Ocean, where we have yet to explore the possibilities of food. It’s served in an edible fungi tart dish from Le Creuset, a brand that will surely endure even as culinary innovations move from kitchens to biotech labs. This snack is brought to you by the inventive mind of Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark, which spans generations (and atmospheres) drastically shaped by a devastating worldwide plague…
  • Sustainably farmed mussels in a citrus broth covered by a gigantic supremed lime, says Sarah Blake. She’s the author of Clean Air, which takes place in a near-distant future where plants overproduce deadly pollen to save the planet’s ecosystems, killing a ton of humans while the rest live in domes and eat oversize produce farmed by robots.
  • In Goliath, novelist Tochi Onyebuchi imagines a future in which the rich have taken off for space colonies, leaving the rest on radiation-ruined Earth. A hundred years from now, coffee beans will be extinct (a real possibility), so Onyebuchi has us sipping java made from okra seeds, a significant cultural touchstone of Black cuisine even in the postapocalypse.
  • 3D-printed tortilla chips made from hydroponic black bean paste, with cell-cloned cheese sauce and jalapeños, all sourced from aerial farms in the upper atmosphere of Venus. In her optimistic vision of the future, author Martha Wells sees people living on space stations or on other planets after Earth’s resources have been depleted (you don’t want to hear the pessimistic version!). Wells’s next fantasy series, Witch King, is out May 2023.

 

 

Original article here

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