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11 Sep 2024
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I’m a Neurologist. Here’s the One Thing I Do Every Day for My Long-Term Brain Health

 

Everything you do—walking to your yoga class, making your favorite latte order, talking to your bestie, and just getting through the workday—happens thanks to your brain. Your brain is the control center for your entire body—it’s how you get shit done. So how can you take care of such a beautifully complex and integral part of your body and keep it in great shape for as long as possible?

Lara V. Marcuse, MD, a board-certified neurologist and codirector of the Mount Sinai Epilepsy Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, shares the one thing she does every day (or almost every day, because life gets busy, folks!) to keep her brain healthy. As a bonus? It’s fun.

Pick up a difficult new skill, even if you suck at it.

“I started playing piano in my mid-40s,” Dr. Marcuse tells SELF. It all started by chance when her son began taking lessons: “I took his lesson book on the sly one night before bed, and I was totally enthralled by it,” she says, though she admits she found the songs themselves hard to get into at first. “I’m a 1980s New York City club kid. I grew up on a steady diet of house music, and I never liked classical.” It’s been seven years since she first gave playing a Chopin piece a shot, and she hasn’t looked back since. “[Playing piano] helps me get into [the] nooks and crannies of myself—and into my spirit,” she says.

Taking up a hobby that’s unfamiliar and even difficult forces your brain to exercise new or rarely used neural pathways, and that can help prevent cognitive decline and even protect your brain against Alzheimer’s disease, a type of dementia that leads to memory loss and an inability to complete daily tasks. Keeping your brain active makes neural pathways strong—and the opposite is true if you’re not finding ways to engage your mind.

Playing an instrument, in particular, engages every facet of your brain. If you’ve ever looked at a sheet of music, it’s basically like reading a different language. Your brain goes through a bunch of hoops to figure it out. (Anecdotally speaking, as a former cello player, I can attest to the fact that reading music is no joke; I recall spending hours trying to understand a simple string of notes.) When you sit down to play the keys or strum a guitar, your brain is hard at work trying to tell your hands what to do.

Musical activities trigger the auditory cortex (a.k.a. the part of your brain that helps you hear) and areas of your brain that are involved in memory function. According to a 2021 review published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, performing music is rewarding and makes you want to continue your musical training practice. It also improves brain plasticity, which refers to ways your brain changes in response to external or internal factors, like a stroke or another traumatic brain injury, and how the brain adapts afterward. Learning how to play might result in structural and functional changes in your brain over time, exactly because it takes a while to learn.

Your brain-bolstering activity of choice doesn’t have to be music-based, Dr. Marcuse says, as long as you’re interested in whatever you’re doing enough to want to commit to it. You can paint, try tai chi, or learn how to interpret tarot cards.

The other key piece of this is making sure that your new hobby involves some amount of challenge. “It has to be something a little new that’s a little hard,” Dr. Marcuse says. Passively watching the latest episode of The Bachelor won’t cut it, because you need your brain to be active, take in new information, digest it, and then put it back out there.

While you might feel that learning a new skill feels daunting, that’s the point! According to Dr. Marcuse, you don’t have to be good at the activity to protect your brain: “I never took music lessons as a kid. I’m not really good at it. I never will be,” she says.

And despite not being the next Mozart, she says that playing the piano adds some color and levity to her days, in addition to protecting her brain. “I really need that in my life—I have a very stressful job,” she says. “It makes me feel that the world is sort of full of beauty and hope.”

How to make a new skill a regular part of your life—and why it’s great for your brain

You don’t have to do the activity every single day, or even for a very long time. “Just try to do it frequently, and don’t do it for very long,” Dr. Marcuse says. Sometimes all she has time for is a few bars or a couple of scales—do whatever works for you, as long as you stay somewhat in the swing of a routine.

A 2020 research study found that increasing the frequency with which you engage in your hobby (like doing crossword puzzles, playing board games—or an instrument—or reading the newspaper) decreases cognitive impairment and depressive symptoms in older populations. In other words, doing your hobby more often will be better for your overall well-being. Practice not only increases the speed at which you can perform a task, but it also improves your accuracy. Research theorizes that when you attempt an activity for the first time, specific brain regions are activated to help you complete the task; this creates new neural pathways as your brain stores all this new information in your memory as you continue practicing your skill over time.

Consistently training your brain will help boost your cognitive processes over time, because the myelin sheath—the layer of protein that coats your nerves—thickens. A plumper myelin sheath helps your brain transmit and process information more efficiently. (An added bonus of practicing: Even though the word routine sounds dull as all get-out, maintaining one can reduce your stress levels and make you happier in general.)

Whether you decide to take a cooking class or learn Spanish, try a new hobby that really speaks to you. “Everything you do to protect your brain is going to make your life better,” Dr. Marcuse says. Bearing that in mind: I think it’s time to pull out the ol’ cello that’s been collecting dust in my closet.

 

 

Original article here

 

07 Sep 2024
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Should we be eating three meals a day?

 

It’s likely you eat three meals a day – modern life is designed around this way of eating. We’re told breakfast is the most important meal of the day, we’re given lunch breaks at work, and then our social and family lives revolve around evening meals. But is this the healthiest way to eat?

Before considering how frequently we should eat, scientists urge us to consider when we shouldn’t.

Intermittent fasting, where you restrict your food intake to an eight-hour window, is becoming a huge area of research.

Giving our bodies at least 12 hours a day without food allows our digestive system to rest, says Emily Manoogian, clinical researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, and author of a 2019 paper entitled “When to eat”.

Rozalyn Anderson, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health, has studied the benefits of calorie restriction, which is associated with lower levels of inflammation in the body.

“Having a fasting period every day could reap some of these benefits,” she says. “It gets into the idea that fasting puts the body in a different state, where it’s more ready to repair and surveil for damage, and clear misfolded proteins.” Misfolded proteins are faulty versions of ordinary proteins, which are molecules that perform a huge range of important jobs in the body. Misfolded proteins have been associated with a number of diseases.

Intermittent fasting is more in line with how our bodies have evolved, Anderson argues. She says it gives the body a break so it’s able to store food and get energy to where it needs to be, and trigger the mechanism to release energy from our body stores.

Fasting could also improve our glycaemic response, which is when our blood glucose rises after eating, says Antonio Paoli, professor of exercise and sport sciences at the University of Padova in Italy. Having a smaller blood glucose increase allows you to store less fat in the body, he says.

“Our data suggests that having an early dinner and increasing the time of your fasting window increases some positive effects on body, like better glycaemic control,” Paoli says.

It’s better for all cells to have lower levels of sugar in them because of a process called glycation, Paoli adds. This is where glucose links to proteins and forms compounds called “advanced glycation end products”, which can cause inflammation in the body and increase the risk of developing diabetes and heart disease.

 

“Wouldn’t one meal a day leave us feeling hungry? Not necessarily.”

 

But if intermittent fasting is a healthy way to eat – how many meals does this leave room for?

Some experts argue it’s best to have one meal a day, including David Levitsky, professor at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology in New York, who does this himself.

“There’s a lot of data showing that, if I show you food or pictures of food, you’re likely to eat, and the more frequently food is in front of you, the more you’re going to eat that day,” he says.

This is because, before we had fridges and supermarkets, we ate when food was available.  Throughout history, we consumed one meal a day, including the Ancient Romans who ate one meal around midday, says food historian Seren Charrington-Hollins.

 

 

Wouldn’t one meal a day leave us feeling hungry? Not necessarily, Levitsky argues, because hunger is often a psychological sensation.

“When the clock says 12pm, we may get feelings to eat, or you might be conditioned to eat breakfast in the morning, but this is nonsense. Data shows that if you don’t eat breakfast, you’re going to eat fewer calories overall that day.

“Our physiology is built for feasting and fasting,” he says. However, Levitsky doesn’t recommend this approach for people with diabetes.

But Manoogan doesn’t recommend sticking to one meal a day, since this can increase the level of glucose in our blood when we’re not eating – known as fasting glucose. High levels of fasting glucose over a long period of time is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes.

Keeping blood glucose levels down requires eating more regularly than once a day, Manoogan says, as this prevents the body thinking it’s starving and releasing more glucose when you do eventually eat in response.

Instead, she says, two to three meals a day is best – with most of your calories consumed earlier in the day. This is because eating late at night is associated with cardio-metabolic disease, including diabetes and heart disease.

“If you eat most of your food earlier on, your body can use the energy you feed it throughout the day, rather than it being stored in your system as fat,” Manoogan says.

But eating too early in the morning should be avoided, too, she says, as this wouldn’t give you sufficient time to fast. Also, eating too soon after waking up works against our circadian rhythm – known as our body clock – which researchers say dictates how the body processes food differently throughout the day.Our bodies release melatonin overnight to help us sleep – but melatonin also pauses the creation of insulin, which stores glucose in the body. Because melatonin is released while you’re sleeping, the body uses it to make sure we don’t take in too much glucose while we’re sleeping and not eating, Manoogan says.

“If you take in calories when your melatonin is high, you get really high glucose levels. Consuming a lot of calories at night poses a significant challenge to the body because if insulin is supressed, your body can’t store glucose properly.”

 

 

And, as we know, high levels of glucose over long periods of time can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

This doesn’t mean we should skip breakfast altogether, but some evidence suggests we should wait an hour or two after waking up before we crack open the eggs. It’s also worth remembering that breakfast as we know and love it today is a relatively new concept.

“The Ancient Greeks were the first to introduce the concept of breakfast, they’d eat bread soaked in wine, then they had a frugal lunch, then a hearty evening meal,” says Charrington-Hollins.

Initially, breakfast was exclusive to aristocratic classes, says Charrington-Hollins. It first caught on in the 17th Century, when it became the luxury of those who could afford the food and the time for a leisurely meal in the morning.

“The concept today of breakfast being the norm [came about] during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century and its introduction of working hours,” says Charrington-Hollins. Such a routine lends itself to three meals a day. “The first meal would be something quite simple for the working classes – it might be street food from a vendor or bread.”

But after war, when availability of food diminished, the idea of eating a full breakfast wasn’t possible and a lot of people skipped it. “The idea of three meals a day went out the window,” says Charrington-Hollins. “In the 1950s breakfast becomes how we recognise it today: cereal and toast. Prior to that we were happy to eat a piece of bread with jam.”

So, the science seems to say the healthiest way to eat throughout the day is to have two or three meals, with a long fasting window overnight, to not eat too early or too late in the day, and to consume more calories earlier on in the day. Is this realistic?

Manoogan says it’s best to not specify the best times to eat, as this can be difficult for people with responsibilities and irregular time commitments, such as those working night shifts.

“Telling people to stop eating by 7pm isn’t helpful because people have different schedules. If you try to give your body regular fast nights, try to not eat too late or early and try to not have huge final meals, this can usually help. People can at least adopt parts of this,” she says.

 

 

“You could see a dramatic change just from a small delay in your first meal and advancing your last meal. Making this regular without changing anything else could have a big impact.”

But whatever changes you make, researchers agree that consistency is crucial.

“The body works in patterns,” says Anderson. “We respond to the anticipation of being fed. One thing intermittent fasting does is it imposes a pattern, and our biological systems do well with a pattern.” She says the body picks up on cues to anticipate our eating behaviours so it can best deal with the food when we eat it.

When it comes to how many meals we deem normal, Charrington-Hollins is seeing change on the horizon.

“Over the centuries, we’ve become conditioned to three meals a day, but this is being challenged now and people’s attitude to food is changing. We have more sedate lifestyles, we’re not doing the level of work we were doing in the 19th Century, so we need fewer calories.

“I think, long-term, we’ll be reducing back to a light meal then a main meal, depending on what happens work-wise. Our working hours will be the driving force.

“When we came off rations, we embraced three meals a day because there was suddenly an abundance of food. But time goes on – food is everywhere now.”

 

 

Original article here

04 Sep 2024
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What God, Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Have In Common

 

In my 20s, I had a friend who was brilliant, charming, Ivy-educated and rich, heir to a family fortune. I’ll call him Gallagher. He could do anything he wanted. He experimented, dabbling in neuroscience, law, philosophy and other fields. But he was so critical, so picky, that he never settled on a career. Nothing was good enough for him. He never found love for the same reason. He also disparaged his friends’ choices, so much so that he alienated us. He ended up bitter and alone. At least that’s my guess. I haven’t spoken to Gallagher in decades.

There is such a thing as being too picky, especially when it comes to things like work, love and nourishment (even the pickiest eater has to eat something). That’s the lesson I gleaned from Gallagher. But when it comes to answers to big mysteries, most of us aren’t picky enough. We settle on answers for bad reasons, for example, because our parents, priests or professors believe it. We think we need to believe something, but actually we don’t. We can, and should, decide that no answers are good enough. We should be agnostics.

Some people confuse agnosticism (not knowing) with apathy (not caring). Take Francis Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Institutes of Health. He is a devout Christian, who believes that Jesus performed miracles, died for our sins and rose from the dead. In his 2006 bestseller The Language of God, Collins calls agnosticism a “cop-out.” When I interviewed him, I told him I am an agnostic and objected to “cop-out.”

Collins apologized. “That was a put-down that should not apply to earnest agnostics who have considered the evidence and still don’t find an answer,” he said. “I was reacting to the agnosticism I see in the scientific community, which has not been arrived at by a careful examination of the evidence.” I have examined the evidence for Christianity, and I find it unconvincing. I’m not convinced by any scientific creation stories, either, such as those that depict our cosmos as a bubble in an oceanic “multiverse.”

People I admire fault me for being too skeptical. One is the late religious philosopher Huston Smith, who called me “convictionally impaired.” Another is megapundit Robert Wright, an old friend, with whom I’ve often argued about evolutionary psychology and Buddhism. Wright once asked me in exasperation, “Don’t you believe anything?” Actually, I believe lots of things, for example, that war is bad and should be abolished.

But when it comes to theories about ultimate reality, I’m with Voltaire. “Doubt is not a pleasant condition,” Voltaire said, “but certainty is an absurd one.” Doubt protects us from dogmatism, which can easily morph into fanaticism and what William James calls a “premature closing of our accounts with reality.” Below I defend agnosticism as a stance toward the existence of God, interpretations of quantum mechanics and theories of consciousness. When considering alleged answers to these three riddles, we should be as picky as my old friend Gallagher.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Why do we exist? The answer, according to the major monotheistic religions, including the Catholic faith in which I was raised, is that an all-powerful, supernatural entity created us. This deity loves us, as a human father loves his children, and wants us to behave in a certain way. If we’re good, He’ll reward us. If we’re bad, He’ll punish us. (I use the pronoun “He” because most scriptures describe God as male.)

My main objection to this explanation of reality is the problem of evil. A casual glance at human history, and at the world today, reveals enormous suffering and injustice. If God loves us and is omnipotent, why is life so horrific for so many people? A standard response to this question is that God gave us free will; we can choose to be bad as well as good.

The late, great physicist Steven Weinberg, an atheist, who died in July, slaps down the free will argument in his book Dreams of a Final Theory. Noting that Nazis killed many of his relatives in the Holocaust, Weinberg asks: Did millions of Jews have to die so the Nazis could exercise their free will? That doesn’t seem fair. And what about kids who get cancer? Are we supposed to think that cancer cells have free will?

On the other hand, life isn’t always hellish. We experience love, friendship, adventure and heartbreaking beauty. Could all this really come from random collisions of particles? Even Weinberg concedes that life sometimes seems “more beautiful than strictly necessary.” If the problem of evil prevents me from believing in a loving God, then the problem of beauty keeps me from being an atheist like Weinberg. Hence, agnosticism.

THE PROBLEM OF INFORMATION

Quantum mechanics is science’s most precise, powerful theory of reality. It has predicted countless experiments, spawned countless applications. The trouble is, physicists and philosophers disagree over what it means, that is, what it says about how the world works. Many physicists—most, probably—adhere to the Copenhagen interpretation, advanced by Danish physicist Niels Bohr. But that is a kind of anti-interpretation, which says physicists should not try to make sense of quantum mechanics; they should “shut up and calculate,” as physicist David Mermin once put it.

Philosopher Tim Maudlin deplores this situation. In his 2019 book Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory, he points out that several interpretations of quantum mechanics describe in detail how the world works. These include the GRW model proposed by Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber; the pilot-wave theory of David Bohm; and the many-worlds hypothesis of Hugh Everett. But here’s the irony: Maudlin is so scrupulous in pointing out the flaws of these interpretations that he reinforces my skepticism. They all seem hopelessly kludgy and preposterous.

Maudlin does not examine interpretations that recast quantum mechanics as a theory about information. For positive perspectives on information-based interpretations, check out Beyond Weird by journalist Philip Ball and The Ascent of Information by astrobiologist Caleb Scharf. But to my mind, information-based takes on quantum mechanics are even less plausible than the interpretations that Maudlin scrutinizes. The concept of information makes no sense without conscious beings to send, receive and act upon the information.

Introducing consciousness into physics undermines its claim to objectivity. Moreover, as far as we know, consciousness arises only in certain organisms that have existed for a brief period here on Earth. So how can quantum mechanics, if it’s a theory of information rather than matter and energy, apply to the entire cosmos since the big bang? Information-based theories of physics seem like a throwback to geocentrism, which assumed the universe revolves around us. Given the problems with all interpretations of quantum mechanics, agnosticism, again, strikes me as a sensible stance.

MIND-BODY PROBLEMS

The debate over consciousness is even more fractious than the debate over quantum mechanics. How does matter make a mind? A few decades ago, a consensus seemed to be emerging. Philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his cockily titled Consciousness Explained, asserted that consciousness clearly emerges from neural processes, such as electrochemical pulses in the brain. Francis Crick and Christof Koch proposed that consciousness is generated by networks of neurons oscillating in synchrony.

Gradually, this consensus collapsed, as empirical evidence for neural theories of consciousness failed to materialize. As I point out in my recent book Mind-Body Problems, there are now a dizzying variety of theories of consciousness. Christof Koch has thrown his weight behind integrated information theory, which holds that consciousness might be a property of all matter, not just brains. This theory suffers from the same problems as information-based theories of quantum mechanics. Theorists such as Roger Penrose, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, have conjectured that quantum effects underpin consciousness, but this theory is even more lacking in evidence than integrated information theory.

Researchers cannot even agree on what form a theory of consciousness should take. Should it be a philosophical treatise? A purely mathematical model? A gigantic algorithm, perhaps based on Bayesian computation? Should it borrow concepts from Buddhism, such as anatta, the doctrine of no self? All of the above? None of the above? Consensus seems farther away than ever. And that’s a good thing. We should be open-minded about our minds.

So, what’s the difference, if any, between me and Gallagher, my former friend? I like to think it’s a matter of style. Gallagher scorned the choices of others. He resembled one of those mean-spirited atheists who revile the faithful for their beliefs. I try not to be dogmatic in my disbelief, and to be sympathetic toward those who, like Francis Collins, have found answers that work for them. Also, I get a kick out of inventive theories of everything, such as John Wheeler’s “it from bit” and Freeman Dyson’s principle of maximum diversity, even if I can’t embrace them.

I’m definitely a skeptic. I doubt we’ll ever know whether God exists, what quantum mechanics means, how matter makes mind. These three puzzles, I suspect, are different aspects of a single, impenetrable mystery at the heart of things. But one of the pleasures of agnosticism—perhaps the greatest pleasure—is that I can keep looking for answers and hoping that a revelation awaits just over the horizon.

 

 

Original article here

02 Sep 2024
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The health benefits of seaweed – a bath full of bladderwrack might be just what the doctor ordered

 

Seaweed, the colourful macroalgae that grows in the ocean, is a food source for marine life and humans. Each type of seaweed has a unique set of nutrients and can boost vitamin and mineral intake if eaten regularly.

Seaweed is widely consumed in Asia, and a staple ingredient in many Japanese, Korean and Chinese dishes. For example, nori is well known as the seaweed used to wrap sushi rolls, while wakame or kelp are often found in comforting ramen noodle dishes. These seaweeds impart an instantly recognisable savoury taste – known as umami flavour – to food and can add a variety of vitamins and minerals to meals.

Seaweed types can be broadly classified according to their colour: red, green and brown. Around 145 species of seaweed are eaten around the world. Seaweed is valued for its antioxidant properties, which helps protect cells against free radical damage.

Many seaweeds contain phenolic and flavonoid compounds, which are important antioxidants, as well as omega-3 fatty acids, amino acids, fibre, vitamins A, C and E – and minerals such as copper, zinc and iodine.

The seaweeds with the greatest nutritional value include those often referred to as the “wracks”. Bladder, toothed and spiral wracks often have notably higher antioxidant contents than many other seaweeds. However, nutritional content varies depending on the type of seaweed, harvest location and the season in which it’s harvested.

As well as being nutritious, seaweed has potential as a source of valuable antimicrobial agents. Research from Queen’s University Belfast has shown that seaweed species can fight off the growth of harmful microorganisms in animals, some of which are becoming resistant to antibiotics.

While eating seaweed has an array of benefits, there are a few things to watch out for. Due to the high iodine content in many seaweed species, seaweed consumption could exacerbate thyroid conditions or interfere with thyroid medications.

Some reports also suggest that, depending on the habitat, seaweed species may accumulate heavy metals such as cadmium, which has been reported to cause liver and kidney toxicity, and mercury, a known neurotoxin.

It’s important, then, to check different countries’ maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) for heavy metal concentrations in seaweed products and only purchase those that have been tested and deemed safe for consumption.

Seaweed Bathing

But diet is not the only way to experience the benefits of seaweed.

In recent years, there has been an upsurge in seaweed bathing, which is believed to be beneficial to health. A bath full of bladderwrack might not seem very appealing – but this strap-like, olive coloured seaweed, found along the coasts of the North Sea, Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean, has been shown to have beneficial effects as a topical treatment for various skin issues from skin ageing to wound healing.

The tradition of seaweed bathing, which has been practised for hundreds of years, was originally recommended for arthritis sufferers to ease pain, stiffness and inflammation of joints. Nowadays, it is also recommended for athletes after a strenuous workout because seaweed’s high magnesium content is believed to be soothing for aching muscles.

Many companies that specialise in the harvesting of seaweed for bathing purposes aim to do so sustainably. This means that the seaweed is cut from the reef at low tide and is never pulled from the root to ensure regrowth. As demand increases, there is a growing awareness of the challenges around growing and harvesting methods, technical know how and environmental impact of expanding production.

The moisturising effects of seaweed are also prized by the beauty industry as today’s consumers place greater value on natural – and environmentally friendly – skincare ingredients.

Containing extracts of seaweeds such as toothed wrack and sea spaghetti, seaweed-based skincare lines claim anti-photoaging, hydrating and protective, nourishing and skin-plumping effects. But check the label: the closer to the top of the ingredient list, the greater the amount of seaweed in the product.

So, to enhance your health, seaweed can be easily incorporated into your lifestyle. Add to your diet, in moderation, by exploring seaweed recipes and by sprinkling dried, ground seaweed mixtures featuring dulse, wakame, sea spaghetti and wracks into smoothies, over salads and even on pizza.

It is also possible to buy hand harvested seaweed products for adding to the bath so that the benefits of submerging in marine algae can be realised from home – no matter how far from the sea we may live.

 

 

Original article here

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