I am not sure if the health care system will ever realize that health, or balance is just that—a deep understanding that all things are linked, including ourselves, with everything around us. Integrative thinking does not come naturally to people, especially to the overly educated in one field of endeavor. As an inveterate devotee of Consilience, I am glad to see articles that support a balanced approach. Hugo Rodier, MD
Lifestyle habits that protect the heart can also protect against cancer.
“HealthDay (3/16, Norton) reports researchers found “the same lifestyle habits that protect the heart can also curb the risk of a range of cancers.” In the study, which included more than 20,000 adults in the U.S., “people with risk factors for heart disease also faced increased odds of developing cancer over the next 15 years.” Meanwhile, “people who followed a heart-healthy lifestyle cut their risk of a cancer diagnosis.” The findings were published in JACC: CardioOncology.”
Comment: common sense is not so common, is it? Do we still need studies to prove that good nutrition, a clean environment, and loving relationships decrease the risk of ALL DISEASES? See below.
Regular consumption of meat may be linked to higher risk of ischemic heart disease, diabetes.
“Cardiovascular Business (3/18, Walter) reports, “Regularly eating unprocessed red meat and processed meat may be associated with a higher risk of ischemic heart disease, diabetes and other significant health conditions, according to a study of 470,000 adults.” (J. BMC Medicine) Participant’s “diets were evaluated and the researchers tracked the regularity of 25 common health conditions.”
Comment: and a higher risk of cancer and every other disease. I know it is hard to give up meat, but it is unquestionably the best diet. Two caveats. One, beware of compensating with refined sugar. Two, supplement B vitamins. If you cannot give up meat, at least eat lean meats only, mostly fish.
Eating five servings of fruits and vegetables each day can lower risk of early death from all causes.
“HealthDay (3/1, Preidt) reports researchers “analyzed data from more than 2 million people in” many countries, including the U.S., and concluded that five servings of fruits and vegetables each day can lower the risk of early death. The researchers found that “compared to people who had two servings of fruits and vegetables a day, those who had five servings a day had a: 13% lower risk of death from all causes; a 12% lower risk of death from heart disease and stroke; a 10% lower risk of death from cancer, and a 35% lower risk of death from respiratory disease, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.” The findings were published in Circulation.”
Comment: the best is 13 servings a day, something you cannot do when you fill up with starch, refined sugar, and meat.
Psychopathic tendencies linked to patterns of brain connectivity.
by Eric W. Dolan. March 11, 2021 in Cognitive Science, Mental Health
“Neurobiological mechanisms underly certain psychopathic tendencies. The study, published in NeuroImage: Clinical, indicates that psychopathic personality traits such as callousness are associated with differences in connectivity between two important brain networks. “We are broadly interested in understanding psychopathy, a harmful set of personality traits that is associated with severe aggression, criminality, and recidivism,” said study author Hailey Dotterer, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Michigan. “We’ve been curious about what motivates people to act the way they do, particularly when individuals act in negative ways — in harming others and ignoring societal norms and laws, which is essentially the core of psychopathy.”
“It is important to investigate the neural underpinnings of psychopathy because previous work suggests that the ways that disparate brain regions communicate with each other is related to emotion and attention, which are impaired in psychopathy,” Dotterer said. Dotterer and her colleagues examined resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 123 men who had completed an assessment of psychopathic personality traits. These traits were measured on a continuum and in the community, meaning they measured the relative amount of these traits in young adults, not in those in prisons or very high on psychopathy. That is, we all have relatively more or less of each of these traits and these can be mapped to brain functioning.
Comment: a severe lack of integrative thinking, an inability to think with both sides of the brain is associated with psychopathic tendencies. A glaring example is our country’s politics: not finding anything good in the political party we oppose is not logical.
Gut bacteria influence how long we live.
Alexandra Thompson, Journal Nature Metabolism, 2 March 2021
“The micro-organisms in the gastrointestinal tract do far more than just digest food, with studies implying they help control a person’s weight, regulate mood and even communicate with the immune system. With the microbiome’s role in ageing being less clear, scientists from the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle analyzed 9,000 people, aged 18 to 101. They observed a “microbial drift towards a unique compositional state” in healthy 80-year-olds, compared to their less-fit counterparts. These healthy older adults also had a “depletion” of certain core bacterial species, defined as those which are common to all humans. Those who retained these specific gut bugs or had a “low gut microbiome uniqueness measure” were less likely to survive over the next four years. A human’s gut bacteria is known to change with age. This is rapid in early life, up to three years old, “followed by a long period of relative stability, ending with gradual changes associated with advanced age.”
Comment: your gut bacteria does best with fruits and vegetables; they have more fiber and antioxidants, most of which are also classed as “prebiotics,” or micronutrients that sustain probiotics.
The gut microbiome modulates the protective association between a Mediterranean diet and cardiometabolic disease.
J. Nature Medicine 2021 February 11
“To address how the microbiome might modify the interaction between diet and cardiometabolic health, we analyzed longitudinal microbiome data from 307 male participants in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, together with long-term dietary information and measurements of biomarkers of glucose homeostasis, lipid metabolism and inflammation from blood samples. Here, we demonstrate that a healthy Mediterranean-style dietary pattern is associated with specific functional and taxonomic components of the gut microbiome, and that its protective associations with cardiometabolic health vary depending on microbial composition. In particular, the protective association between adherence to the Mediterranean diet and cardiometabolic disease risk was significantly stronger among participants with decreased abundance of Prevotella copri. Our findings advance the concept of precision nutrition and have the potential to inform more effective and precise dietary approaches for the prevention of cardiometabolic disease mediated through alterations in the gut microbiome.”
Comment: the way to a man’s (and woman’s) heart is through the stomach.
Modulating gut microbiota to treat cancer.
J. Science 2021;371:573-574.
“In the fourth century, a Chinese practitioner reportedly used the stool of healthy subjects to treat patients with diarrhea (1). In 1958, fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) was reported as a treatment for Clostridium difficile infection that was resistant to antibiotics (2). FMT became an option for routine treatment for such infections in 2013, after a clinical trial demonstrated a higher response rate in C. difficile–infected patients treated with FMT (81%) compared to those treated with an antibiotic (31%) (3). Since then, interest in FMT has evolved in diverse clinical settings. In cancer, studies on hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, arguably the first immunotherapy of the modern cancer era, have suggested a role for the gut microbiota in clinical outcomes (4). On pages 602 and 595 of this issue, Baruch et al. (5) and Davar et al. (6), respectively, report that manipulating the gut microbiota may allow cancer patients to overcome resistance to immunotherapy.”
Comment: surely you see how all the articles listed are linked.
