reNourishment

Until about 2006, almost all studies on salt and health outcomes relied on the well-known fact that blood pressure can drop slightly when people eat less salt. From that, and from other studies linking blood pressure to risks of heart attacks and strokes, researchers created models showing how many lives could be saved if people ate less salt.

The United States dietary guidelines, based on the 2005 Institute of Medicine report, recommend that the general population aim for sodium levels of 1,500 to 2,300 milligrams a day because those levels will not raise blood pressure. The average sodium consumption in the United States, and around the world, is about 3,400 milligrams a day, according to the Institute of Medicine — an amount that has not changed in decades.

But more recently, researchers began looking at the actual consequences of various levels of salt consumption, as found in rates of heart attacks, strokes and death, not just blood pressure readings. Some of what they found was troubling.

One 2008 study the committee examined, for example, randomly assigned 232 Italian patients with aggressively treated moderate to severe congestive heart failure to consume either 2,760 or 1,840 milligrams of sodium a day, but otherwise to consume the same diet. Those consuming the lower level of sodium had more than three times the number of hospital readmissions — 30 as compared with 9 in the higher-salt group — and more than twice as many deaths — 15 as compared with 6 in the higher-salt group.

Another study, published in 2011, followed 28,800 subjects with high blood pressure ages 55 and older for 4.7 years and analyzed their sodium consumption by urinalysis. The researchers reported that the risks of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and death from heart disease increased significantly for those consuming more than 7,000 milligrams of sodium a day and for those consuming fewer than 3,000 milligrams of sodium a day.

There are physiological consequences of consuming little sodium, said Dr. Michael H. Alderman, a dietary sodium expert at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who was not a member of the committee. As sodium levels plunge, triglyceride levels increase, insulin resistance increases, and the activity of the sympathetic nervous system increases. Each of these factors can increase the risk of heart disease.

“Those are all bad things,” Dr. Alderman said. “A health effect can’t be predicted by looking at one physiological consequence. There has to be a net effect.”

Medical and public health experts responded to the new assessment of the evidence with elation or concern, depending on where they stand in the salt debates.

“What they have done is earth-shattering,” Dr. Alderman said. “They have changed the paradigm of this issue. Until now it was all about blood pressure. Now they say it is more complicated.” The report, he predicted, “will have a big impact.”

Many studies rely on people's recollection of what they ate. But in this study, funded mainly by the Spanish government, the researchers actually checked people's consumption of olive oil and nuts with lab tests.

The researchers didn't set any limits on calories or give targets for exercise, but the results were still astounding.

The study was stopped early (after a median follow-up of 4.8 years) because the benefits from the Mediterranean diet were readily apparent. Overall, the people consuming the diets rich in olive oil (at least 1/4 cup per day!) or nuts had about a 30 percent lower risk of having a heart attack, stroke or dying from a cardiovascular cause when compared to those on a low-fat diet.

They ”de-construct” (instead of demolish) houses and other buildings, and sell the parts at great prices to people like you and me. According to their Web site, “TRP is able to salvage up to 80 percent of the materials and channel them back into the marketplace through donations and sales at its network of retail outlets.” Not only does this keep the materials out of the landfills, but it gives each of us an opportunity to use materials of quality and character that you simply don’t find at the typical home improvement store. Often these material are hand-crafted and would be out of the budget for a typical homeowner, like that massive NCC-1701 range hood.

“People automatically think low doses do less than high doses,” said Cheryl Watson, a University of Texas biochemistry professor and lead author of the study published in Environmental Health Perspectives. “But both natural hormones and unnatural ones like [BPS] can have effects at surprisingly low doses.”

Laura Vandenberg, a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts University who studies BPA, said one limitation of the research was that it used rat cells, but she was quick to point out the method is “extremely informative about predictions for a whole animal.”

The study “is a great first research step on BPS and, in my opinion, should be sufficient to say this is an estrogen and we don’t want it in our bodies,” Vandenberg said.

As its name would suggest, BPS has a similar structure to BPA, which has been used since the 1950s for a variety of purposes, including the manufacture of polycarbonate plastics.

"It's gratifying to finally see solid, chemical evidence that the sieves were used for cheese-making, said Oliver Craig, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of York in England. But to him, it also presents a bit of a mystery.

DNA studies show that genetic mutations giving adults the ability to tolerate lactose swept through the people of Europe during the period from which the sieves date. The rapid spread means the mutation must have offered a big advantage to those who carried it."

Doesn't seem like a big mystery unless you are stuck in a modern pasteurization paradigm. Raw milk contains the enzymes necessary for lactose digestion, but pasteurization kills those enzymes. (Hence the proliferation of "lactose intolerance" today—most of the time it's just "pasteruization intolerance.") Since  they would have used raw milk, lactose intolerance would not have been an issue. And knowing what we do about epigenetics, couldn't that have been a factor? 

Retired NFL players have a higher-than-average risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to a 2012study of 3,400 retired players by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  

On the whole, the players were more depressed and showed more cognitive loss, such as a loss of short-term memory, than other men of comparable age, education and stature, researchers found.

"We are looking at the individual and seeing what they need to be successful. But that cannot replace a committed teacher who is connected with their students."

This teaching style has been fully embraced by Glyn Davies, a Grade 6 and 7 teacher at Anderson elementary. Well-known for turning his classroom into the dark reaches of space complete with stars and planets, he said the way he and his colleagues have approached teaching has changed dramatically over his 16-year career.

Observations from populations around the world where longevity is common include moderate consumption of mostly plant-based diets, meat and dairy from grass-fed animals, a weekly day of rest, a sense of purpose and a strong sense of community. Definitely worth watching.

Hundreds of bacterial species call each of us "home." In sheer numbers, these microbes and their genes dwarf us. It turns out that we are only 10 percent human: for every human cell that is intrinsic to our body, there are about 10 resident microbes — including commensals (generally harmless freeloaders) and mutualists (favor traders) and, in only a tiny number of cases, pathogens. To the extent that we are bearers of genetic information, more than 99 percent of it is microbial. And it appears increasingly likely that this “second genome,” as it is sometimes called, exerts an influence on our health as great and possibly even greater than the genes we inherit from our parents. But while your inherited genes are more or less fixed, it may be possible to reshape, even cultivate, your second genome.

Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford, suggests that we would do well to begin regarding the human body as “an elaborate vessel optimized for the growth and spread of our microbial inhabitants.” This humbling new way of thinking about the self has large implications for human and microbial health, which turn out to be inextricably linked. Disorders in our internal ecosystem — a loss of diversity, say, or a proliferation of the “wrong” kind of microbes — may predispose us to obesity and a whole range of chronic diseases, as well as some infections.

“Fecal transplants,” which involve installing a healthy person’s microbiota into a sick person’s gut, have been shown to effectively treat anantibiotic-resistant intestinal pathogen named C. difficile, which kills 14,000 Americans each year. (Researchers use the word “microbiota” to refer to all the microbes in a community and “microbiome” to refer to their collective genes.) We’ve known for a few years that obese mice transplanted with the intestinal community of lean mice lose weight and vice versa. (We don’t know why.) A similar experiment was performed recently on humans by researchers in the Netherlands: when the contents of a lean donor’s microbiota were transferred to the guts of male patients with metabolic syndrome, the researchers found striking improvements in the recipients’ sensitivity to insulin, an important marker for metabolic health. Somehow, the gut microbes were influencing the patients’ metabolisms.

Our resident microbes also appear to play a critical role in training and modulating our immune system, helping it to accurately distinguish between friend and foe and not go nuts on, well, nuts and all sorts of other potential allergens. Some researchers believe that the alarming increase in autoimmune diseases in the West may owe to a disruption in the ancient relationship between our bodies and their “old friends” — the microbial symbionts found within.

These claims sound extravagant, and in fact many microbiome researchers are careful not to make the mistake that scientists working on the human genome did a decade or so ago, when they promised they were on the trail of cures to many diseases. We’re still waiting. Yet whether any cures emerge from the exploration of the second genome, the implications of what has already been learned — for our sense of self, for our definition of health and for our attitude toward bacteria in general — are difficult to overstate. Human health should now “be thought of as a collective property of the human-associated microbiota,” as one group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review articleon microbial ecology — that is, as a function of the community, not the individual.

Such a paradigm shift comes not a moment too soon, because as a civilization, we’ve just spent the better part of a century doing our unwitting best to wreck the human-associated microbiota with a multifronted war on bacteria and a diet notably detrimental to its well-being. Researchers now speak of an impoverished “Westernized microbiome” and ask whether the time has come to embark on a project of “restoration ecology” — not in the rain forest or on the prairie but right here at home, in the human gut.

Recycling used materials can take a more traditional aspect, for economic reasons for instance. When she returned to Switzerland after working for ten years in Africa, architect Barbara Buser from Basel architectural firm In Situ, rebelled against the huge amounts of perfectly good construction materials thatwere being wasted.

“It’s possible to build entire houses using recycled materials, their used aspect even adds charm to the structure.” Buser knows that in Switzerland this is still a niche market, tied to economic aspects more than innovation.

Only a few architects use this second-hand exchange or use recyclable objects. This is not because of legislation, because the same fire safety and security rules apply to new and used material, explains Thomas Muller from the Swiss Association of Engineers and Architects. On the contrary, recycling is encouraged in Switzerland through specific construction standards.

According to Muller, the reluctance of architects to work with reclaimed objects is the main reason why they are not used more widely. For architects, recycled materials causes artistic limitations, especially in the case of visible elements. And even though clients want to be alternative and innovative, are often hesitant of taking the actual step of building their homes with old materials.

        Traditional fermentation of raw milk into cheese, creme fraiche, yogurt, lassi and other dairy products is a form of natural preservation with many health benefits. The identities of the micro-organisms that generate medicinal molecules in raw milk dairy products are often known. Lactic acid bacteria are examples of important fermenters. They enrich milk with vitamins and also make small proteins called bacteriocins—antibiotics that work by perforating bacterial cell membranes. One bacteriocin, lacticin 3147, destroys the diarrhea-inducing germ Clostridium difficile. Other important fermenters include strains of Lactobacillus, Propionibacterium, Bifidobacterium, and Enterococcus. These fermenters serve double duty synthesizing conjugated linoleic acid, an anti-clotting and anti-cancer agent. (Curiously, aged cheeses contain less of this acid than cheeses with a short ripening period.)

           Moreover, bacteria that could have a hand in improved fermentation are being revealed all the time. One such strain is Lactobacillus helveticus BGRA43 which breaks apart key proteins as it ferments milk such that it imbues the milk with anti-microbial, anti-hypertensive, and immunomodulatory properties.

           But in most cases, the enrichment of health-promoting substances was an unintended, and until recently, an unnoticed, side effect of making tasty foodstuffs that last. It isn’t always clear whether the chemicals involved survive digestion in the human gut and go on to do good things around the body. This point needs examining before fermentation science can be used to design healthier dairy products in the future.

"This is so much more than green electricity production," Norrbom said. "You help Wisconsin food processors become more competitive and you use their waste to create electricity. And then the waste heat off those engines, you're able to return to a local plant that they can use for their process heat."

In the past, scientists believed that emotional intelligence and general intelligence were distinct, and books and movies are rife with depictions of intellectually brilliant but socially clueless nerds.

But Barbey and his colleagues wondered whether emotional intelligence and IQ were more tightly coupled than previously thought. To find out, the team used emotional intelligence, and intelligence tests drawn from 152 Vietnam veterans.

Barbey's team found that as IQ test scores went up so did measures of social abilities.

In his glass-topped office building overlooking the Maria Magdalena church in Stockholm, Goran Stiernstedt, a doctor turned public health official, has spent many difficult hours going over what happened in his country during the swine flu pandemic, wondering if things should have been different.

"The big question is was it worth it? And retrospectively I have to say it was not," he told Reuters in an interview.

While estimates vary, Stiernstedt says Sweden's mass vaccination saved between 30 and 60 people from swine flu death. Yet since the pandemic ended, more than 200 cases of narcolepsy have been reported in Sweden.

With hindsight, this risk-benefit balance is unacceptable. "This is a medical tragedy," he said. "Hundreds of young people have had their lives almost destroyed."

These gut bacteria cause altered blood levels of the sex hormone testosterone as well as the amounts and types  of certain fatty chemicals in male and female mouse blood. In other words, they can truly affect the biochemistry of the body in ways that depend on the animal’s sex. 

To qualify to start a cooking business from home, an individual or small business owner must run a “cottage food operation,” meaning they can retain only one non-family or household employee and generate no more than $35,000 in gross annual revenue. This does not allow for foods related to meat or dairy products, but allows for items like baked goods and jams. Cooks need a registration number to conduct direct and indirect sales from home, and their kitchen will need to meet health and safety regulations.

His journey began in 2009, when, as a surfer, teacher, musician and self-described “spiritual seeker,” he returned home after traveling for four months in Central America and moved back in with his mother in West L.A. Looking through her kitchen window, he had an epiphany.

“I wanted to become more self-sufficient and know where my food comes from,” he recalls. He wanted to grow his own food free of pesticides and other chemicals. He wanted to become a farmer.