New Hampshire Health News Digest

Health Correlator: Niacin turbocharges the growth hormone response to anaerobic exercise: A delayed effect : Niacin is also known as vitamin B3, or nicotinic acid. It is an essential vitamin whose deficiency leads to pellagra. In large doses of 1 to 3 g per day it has several effects on blood lipids, including an increase in HDL cholesterol and a marked decreased in fasting triglycerides. Niacin is also a powerful antioxidant. Among niacin’s other effects, when taken in large doses�of 1 to 3 g per day, is an acute elevation in growth hormone secretion. This is a delayed effect, frequently occurring 3 to 5 hours after taking niacin. This effect is independent of exercise. It is important to note that large doses of 1 to 3 g of niacin are completely unnatural, and cannot be achieved by eating foods rich in niacin. For example, one would have to eat a toxic amount of beef liver (e.g., 15 lbs) to get even close to 1 g of niacin. Beef liver is one of the richest natural sources of nia...

Lowering the Bar on the Low-Fat Diet | JAMA | JAMA Network : David S. Ludwig, MD, PhD 1 The recent revelation that the sugar industry attempted to manipulate science in the 1960s1 has once again focused attention on the quality of the scientific evidence in the field of nutrition and how best to prevent diet-related chronic disease.  Beginning in the 1970s, the US government and major professional nutrition organizations recommended that individuals in the United States eat a low-fat/high-carbohydrate diet, launching arguably the largest public health experiment in history. Throughout the ensuing 40 years, the prevalence of obesity and diabetes increased several-fold, even as the proportion of fat in the US diet decreased by 25%. Recognizing new evidence that consumption of processed carbohydrates—white bread, white rice, chips, crackers, cookies, and sugary drinks—but not total fat has contributed importantly to these epidemics, the 2015 USDA Dietary Guidelines f...

Activity Trackers May Undermine Weight Loss Efforts. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/well/activity-trackers-may-undermine-weight-loss-efforts.html

We’re All Guinea Pigs in a Failed Decades-Long Diet Experiment | VICE | United States : Overseas, national health authorities followed America's lead on fat. The results have been similarly grim. Earlier this year, a UK nonprofit called the National Obesity Forum (NOF) published a blistering condemnation of its government's diet and nutrition policies. In its report, the NOF argues that advice to cut back on fat and cholesterol is "the root cause" of Britain's skyrocketing rates of obesity and diabetes. Speaking shortly after the report's publication, Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who consulted on the NOF report, said, "The change in dietary advice to promote low-fat foods is perhaps the biggest mistake in modern medical history. Along with ripping its government's "failed policies," the NOF report called for a "complete overhaul of dietary advice and public health messaging." In a recent editorial appearing in the B...

50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat : The Two-Way : NPR : In the 1960s, the sugar industry funded research that downplayed the risks of sugar and highlighted the hazards of fat, according to a newly published article in JAMA Internal Medicine. The article draws on internal documents to show that an industry group called the Sugar Research Foundation wanted to "refute" concerns about sugar's possible role in heart disease. The SRF then sponsored research by Harvard scientists that did just that. The result was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, with no disclosure of the sugar industry funding. The sugar-funded project in question was a literature review, examining a variety of studies and experiments. It suggested there were major problems with all the studies that implicated sugar, and concluded that cutting fat out of American diets was the best way to address coronary heart disease.  The authors of th...

Aerobic exercise training increases brain volume in aging humans. - PubMed - NCBI : Significant increases in brain volume, in both gray and white matter regions, were found as a function of fitness training for the older adults who participated in the aerobic fitness training but not for the older adults who participated in the stretching and toning (nonaerobic) control group. As predicted, no significant changes in either gray or white matter volume were detected for our younger participants. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that cardiovascular fitness is associated with the sparing of brain tissue in aging humans. Furthermore, these results suggest a strong biological basis for the role of aerobic fitness in maintaining and enhancing central nervous system health and cognitive functioning in older adults.

Benefits of regular aerobic exercise for executive functioning in healthy populations. - PubMed - NCBI : Research suggests that regular aerobic exercise has the potential to improve executive functioning, even in healthy populations. The purpose of this review is to elucidate which components of executive functioning benefit from such exercise in healthy populations. In light of the developmental time course of executive functions, we consider separately children, young adults, and older adults. Data to date from studies of aging provide strong evidence of exercise-linked benefits related to task switching, selective attention, inhibition of prepotent responses, and working memory capacity; furthermore, cross-sectional fitness data suggest that working memory updating could potentially benefit as well. In young adults, working memory updating is the main executive function shown to benefit from regular exercise, but cross-sectional data further suggest that task-switching and post erro...

Impact of aerobic exercise training on cognitive functions and affect associated to the COMT polymorphism in young adults : Physical fitness can serve as a means to enhance cognitive functioning by modulating particular aspects of brain functioning. However, mechanisms underlying this modulating effect remain widely unresolved. To examine the impact and to clarify the mechanisms of physical fitness training in a young and healthy population, it was investigated whether an increase in fitness would result in improvements in executive control processes and positive and negative affect. Moreover, genotype of the Val158Met polymorphism in catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) as an index of relative central dopamine bioavailability was determined to elucidate dopamine tuning efficiency and its association with performance in the applied cognitive tasks. Seventy-five individuals participated and underwent an incremental fitness test to assess physical fitness. An exercising group subsequently...

The sugar conspiracy | Ian Leslie | Society | The Guardian : Although Keys had shown a correlation between heart disease and saturated fat, he had not excluded the possibility that heart disease was being caused by something else. Years later, the Seven Countries study’s lead Italian researcher, Alessandro Menotti, went back to the data, and found that the food that correlated most closely with deaths from heart disease was not saturated fat, but sugar.

The Science of Smart: A Surprising Way To Improve Executive Function - Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers — Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers | PBS :  There is one surprising but well-supported way to improve executive function in both children and adults, however: aerobic exercise. A just-published review of the relevant research, appearing in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, concludes that “ample evidence indicates that regular engagement in aerobic exercise can provide a simple means for healthy people to optimize a range of executive functions.”

NY Times. How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show. The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrit ion and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry. “They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA paper. The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of rese...

 Reversing impaired kidney function in diabetics may be possible with the ketogenic diet. The researchers at Mount Sinai Medical School found that the ketogenic diet, a style of eating based on high-fat and low-carbohydrate intake, may be beneficial in reversing kidney function. The researchers studied mice that were genetically predisposed to have type 1 or type 2 diabetes. The mice went on to develop diabetic kidney damage. Half of the mice were put on the ketogenic diet and the other half served as controls. After eight weeks, molecular indicators of kidney damage were reversed in the mice on the ketogenic diet, along with kidney pathology in mice with type 2 diabetes. http://www.belmarrahealth.com/reversing-impaired-kidney-function-diabetics-may-possible-ketogenic-diet/

 Reversing impaired kidney function in diabetics may be possible with the ketogenic diet. The researchers at Mount Sinai Medical School found that the ketogenic diet, a style of eating based on high-fat and low-carbohydrate intake, may be beneficial in reversing kidney function. The researchers studied mice that were genetically predisposed to have type 1 or type 2 diabetes. The mice went on to develop diabetic kidney damage. Half of the mice were put on the ketogenic diet and the other half served as controls. After eight weeks, molecular indicators of kidney damage were reversed in the mice on the ketogenic diet, along with kidney pathology in mice with type 2 diabetes. http://www.belmarrahealth.com/reversing-impaired-kidney-function-diabetics-may-possible-ketogenic-diet/

 Reversing impaired kidney function in diabetics may be possible with the ketogenic diet. The researchers at Mount Sinai Medical School found that the ketogenic diet, a style of eating based on high-fat and low-carbohydrate intake, may be beneficial in reversing kidney function. The researchers studied mice that were genetically predisposed to have type 1 or type 2 diabetes. The mice went on to develop diabetic kidney damage. Half of the mice were put on the ketogenic diet and the other half served as controls. After eight weeks, molecular indicators of kidney damage were reversed in the mice on the ketogenic diet, along with kidney pathology in mice with type 2 diabetes. http://www.belmarrahealth.com/reversing-impaired-kidney-function-diabetics-may-possible-ketogenic-diet/