New Hampshire Health News Digest

Early Time-Restricted Feeding Improves Insulin Sensitivity, Blood Pressure, and Oxidative Stress Even without Weight Loss in Men with Prediabetes Elizabeth F Sutton 1, Robbie Beyl 1, Kate S Early 2, William T Cefalu 3, Eric Ravussin 1, Courtney M Peterson 4 Intermittent fasting (IF) improves cardiometabolic health; however, it is unknown whether these effects are due solely to weight loss. We conducted the first supervised controlled feeding trial to test whether IF has benefits independent of weight loss by feeding participants enough food to maintain their weight. Our proof-of-concept study also constitutes the first trial of early time-restricted feeding (eTRF), a form of IF that involves eating early in the day to be in alignment with circadian rhythms in metabolism. Men with prediabetes were randomized to eTRF (6-hr feeding period, with dinner before 3 p.m.) or a control schedule (12-hr feeding period) for 5 weeks and later crossed over to the other schedule. eTRF improved insul...

Substantiating EBV’s causal role in MS has been fraught with challenges, partly because EBV infections are so common. About 95% of adults get infected with the virus, yet only a tiny fraction of people ever develops MS. Moreover, the onset of MS symptoms occurs, on average, a decade after EBV infection, and some studies have found that MS develops 30 years after the EBV caused mononucleosis, says Kassandra Munger, Sc.D., a senior research scientist at Harvard public health school and one of the study’s two senior co-authors. “We can consider EBV necessary to developing MS, but there need to be other mitigating factors, such as a genetic predisposition,” says Munger says. Cigarette smoking, vitamin D deficiency and obesity, particularly early in life, could play a role in whether EBV infection leads to MS. https://www.managedhealthcareexecutive.com/view/harvard-researchers-identify-epstein-barr-virus-as-a-cause-of-ms

A 113-g serving of lean beef increased muscle protein synthesis by approximately 50% in both young and older volunteers. Despite a threefold increase in protein and energy content, there was no further increase in protein synthesis after ingestion of 340 g lean beef in either age group. Ingestion of more than 30 g protein in a single meal does not further enhance the stimulation of muscle protein synthesis in young and elderly. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19699838/

Other labs around the world have tried to figure out if brown fat matters in other ways. In rodent studies, activating brown fat with cold temperatures has been found to regulate fatty acid and glucose levels. That led some researchers to suspect that the tissue can help protect against dysfunctional glucose processing in diabetes and fatty acid processing in obesity. So far, some studies in adult people have linked brown fat’s presence to leanness and normal blood sugar. (In 2013, WIRED covered an independent researcher’s quest to harness brown adipose for weight loss.) But it’s not as simple a proposition as braving a little cold, tacking on some brown fat, and then losing weight. The story is a bit more complicated. After the brown fat discoveries in 2009, Joris Hoeks, a diabetes researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, was curious about its role in controlling blood sugar. His team recruited people with type 2 diabetes for a cold acclimation study. An important ha...

Higher potassium intake (3g/day) decreased risk of heart disease by 25%, and higher magnesium intake (320 mg/day) decreased risk by 34%. Decreasing sodium had no effect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0091743575900377

One of the only silver linings of the pandemic has been that young people are less affected by COVID-19 than the elderly. In fact, the most vital indicator of negative COVID-19 outcomes is age: Unlike the Spanish flu, which ravaged armies that were overwhelmingly comprised of otherwise healthy young people during World War I, COVID-19's death toll is dramatically skewed toward those who have already lived many years. (For context, the average age of death from Spanish flu was 28.) That said, about 600 Americans under the age of 18 have died of COVID-19 during the pandemic. A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took a closer look at young people who were hospitalized for COVID-19 in July and August, while the delta variant wave took hold, and largely found that healthy young people continue to mostly evade the worst of COVID-19. The study found that most young people who suffer severe COVID-19 outcomes had underlying health conditions. The most comm...