New Hampshire Health News Digest

Exercise increased the growth of new muscle cells and blood vessels in the weakened muscles of people with heart failure, according to two new studies.  "If you have heart failure, exercise training can improve your health status, increase your ability to exercise and reverse patterns of muscle damage that are common in heart failure," said Axel Linke, M.D., assistant professor of medicine at the University of Leipzig, Germany, and a co-author on both studies. In chronic heart failure, the heart can't pump enough blood to other organs in the body. "In addition to getting out of condition because it becomes difficult to exercise, people with heart failure have cellular-level changes in their muscles that make them weaker, more prone to fatigue, and in later stages results in actual muscle shrinkage," he said. In one study (abstract 3797), researchers investigated whether exercise training could activate progenitor cells, a pool of immature cells in skele...

A Single Session Of Exercise Alters 9,815 Molecules In Our Blood - HotWnews.com Hot World News Daily News : The types of molecules also ranged widely, with some involved in fueling and metabolism, others in immune response, tissue repair or appetite. And within those categories, molecular levels coursed and changed during the hour. Molecules likely to increase inflammation surged early, then dropped, for instance, replaced by others likely to help reduce inflammation. “It was like a symphony,” says Michael Snyder, the chair of the genetics department at Stanford University and senior author of the study. “First you have the brass section coming in, then the strings, then all the sections joining in.” Interestingly, though, different people’s blood followed different orchestrations. Those who showed signs of insulin resistance, a driver of diabetes, for instance, tended to show smaller increases in some of the molecules related to healthy blood sugar control and higher increases i...

A Low-Carb Strategy for Fighting the Pandemic’s Toll — The Nutrition Coalition : Other studies have found that dietary changes can rapidly and substantially improve cardiovascular risk factors, including conditions like hypertension that are major risk factors for worsened Covid-19 outcomes. A 2011 study in the journal Obesity on 300 clinic patients eating a very low-carbohydrate diet saw blood pressure quickly drop and remain low for years. And a 2014 trial on 148 subjects, funded by the National Institutes of Health, found a low-carb diet to be “more effective for weight loss and cardiovascular risk factor reduction” than a low-fat control diet at the end of the 1-year experiment.  Since 2018, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and its European counterpart have considered a low-carb diet as one standard of care for people with Type 2 diabetes, in part because it lowers blood pressure and improves HDL, the “good” cholesterol. A 2019 ADA report stated that a low-carbohydra...

In short, low carb gives you more energy to use. High carb stores that energy as fat instead.  How might a high-carb diet drive fat storage, increase hunger and slow metabolism? Our new study assessed calories in the blood available to fuel metabolism after eating. Following an initial surge, calories crashed on a high-carb diet. Intervention After achieving 10% to 14% weight loss on a run-in diet, participants were randomized to weight-loss-maintenance test diets varying in carbohydrate content (high-carbohydrate, 60% of total energy, n = 11; moderate-carbohydrate, 40%, n = 8; low-carbohydrate, 20%, n = 10) and controlled for protein (20%). During 24-hour metabolic ward admissions between 10 and 15 weeks on the test diets, metabolic fuels and hormones were measured. Main Outcome Measure Energy availability (EA) based on energy content of blood glucose, beta-hydroxybutyrate, and free fatty acids, in the late postprandial period (180 to 300 minutes). Insulin at 30 minutes into...

Death of the calorie | 1843 illions of dieters give up when their calorie-counting is unsuccessful. Camacho was more stubborn than most. He took photos of his meals to record his intake more accurately, and would log into his calorie spreadsheets from his phone. He thought about every morsel he ate. And he bought a proliferation of gadgets to track his calorie output. But he still didn’t lose much weight. One problem was that his sums were based on the idea that calorie counts are accurate. Food producers give impressively specific readings: a slice of Camacho’s favourite Domino’s double pepperoni pizza is supposedly 248 calories (not 247 nor 249). Yet the number of calories listed on food packets and menus are routinely wrong. Susan Roberts, a nutritionist at Tufts University in Boston, has found that labels on American packaged foods miss their true calorie counts by an average of 8%. American government regulations allow such labels to understate calories by up to 20% (to ensure t...

Egg consumption and cardiovascular disease | The BMJ “In over 215 000 people free of major chronic disease at baseline, researchers found no association between egg intake and risk of cardiovascular disease”

Effect of a ketogenic diet on hepatic steatosis and hepatic mitochondrial metabolism in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease : SIGNIFICANCE Ketogenic diet is an effective treatment for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Here, we present evidence that hepatic mitochondrial fluxes and redox state are markedly altered during ketogenic diet-induced reversal of NAFLD in humans. Ketogenic diet for 6 d markedly decreased liver fat content and hepatic insulin resistance. These changes were associated with increased net hydrolysis of liver triglycerides and decreased endogenous glucose production and serum insulin concentrations. Partitioning of fatty acids toward ketogenesis increased, which was associated with increased hepatic mitochondrial redox state and decreased hepatic citrate synthase flux. These data demonstrate heretofore undescribed adaptations underlying the reversal of NAFLD by ketogenic diet and highlight hepatic mitochondrial fluxes and redox state as potential treatment tar...

Reexamining the origins of human fatherhood: Dads emerged to reap the benefits of partnerships with females and other males, researchers say -- ScienceDaily : That paternal provisioning arose in humans seems remarkable and puzzling and has revolved around a discussion about two groups of males dubbed "Dads" and "Cads." With promiscuous mating, a would-be Dad who provides food for a mate and their joint offspring without seeking additional mates risks being outcompeted in terms of biological fitness by a Cad, who focuses only on promiscuous mating instead of investing in offspring. Such a competitive disadvantage creates a formidable barrier for Dads to emerge when Cads abound. An oft-invoked explanation for the evolution of paternal provisioning in humans is that ancestral females started mating preferentially with males who provided them with food, in exchange for female sexual fidelity. This explanation is insufficient for several reasons, the researchers wr...

Loss of smell and taste validated as COVID-19 symptoms in patients with high recovery rate: Study suggests clinicians should include sensory impairment as standard screening measure -- ScienceDaily :  Yan said the study demonstrated the high prevalence and unique presentation of certain sensory impairments in patients positive with COVID-19. Of those who reported loss of smell and taste, the loss was typically profound, not mild. But encouragingly, the rate of recovery of smell and taste was high and occurred usually within two to four weeks of infection. "Our study not only showed that the high incidence of smell and taste is specific to COVID-19 infection, but we fortunately also found that for the majority of people sensory recovery was generally rapid," said Yan. "Among the Covid-19 patients with smell loss, more than 70 percent had reported improvement of smell at the time of survey and of those who hadn't reported improvement, many had only been diagnosed r...

Our ability to focus may falter after eating one meal high in saturated fat: Study also looks at effect of leaky gut on concentration -- ScienceDaily

Keto diets may reverse polycystic kidney disease - Futurity KETOSIS TO FIGHT POLYCYSTIC KIDNEY DISEASE In previous studies, the research team found that reducing food intake in mouse models slowed the growth of polycystic kidneys; but at the time, they did not know why. In the new paper, the scientists identified the specific metabolic process responsible for slowing the progress of the disease. The best part? It’s a process many of us already know well. “There’s a way of avoiding the development of the cysts through dietary interventions that lead to ketosis,” Weimbs says. You read that right: Ketosis, the underlying metabolic state of popular diets such as the  ketogenic diet , and, to a lesser extent, time-restricted feeding (a form of intermittent fasting), has been shown in the Weimbs group’s studies to stall and even reverse PKD. “The cysts appear to be largely glucose-dependent,” Weimbs explains. In people with the predisposition toward PKD, the continuous supply of sugar ...

Red meat halves risk of depression - Telegraph : Experts admitted surprise at the findings because so many other studies have linked red meat to physical health risks. The team made the link after a study of 1000 Australian women. Professor Felice Jacka, who led the research by Deakin University, Victoria, said: "We had originally thought that red meat might not be good for mental health but it turns out that it actually may be quite important.

How broken sleep promotes cardiovascular disease : Most people have at some point echoed Macbeth’s complaint about the loss of “sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”. Sleep disorders, such as obstructive sleep apnoea (when breathing temporarily stops, causing both sleep disruption and lack of oxygen in blood) and sleep deprivation, have been associated with an increased risk of atherosclerosis and its harmful cardiovascular effects1,2. Atherosclerosis is characterized by the formation of ‘plaques’ in arteries, as white blood cells enter the artery wall, take up cholesterol and other substances from the blood and trigger an inflammatory response. However, the mechanisms linking sleep disruption and atherosclerosis have been largely unknown. Writing in Nature, McAlpine et al.3 show that persistent sleep disruption causes the brain to signal the bone marrow to increase the production of white blood cells. McAlpine et al. studied mice that were prone to developing atherosclero...

Frontiers | A ketogenic diet improves cognition and has biochemical effects in prefrontal cortex that are dissociable from hippocampus | Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience : Age-related cognitive decline has been linked to a diverse set of neurobiological mechanisms, including bidirectional changes in proteins critical for neuron function. Importantly, these alterations are not uniform across the brain. For example, the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex show distinct patterns of dysfunction in advanced age. Because higher cognitive functions require large-scale interactions across prefrontal cortical and hippocampal networks, selectively targeting an alteration within one region may not broadly restore function to improve cognition. One mechanism for decline that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and hippocampus (HPC) share, however, is a reduced ability to utilize glucose for energy metabolism. Although this suggests that therapeutic strategies bypassing the need for neuronal glycolysis may ...

The case for a breakfast feast : "Having the largest meal in the morning appears to have advantages for weight control compared with having a large meal in the evening, she said, since the digestive process and the action of insulin, the pancreatic hormone that the body uses to process the sugars in carbohydrates and store glucose, appear to be at their peak performance early in the day. As a result, “our body can use the nutrients as a source of energy the easiest,” Kahleova said. A person eating identical meals at different times of the day might deposit more fat after an evening meal than a morning meal, she said. That’s because insulin action is more efficient in the morning, experts say. “If you give a healthy individual a big bolus of glucose in the morning, the blood glucose might stay high one or two hours before coming back to normal,” said Dr. Satchidananda Panda, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. “You take that same normal health...