Hello everyone: On this Memorial Day, we choose to acknowledge and honor our Veterans and to thank them for their sacrifices to ensure our freedom and safety. In addition to being the right thing to do, it also promotes general health in our population. It turns out that gratitude can be cultivated and it will help to undo the negative effects of stress and loneliness. Please recall from earlier articles that both stress and loneliness are direct causes of inflammation, and that inflammation will cause, aggravate or perpetuate virtually all illness. So, by cultivating gratitude, we can feel better mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Whether it is a prayer of gratitude, or a gratitude journal, or finding a way to be thankful and grateful to someone every day, or to offer a smile to strangers or anyone…virtually any act of gratitude will help us cultivate an aspect of our ... Read more
Archives for May 2019
Exercise and Brain Health: How Much Is Enough?
Hello everyone: Here is some great news about exercise and brain volume. Please recall that any loss of brain volume is NOT a good thing, as it is associated with brain fog, progressing to cognitive impairment progressing to dementia. So some smart folks decided to figure it out for us: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2730790?guestAccessKey=dbc8a200-1cef-4c35-baef-1f985d6db75c&utm_source=silverchair&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=article_alert-jamanetwork&utm_content=weekly_highlights&utm_term=050419 Importance: Dementia risk may be attenuated by physical activity (PA); however, the specific activity levels optimal for dementia prevention are unclear. Moreover, most older adults are unable to meet the nationally recommended PA guidelines, set at 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous PA per week. Conclusions and Relevance: Every additional hour of ... Read more
Preventing Brain Atrophy In Alzheimer’s: It can be done!!
Hello everyone: This is a pretty astounding paper that reveals how certain B vitamins slowed brain shrinkage and cognitive decline, plus they went even further with great results: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/110/23/9523.full.pdf “Is it possible to prevent atrophy of key brain regions related to cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease (AD)? One approach is to modify nongenetic risk factors, for instance by lowering elevated plasma homocysteine using B vitamins. In an initial, randomized controlled study on elderly subjects with increased dementia risk (mild cognitive impairment according to 2004 Petersen criteria), we showed that high-dose B-vitamin treatment (folic acid 0.8 mg, vitamin B6 20 mg, vitamin B12 0.5 mg) slowed shrinkage of the whole brain volume over 2 y.” If that was not enough, look what else they did!! “Here, we go further by demonstrating that ... Read more
Food IS Medicine
Hello again everyone: What I tell patients every day is that food choices have everything to do with health, and they either get it but do not know what food choices to make or they just don’t fully believe it. Well…believe it! There is just too much good science now to doubt it. Here is what the opening paragraph from a Harvard monograph has to say: “For critically and chronically ill people, food is medicine. With adequate amounts of nutritious food, people who are sick have a better response to medication, maintain and gain strength, and have improved chances of recovery. Ultimately, access to healthy food leads to improved health outcomes and lower health care costs…Food is increasingly recognized as a core component of preventive and ameliorative health care.” https://www.chlpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/6.5.2014-Food-is-Medicine-Report-FINAL.pdf There are now ... Read more
