Cardiac Aging? You Can Use The Vagus Nerve To Protect Against It

…and other items from this week’s health news:

Stay young at heart (literally!)

The vagus nerve is mostly associated with relaxation (it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, triggering the opposite of a “fight or flight” response, sometimes called the relaxation response).

However, researchers (Dr. Valentina Casieri et al.) have found that maintaining the vagus nerve connection to the heart—especially the right cardiac vagus nerve—helps slow cardiac aging, protects heart muscle cells, and preserves pumping strength even without changes in heart rate.

In contrast, loss of vagal nerve integrity accelerates heart aging, suggesting this brain–heart pathway plays a direct protective role in long-term cardiac health.

Read in full: This tiny nerve may help keep the heart young ← the title here was an interesting editorial choice, given that “this tiny nerve” is the longest nerve in the human body!

Related: The Vagus Nerve (And How You Can Make Use Of It)

Walking while you work

First, some things you probably already know, but let’s be methodical:

• Increasing walking consistently improves health outcomes such as blood pressure and glucose tolerance, with mounting evidence suggesting around 7,000 steps per day helps prevent many diseases.
  • Under that amount, there’s a simple rule: more steps are better than fewer
  • Over that amount, the same is technically true, but with diminishing marginal returns after 8,000 steps
• Sitting is particularly bad and is becoming an epidemic: the rise of working from home has increased prolonged sitting, reducing incidental movement that normally comes from commuting, moving around an office, and so forth.

So, what’s this about walking while you work? It’s about using a walking pad treadmill at one’s desk, to get in those steps while working. The premise is simple: it encourages regular walking breaks during time that would otherwise be fully sedentary, which is likely to benefit health when used across the day.

What studies show: research on treadmill desks suggests modest but meaningful improvements in steps per day, body fat, cholesterol, blood pressure, and metabolism, though results vary widely between individuals.

However, you might be wondering about the practicality of it. Per the science, walking while working does not harm general cognitive performance (i.e. it’s not a distraction), but it will tend to reduce typing accuracy and make precise mouse use difficult, limiting suitability for those of us who do a lot of that ← this writer loves her standing desk, but definitely couldn’t reasonably do this work while walking!

Depending on the nature of your work, voice-to-text tools built into some operating systems may help address the challenge of typing accurately while walking. However, this is best for writing of the kind where the content is all that matters, rather than the presentation. For example, doctors often dictate reports this way, but they are mostly internal things, not for publication. 10almonds articles couldn’t be produced that way; it’d look atrocious (with current technology, at least)!

Another issue is that walking pads and treadmill desks can be expensive and may require additional equipment, so regularly walking away from a desk may be a simpler and cheaper way to gain similar health benefits.

Read in full: Walk while you work: Are the extra steps on an under desk treadmill worth the cost?

Related: Stand Up For Your Health (Or Don’t) ← our main feature on this also includes more things you can do if you must sit, to make sitting less bad!

Obesity redefined: 69% of Americans now obese

We don’t love the word “obesity”, as it has a usually false assumption build into the word (it literally means “because of having eaten everything that was around”).

However, it’s the in-use medical word that’s being redefined here, so we can’t do as we often do and talk instead in more accurate terms, such as adiposity (literally: fatness, i.e. the quality of containing fat) and the like. Whenever we use the word “obesity” at 10almonds, it’s usually because it was pertaining to the defined medical term.

However, that about adiposity is now more relevant!

Because while obesity was previously defined in terms of BMI (a woefully misleading metric for manifold reasons), it now takes into account body fat percentage, as well as waist measurements (and more specifically: waist circumference, waist-to-height ratio, and waist-to-hip ratio).

These are all much better measures, which we’ve written about before, here: Better Than BMI (and here: The Other Waist Ratio).

This new, more useful classification system now puts 68.6% of US adults in the “obese” category, up from 42.9% under the BMI system.

Read in full: Nearly 70% of U.S. adults could now be classified as obese

Related: Fat’s Real Barriers To Health

Take care!