What Matters Most For Your Heart?
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Eat More (Of This) For Lower Blood Pressure
Heart disease remains the world’s #1 killer. We’d say “and in the US, it’s no different”, but in fact, the US is #1 country for heart disease. So, it’s worse and perhaps some extra care is in order.
But how?
What matters the most
Is it salt? Salt plays a part, but it’s not even close to the top problem:
Hypertension: Factors Far More Relevant Than Salt
Is it saturated fat? Saturated fat from certain sources plays more of a role than salt, but other sources may not be so much of an issue:
Can Saturated Fats Be Heart-Healthy?
Is it red meat? Red meat is not great for the heart (or for almost anything else, except perhaps anemia):
The Whys and Hows of Cutting Meats Out Of Your Diet
…but it’s still not the top dietary factor.
The thing many don’t eat
All the above are foodstuffs that a person wanting a healthier heart and cardiovascular system in general might (reasonably and usually correctly) want to cut down, but there’s one thing that most people need more of:
Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
And this is especially true for heart health:
❝Dietary fiber has emerged as a crucial yet underappreciated part of hypertension management.
Our comprehensive analysis emphasizes the evidence supporting the effectiveness of dietary fiber in lowering blood pressure and reducing the risk of cardiovascular events.❞
Specifically, she and her team found:
- Each additional 5g of fiber per day reduces blood pressure by 2.8/2.1 (systolic/diastolic, in mmHG)
- Dietary fiber works in several ways to improve cardiovascular health, including via gut bacteria, improved lipids profiles, and anti-inflammatory effects
- Most people are still only getting a small fraction (¼ to ⅓) of the recommended daily amount of fiber. To realize how bad that is, imagine if you consumed only ¼ of the recommended daily amount of calories every day!
You can read more about it here:
Dietary fiber critical in managing hypertension, international study finds
That’s a pop-science article, but it’s still very informative. If you prefer to read the scientific paper itself (or perhaps as well), you can find it below
Recommendations for the Use of Dietary Fiber to Improve Blood Pressure Control
Want more from your fiber?
Here’s yet another way fiber improves cardiometabolic health, hot off the academic press (the study was published just a couple of weeks ago):
How might fiber lower diabetes risk? Your gut could hold the clues
this pop-science article was based on this scientific paper
Gut Microbiota and Blood Metabolites Related to Fiber Intake and Type 2 Diabetes
Take care!
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Premature babies are given sucrose for pain relief – but new research shows it doesn’t stop long-term impacts on development
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Infants born very preterm spend weeks or even months in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) while their immature brains are still developing.
During this time, they receive up to 16 painful procedures every day. The most common is a routine heel prick used to collect a blood sample. Suctioning of the infant’s airways is also common.
While many of these procedures provide critical care, we know they are acutely painful. Even tearing tape off the skin can be painful.
We also know, from decades of research, that preterm babies’ exposure to daily painful invasive procedures is related to altered brain development, stress functioning and poorer cognitive and behavioural outcomes.
The commonest strategy to manage acute pain in preterm babies is to give them sucrose, a sugar solution. But my recent research with Canadian colleagues shows this doesn’t stop these long-term impacts.
In New Zealand, there is no requirement to document all procedures or pain treatments. But as the findings from our Canadian study show, we urgently need research to improve long-term health outcomes for children born prematurely.
Getty Images Long-term effects of pain in early life
We collected data on the number of procedures, clinical exposures and sucrose doses from three NICUs across Canada.
One of these sites does not use sucrose for acute pain management. This meant we were able to compare outcomes for children who received sucrose during their NICU stay and those who did not, without having to randomly assign infants to different care as you would in a randomised controlled trial – the gold standard approach.
At 18 months of age, when children born preterm are typically seen for a follow-up, parents report on their child’s behaviour. Our findings replicate earlier research: very preterm babies who were exposed to painful procedures early in life showed more anxiety and depressive symptoms by toddlerhood.
Our findings are similar regarding a child’s cognition and language, backing results from other studies. We found no link between preterm babies’ later behaviour and how much sucrose they were given to manage pain.
Sucrose is thought to activate centres of the brain that modulate pain and lead to the release of endorphins, but the exact mechanism remains unclear. It has become the worldwide standard of care for acute neonatal pain, but it doesn’t seem to be helping in the long term.
Improving pain treatment
About 1 in 13 babies are born preterm each year in Aotearoa New Zealand. Some 1-2% are very preterm, two to four months early. Māori and other ethnic minorities are at higher risk.
Studies in New Zealand show children born very preterm have up to a three-fold risk of emotional disorders in preschool and by school age. This remains evident through adulthood.
Sucrose may stop preterm babies from showing signs of pain, but physiological and neurological pain responses nevertheless happen.
As is the case internationally, sucrose is used widely in New Zealand, but there is considerable variation in protocols of use across hospitals. No national guidelines for best practice exist.
Infant pain should be assessed, but international data suggest this isn’t always the case. What’s more, pain isn’t always managed. Routine assessment of pain and parent education videos are useful initiatives to encourage pain management.
Minimising the number of procedures is recommended by international bodies. Advances in clinical care, including the use of less invasive ventilation support and the inclusion of parents in the daily care of their infant, have seen the number of procedures decrease.
Pain management guidelines also help, but whether these changes improve outcomes in the long term, we don’t know yet.
We do know there are other ways of treating neonatal pain and minimising long-term impacts. Placing a newborn on a parent’s bare chest, skin-to-skin, effectively reduces short and long-term effects of neonatal pain.
For times when whānau are not able to be in the NICU, we have limited evidence that other pain management strategies, such as expressed breast milk, are effective. Our recent research cements this: sucrose isn’t helping as we thought.
Understanding which pain management strategies should be used for short and long-term benefits of this vulnerable population could make a big difference in the lives of these babies.
This requires additional research and a different approach, while considering what is culturally acceptable in Aotearoa New Zealand. If the strategies we are currently using aren’t working, we need to think creatively about how to limit the impact of pain on children born prematurely.
Mia McLean, Senior lecturer, Auckland University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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STI rates are increasing among midlife and older adults. We need to talk about it
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Globally, the rates of common sexually transmissible infections (STIs) are increasing among people aged over 50. In some cases, rates are rising faster than among younger people.
Recent data from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that, among people aged 55 and older, rates of gonorrhoea and chlamydia, two of the most common STIs, more than doubled between 2012 and 2022.
Australian STI surveillance data has reflected similar trends. Between 2013 and 2022, there was a steady increase in diagnoses of chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis among people aged 40 and older. For example, there were 5,883 notifications of chlamydia in Australians 40 plus in 2013, compared with 10,263 in 2022.
A 2020 study of Australian women also showed that, between 2000 and 2018, there was a sharper increase in STI diagnoses among women aged 55–74 than among younger women.
While the overall rate of common STIs is highest among young adults, the significant increase in STI diagnoses among midlife and older adults suggests we need to pay more attention to sexual health across the life course.
Fit Ztudio/Shutterstock Why are STI rates rising among older adults?
STI rates are increasing globally for all age groups, and an increase among midlife and older people is in line with this trend.
However, increases of STIs among older people are likely due to a combination of changing sex and relationship practices and hidden sexual health needs among this group.
The “boomer” generation came of age in the 60s and 70s. They are the generation of free love and their attitude to sex, even as they age, is quite different to that of generations before them.
Given the median age of divorce in Australia is now over 43, and the internet has ushered in new opportunities for post-separation dating, it’s not surprising that midlife and older adults are exploring new sexual practices or finding multiple sexual partners.
People may start new relationships later in life. Tint Media/Shutterstock It’s also possible midlife and older people have not had exposure to sexual health education in school or do not relate to current safe sex messages, which tend to be directed toward young people. Condoms may therefore seem unnecessary for people who aren’t trying to avoid pregnancy. Older people may also lack confidence negotiating safe sex or accessing STI screening.
Hidden sexual health needs
In contemporary life, the sex lives of older adults are largely invisible. Ageing and older bodies are often associated with loss of power and desirability, reflected in the stereotype of older people as asexual and in derogatory jokes about older people having sex.
With some exceptions, we see few positive representations of older sexual bodies in film or television.
Older people’s sexuality is also largely invisible in public policy. In a review of Australian policy relating to sexual and reproductive health, researchers found midlife and older adults were rarely mentioned.
Sexual health policy generally targets groups with the highest STI rates, which excludes most older people. As midlife and older adults are beyond childbearing years, they also do not feature in reproductive health policy. This means there is a general absence of any policy related to sex or sexual health among midlife or older adults.
Added to this, sexual health policy tends to be focused on risk rather than sexual wellbeing. Sexual wellbeing, including freedom and capacity to pursue pleasurable sexual experiences, is strongly associated with overall health and quality of life for adults of all ages. Including sexual wellbeing as a policy priority would enable a focus on safe and respectful sex and relationships across the adult life course.
Without this priority, we have limited knowledge about what supports sexual wellbeing as people age and limited funding for initiatives to engage with midlife or older adults on these issues.
Midlife and older adults may have limited knowledge about STIs. Southworks/Shutterstock How can we support sexual health and wellbeing for older adults?
Most STIs are easily treatable. Serious complications can occur, however, when STIs are undiagnosed and untreated over a long period. Untreated STIs can also be passed on to others.
Late diagnosis is not uncommon as some STIs can have no symptoms and many people don’t routinely screen for STIs. Older, heterosexual adults are, in general, less likely than other groups to seek regular STI screening.
For midlife or older adults, STIs may also be diagnosed late because some doctors do not initiate testing due to concerns they will cause offence or because they assume STI risk among older people is negligible.
Many doctors are reluctant to discuss sexual health with their older patients unless the patient explicitly raises the topic. However, older people can be embarrassed or feel awkward raising matters of sex.
Resources for health-care providers and patients to facilitate conversations about sexual health and STI screening with older patients would be a good first step.
To address rising rates of STIs among midlife and older adults, we also need to ensure sexual health promotion is targeted toward these age groups and improve accessibility of clinical services.
More broadly, it’s important to consider ways to ensure sexual wellbeing is prioritised in policy and practice related to midlife and older adulthood.
A comprehensive approach to older people’s sexual health, that explicitly places value on the significance of sex and intimacy in people’s lives, will enhance our ability to more effectively respond to sexual health and STI prevention across the life course.
Jennifer Power, Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow, Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Mocktails – by Moira Clark
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We’ve reviewed books about quitting alcohol before (such as this one), but today’s is not about quitting, so much as about enjoying non-alcoholic drinks; it’s simply a recipe book of zero-alcohol cocktails, or “mocktails”.
What sets this book apart from many of its kind is that every recipe uses only natural and fresh ingredients, rather than finding in the ingredients list some pre-made store-bought component. Instead, because of its “everything from scratch” approach, this means:
- Everything is reliably as healthy as the ingredients you use
- Every recipe’s ingredients can be found easily unless you live in a food desert
Each well-photographed and well-written recipe also comes with a QR code to see a step-by-step video tutorial (or if you get the ebook version, then a direct link as well).
Bottom line: this is the perfect mocktail book to have in (and practice with!) before the summer heat sets in.
Click here to check out Mocktails: A Delicious Collection of Non-Alcoholic Drinks, and get mixing!
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Can what you eat during pregnancy and breastfeeding affect whether your child develops food allergies?
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Many questions pop up when you’re growing or raising a new baby.
Among them, women often wonder if what they eat during pregnancy or breastfeeding will affect whether or not their child will have a food allergy.
Researchers have also been trying to answer this question for many years.
A baby’s exposure to food allergens during pregnancy and via breast milk is thought to be important. Experts believe it could allow the child to start developing helpful immune responses so they tolerate food allergens in their diet in future.
But to what degree this theory plays out, and whether a mother’s diet influences their child’s likelihood of developing food allergies, isn’t yet clear. Here’s what we know so far.
Maria Evseyeva/Shutterstock The science of food allergies
A food allergy occurs when the body’s immune system responds to a particular food as if it was harmful to the body.
In Australia, foods which commonly cause allergies include egg, cow’s milk, peanut, tree nuts, sesame, soy, wheat, fish and other seafood (this can vary a little in different countries). Although almost any food can cause an allergic reaction.
For people with food allergies, symptoms can appear within minutes of eating the food. These symptoms can include a swollen face, lips or eyes, hives or welts on the skin, vomiting, trouble breathing, and persistent dizziness or collapse.
In pregnancy, food allergens can cross the placenta and can be detected in amniotic fluid, from which they reach the baby’s gastrointestinal tract when the baby swallows.
After birth this process continues when food allergens pass from breast milk to the baby’s gastrointestinal tract. Both of these pathways lead to early life exposure to different foods.
This is thought to help the baby’s developing immune system to accept food allergens when they’re introduced once the child starts eating solids. In other words, the immune system may be more likely to see the food as harmless and not mount an allergic response against the food.
Babies can be exposed to allergens in breast milk before they start eating solid foods. Nastyaofly/Shutterstock Along with food allergens, babies also receive beneficial antibodies in breast milk. Levels of food allergen-specific antibodies, which could offer protection against allergies, have been found to be higher in babies whose mothers ate more of foods including egg, peanut, cow’s milk and wheat during early breastfeeding.
Lower levels of these beneficial antibodies in the blood have been linked with higher chances of babies developing food allergies.
Research is trying to answer the question
While there are scientific explanations for how a woman’s diet during pregnancy and breastfeeding could influence her child’s likelihood of developing a food allergy, we don’t have conclusive evidence to tell us exactly what the best diet is to prevent allergies.
Some studies have tried to look at this, but results have been inconsistent because they have been done in different populations, diet has been assessed in different ways, and they have not always been able to account for other factors that might influence both diet and food allergy risk.
Current research is trying to understand this further. A large Australian study, the PrEggNut Study, is testing whether the amount of egg and peanut mothers eat during pregnancy and breastfeeding affects their child’s risk of having an egg or peanut allergy.
More than 2,100 mothers were randomly assigned to eat either higher or lower amounts of egg and peanut from mid-pregnancy until their baby was four months old. Results are expected next year.
Another Australian study, the Nuts For Babies Study, is testing whether the amount of peanuts and cashew nuts mothers eat during breastfeeding can reduce the chances of their child developing a peanut or cashew nut allergy.
This study has recently commenced and is looking for 4,000 pregnant women living in Western Australia or Victoria and who are planning to breastfeed their baby to participate.
Ongoing research is trying to tell us how a mother’s diet during pregnancy or breastfeeding could affect her child’s risk of food allergies. Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels So what’s the advice for now?
There are many other things, such as genetic and environmental factors, that may also play a role in the development of a baby’s immune system, including how their immune cells respond to food allergens. And we still have a lot to learn about what causes allergies more broadly.
While we wait for the results of the above studies, the current advice is for mothers not to avoid any common allergy-causing foods during pregnancy and breastfeeding (unless of course they’re allergic themselves).
The science so far suggests that if anything, exposing the baby to allergens could reduce their risk of developing allergies, rather than increase it.
Once the baby is ready to eat solid foods, we know introducing peanuts and eggs from around six months of age makes it less likely the child will develop an allergy to these foods.
Introducing other common allergy-causing foods in the first year of life may also be helpful, although the evidence for this is not as strong compared with peanuts and eggs.
Once these foods have been introduced, continuing to include them in your baby’s meals regularly, at least once a week, might also make it less likely they develop an allergy to these foods.
Jennifer Koplin, Evidence and Translation Lead, National Allergy Centre of Excellence; Chief Investigator, Centre of Food Allergy Research; Associate Professor and Group Leader, Childhood Allergy & Epidemiology Group, Child Health Research Centre, The University of Queensland; Debbie Palmer, Head, Early Life & Life-Course Health Program; Team Lead, Nutrition in Early Life; Food Allergy Stream Co-chair, National Allergy Centre of Excellence, The Kids Research Institute Australia, and Desalegn Markos Shifti, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Child Health Research Centre, Faculty of Medicine, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Instead Of Standing On One Leg…
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Some better ways to train balance and stability:
Best foot forward… and back!
We’ve mentioned before that standing on one leg trains static balance—where you’re staying still—but most falls happen during movement, which requires dynamic balance.
For many people, it’s possible to stand on one leg for more than 20 seconds yet still feel unsteady when walking, turning, or stepping over things, because real-world balance depends on reacting to movement and the unexpected.
So here are some ways to train that real-world dynamic balance:
- Obstacle step or cross step over: roll two towels into sausages, lay them in a cross on the floor, step forwards, sideways, and backwards over them in different directions, increase your pace onto your toes as you improve, raise the towels and/or lift your gaze to make it harder, and train agility, coordination, and foot clearance.
- Tightrope walk: walk heel-to-toe in a straight line for about 10 feet as slowly as possible to narrow your base of support and challenge side-to-side control, then progress by turning your head or closing your eyes to further hone your balance systems.
- Cup taps: stand in a corner for safety, balance on one leg, tap three cups placed around you with your free foot without crushing them, vary the order and distance to build rhythm, coordination, and quick foot placement for stumble recovery.
For more on all of this plus some visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
90% Of People Over 50 Fail This Balance Test. Will You?
Take care!
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The Big Book of Kombucha – by Hannah Crum & Alex LaGory
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If you’ve been thinking “I should get into kombucha”, then this is the universe prompting you, because with in this book’s 400 pages is all the information you need and more.
Because, it’s understandable to be wary when starting out, from “what if my jar explodes” to “what if I poison my family”, but the authors (and photographer) take every care to ensure that everything goes perfectly, guiding us through everything from start to finish, including very many high-quality color photos of what things should (and shouldn’t) look like.
On which note, that does mean that to enjoy the color you should get a physical copy or Kindle Fire, not a Kindle e-ink version (as then it’d be black and white).
There’s also a comprehensive section on troubleshooting, as well as hundreds of recipes for all kinds of flavors and occasions.
Bottom line: in the category of books that could reasonably be called “The Bible of…”, this one’s the “The Bible of Kombucha”.
Click here to check out The Big Book Of Kombucha, and get brewing!
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