One Thing That Does Pair Well With Alcohol…

Alcohol is not a healthy thing to consume. That shouldn’t be a controversial statement, but there is a popular belief that it can be good for the heart:

Red Wine & The Heart: Can We Drink To Good Health?

The above is an interesting and well-balanced article that examines the arguments for health benefits (including indirectly, e.g. social aspects).

Ultimately, though, as the World Health Organization puts it:

WHO: No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health

There is some good news:

We can somewhat reduce the harm done by alcohol by altering our habits slightly:

How To Make Drinking Less Harmful

…and we can also, of course, reduce our alcohol consumption (ideally to zero, but any reduction is an improvement already):

How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol

And, saving the best news (in this section, anyway) for last, it is almost always possible to undo the harm done specifically to one’s liver:

How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

Nanotechnology to the rescue?

Remember when we had a main feature about how colloidal gold basically does nothing by itself (and that that’s precisely why gold is used in medicine, when it is used)?

Now it has an extra bit of nothing to do, for our benefit (if we drink alcohol, anyway), as part of a gel that detoxifies alcohol before it can get to our liver:

Gold is one of the “ingredients” in a gel containing a nanotechnology lattice of protein fibrils coated with iron (and the gold is there as an inert catalyst, which is chemistry’s way of saying it doesn’t react in any way but it does cheer the actual reagents on). There’s more chemistry going on than we have room to discuss in our little newsletter, so if you like the full details, you can read about that here:

Single-site iron-anchored amyloid hydrogels as catalytic platforms for alcohol detoxification

The short and oversimplified explanation is that instead of alcohol being absorbed from the gut and transported via the bloodstream to the liver, where it is metabolized (poisoning the liver as it goes, and poisoning the rest of the body too, including the brain), the alcohol is degraded while it is still in the gastrointestinal tract, converted by the gel’s lattice into acetic acid (which is at worst harmless, and actually in moderation a good thing to have).

Even shorter and even more oversimplified: the gel turns the alcohol into vinegar in the stomach and gut, before it can get absorbed into the blood.

But…

Of course there’s a “but”…

There are some limitations:

It doesn’t get it all (tests so far found it only gets about half of the alcohol), and so far it’s only been tested on mice, so it’s not on the market yet—while the researchers are sufficiently confident about it that a patent application has now been made, though, so it’ll probably show up on the market in the near future.

You can read a pop-science article about it (with diagrams!) here:

New gel breaks down alcohol in the body

Want to read more…

…about how to protect your organs (including your brain) from alcohol completely?

We’ve reviewed quite a number of books about quitting alcohol, so it’s hard to narrow it down to a single favorite, but after some deliberation, we’ll finish today with recommending:

Quit Drinking – by Rebecca Dolton ← _{^{you can read our review here}}

Take care!

Your Bones Were Made For Moving Too!

We know that to look after bone health, resistance training is generally what’s indicated. Indeed, we mentioned it yesterday, and we’ve talked about it before:

Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)

We also know that if you have osteoporosis already, some exercises are a better or worse idea than others:

Osteoporosis & Exercises: Which To Do (And Which To Avoid)

However! New research suggests that also getting in your recommended 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise slows bone density loss.

The study by Dr. Tiina Savikangas et al. looked at 299 people in their 70s (just over half being women) and found that, over the course of a year, bone mineral density loss was inversely correlated with moderate exercise as recorded by an accelerometer (as found in most fitness-tracking wearables and smartphones).

In other words: those who got more minutes of exercise, kept more bone mineral density.

As well as monitoring bone mineral density, the study also looked at cross-sectional area, but that remained stable throughout.

As for how much is needed:

❝Even short bursts of activity can be significant for the skeleton, so we also looked at movement in terms of the number and intensity of individual impacts. For example, walking and running cause impacts of different intensities.

We found that impacts that were comparable to at least brisk walking were associated with better preservation of bone mineral density.❞

~ Dr. Tiina Savikangas

Read more: Impacts during everyday physical activity can slow bone loss ← pop-science source, interviewing the lead researcher

On which note, we’ve a small bone to pick…

As a small correction, the pop-science source says that the subjects’ ages ranged from 70 to 85 years; the paper, meanwhile, clearly shows that the age-range was 74.4±3.9 years (shown in the “Results” table), rounded to 74.4 ± 4 years, in the abstract. So, certainly no participant was older than 78 years and four months.

Why this matters: the age range itself may be critical or it might not, but what is important is that this highlights how we shouldn’t just believe figures cited in pop-science articles, and it’s always good to click through to the source!

Read the study: Changes in femoral neck bone mineral density and structural strength during a 12-month multicomponent exercise intervention among older adults – Does accelerometer-measured physical activity matter?

This paper is a particularly fascinating read if you have time, because—unlike a lot of studies—they really took great care to note what exactly can and cannot be inferred from the data, and how and why.

Especially noteworthy was the diligence with which they either controlled for, or recognized that they could not control for, far more variables than most studies even bother to mention.

This kind of transparency is critical for good science, and we’d love to see more of it!

Want to apply this to your life?

Tracking minutes-of-movement is one of the things that fitness trackers are best at, so connect your favourite app (one of these days we’ll do a fitness tracker comparison article) and get moving!

And as for the other things that fitness trackers do? As it turns out, they do have their strengths and weaknesses, which are good to bear in mind:

Thinking of using an activity tracker to achieve your exercise goals? Here’s where it can help—and where it probably won’t

Take care!