What are compound exercises and why are they good for you?
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So you’ve got yourself a gym membership or bought a set of home weights. Now what? With the sheer amount of confusing exercise advice out there, it can be hard to decide what to include in a weights routine.
It can help to know there are broadly two types of movements in resistance training (lifting weights): compound exercises and isolation exercises.
So what’s the difference? And what’s all this got to do with strength, speed and healthy ageing?
What’s the difference?
Compound exercises involve multiple joints and muscle groups working together.
In a push up, for example, your shoulder and elbow joints are moving together. This targets the muscles in the chest, shoulder and triceps.
When you do a squat, you’re using your thigh and butt muscles, your back, and even the muscles in your core.
It can help to think about compound movements by grouping them by primary movement patterns.
For example, some lower body compound exercises follow a “squat pattern”. Examples include bodyweight squats, weighted squats, lunges and split squats.
We also have “hinge patterns”, where you hinge from a point on your body (such as the hips). Examples include deadlifts, hip thrusts and kettle bell swings.
Upper body compounded exercises can be grouped into “push patterns” (such as vertical barbell lifts) or “pull patterns” (such as weighted rows, chin ups or lat pull downs, which is where you use a pulley system machine to lift weights by pulling a bar downwards).
In contrast, isolation exercises are movements that occur at a single joint.
For instance, bicep curls only require movement at the elbow joint and work your bicep muscles. Tricep extensions and lateral raises are other examples of isolation exercises.
Compound exercises can make daily life easier
Many compound exercises mimic movements we do every day.
Hinge patterns mimic picking something off the floor. A vertical press mimics putting a heavy box on a high shelf. A squat mimics standing up from the couch or getting on and off the toilet.
That might sound ridiculous to a young, fit person (“why would I need to practise getting on and off a toilet?”).
Unfortunately, we lose strength and muscle mass as we age. Men lose about 5% of their muscle mass per decade, while for women the figure is about 4% per decade.
When this decline begins can vary widely. However, approximately 30% of an adult’s peak muscle mass is lost by the time they are 80.
The good news is resistance training can counteract these age-related changes in muscle size and strength.
So building strength through compound exercise movements may help make daily life feel a bit easier. In fact, our ability to perform compound movements are a good indicator how well we can function as we age.
What about strength and athletic ability?
Compound exercises use multiple joints, so you can generally lift heavier weights than you could with isolation exercises. Lifting a heavier weight means you can build muscle strength more efficiently.
One study divided a group of 36 people into two. Three times a week, one group performed isolation exercises, while the other group did compound exercises.
After eight weeks, both groups had lost fat. But the compound exercises group saw much better results on measures of cardiovascular fitness, bench press strength, knee extension strength, and squat strength.
If you play a sport, compound movements can also help boost athletic ability.
Squat patterns require your hip, knee, and ankle to extend at the same time (also known as triple extension).
Our bodies use this triple extension trick when we run, sprint, jump or change direction quickly. In fact, research has found squat strength is strongly linked to being able to sprint faster and jump higher.
Isolation exercises are still good
What if you’re unable to do compound movements, or you just don’t want to?
Don’t worry, you’ll still build strength and muscle with isolation exercises.
Isolation exercises are also typically easier to learn as there is no skill required. They are an easy and low risk way to add extra exercise at the end of the workout, where you might otherwise be too tired to do more compound exercises safely and with correct form.
In fact, both isolation and compound exercises seem to be equally effective in helping us lose body fat and increase fat-free muscle mass when total intensity and volume of exercises are otherwise equal.
Some people also do isolation exercises when they want to build up a particular muscle group for a certain sport or for a bodybuilding competition, for example.
I just want a time efficient workout
Considering the above factors, you could consider prioritising compound exercises if you’re:
- time poor
- keen to lift heavier weights
- looking for an efficient way to train many muscles in the one workout
- interested in healthy ageing.
That said, most well designed workout programs will include both compound and isolation movements.
Correction: This article has been amended to reflect the fact a weighted row is a pull pattern, not a push pattern.
Mandy Hagstrom, Senior Lecturer, Exercise Physiology. School of Health Sciences, UNSW Sydney and Anurag Pandit, PhD Candidate in Exercise Physiology, UNSW Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Do You Know These 10 Common Ovarian Cancer Symptoms?
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It’s better to know in advance:
Things you may need to know
The symptoms listed in the video are:
- Abdominal bloating: persistent bloating due to fluid buildup, often mistaken for overeating or weight gain.
- Pelvic or abdominal pain: continuous pain in the lower abdomen or pelvis, unrelated to menstruation.
- Difficulty eating or feeling full quickly: loss of appetite or feeling full after eating only a small amount.
- Urgent or frequent urination: increased need to urinate due to tumor pressure on the bladder.
- Unexplained weight loss: sudden weight loss without changes in diet or exercise (this goes for cancer in general, of course).
- Fatigue: extreme tiredness that doesn’t improve with rest, possibly linked to anemia.
- Back pain: persistent lower back pain due to tumor pressure or fluid buildup.
- Changes in bowel habits: unexplained constipation, diarrhea, or a feeling of incomplete bowel movements.
- Menstrual changes: irregular, heavier, lighter, or missed periods in premenopausal women.
- Pain during intercourse: discomfort or deep pelvic pain during or after vaginal sex—often overlooked!
Of course, some of those things can be caused by many things, but it’s worth getting it checked out, especially if you have a cluster of them together. Even if it’s not ovarian cancer (and hopefully it won’t be), having multiple things from this list certainly means that “something wrong is not right” in any case.
For those who remember better from videos than what you read, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Take care
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What Grief Does To Your Body (And How To Manage It)
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What Grief Does To The Body (And How To Manage It)
In life, we will almost all lose loved ones and suffer bereavement. For most people, this starts with grandparents, eventually moves to parents, and then people our own generation; partners, siblings, close friends. And of course, sometimes and perhaps most devastatingly, we can lose people younger than ourselves.
For something that almost everyone suffers, there is often very little in the way of preparation given beforehand, and afterwards, a condolences card is nice but can’t do a lot for our mental health.
And with mental health, our physical health can go too, if we very understandably neglect it at such a time.
So, how to survive devastating loss, and come out the other side, hopefully thriving? It seems like a tall order indeed.
First, the foundations:
You’re probably familiar with the stages of grief. In their most commonly-presented form, they are:
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
You’ve probably also heard/read that we won’t always go through them in order, and also that grief is deeply personal and proceeds on its own timescale.
It is generally considered healthy to go through them.
What do they look like?
Naturally this can vary a lot from person to person, but examples in the case of bereavement could be:
- Denial: “This surely has not really happened; I’ll carry on as though it hasn’t”
- Anger: “Why didn’t I do xyz differently while I had the chance?!”
- Bargaining: “I will do such-and-such in their honor, and this will be a way of expressing the love I wish I could give them in a way they could receive”
- Depression: “What is the point of me without them? The sooner I join them, the better.”
- Acceptance: “I was so lucky that we had the time together that we did, and enriched each other’s lives while we could”
We can speedrun these or we can get stuck on one for years. We can bounce back and forth. We can think we’re at acceptance, and then a previous stage will hit us like a tonne of bricks.
What if we don’t?
Assuming that our lost loved one was indeed a loved one (as opposed to someone we are merely societally expected to mourn), then failing to process that grief will tend to have a big impact on our life—and health. These health problems can include:
As you can see, three out of five of those can result in death. The other two aren’t great either. So why isn’t this taken more seriously as a matter of health?
Death is, ironically, considered something we “just have to live with”.
But how?
Coping strategies
You’ll note that most of the stages of grief are not enjoyable per se. For this reason, it’s common to try to avoid them—hence denial usually being first.
But, that is like not getting a lump checked out because you don’t want a cancer diagnosis. The emotional reasoning is understandable, but it’s ultimately self-destructive.
First, have a plan. If a death is foreseen, you can even work out this plan together.
But even if that time has now passed, it’s “better late than never” to make a plan for looking after yourself, e.g:
- How you will try to get enough sleep (tricky, but sincerely try)
- How you will remember to eat (and ideally, healthily)
- How you will still get exercise (a walk in the park is fine; see some greenery and get some sunlight)
- How you will avoid self-destructive urges (from indirect, e.g. drinking, to direct, e.g. suicidality)
- How you will keep up with the other things important in your life (work, friends, family)
- How you will actively work to process your grief (e.g. journaling, or perhaps grief counselling)
Some previous articles of ours that may help:
- How To Keep On Keeping On ← this is about looking after general health when motivation is low
- The Mental Health First-Aid You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← this is about managing depression
- How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To) ← this is about managing suicidality
- Life After Death? (Your Life; A Loved One’s Death) ← this is about bereavement and romance
If it works, it works
If we are all unique, then any relationship between any two people is uniqueness squared. Little wonder, then, that our grief may be unique too. And it can be complicated further:
- Sometimes we had a complicated relationship with someone
- Sometimes the circumstances of their death were complicated
There is, for that matter, such a thing as “complicated grief”:
Read more: Complicated grief and prolonged grief disorder (Medical News Today)
We also previously reviewed a book on “ambiguous loss”, exploring grieving when we cannot grieve in the normal way because someone is gone and/but/maybe not gone.
For example, if someone is in a long-term coma from which they may never recover, or if they are missing-presumed-dead. Those kinds of situations are complicated too.
Unusual circumstances may call for unusual coping strategies, so how can we discern what is healthy and what isn’t?
The litmus test is: is it enabling you to continue going about your life in a way that allows you to fulfil your internal personal aspirations and external social responsibilities? If so, it’s probably healthy.
Look after yourself. And if you can, tell your loved ones you love them today.
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What’s the difference between vegan and vegetarian?
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What’s the difference? is a new editorial product that explains the similarities and differences between commonly confused health and medical terms, and why they matter.
Vegan and vegetarian diets are plant-based diets. Both include plant foods, such as fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains.
But there are important differences, and knowing what you can and can’t eat when it comes to a vegan and vegetarian diet can be confusing.
So, what’s the main difference?
Creative Cat Studio/Shutterstock What’s a vegan diet?
A vegan diet is an entirely plant-based diet. It doesn’t include any meat and animal products. So, no meat, poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, dairy or honey.
What’s a vegetarian diet?
A vegetarian diet is a plant-based diet that generally excludes meat, poultry, fish and seafood, but can include animal products. So, unlike a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet can include eggs, dairy and honey.
But you may be wondering why you’ve heard of vegetarians who eat fish, vegetarians who don’t eat eggs, vegetarians who don’t eat dairy, and even vegetarians who eat some meat. Well, it’s because there are variations on a vegetarian diet:
- a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet excludes meat, poultry, fish and seafood, but includes eggs, dairy and honey
- an ovo-vegetarian diet excludes meat, poultry, fish, seafood and dairy, but includes eggs and honey
- a lacto-vegetarian diet excludes meat, poultry, fish, seafood and eggs, but includes dairy and honey
- a pescatarian diet excludes meat and poultry, but includes eggs, dairy, honey, fish and seafood
- a flexitarian, or semi-vegetarian diet, includes eggs, dairy and honey and may include small amounts of meat, poultry, fish and seafood.
Are these diets healthy?
A 2023 review looked at the health effects of vegetarian and vegan diets from two types of study.
Observational studies followed people over the years to see how their diets were linked to their health. In these studies, eating a vegetarian diet was associated with a lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease (such as heart disease or a stroke), diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), dementia and cancer.
For example, in a study of 44,561 participants, the risk of heart disease was 32% lower in vegetarians than non-vegetarians after an average follow-up of nearly 12 years.
Further evidence came from randomised controlled trials. These instruct study participants to eat a specific diet for a specific period of time and monitor their health throughout. These studies showed eating a vegetarian or vegan diet led to reductions in weight, blood pressure, and levels of unhealthy cholesterol.
For example, one analysis combined data from seven randomised controlled trials. This so-called meta-analysis included data from 311 participants. It showed eating a vegetarian diet was associated with a systolic blood pressure (the first number in your blood pressure reading) an average 5 mmHg lower compared with non-vegetarian diets.
It seems vegetarian diets are more likely to be healthier, across a number of measures.
For example, a 2022 meta-analysis combined the results of several observational studies. It concluded a vegetarian diet, rather than vegan diet, was recommended to prevent heart disease.
There is also evidence vegans are more likely to have bone fractures than vegetarians. This could be partly due to a lower body-mass index and a lower intake of nutrients such as calcium, vitamin D and protein.
But it can be about more than just food
Many vegans, where possible, do not use products that directly or indirectly involve using animals.
So vegans would not wear leather, wool or silk clothing, for example. And they would not use soaps or candles made from beeswax, or use products tested on animals.
The motivation for following a vegan or vegetarian diet can vary from person to person. Common motivations include health, environmental, ethical, religious or economic reasons.
And for many people who follow a vegan or vegetarian diet, this forms a central part of their identity.
More than a diet: veganism can form part of someone’s identity. Shutterstock So, should I adopt a vegan or vegetarian diet?
If you are thinking about a vegan or vegetarian diet, here are some things to consider:
- eating more plant foods does not automatically mean you are eating a healthier diet. Hot chips, biscuits and soft drinks can all be vegan or vegetarian foods. And many plant-based alternatives, such as plant-based sausages, can be high in added salt
- meeting the nutrient intake targets for vitamin B12, iron, calcium, and iodine requires more careful planning while on a vegan or vegetarian diet. This is because meat, seafood and animal products are good sources of these vitamins and minerals
- eating a plant-based diet doesn’t necessarily mean excluding all meat and animal products. A healthy flexitarian diet prioritises eating more whole plant-foods, such as vegetables and beans, and less processed meat, such as bacon and sausages
- the Australian Dietary Guidelines recommend eating a wide variety of foods from the five food groups (fruit, vegetables, cereals, lean meat and/or their alternatives and reduced-fat dairy products and/or their alternatives). So if you are eating animal products, choose lean, reduced-fat meats and dairy products and limit processed meats.
Katherine Livingstone, NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, Deakin University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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4 things ancient Greeks and Romans got right about mental health
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According to the World Health Organization, about 280 million people worldwide have depression and about one billion have a mental health problem of any kind.
People living in the ancient world also had mental health problems. So, how did they deal with them?
As we’ll see, some of their insights about mental health are still relevant today, even though we might question some of their methods.
Jr Morty/Shutterstock 1. Our mental state is important
Mental health problems such as depression were familiar to people in the ancient world. Homer, the poet famous for the Iliad and Odyssey who lived around the eighth century BC, apparently died after wasting away from depression.
Already in the late fifth century BC, ancient Greek doctors recognised that our health partly depends on the state of our thoughts.
In the Epidemics, a medical text written in around 400BC, an anonymous doctor wrote that our habits about our thinking (as well as our lifestyle, clothing and housing, physical activity and sex) are the main determinants of our health.
Homer, the ancient Greek poet, had depression. Thirasia/Shutterstock 2. Mental health problems can make us ill
Also writing in the Epidemics, an anonymous doctor described one of his patients, Parmeniscus, whose mental state became so bad he grew delirious, and eventually could not speak. He stayed in bed for 14 days before he was cured. We’re not told how.
Later, the famous doctor Galen of Pergamum (129-216AD) observed that people often become sick because of a bad mental state:
It may be that under certain circumstances ‘thinking’ is one of the causes that bring about health or disease because people who get angry about everything and become confused, distressed and frightened for the slightest reason often fall ill for this reason and have a hard time getting over these illnesses.
Galen also described some of his patients who suffered with their mental health, including some who became seriously ill and died. One man had lost money:
He developed a fever that stayed with him for a long time. In his sleep he scolded himself for his loss, regretted it and was agitated until he woke up. While he was awake he continued to waste away from grief. He then became delirious and developed brain fever. He finally fell into a delirium that was obvious from what he said, and he remained in this state until he died.
3. Mental illness can be prevented and treated
In the ancient world, people had many different ways to prevent or treat mental illness.
The philosopher Aristippus, who lived in the fifth century BC, used to advise people to focus on the present to avoid mental disturbance:
concentrate one’s mind on the day, and indeed on that part of the day in which one is acting or thinking. Only the present belongs to us, not the past nor what is anticipated. The former has ceased to exist, and it is uncertain if the latter will exist.
The philosopher Clinias, who lived in the fourth century BC, said that whenever he realised he was becoming angry, he would go and play music on his lyre to calm himself.
Doctors had their own approaches to dealing with mental health problems. Many recommended patients change their lifestyles to adjust their mental states. They advised people to take up a new regime of exercise, adopt a different diet, go travelling by sea, listen to the lectures of philosophers, play games (such as draughts/checkers), and do mental exercises equivalent to the modern crossword or sudoku.
Galen, a famous doctor, believed mental problems were caused by some idea that had taken hold of the mind. Pierre Roche Vigneron/Wikimedia For instance, the physician Caelius Aurelianus (fifth century AD) thought patients suffering from insanity could benefit from a varied diet including fruit and mild wine.
Doctors also advised people to take plant-based medications. For example, the herb hellebore was given to people suffering from paranoia. However, ancient doctors recognised that hellebore could be dangerous as it sometimes induced toxic spasms, killing patients.
Other doctors, such as Galen, had a slightly different view. He believed mental problems were caused by some idea that had taken hold of the mind. He believed mental problems could be cured if this idea was removed from the mind and wrote:
a person whose illness is caused by thinking is only cured by taking care of the false idea that has taken over his mind, not by foods, drinks, [clothing, housing], baths, walking and other such (measures).
Galen thought it was best to deflect his patients’ thoughts away from these false ideas by putting new ideas and emotions in their minds:
I put fear of losing money, political intrigue, drinking poison or other such things in the hearts of others to deflect their thoughts to these things […] In others one should arouse indignation about an injustice, love of rivalry, and the desire to beat others depending on each person’s interest.
4. Addressing mental health needs effort
Generally speaking, the ancients believed keeping our mental state healthy required effort. If we were anxious or angry or despondent, then we needed to do something that brought us the opposite of those emotions.
Watch some comedy, said physician Caelius Aurelianus. VCU Tompkins-McCaw Library/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA This can be achieved, they thought, by doing some activity that directly countered the emotions we are experiencing.
For example, Caelius Aurelianus said people suffering from depression should do activities that caused them to laugh and be happy, such as going to see a comedy at the theatre.
However, the ancients did not believe any single activity was enough to make our mental state become healthy. The important thing was to make a wholesale change to one’s way of living and thinking.
When it comes to experiencing mental health problems, we clearly have a lot in common with our ancient ancestors. Much of what they said seems as relevant now as it did 2,000 years ago, even if we use different methods and medicines today.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Konstantine Panegyres, McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, researching Greco-Roman antiquity, The University of Melbourne
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Human, Bird, or Dog Waste? Scientists Parsing Poop To Aid DC’s Forgotten River
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KFF Health News Peggy Girshman reporting fellow Jackie Fortiér joined a boat tour to spotlight a review of microbes in the Anacostia River, a step toward making the river healthier and swimmable. The story was featured on WAMU’s “Health Hub” on Feb. 26.
On a bright October day, high schoolers from Francis L. Cardozo Education Campus piled into a boat on the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. Most had never been on the water before.
Their guide, Trey Sherard of the Anacostia Riverkeeper, started the tour with a well-rehearsed safety talk. The nonprofit advocates for the protection of the river.
A boy with tousled black hair casually dipped his fingers in the water.
“Don’t touch it!” Sherard yelled.
Why was Sherard being so stern? Was it dangerously cold? Were there biting fish?
Because of the sewage.
“We get less sewage than we used to. Sewage is a code word for what?” Sherard asked the teenagers.
“Poop!” one student piped up.
“Human poop,” Sherard said. “Notice I didn’t say we get none. I said we get what? Less.”
Tours like this are designed to get young people interested in the river’s ecology, but it’s a fine line to tread — interacting with the water can make people sick. Because of the health risks, swimming hasn’t been legal in the Anacostia for more than half a century. The polluted water can cause gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses, as well as eye, nose, and skin infections.
The river is the cleanest it’s been in years, according to environmental experts, but they still advise you not to take a dip in the Anacostia — not yet, at least.
About 40 million people in the U.S. live in a community with a combined sewer system, where wastewater and stormwater flow through the same pipes. When pipe capacities are reached after heavy rains, the overflow sends raw wastewater into the rivers instead of to a treatment plant.
Federal regulations, including sections of the Clean Water Act, require municipalities such as Washington to reduce at least 85% of this pollution or face steep fines.
To achieve compliance, Washington launched a $2.6 billion infrastructure project in 2011. DC Water’s Clean Rivers Project will eventually build multiple miles-long underground storage basins to capture stormwater and wastewater and pump it to treatment plants once heavy rains have subsided.
The Anacostia tunnel is the first of these storage basins to be completed. It can collect 190 million gallons of bacteria-laden wastewater for later treatment, said Moussa Wone, vice president of the Clean Rivers Project.
Climate change is causing more intense rainstorms in Washington, so even after construction is complete in 2030, Wone said, untreated stormwater will be discharged into the river, though much less frequently.
“On the Anacostia, we’re going to be reducing the frequency of overflows from 82 to two in an average year,” Wone said.
But while the Anacostia sewershed covers 176 square miles, he noted, only 17% is in Washington.
“The other 83% is outside the district,” Wone said. “We can do our part, but everybody else has to do their part also.”
Upstream in Maryland’s Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, miles of sewer lines are in the process of being upgraded to divert raw sewage to a treatment plant instead of the river.
The data shows that poop is a problem for river health — but knowing what kind of poop it is matters. Scientists monitor E. coli to indicate the presence of feces in river water, but since the bacteria live in the guts of most warm-blooded animals, the source is difficult to determine.
“Is it human feces? Or is it deer? Is it gulls’? Is it dogs’?” said Amy Sapkota, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of Maryland.
Bacterial levels can fluctuate across the river even without rainstorms. An Anacostia Riverkeeper report found that in 2023 just three of nine sites sampled along the Washington portion of the watershed had consistently low E. coli levels throughout the summer season.
Sapkota is heading a new bacterial monitoring program measuring the amount of E. coli that different animal species deposit along the river.
The team uses microbial source tracking to analyze samples of river water taken from different locations each month by volunteers. The molecular approach enables scientists to target specific gene sequences associated with fecal bacteria and determine whether the bacteria come from humans or wildlife. Microbial source tracking also measures fecal pollution levels by source.
“We can quantify the levels of different bacterial targets that may be coming from a human fecal source or an animal fecal source,” Sapkota said.
Her team expects to have preliminary results this year.
The health risk to humans from river water will never be zero, Sapkota said, but based on her team’s research, smart city planning and retooled infrastructure could lessen the level of harmful bacteria in the water.
“Let’s say that we’re finding that actually there’s a lot of deer fecal signatures in our results,” Sapkota said. “Maybe this points to the fact that we need more green buffers along the river that can help prevent fecal contaminants from wildlife from entering the river during stormwater events.”
Washington is hoping to recoup some of the cost of building green spaces and other river cleanup. In January, the office of D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed a lawsuit seeking unspecified damages from the federal government over decades of alleged pollution of the Anacostia River.
Brenda Lee Richardson, coordinator of the Anacostia Parks & Community Collaborative, said the efforts to cut down on trash and sewage are paying off. She sees a river on the mend, with more plant and animal life sprouting up.
“The ecosystem seems a lot greener,” she said. “There’s stuff in the river now that wasn’t there before.”
But any changes to the waterfront need to be done with residents of both sides of the river in mind, she said.
“We want there to be some sense of equity as it relates to who has access,” she said. “When I look at who is recreating, it’s not people who look like me.”
Richardson has lived for 40 years in Ward 8 — a predominantly Black area on the east side of the river whose residents are generally less affluent than those on the west side. She and her neighbors don’t consider the Anacostia a place to get out and play, she said.
As the water quality slowly improves, Richardson said, she hopes the Anacostia’s reputation is also rehabilitated. Even if it’s not safe to swim in, Richardson enjoys boating trips like the one with the Anacostia Riverkeeper.
“To see all those creatures along the way and the greenery. It was comforting,” she said. “So rather than take a pill to settle my nerves, I can just go down the river.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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PS, We Love You
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PS, we love you. With good reason!
There are nearly 20,000 studies on PS listed on PubMed alone, and its established benefits include:
- significantly improving memory
- potential reversal (!) of neurodegeneration
- reduction of stress activation
- improvement in exercise capacity
- it even helps avoid rejection of medical implants
We’ll explore some of these studies and give an overview of how PS does what it does. Just like the (otherwise unrelated) l-theanine we talked about a couple of weeks ago, it does do a lot of things.
PS = Cow Brain?!
Let’s first address a concern. You may have heard something along the lines of “hey, isn’t PS made from cow brain, and isn’t that Very Bad™ for humans, mad cow disease and all?”. The short answer is:
Firstly: ingesting cow brain tissue is indeed generally considered Very Bad™ for humans, on account of the potential for transmission of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) resulting in its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease (CJD), whose unpleasantries are beyond the scope of this newsletter.
Secondly (and more pleasantly): whilst PS can be derived from bovine brain tissue, most PS supplements these days derive from soy—or sometimes sunflower lecithin. Check labels if unsure.
Using PS to Improve Other Treatments
In the human body, the question of tolerance brings us a paradox (not the tolerance paradox, important as that may also be): we must build and maintain a strong immune system capable of quickly adapting to new things, and then when we need medicines (or even supplements), we need our body to not build tolerance of them, for them to continue having an effect.
So, we’re going to look at a very hot-off-the-press study (Feb 2023), that found PS to “mediate oral tolerance”, which means that it helps things (medications, supplements etc.) that we take orally and want to keep working, keep working.
In the scientists’ own words (we love scientists’ own words because they haven’t been distorted by the popular press)…
❝This immunotherapy has been shown to prevent/reduce immune response against life-saving protein-based therapies, food allergens, autoantigens, and the antigenic viral capsid peptide commonly used in gene therapy, suggesting a broad spectrum of potential clinical applications. Given the good safety profile of PS together with the ease of administration, oral tolerance achieved with PS-based nanoparticles has a very promising therapeutic impact.❞
Nguyen et al, Feb 2023
In other words, to parse those two very long sentences into two shorter bullet points:
- It allows a lot of important treatments to continue working—treatments that the body would otherwise counteract
- It is very safe—and won’t harm the normal function of your immune system at large
This is also very consistent with one of the benefits we mentioned up top—PS helps avoid rejection of implants, something that can be a huge difference to health-related quality of life (HRQoL), never mind sometimes life itself!
What is PS Anyways, and How Does It Work?
Phosphatidylserine is a phospholipid, a kind of lipid, found in cell membranes. More importantly:
It’s a signalling agent, mainly for apoptosis, which in lay terms means: it tells cells when it’s time to die.
Cellular death sounds like a bad thing, but prompt and efficient cellular apoptosis (death) and resultant prompt and efficient autophagy (recycling) reduce the risk of your body making mistakes when creating new cells from old cells.
Think about photocopying:
- Situation A: You have a document, and you want to copy it. If you copy it before it gets messed up, your copy will look almost, if not exactly, like the original. It’ll be super easy to read.
- Situation B: You have a document, and you want to copy it, but you delay doing so for so long that the original is all scuffed and creased and has a coffee stain on it. These unwanted changes will get copied onto the new document, and any copy made of that copy will keep the problems too. It gets worse and worse each time.
So, using this over-simplifier analogy, the speed of ‘copying’ is a major factor in cellular aging. The sooner cells are copied, before something gets damaged, the better the copy will be.
So you really, really want to have enough PS (our bodies make it too, by the way) to signal promptly to a cell when its time is up.
You do not want cells soldiering on until they’re the biological equivalent of that crumpled up, coffee-stained sheet of paper.
Little wonder, then, that PS’ most commonly-sought benefit when it comes to supplementation is to help avoid age-related neurodegeneration (most notably, memory loss)!
Keeping the cells young means keeping the brain young!
PS’s role as a signalling agent doesn’t end there—it also has a lot to say to a wide variety of the body’s immunological cells, helping them know what needs to happen to what. Some things should be immediately eaten and recycled; other things need more extreme measures applied to them first, and yet other things need to be ignored, and so forth.
You can read more about that in Elsevier’s publication if you’re curious 🙂
Wow, what a ride today’s newsletter has been! We started at paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin, and got down to the nitty gritty with a bunch of hopefully digestible science!
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