Is it time to end daylight saving time? - “I have 7 kids & some of them have just real sleep difficulties. I always thought, ‘Why don’t we stop this insanity of changing our clocks? If I was a legislator, that’s what I would do.”

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Egg Substitutes for Cooking and Baking

Egg Substitutes for Cooking and Baking

Reading Time: 5 minutes Egg allergies are on the rise and one of the most common allergens in children, second only to dairy allergies. My most recent test showed that I had actually reversed my sensitivity to grains and dairy but still had a strong reaction to eggs. (A little parting gift from my autoimmune disease.) Avoiding eggs can …

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October 02, 2019 at 05:00PM Wellness Mama® https://ift.tt/2hMTHxr https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

How Neuroscience Could Explain the Rise of Addictions, Heart Disease and Diabetes in 21st Century America

The conditions of human life began to improve with the Enlightenment of the 18^th century, and we are better off now by many measures: food access, health, lifespan, and so on.

But it hasn’t been an unbroken line of advancement. In the last three decades, U.S. death rates have risen steeply from suicide and compulsive consumption of alcohol and drugs, which Princeton University professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton famously termed “deaths of despair.” Exceeding these deaths of despair by tenfold are rising deaths from type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease—caused significantly by compulsive consumption of what we might call “foods of despair,” the extremely sweet, fatty, high-calorie foods that comprise much of the American diet.

The medical community typically identifies each clinical manifestation as a separate “disease” or “disorder,” arising from internal “dysregulation.” Yet addictions, hypertension and type 2 diabetes are not dysregulations. Rather, they are predictable adaptations to life in a cage––a world-wide zoo where, deprived of challenges, we desperately seek distractions, quarrel, and grow fat. How did this happen?

Our ancestor half a billion years ago was a marine worm equipped with a brain. The worm learned and remembered where to find food and mates, how to avoid danger, and so on. The key was a neural circuit that drove the creature to seek food, sex, and safety––and rewarded each favorable result with a brief pulse of the neurochemical dopamine. The pulse of dopamine provided a pulse of satisfaction and a pause in seeking. As the pulse dissipated, seeking resumed to serve the next need. Humans retained this reward circuit because it is an efficient teacher. Thus, like our ancient progenitor, we continually seek the next positive surprise that will provide the next pulse of dopamine.

Emerging as a species 150,000 years ago, humans were continually challenged as we migrated throughout Africa and beyond—crossing mountain ranges, deserts, and oceans. Each challenge successfully met delivered a pulse. Humans in the wild found food only episodically, and every surprising morsel provided a pulse of satisfaction.

The risk of scarcity was reduced by sharing, so the human reward circuit evolved to deliver a pulse both for giving and for receiving. The core human features were ingenuity and gradual mastery, coupled to rewarding, egalitarian cooperation.

These qualities were slowly confounded by agriculture as certain groups and families captured the most fertile lands and accumulated surpluses. But modern industry abruptly changed the whole game. Now we obtain food and comfort without effort or surprise. Nor is there much sharing going on in the traditional sense—now, if we come up short, we resort to a credit card, and egalitarianism has been replaced by a widening chasm between the haves and have-nots.

Moreover, our collective genius has narrowed the possibilities for most individuals to exercise their natural gifts across the lifespan. We evolved to explore the planet, but now multitudes are confined to punch a ticket, scan an item, or sit in cubicles and stare at screens. Such activities, learned in minutes or days, present neither challenge nor surprise, so they are unrewarding. Lacking small pulses of dopamine, we grow uncomfortable and seek relief with substances that act powerfully on the reward circuit to release dopamine in great surges.

Every biological circuit responds to a surge by “adapting”—that is, by reducing its sensitivity to strong sustained stimulation. A surge of dopamine reduces the sensitivity of dopamine receptors, which calls for a larger surge and thus more of whatever drug (cocaine, heroin, nicotine, alcohol, sugar) caused it. These systems are neither broken nor “dysregulated;” they are behaving exactly as they were designed. But they evolved to serve small, episodic fluctuations, not chronic surges that lead inevitably to physiological and psychological despair. Of course, not everyone falls into this state of hopelessness: education, equality, and opportunities for meaningful work all help protect individuals from addiction and despair.

To treat the pathologies caused by drugs of despair and rich food, standard medicine seeks new drugs. But each new drug evokes a panoply of effects, plus further adaptations, so we teeter away from true health toward unstable conditions barely maintained through costly poly-pharmacy. Moreover, the drugs employed to treat addictions act by antagonizing the brain’s opioid receptors with the hope that blocking the reward circuit will reduce cravings. But strategies that rely on preventing satisfaction cannot work over the long run.

Instead, we must re-expand opportunities for small satisfactions via challenging activities that require life-long learning and thereby rescue the reward system from its pathological regime.

This will require serious social reorganization. For example, the most mind-numbing jobs are now the worst paid and often require a worker to find a second job. We could insist on better pay and shorter hours for the most mind-numbing work. With the time and spirit so liberated, we could expand opportunities for public service. Noticing the similarities between cave paintings and subway graffiti, we could expand opportunities for public art. Impossible?

Recall that starting December 11, 1941—five days after Pearl Harbor—car tires were rationed. Three weeks later, all car sales to civilians ceased, and the national speed limit was set at 35mph to save gasoline. Then gas was rationed, and sugar sales were limited to half a pound per person per week, half of what was then normal. Similar actions now could simultaneously reduce obesity, addiction, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes; a renewed sense that we all share the same lifeboat could reduce deaths of despair.

The Sleep Habits That Can Improve Your Grades, According to a New Study

Jeffrey Grossman set out to study how exercise affects college students’ grades. What he found, instead, offers uniquely specific insight into the impact sleep has on academic performance.

Grossman, a professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), asked 100 of his Introduction to Solid State Chemistry students to wear a Fitbit activity tracker for an entire semester. (Eighty-eight did.) He also worked with colleagues in MIT’s athletic department to create an exercise class—incorporating videos from his “hero,” “Insanity” creator Shaun T—that 22 of the students took throughout the semester. Grossman expected these students to perform better academically than their classmates—but after months of poring over the data, he says, an association just wasn’t there.

“It was disappointing, to be honest,” Grossman says. But “after going through this, we took a little break and said, ‘Wait a second. We don’t just have the active data; we have the inactive data.'” Grossman and his colleagues realized they had something rare: a relatively large amount of objective data on sleep duration, quality and consistency from a diverse group of people actively engaged in a learning environment. They ran new analyses, and started to see patterns unfolding.

Some of their findings—like the idea that getting more and higher quality sleep is associated with higher grades—are hardly shocking. But other conclusions go deeper than general sleep recommendations.

Among the most important findings, Grossman says, was that sleep consistency appears to be just as important as sleep duration and quality when it comes to academic performance. Most doctors recommend keeping sleep and rise times fairly constant throughout the week, to avoid disturbing the circadian rhythms that regulate wakefulness. Grossman’s data suggest that a uniform pattern may also help the brain process and cement new information, potentially resulting in higher grades.

“If you can just get the same amount each night, compared to someone who averages the same amount as you but gets less consistent sleep, you’re going to do better,” he says. “I think it has to do with how we rely on sleep to process information that we learn that day. When that processing is more variable, I think we just aren’t going to be as consistent.”

Further validating that theory, Grossman and his colleagues examined sleep data collected on the nights before tests and quizzes, and found that night-before duration had little bearing on students’ grades. “You can sleep a ton the night before or you can sleep very little the night before, and it doesn’t really have an [impact] on your performance,” he says. “What has an [impact] is [sleep during] the week before.”

The researchers also found that bedtime doesn’t matter—up to a point. Students in the study had an average bedtime around 2 a.m., and averaged seven hours of sleep per night, in keeping with standard sleep-length recommendations. As long as students turned in by roughly 2 a.m., the researchers found, sleep duration appeared to be the most important predictor of academic performance. But going to bed later than 2 a.m., Grossman says, was associated with lower class scores, even if students got as much sleep than those who went to bed earlier.

Grossman isn’t totally sure why that’s the case, but he has a few theories. “Maybe after that point the seven hours takes you to a time in the morning where you can no longer get the same type of sleep; maybe too many other things are going on,” he says. “It could just be that going to bed that late actually has an impact on the processing that your brain does when it’s consolidating memory.”

All told, Grossman found that sleep habits could explain about 25% of a student’s grade in his class. Rest was impactful enough, Grossman says, that it appeared to explain a long-term disparity he’d observed in his classes, where female students tended to get better grades than male peers. In the study, adjusting for sleep quality differences between men and women appeared to almost entirely explain that gap, suggesting that male students could perform just as well if they slept better. It wasn’t possible to tell from the study whether men need more sleep than women to achieve the same performance, or if male students were simply more likely than female peers to sacrifice sleep, but Grossman says the issue is worth further study.

While Grossman’s study looked specifically at college students, making it difficult to generalize the results to the entire population, he says many of the takeaways probably apply to other people, too—namely the importance of good quality, consistent rest, whether you’re in school or not. “It’s also just about clarity and thinking and idea generation throughout the day,” Grossman says. “You will be more mentally prepared for your day” if you get enough sleep.

Grossman isn’t giving up on his original hypothesis about fitness, either. “I still think the exercise [theory] is right,” he says, “and I’m going to bring my guy Shaun T back into the mix someday.”

High ambitions: Uruguay cannabis firm targets booming global market for medical marijuana

High ambitions: Uruguay cannabis firm targets booming global market for medical marijuana
Reuters: Health
In a white, sterilized laboratory on the outskirts of Uruguayan capital Montevideo, biochemist Javier Varela and his team are carefully cultivating plants for a booming multibillion-dollar global market in medical marijuana.

South Korea confirms new cases of African swine fever in North Korea border town

South Korea confirms new cases of African swine fever in North Korea border town
Reuters: Health
South Korea on Wednesday confirmed two additional cases of African swine fever at pig farms in Paju, a town near its border with North Korea, the country's agriculture ministry said, bringing its total number of cases of the disease to eleven.

Johnson & Johnson settles Ohio lawsuits to avoid federal trial

Johnson & Johnson settles Ohio lawsuits to avoid federal trial
Reuters: Health
Johnson & Johnson said on Tuesday it will pay $20.4 million to settle claims by two Ohio counties, allowing the U.S. healthcare giant to avoid an upcoming federal trial seeking to hold the industry responsible for the nation's opioid epidemic.