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"17 Ways to Cut Your Risk of Stroke, Dementia and Depression All at Once"

The main take aways:

The study, which looked at data from 59 meta-analyses, identified six factors that lower your risk of brain diseases:

• Low to moderate alcohol intake (Consuming one to three drinks a day had a smaller benefit than consuming less than one drink a day.)
• Cognitive activity, meaning regular engagement in mentally stimulating tasks like reading or doing puzzles
• A diet high in vegetables, fruit, dairy, fish and nuts
• Moderate or high levels of physical activity
• A sense of purpose in life
• A large social network

[...]

The study also identified 13 health characteristics and habits that make you more likely to develop dementia, a stroke or late-life depression. (Altogether, the protective and harmful factors add up to 19 factors because two of them, diet and social connections, can increase or decrease risk, depending on their type and quality.)

• High blood pressure
• High body mass index
• High blood sugar
• High total cholesterol
• Depressive symptoms
• A diet high in red meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, sweets and sodium
• Hearing loss
• Kidney disease
• Pain, particularly forms that interfere with activity
• Sleep disturbances (for example, insomnia or poor sleep quality) or sleep periods longer than eight hours
• Smoking history
• Loneliness or isolation
• General stress or stressful life events (as reported by study subjects)

One person's month-long sleep improvement efforts

From the author's summary at the end, emphasis mine:

Above all, my biggest takeaway from the month was that my sleep will be good if I make it a priority, and that sleeping well is under my control, even if I don’t always get to choose the ideal conditions to make it happen.

I don’t plan to be obsessive about forcing an early bed time on all occasions, especially if that means missing out on opportunities to socialize with people who don’t go to bed at 9:30 p.m. But I do think my decision to cut out screen time after 9 p.m. forced me to realize how much I had been trading off sleep for entertainment of dubious value.

"Better Ways Than BMI to Measure Obesity"

There is a reality to data and that is that most commonly a data point is meaningless without context. Whether that context is historical (the data is going up! the data is going down!) or context of additional variables. For example, someone telling you a weather forecast is useless without knowing where they are forecasting. Usually the answer is locally based, but if you turn on the news and hear about the blizzard that is coming, but you look outside and it is sunny with no clouds in the sky and no snow on the ground, well, this might need some clarification.

BMI is another example of this. The basis of the ranges were determined from white men, and then extrapolated to other genders and races. And also without context to underlying causes of obesity. The AMA is attempting to get physicians to decrease their usage of BMI as a standalone measurement and instead put forward other things, such as direct measuring of body fat, etc.

But now BMI should be given much less importance, the American Medical Association (AMA) says. Last month the leading physician's group recommended that practitioners de-emphasize BMI because it can get weight-related health risks wrong, especially when used as the sole diagnostic tool. The policy announcement also noted that BMI, originally developed from data on non-Hispanic white men, has played a role in perpetuating "racist exclusion" and causing "historical harm" by misidentifying the weight status of people in many racial and ethnic minority groups.

In discussing what to use in place of BMI:

That's essentially a tape measure around the waist. And the American Heart Association uses it to classify abdominal obesity at 35 inches for women and 40 inches for men, right?

Correct. But we should avoid repeating past mistakes by relying on waist circumference instead of directly measuring body fat. Like BMI, the standard cutoff values for waist circumference are based on white populations, so they may not be universally applicable. Waist circumference does not consider variations in height either, which is why incorporating additional measures such as waist-to-height ratio is important for a comprehensive assessment.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach for diagnosing obesity. It's a complex disease and should be assessed using multiple measures.

Study shows that electrical impulse treatment to senior brains could help resist effects of Alzheimers

A new study with the following dense title, "Long-lasting, dissociable improvements in working memory and long-term memory in older adults with repetitive neuromodulation" is pretty hard to grok and I bounced off of it. I heard about it from this article on Verge.com.

The Abstract:

The development of technologies to protect or enhance memory in older people is an enduring goal of translational medicine. Here we describe repetitive (4-day) transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) protocols for the selective, sustainable enhancement of auditory–verbal working memory and long-term memory in 65–88-year-old people. Modulation of synchronous low-frequency, but not high-frequency, activity in parietal cortex preferentially improved working memory on day 3 and day 4 and 1?month after intervention, whereas modulation of synchronous high-frequency, but not low-frequency, activity in prefrontal cortex preferentially improved long-term memory on days 2–4 and 1?month after intervention. The rate of memory improvements over 4?days predicted the size of memory benefits 1?month later. Individuals with lower baseline cognitive function experienced larger, more enduring memory improvements. Our findings demonstrate that the plasticity of the aging brain can be selectively and sustainably exploited using repetitive and highly focalized neuromodulation grounded in spatiospectral parameters of memory-specific cortical circuitry.

Will be curious to see if further studies come out of this and perhaps a new treatment for seniors becomes standard in an effort to improve memory recall for them.

For much of my life, salad was not a food I enjoyed. I've always hated lettuce. It was tasteless and it's texture made me gag and I just hated it. I'm not saying it was a reasonable or logical mentality. My wife convinced me to try spinach as an adult and I've found I am fine with it. It doesn't cause revulsion in me the way iceberg lettuce does. I use it in my smoothies and occasionally, like this week, I use it for lunch salads.

Now, I am not thrilled by spinach salad, but it is food. And it is healthy. Over the years my recipe has been purposefully simple and bland: spinach, chicken, almonds, olive oil, some garlic salt (not a lot, and mostly as part of cooking the chicken.)

This week I've added chopped raw bell pepper and I have to say, I quite liked it. I think I probably needed a little more chicken, but overall I was quite happy with this lunch.

I am determined to prioritize weightloss this year and get my health back to where it needs to be. We'll see how successful I am, but if today's salad holds my interest then it is an exciting development as a go-to option for my daily lunches.