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How to feed your gut | Life and style | The Guardian

If you were to view your microbiome as a garden, fibre would be your fertiliser. Spector reckons that most people need to double their intake. Foods containing the best fibre types for your microbes – AKA prebiotic foods – include artichokes, jerusalem artichokes, leeks, celery, chicory, onions and garlic. Variety is the top priority. “So, it’s not just focusing on one or two of these examples,” warns Spector. “Our latest research is showing that it’s not necessarily someone who calls themselves vegetarian who has the most healthy gut – it’s the person who eats more diversity of plants in a week. Having the same salad every day isn’t going to be as healthy as eating a rich diversity of food with occasional meat.” This could just as easily be a way of describing the Mediterranean diet, with its kaleidoscope of fruit, veg, nuts, grains and legumes.
#paleotherapy #food #microbiome #diversity - theguardian.com

Eating Salad Every Day Keeps Brains 11 Years Younger and Prevents Dementia, Study Shows

Nutritional epidemiologist Martha Clare Morris and her team at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found that people who ate one to two servings of leafy green vegetables each day experienced fewer memory problems and cognitive decline compared to people who rarely ate spinach. In fact, Morris estimates that veggie lovers who included about 1.3 servings a day into their diets had brains that were roughly 11 years younger compared to those who consumed the least amount of foods like spinach or kale.
#paleotherapy #memory #food #micro-biome #salad - newsweek.com

How Civilization Started | The New Yorker

there is a crucial, direct link between the cultivation of cereal crops and the birth of the first states. It’s not that cereal grains were humankind’s only staples; it’s just that they were the only ones that encouraged the formation of states. “History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit or sweet potato states,” he writes. What was so special about grains? The answer will make sense to anyone who has ever filled out a Form 1040: grain, unlike other crops, is easy to tax. Some crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava) are buried and so can be hidden from the tax collector, and, even if discovered, they must be dug up individually and laboriously. Other crops (notably, legumes) ripen at different intervals, or yield harvests throughout a growing season rather than along a fixed trajectory of unripe to ripe—in other words, the taxman can’t come once and get his proper due. Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ”
#history #politics #food #cities #taxes - newyorker.com

The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Restaurant | The New Yorker

Restaurant investing tempts because it allows one to be part of a project that is taken seriously in places like the Times. You can’t own one-forty-second of the next Zadie Smith novel. Restaurant investing is also tempting because of its relatively low entry price, compared with, say, backing a movie. And it seduces because of a category error: I thought I knew something about the business of hospitality, just because guests at a dinner party once said nice things about my panzanella.
#food #nyc #real-estate #ego - newyorker.com

The Best Thing to Eat Before a Workout? Maybe Nothing at All - The New York Times

“If we just think of this in evolutionary terms,” he said, “our ancestors would have had to expend a great deal of energy through physical activity in order to hunt and gather food. So, it would be perfectly normal for the exercise to come first, and the food to follow.”
#paleotherapy #food #epigenetics #diabetes - nytimes.com

The "True" Human Diet - Scientific American Blog Network

From the standpoint of paleoecology, the Paleolithic diet is a myth. Food choice is as much about what’s available to be eaten as it is about what a species evolved to eat. And just as fruits ripen, leaves flush, and flowers bloom predictably at different times of the year, foods available to our ancestors varied over deep time as the world changed around them from warm and wet to cool and dry and back again. Those changes are what drove our evolution.
#paleotherapy #food - blogs.scientificamerican.com

World-first trial shows improving diet can treat major depression - Medical News Today

The results of the study, published in the international journal BMC Medicine, showed that participants in the dietary intervention group had a much greater reduction in their depressive symptoms over the three-month period, compared to those in the social support group. At the end of the trial, a third of those in the dietary support group met criteria for remission of major depression, compared to 8 percent of those in the social support group.
#depression #food #micro-biome - medicalnewstoday.com

World-first trial shows improving diet can treat major depression - Medical News Today

In the study, adults with major depressive disorder were recruited and randomly assigned to receive either social support, which is known to be helpful for people with depression, or support from a clinical dietitian, over a three-month period. The dietary group received information and assistance to improve the quality of their current diets, with a focus on increasing the consumption of vegetables, fruits, wholegrains, legumes, fish, lean red meats, olive oil and nuts, while reducing their consumption of unhealthy 'extras' foods, such as sweets, refined cereals, fried food, fast-food, processed meats and sugary drinks. […] The results of the study, published in the international journal BMC Medicine, showed that participants in the dietary intervention group had a much greater reduction in their depressive symptoms over the three-month period, compared to those in the social support group. At the end of the trial, a third of those in the dietary support group met criteria for remission of major depression, compared to 8 percent of those in the social support group.
#depression #food - medicalnewstoday.com

Calorie restriction lets monkeys live long and prosper -- ScienceDaily

In 2009, the UW-Madison study team reported significant benefits in survival and reductions in cancer, cardiovascular disease, and insulin resistance for monkeys that ate less than their peers. In 2012, however, the NIA study team reported no significant improvement in survival, but did find a trend toward improved health. "These conflicting outcomes had cast a shadow of doubt on the translatability of the caloric-restriction paradigm as a means to understand aging and what creates age-related disease vulnerability," says Anderson, one of the report's corresponding authors. Working together, the competing laboratories analyzed data gathered over many years and including data from almost 200 monkeys from both studies. Now, scientists think they know why the studies showed different results.
#food #aging #calories - sciencedaily.com

Time-restricted feeding study shows promise in helping people shed body fat -- ScienceDaily

The first human test of early time-restricted feeding, or eTRF, found that this meal-timing strategy reduced swings in hunger and altered fat and carbohydrate burning patterns, which may help with losing weight. With eTRF, people eat their last meal by the mid-afternoon and do not eat again until breakfast the next morning. The findings were unveiled during a presentation at The Obesity Society Annual Meeting at Obesity Week 2016 in New Orleans, Louisiana. "Eating only during a much smaller window of time than people are typically used to may help with weight loss," said Courtney Peterson, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Nutrition Sciences at UAB. "We found that eating between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. followed by an 18-hour daily fast kept appetite levels more even throughout the day, in comparison to eating between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., which is what the average American does."
#food #weightloss - sciencedaily.com

The Natural Dietary Add-On Found To Treat Anxiety and Even Major Depression - PsyBlog

“We took measurements of the cytokines in the blood serum, as well as measured the productivity of cells that produced two important cytokines, interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFa). We saw a 14 percent reduction in the amounts of IL-6 among the students receiving the omega-3. …anything we can do to reduce cytokines is a big plus in dealing with the overall health of people at risk for many diseases.”
#food #anxiety - spring.org.uk

Cooking is the essential human act

Our 86 billion neurons need so much energy that if we shared a way of life with other primates we couldn’t possibly survive: there would be insufficient hours in the day to feed our hungry brain. It needs 500 calories a day to function, which is 25 percent of what our entire body requires. That sounds like a lot, but a single cupful of glucose can fuel the brain for an entire day, with just over a teaspoon being required per hour. Nevertheless, the brains of almost all other vertebrates are responsible for a mere 10 percent of their overall metabolic needs. We evolved and learned a clever trick in our evolutionary past in order to find the time to feed our neuron-packed brains: we began to cook our food. By so doing, more energy could be extracted from the same quantity of plant stuffs or meat than from eating them raw.
#brain #neurons #food #energy - nybooks.com

The Hunger in Our Heads

In fact, the researchers calculated that the exercisers consumed about 25 fewer calories than they did during their baseline session. The nonexercisers, however, consumed about 100 calories more.
#health #exercise #racery #food - nytimes.com

The Right Food Can Promote Trust And Closeness Between People - PsyBlog

The new study found people reached agreements twice as quickly and were more generous with their money after eating the same foods together.
#synchronize #food - spring.org.uk

Is depression a kind of allergic reaction?

Both cytokines and inflammation have been shown to rocket during depressive episodes, and – in people with bipolar – to drop off in periods of remission. Healthy people can also be temporarily put into a depressed, anxious state when given a vaccine that causes a spike in inflammation. Brain imaging studies of people injected with a typhoid vaccine found that this might be down to changes in the parts of the brain that process reward and punishment. There are other clues, too: people with inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis tend to suffer more than average with depression; cancer patients given a drug called interferon alpha, which boosts their inflammatory response to help fight the cancer, often become depressed as a side-effect.
#depression #food #inflamation #allergy - theguardian.com

Why does sugar in cornbread divide races in the South? | The Charlotte Observer

So many Southern food traditions are shared by both races. Most Southerners, black and white, revere fried chicken, pursue pork barbecue and exalt their grandmothers’ garden vegetables. So why is there such a fundamental difference between two styles of one basic bread? Culinary historians have debated this one for years: Did the descendants of slave cooks who were exposed to British baking styles come to value cornbread that was lighter and softer? Did the children of farm-based white Southerners get used to unsweetened cornbread that tasted more emphatically like corn? Whatever caused it, the line is drawn.
#food #race #the-south - charlotteobserver.com

Midnight munchies mangle memory: Eating at the wrong time impairs learning, memory -- ScienceDaily

Some genes involved in both the circadian clock and in learning and memory are regulated by a protein called CREB (cAMP response element-binding protein). When CREB is less active, it decreases memory, and may play a role in the onset of Alzheimer's disease. In the mice fed at the wrong time, the total activity of CREB throughout the hippocampus was significantly reduced, with the strongest effects in the day. However, the master pacemaker of the circadian system, the suprachiasmatic nucleus located in the hypothalamus, is unaffected. This leads to desynchrony between the clocks in the different brain regions (misalignment), which the authors suggest underlies the memory impairment. "Modern schedules can lead us to eat around the clock so it is important to understand how the timing of food can impact cogitation" says Professor Christopher Colwell from the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. "For the first time, we have shown that simply adjusting the time when food is made available alters the molecular clock in the hippocampus and can alter the cognitive performance of mice." Eating at the wrong time also disrupted sleep patterns. The inappropriate feeding schedule resulted in the loss of the normal day/night difference in the amount of sleep although the total time spent asleep over 24 hours was not changed. Sleep became fragmented, with the mice catching up on sleep by grabbing more short naps throughout the day and night.
#food #circadian #learning - sciencedaily.com

Variable rewards rock again!

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that the majority of children and adults chose a half-sized portion paired with a toy or monetary prize over a full-sized portion without a toy or monetary prize. The price of the two options was kept the same. Great, right? But it gets better. Not only can a small prize motivate the healthier meal choice, but, in fact, the mere prospect of getting it is more motivating than the prize itself. In other words, the researchers found that people were more likely to choose a smaller meal for the chance to win a $10 lottery than to get a guaranteed reward. The premiums in the study were the chance to win $10, $50 or $100.
#managing #food #motivation #games #fMRI - sciencedaily.com

Animal awareness of others' needs

As long ago as 1959, Russell Church of Brown University set up a test which allowed laboratory rats in half of a cage to get food by pressing a lever. The lever also delivered an electric shock to rats in the other half of the cage. When the first group realised that, they stopped pressing the lever, depriving themselves of food. In a similar test on rhesus monkeys reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1964, one monkey stopped giving the signal for food for 12 days after witnessing another receive a shock. There are other examples of animals preferring some sort of feeling over food.
#managing #food #consciousness #pain - economist.com

The Dark Side of Your Fitbit And Fitness App - The Daily Beast

I equate using a fitness tracker or food calorie tracker as a marker of dishonesty with ourselves. We are missing a pivotal step: self-reflection. It’s really easy to buy a Nike Fuel band and wear it. It’s much harder, however, to get deep with yourself. Fitness apps are a flawed, abbreviated version of this self-reflection process. They focus too much on the number of steps, calories, or distance traveled. Fitness tracking devices distract us from what really needs to happen: we need to look at ourselves naked in the mirror and have an honest conversation with our naked self about the status of our health.
#running #food #meditation - thedailybeast.com

Allen and Son BBQ

Keith Allen chops his own wood and tends his own pit, positioning the coals so that their contact with drippings from the meat will produce precisely the smoky flavor he’s looking for. “I’m trying to get the taste,” he told us. “Everybody else is just trying to get done.”
#managing #food #North-Carolina #the-south - newyorker.com

A new restaurant in LA

At Sqirl, a tiny restaurant in a strange neighborhood, a young chef is serving up “a sneaky sort of complicated simplicity”
#food #california - bloomberg.com

Five day 'fasting' diet slows down ageing and may add years to life - Telegraph

“Strict fasting is hard for people to stick to, and it can also be dangerous, so we developed a complex diet that triggers the same effects in the body,' said Professor Valter Longo, USC Davis School of Gerontology and director of the USC Longevity Institute. “I've personally tried both, and the fasting mimicking diet is a lot easier and also a lot safer. “I think based on the markers for ageing and disease in humans it has the potential to add a number of years of life but more importantly to have a major impact on diabetes, cancer, heart disease and other age-related disease.”
#health #food #aging #life-logging - telegraph.co.uk

Since 1960, weight up 18.5% for American women, 17.6% for men

The average American is 33 pounds heavier than the average Frenchman, 40 pounds heavier than the average Japanese citizen, and a whopping 70 pounds heavier than the average citizen of Bangladesh. To add up to one ton of total mass, it takes 20 Bangladeshis but only 12.2 Americans.
#health #food - washingtonpost.com

Urban Blight Comes to the West Village

Cafe Angelique reportedly closed when its sixteen-thousand-dollar rent increased to forty-two thousand dollars. A Gray’s Papaya on Eighth Street closed after its owner reported a rent increase of twenty thousand dollars per month.
#food #nyc #real-estate - newyorker.com

No link found between saturated fat and heart disease

The team, whose results appear in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, conducted a "meta-analysis" of data from 72 studies involving more than 600,000 participants from 18 countries. A key finding was that total saturated fat, whether measured in the diet or the bloodstream, showed no association with heart disease. In addition, levels of "healthy" polyunsaturated fats such as omega 3 and omega 6 had no general effect on heart disease risk.
#health #food - telegraph.co.uk