Unfortunately,
breast-feeding until that age is often difficult, if not impossible,
because mothers have to return to work, and children go off to preschool
or day care. So we often replace human milk with the milk of cows or
other animals. But at a certain point, we have to acknowledge that we
are the only mammals on the planet that continue to consume milk after
childhood, often in great amounts.
More and
more evidence is surfacing, however, that milk consumption may not only
be unhelpful, it might also be detrimental. This is in spite of the
fact that the United States Department of Agriculture and other
organizations advocate that even adults should drink at least three cups a day.
Photo
Credit
Nellie Doneva/Abilene Reporter-News, via Associated Press
More than 10,000 years ago,
when human beings began to domesticate animals, no adults or older
children consumed milk. Many people don’t drink it today because they
are lactose intolerant. They do just fine.
But if you believe the
advertising of the dairy industry, and the recommendations of many
scientific bodies, they are missing out on some fantastic benefits to
milk consumption: that milk is good for bones, contains calcium and
vitamin D, and “does a body good.”
There’s not a lot of evidence for these types of claims. In 2011, The Journal of Bone and Mineral Research published a meta-analysis
examining whether milk consumption might protect against hip fracture
in middle-aged and older adults. Six studies containing almost 200,000
women could find no association between drinking milk and lower rates of
fractures.
More recent research confirms these findings. A study published in JAMA Pediatrics
this year followed almost 100,000 men and women for more than two
decades. Subjects were asked to report on how much milk they had
consumed as teenagers, and then they were followed to see if that was
associated with a reduced chance of hip fractures later in life. It
wasn’t.
A just-released study in The BMJ
that followed more than 45,000 men and 61,000 women in Sweden age 39
and older had similar results. Milk consumption as adults was associated
with no protection for men, and an increased risk of fractures in
women. It was also associated with an increased risk of death in both
sexes.
This wasn’t a randomized controlled
trial, and no one should assume causality here. But there’s no
association with benefits, and a significant association with harms.
Even studies that examine the nutrients in milk, trying to look for protective effects, often come up short. A 2007 meta-analysis
in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition examined high-quality
studies of how calcium intake was related to fractures. The many studies
of more than 200,000 people age 34 to 79 could find no link between
total calcium intake and the risk of bone fractures.
This
meta-analysis also reviewed randomized controlled trials that examined
if calcium supplements could lower the risk of fracture. More than 6,000
middle-aged and older adults participated in these studies, where
subjects were randomly assigned to get extra calcium or a placebo. Not
only did the extra calcium not reduce the rate of fractures, the
researchers were concerned that it may have increased the risk of hip fractures.
Curtis Penfold got kicked out of his apartment, fired from his job, and left Brigham Young University all in the same week.
He left BYU—a private university operated by The Church of Latter-day Saints—because he had started to disagree with some of the Church’s views, causing tension between him and school officials. His exit from the school caused him to lose his on-campus job, and he subsequently resigned from the Mormon Church. Resigning from the church resulted in getting kicked out of his religiously-affiliated private housing, and he received angry emails from old friends and phone calls from his disappointed parents who said he “lost the light” and “used to be so good.”
“I felt so hated by this community I used to love,” Penfold said.
Penfold originally went to BYU to be around fellow Mormons. But over the course of the two-and-a-half years he spent there, he started to find the lack of LGBT rights in the church distasteful and was unable to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the evil he saw in the world. This loss of faith in God went beyond his separation from Mormonism, leading to months of depression, anxiety over the prospect of no afterlife, and suicidal thoughts. He’s better now, but for a while there were days when he wouldn’t even leave his bed.
Like Penfold, many who leave religion in America become isolated from their former communities, which can make them anxious, depressed, or even suicidal. Others feel liberated. No deconversion story is the same, but many who leave behind strongly-held religious beliefs can see an impact on their health.
Americans are less religious than ever. A third of American adults under 30, and a fifth of all Americans don’t identify with any religion, according to a 2012 study by Pew Research (an increase from 15 percent in 2007). But though scientists have studied people who leave cults, research on the health effects of leaving religion is slim.
There are some studies comparing the health of religious and nonreligious people. A 2010 study
by Gallup showed that nonreligious people are more likely to smoke and less likely to eat healthy and exercise than the faithful. A 2004 study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry showed that religiously unaffiliated depressed inpatients are more likely to display suicidal behaviors than religiously affiliated patients. And a 2011 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
showed that people in economically developed societies tend to have similar levels of subjective well-being regardless of religious affiliation. But studies rarely seem to single out people who have left religion. Even the Penn State study didn’t clarify how recently people had deconverted. Recent deconverts are, understandably, those most likely to see health effects, according to Dr. Darrel Ray.
an organization that connects nonbelievers with therapists and each other. According to Ray, it generally takes depressed deconverts two to three years for their health to bounce back. A few years after leaving their religion, they tend to reestablish a social community and rid themselves of guilt they may have felt over premarital sex, depression over losing God, and anxiety about death and hell.
not all of his clients recover within the typical three years, though. Getting over a fear of death after believing in an afterlife for so long takes some of them five years or longer. And about five percent of his clients can take even more time to stop fearing hell. Ray often compares learning about hell to learning a language.
“When you were five years old and learning English, you never stopped to ask your parents why you weren’t learning German,” said Ray, who uses cognitive behavioral therapy to decatastrophize the concept of hell for clients. “You just learn it. The same is often true of religion. When you’re taught about hell and eternal damnation at ages four through seven, these strong concepts are not going to easily leave you. Just like it’s hard to unlearn English, it’s hard to unlearn the
concept of hell.”
Dr. Marlene Winell, a California psychologist and author of Leaving the Fold,
compares leaving religion to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She even created a term for it: religious trauma syndrome (RTS), which she defines in an article for British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies as “struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination.” Not every deconvert goes through RTS, but she writes that like PTSD, the impact of RTS is “long-lasting, with intrusive thoughts, negative emotional states, impaired social functioning, and other problems.” RTS is not recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, though, and some critics say it is just PTSD, applied to religion.
Any negative experiences after leaving religion, from depression to social isolation, can take a toll on your physical health. Isolation, according to a six-year study out of the University of Chicago, can cause health problems such as disrupted sleep, elevated blood pressure, and a 14 percent greater risk of premature death. Depression can cause fatigue, trouble concentrating, headaches, and digestive disorders; and persistent anxiety can cause muscle tension and difficulty sleeping, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Anxiety is also sometimes linked to stomach ulcers, said Dr. Javier Campos.
Campos, a family practice doctor in Kerrville, Texas, says he will sometimes ask patients about their spiritual lives, if he thinks it’s affecting their health or if they’re going through the loss of a loved one. He’s observed a link between his patients’ thoughts on the afterlife and their physical health.
“If you have this thought of hell and that you’re going to be punished for unbelief, it [sometimes] translates into other sematic symptoms, such as headaches, anxiety, and needing to be on medication to sleep,” Campos said.
There are now several resources to help combat negative health outcomes after leaving religion, beyond taking medicine for the symptoms or seeing a therapist. Recovering From Religion has monthly support groups across the world and is about to offer a phone hotline for those struggling with deconversion. Journey Free, an organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area, offers an onlinesupport group for deconverts and weekend retreats where small groups come together to help and support each other. There are even groups that are essentially atheist churches, where deconverts can go to find weekly community in a nonreligious context.
Not every recent deconvert necessarily needs these resources, though. Some who leave religion become healthier than they were before. This was the case for Annie Erlandson.
Raised Evangelical Christian in Lincoln, Nebraska, Erlandson developed anorexia at age nine, modeling after her pastor father, who wrote a book about his own eating disorder. But Erlandson’s struggles with food were tied to her beliefs. She was petrified of growing into womanhood, fearing she would cause men to lust after her and sin. She thought if she could prevent her first period, she could prevent growing breasts and minimize sin. Finally at age 15, doctors caught on to her persistent low weight and diagnosed her with anorexia.
After this, Erlandson began doubting Christianity, and eventually, she lost her faith.
Like Erlandson, some people’s health improves after deconverting because they stop practicing negative health behaviors that may have been tied to their religion. For example, leaving a faith such as Christian Science, which dissuades medical treatment, obviously opens up more opportunities for healthcare intervention.
Other negative health behaviors sometimes associated with being religious, according to social psychologist Dr. Clay Routledge in Psychology Today, are cognitive dissonance (consistent religious doubts can harm your health) and avoidant coping. An example of the latter is the attitude
that things are “all in God’s hands,” which could potentially keep people from taking action on behalf of their own health.
Unlike those who become isolated from community after losing their faith, Erlandson’s social life improved drastically after her deconversion. She began hanging out with theatre kids and people in the local punk rock scene.
“I never really had a social group when I was a Christian,” Erlandsonsaid. “I tried joining a youth group and just never felt like I connected with them. I remember one time, when I was nine, being in
church during a hymn and everyone was singing and raising their hands and closing their eyes. I didn’t feel it. This wave of isolation and trepidation came over me. Everyone seemed engaged except for me. I knew I was not like everyone else.”
But not everyone's health and well-being improves after leaving a religion. Since for many people, religion means being part of a community, and belief in an afterlife can make death less frightening, leaving that behind can lead to isolation and anxiety. The end of a positive religious experience can lead to a decrease in health, as was the case for Penfold. But leaving a negative religious experience may be a way to boost health, especially if someone has a nonreligious community to support them, as Erlandson did. But one way or another, a person’s faith, or lack thereof, is often so important that it affects physical, as well as spiritual, well-being.
Sometimes I think I am obsessed with it and I can’t get enough. Add the fact that it “seems” like this is the winter that will never end, and the thought of curling up on the couch with a giant bowl of buttered popcorn and a movie sounds like bliss.
However, we ALL know how we feel after we binge.
Put crap in and guess what??? Get crap out. Never mind the feeling of guilt than can take over faster than you can get off that couch, but after you’re initial high from all the butter and starch, you get a nice crash that just begins the domino effect of trying to stay awake. And we wonder why we’re tired!
Energy comes from two main things; exercise and food. I would even say food is the predecessor as it has the vital role of whether or not you keep your blood sugar levels steady (awake) or up and down (crash).
Ever wonder why you tend to grab crackers, cereal or other sweets when you are tired? You could say that it’s “just a snack”, but when quick fixes are what you “crave” before any thought is put in it, you are in survival mode.
So how does one curb this? How do you take energetic throughout the day without a “treat” in the afternoon and buckets of coffee at your disposal?
Well just like the rest of it; it’s REALLY complicated. Not. No rocket science here. It’s plain and simple planning. Shocking I know.
Here are 4 ways to boost your energy in the afternoon:
1. Out of sight, out of mind.
If those unhealthy snacks are not in the house, you are way more likely not to eat them. JUST DON’T BUY THEM!
2. Plan your meals and snacks.
I never leave my house without my lunch and at least two snacks. Yes I am human and once in a while I don’t crave what I have but I eat in anyway because half the time it’s just hunger; thus the craving is gone.
3. Don’t over-eat.
Ever wonder why you crave sweets after a big meal? If you are eating a meal high in protein and low in carbohydrates (which is good for weight loss), you could be decreasing your serotonin levels (the happy hormone). Serotonin is increased following a sugary, carbohydrate diet. Eating too large of a meal can increase this risk and drive you towards a “fix” after.
4. Protein protein protein!!!
Yes I know I just said too much can lower serotonin, but “too much” of anything is never a good idea. Balance is key. If you have some protein with every meal AND snack, you balance your blood sugar because protein slows down the digestive process, slowing down the production of insulin thus lowering the amount of sugar that is released in the blood. The slower the process, the fuller you feel longer and less likely to crash.
Now none of this is new but sometimes people need a friendly “kick in the pants” as to why they would rather nap at 3pm than finish that last report.
And here’s a nice little FYI… for all of you trying desperately to stay awake on coffee; you’re almost doing yourself a disservice as caffeine lowers serotonin too.
Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.
Samantha Montpetit-Huynh is the mother of two beautiful girls and the founder of Core Expectations, Toronto‘s only full services wellness team that delivers personal training, abdominal rehabilitation and other support services to the homes and offices of pregnant women and new moms across the GTA.
Greatist News examines and explains the trends and studies making headlines in fitness, health, and happiness. Check out all the news here.
There’s been no shortage of articles touting the benefits of quick, intense exercise. A new study in the International Journal Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism just dug a little deeper to compare oxygen consumption — an indication of metabolism speed — between athletes who performed sprint intervals versus longer bouts of endurance exercise.
The Study The researchers asked eight male students to partake in either 30 minutes of endurance exercise or two-minutes of sprint intervals, three times a week for six weeks. Researchers measured their oxygen consumption (VO2) during and after 24 hours of exercise. Their VO2 was 150 percent higher during endurance exercise than sprinting intervals, yet after 24 hours the overall amount of oxygen consumed between athletes was nearly identical.
Can We Trust It? The study suggests that when it comes to exercise and metabolism, intensity may be just as important as how long we’re hitting the roads. For those who don’t have 30 minutes to spare, two minutes of (now here’s the key!) intense sprinting will boost metabolism over the next day just as much as a longer aerobic jaunt.
On the flip side, the results are based on a super small sample and only included males subjects. The abstract also leaves us wondering what the two aerobic exercises were, exactly, and what shape the men were in to start with. Caveats aside, there is enough science to say that aerobic exercise will help people get healthy and happy, so make sure to squeeze in some heart-pumping cardio, no matter how many minutes long.
Do you think these results are correct? What do you prefer: short intervals or longer bouts of cardio?
Greatist is the fastest-growing fitness, health and happiness start-up. Check out more tips, expert opinion and fun times at Greatist.com.
Forget brain-training exercises, 12-hour shifts and those long, uninterrupted, caffeine-fueled study binges. When you really need new information to sink in, you can’t skimp on taking breaks, new research suggests.
That’s the message from a soon-to-be-published study by psychologists and neuroscientists at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, who asked a small group of normally aging elderly men and women to recall as many details as possible from two stories they were told. Following one of the stories (but not always the same one for all the participants), the men and women were instructed to relax, take a brief break and close their eyes for 10 minutes in a dark room. Following the other story, those same participants were instead distracted with a new task, spotting the differences between pairs of nearly identical images. Overall, the study participants remembered many more details of whichever story they heard before they were told to rest — and their striking memory boost persisted even a full week out after the story-telling.
Take heed, students, doctors and anyone else who has to process large amounts of information: the elderly may worry most about memory, but given what we know about how memories form, these new findings have implications for people of all ages.
Previous research has already shown that both the young and the old have better recall of, say, a list of words if they’re allowed to rest for a few minutes in between learning the words and then regurgitating them. What this latest study adds, however, is evidence that a few minutes of wakeful rest may have an effect even on long-term memory consolidation.
In fact, when we first encounter new information, it seems, we are probably “just at a very early stage of memory formation,” according to Michaela Dewar, the research fellow who is first author on the new study. “Further neural processes have to occur after this stage for us to be able to remember this information at a later point in time,” she told reporters.
Those neural processes don’t have to be consciously planned, however. Research on rats has shown the animals will “re-play” in their brains the things that have just happened to them — things like walking through a maze — if they are given some idle time. Scans of human brains suggest that people do the same thing, and, importantly, that this brain activity occurs automatically, without people having to think about it. The volume of that brain activity is then linked to memory retention later.
Similarly, there is a growing body of evidence on the crucial role of sleep in memory consolidation. The precise mechanisms are not well understood, but sleep seems important both for “declarative” memory (remembering facts) and especially for “procedural” memory — remembering how to do things, like learning to ride a bike or to play scales on a piano. In fact, it’s even been suggested that sleep’s major role in procedural memory is the reason that infants spend most of their lives asleep; they need that time, perhaps, to consolidate new memories about how to control their young bodies.
But if resting, either while awake or asleep, is so important for memory consolidation, then it’s unfortunate there seem to be so very many distractions everywhere we turn. “In this day and age of information overload there are few opportunities to sit back and rest,” Dewar and her colleagues write in their new paper, to be published in Psychological Science. Whether at work or at school, to learn new tasks well, it may help to schedule in some genuine down time.
People following a Mediterranean-style diet may have the best chance of keeping weight off — and doing it without causing negative side effects — according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers led by Cara Ebbeling at Boston Children’s Hospital compared three different diets in people who had already lost weight. Knowing that dieters often struggle to maintain their slimmer bodies, the researchers sought to study the impact of the diets on energy expenditure — that is, which diet helps people burn the most calories a day and would, therefore, help keep them from regaining the weight. The researchers measured the participants’ levels of hormones, enzymes, blood fats and insulin sensitivity, and other markers of heart health and diabetes risk.
The study included 21 overweight and obese adults, aged 18 to 40, who first followed a three-month diet plan (containing 45% of total calories from carbohydrates, 30% from fat and 25% from protein) and lost 10% to 15% of their body weight. A month later, participants were randomly rotated through the three test diets, each for one month at a time:
Low-fat: about 20% of total calories from fat, 60% from carbohydrates and 20% from protein. The diet focuses on whole-grain foods and fruits and vegetables, and reduces intake of fatty meats, oils, nuts and other high-fat products
Low-carb: modeled after the Atkins diet, with 10% of total calories from carbs, 30% from protein and 60% from fat. The diet minimizes intake of carbohydrates, including bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, baked goods and starchy vegetables, while upping consumption of beef, fish, chicken, eggs, cheese and some fruits and veggies
Low-glycemic index: similar to the Mediterranean diet, with 40% of total calories from carbs, 40% from fat and 20% from protein. The diet emphasizes whole grains like oatmeal and brown rice, low-fat meats like fish, fruits and vegetables, beans and healthy fats from olive oil and nuts. It avoids highly processed, sugary carbs and snack foods.
Participants on the low-carb diet burned the most calories — on average 325 calories more a day compared with the low-fat group — but there was a side effect. These dieters also saw increases in the stress hormone cortisol and CRP, a marker of inflammation and a risk factor for heart disease. (In another, unrelated study published in BMJ on Tuesday, researchers confirmed that Swedish women on a low-carbohydrate diet such as Atkins increased their risk of heart disease by 28% compared to women not on such diets.)
People on the low-glycemic index diet burned about 150 calories more each day than the low-fat group, about the equivalent of an hour of moderate exercise, but without the harmful heart effects. The low-fat dieters burned the fewest calories a day, and they also showed increases in triglycerides and lower levels of good cholesterol.
“For weight loss and heart disease prevention, avoid diets that severely restrict any major nutrient, either fat or carbohydrate,” study author Dr. David Ludwig, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, told Bloomberg News. “Instead focus on reducing the highly processed carbohydrates that cause surges and crashes in blood sugar like white bread, white rice, prepared breakfast cereals, those low-fat snack foods and concentrated sugars.”
Those surges and crashes may trigger increases in hunger and appetite, by prompting the brain to seek out calories to make up for the loss it senses. If the body thinks it’s not getting enough calories, it also dials down metabolism to conserve energy — and that could lead people to regain lost weight.
What the study suggests is that a calorie isn’t just a calorie. “It says that from a metabolic perspective all calories are not alike,” Ludwig told the Boston Globe. “The quality of the calories going in affects the number of calories going out.”
Ludwig says the low-glycemic index diet represents a good “middle ground” — it doesn’t drastically reduce any major nutrient, and instead focuses on including a wide variety of foods with high-quality nutrients — for maintaining weight loss.
Some nutrition and weight loss researchers commenting on the new study qualified its results. In an interview with USA Today, Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University and author of Why Calories Count, noted, for example, that longer-term studies of people dieting in the real world (in contrast, the current study gave participants prepared food, much of which they ate at the hospital) showed little difference between different types of diets on weight loss and maintenance. The key is simply to eat less, she said.
Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.
Exercise does a lot of good things — it burns calories, helps keep your weight in check and lowers your risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Now add one more thing to the list: physical activity can change your DNA.
Unlike the aberrations and genetic mutations caused by carcinogens and toxins, exercise-induced alterations to DNA are more like tune-ups, helping muscles to work better and more efficiently. What’s more, these changes occur even after a single 20-minute workout.
Juleen Zierath, a professor of physiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, reports with her colleagues in the journal Cell Metabolism about these very early changes that muscle cells undergo the first time you get off the couch and into the gym. The researchers worked with a group of 14 young men and women who were relatively sedentary, and asked them to work out on an exercise bike that measured their maximum activity levels. The participants also volunteered to give up a little bit of muscle, from their quadriceps, in a relatively painless biopsy procedure performed under local anesthesia. The researchers took the biopsy of muscle cells once before the participants exercised, and again within 20 minutes afterward.
Using the biopsied samples, researchers compared the activity in a series of muscle-related genes before and after exercise. More genes were turned on in the cells taken after the exercise and the participants’ DNA showed less methylation, a molecular process in which chemicals called methyl groups settle on the DNA and limit the cell’s ability to access, or switch on, certain genes. By controlling how much methylation goes on in certain cells at specific times, the body regulates which genes in the DNA are activated — that’s what differentiates the development of an an eye cell, for example, from that of a liver cell.
Methylation also helps to prime muscle cells for a bout of exercise, getting them to pump out the right enzymes and nutrients the muscle needs to get energy and burn calories while you’re pounding the pavement during that mile-long jog. “We are trying to get at the early messages that the muscle is [receiving in order] to say, ‘Something is happening here, we need to coordinate so we can get more enzymes and more machinery on board so we can cope with the demands of this exercise,’” says Zierath.
The more intense the exercise, she says, the more the methyl groups are on the move. She and her team were able to see this firsthand by comparing gene activity in participants who also agreed to exercise at two different intensities over a period of a week. On one visit, they were asked to cycle until they reached 40% of their maximum capacity; on another occasion, they biked until they reached 80% of their maximum. The muscle biopsies following the 80% sessions showed a lower concentration of methyl groups — and therefore more RNA, which is the first byproduct of gene activity — than samples taken after the 40% sessions.
To confirm the role of exercise on gene expression in muscle, the scientists then studied how calcium affected the entire system. When muscle cells start to gear up for intense activity like exercise, they release calcium, which fuels the contraction process. When the scientists blocked calcium production, the effect disappeared, and the muscles didn’t contract as much.
That’s when Zierath threw in some coffee — or more specifically, caffeine. Caffeine triggers the release of calcium, and can enhance the way methyl groups move aside to turn on the genes that help muscles contract. When she added caffeine to a lab dish containing cells from the leg muscles of rats, the muscle cells showed lower concentrations of methyl groups and more mRNA — a similar effect as seen after exercise — as she expected.
But, says Zierath, that doesn’t mean you can skip the workout for a cup of coffee instead. “Most of the physiological effect of the caffeine we drink is on the central nervous system, and not dispersed to all the muscles,” she says. “In order to get the same kind of effect we saw in the cells, you would have to drink 50 cups of coffee a day, which is close to the lethal dose. In my mind, half an hour of moderately high intensity exercise is sufficient to do the same thing.”
Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny . You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.
Headache. Nausea. Cottonmouth. An achy, uncomfortable and just yucky sensation. What are these symptoms of? If you have to ask, then you’ve never had the dreaded hangover before.
It can be difficult to avoid a hangover after a long night of drinking once your head has already hit the pillow for the night. But can you prevent a hangover before it happens? And can you remedy it once you’ve woken up the next day? Fortunately I have a few tips that work for both. They may not be scientifically proven, but they have worked wonders on many a hungover person, and I hope they do the same for you.
The first fact to know before getting into detail about how to deal with a hangover is to know exactly what causes one. According to the Mayo Clinic, a hangover is the body’s reaction to alcohol, shown in several different ways. Alcohol causes your blood vessels to expand, which can cause that pounding headache. Alcohol also causes your body to produce more urine, which causes you to urinate more than usual, which can lead to dehydration, nausea, lightheadedness and dizziness. Alcohol also makes you sleepy, but will not necessarily lead to a good night sleep, leaving you feeling groggy and fatigued in the morning.
Here are my quick and simple tips to not only kicking that hangover, but preventing it from even happening:
Eat - Make sure to eat something substantial before going out drinking. Carbs and protein are important--something that will “stick to your ribs,” so to speak. Don’t stuff your face, but make sure you are satisfied with your meal before you start to drink. This will help to soak up that alcohol so your empty stomach doesn’t suffer.
Hydrate - Throughout the night, it is incredibly important to stay hydrated. Alcohol will dehydrate you by making you have to urinate a lot and very often. That water needs to be replenished. After every one or two drinks, drink a glass of water. This will take the place of any water you are losing while drinking. This will also be effective if you are drinking a lot of sweet drinks; that sugar will go straight to your head. The best way neutralize and water down that sugar is to go heavy on the H20 throughout the night.
Medicate - Before I go to sleep after I’ve been drinking, I make sure to ingest two things before I fall asleep: two chewable vitamins and an entire bottle of Gatorade. The chewable vitamins work as a way to introduce some nutrients back into my body and the Gatorade replenishes my body of all the electrolytes that have been drained as I’ve consumed far too much alcohol throughout the night. When I remember to do this, I don’t wake up with even the slightest headache, let alone any other hangover symptoms.
Satiate - If you are unlucky enough to wake up in the morning after a night of drinking and you are cursed with the classic hangover symptoms, it’s important to get some food into your body as soon as possible to soak up all that booze that is just sitting in your stomach. Breakfast or brunch, depending on when you wake up the next day, is essential. I automatically go for an egg dish that includes one fatty meat, i.e., bacon or sausage, and a starch, such as home fries, potato hash, fries, etc. These three elements mixed together are the ultimate hangover remedy for me.
Bonus: Hair of the Dog - This may or may not be a myth, but for me it works like a charm. The school of thought for this remedy is that the only way to conquer that hangover is to indulge in the hair of the dog that bit you, aka, have another drink! My favorite hair of the dog beverage is a bloody mary, mostly because the spicy flavors and the thickness of the tomato juice always wake me up and soak up all that alcohol from the night before. Plus, they’re absolutely delicious! It really doesn’t take more than one drink to start to get your body back in motion. The point of hair of the dog isn’t to get drunk again but to introduce some new alcohol into your body so it ignores the alcohol from before.
Have any hangover remedies that work for you? Let us know in the comments!
Here's another reason to log off at a reasonable hour: exposure to dim lighting at night — such as that generated by a TV screen, computer or night-light — may lead to depressive symptoms, new animal research suggests.
A study from Ohio State University Medical Center found that hamsters with chronic exposure to dim light at night showed signs of depression within just a few weeks: reduced physical activity compared with hamsters living in normal light-dark conditions, as well as less interest in sugar water (a treat for the hamsters), greater signs of distress when placed in water, and changes in the brain's hippocampus that are similar to brain changes seen in depressed people.
"The results we found in hamsters are consistent with what we know about depression in humans," Tracy Bedrosian, the first author the on the new study, told reporters.
Time.com: TV, video games at night may cause sleep problems in kids
Mood disorders are by no means the only health condition linked to artificial lighting and screen time at night. Earlier this year, the American Medical Association (AMA) put out a disturbing summary of adverse health effects from nighttime lighting, noting that artificial lights disrupt circadian rhythms and alter the body's normal hormonal responses. Coffee may lower risk of depression
In particular, when people spend too little time in darkness, it seems that the body suppresses release of the hormone melatonin, which — among other things — is thought to fight tumor growth and cancers. Other health conditions affected by changes in circadian rhythms, according to the AMA report, may include obesity, diabetes and reproductive problems.
"The good news is that people who stay up late in front of the television and computer may be able to undo some of the harmful effects just by going back to a regular light-dark cycle and minimizing their exposure to artificial light at night," Bedrosian says. "That's what the results we found in hamsters would suggest."
Those animals' depressive symptoms, at least, went away once the hamsters returned to a schedule that included eight full hours of total darkness per day.
Time.com: 5 ways to survive daylight saving time
Bedrosian and her colleagues say that, among humans, exposure to artificial lighting at night has surged over the past 50 years, a trend that happens to coincide with large increases in depression prevalence.
Light pollution can come from TV and computer screens, other electronic displays and ambient sources such as streetlights, passing traffic and neighboring buildings, in addition to overhead lighting within the home.
For their study, the Ohio State researchers also investigated molecular mechanisms that may cause the brain changes associated with nighttime lighting. The scientists found that a cell-signaling protein, or cytokine, known as a hippocampal TNF (tumor necrosis factor) played a limited role.
They demonstrated that by inhibiting TNF signaling, some of the depressive effects of light at night could be reversed in the hamsters. The results are published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
Naps are a great way to recharge our brains and boost our energy, but we don't always have time for long siestas. Good news: Research published in Sleep suggests the best nap length is just ten minutes.
Australian researchers studied twenty-four young adults who sleep well at night but don't normally nap. The participants napped for 5, 10, 20, and 30 minutes (plus a control of no napping) and then were measured across a range of benefits for three hours afterwards. The results:
The 5-minute nap produced few benefits in comparison with the no-nap control. The 10-minute nap produced immediate improvements in all outcome measures (including sleep latency, subjective sleepiness, fatigue, vigor, and cognitive performance), with some of these benefits maintained for as long as 155 minutes. The 20-minute nap was associated with improvements emerging 35 minutes after napping and lasting up to 125 minutes after napping. The 30-minute nap produced a period of impaired alertness and performance immediately after napping, indicative of sleep inertia, followed by improvements lasting up to 155 minutes after the nap.
We've seen before that naps that are too long or timed poorly can actually backfire.
While the perfect amount of time you should nap for may vary, if you're not sure how long to snooze or your naps just aren't cutting it, give the ten-minute power nap (also known as a nano nap) a try. Don't forget to time your nap right too.
According to the study, people whose diets had a higher amount of foods loaded with these antioxidants were two-thirds less likely to develop pancreatic cancer when compared to people who had the least amount of these nutrients in their diets.
The study is published online in the journal Gut.
Antioxidants are vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that protect cells from the damage of "free radicals." Free radicals are destructive fragments of oxygen that have been linked to cancer and other diseases. The new findings show an association between these foods and pancreatic cancer risk, but they do not tell us if or how antioxidants actually prevent pancreatic cancer.
"Vitamins C and E and selenium are good for your general health. And it may be that they help to prevent against pancreatic cancer as well. But more study is needed before we can say that for sure," says study researcher Andrew R. Hart, MD. He is a senior lecturer in gastroenterology at Norwich Medical School in East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
If this association turns out to be causal, antioxidants may help prevent as many as one in 12 cases of pancreatic cancer. The American Cancer Society estimates that about 43,920 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2012. About 37,390 people will die from the disease.
Researchers analyzed the seven-day food diaries of more than 23,500 people aged 40 to 74. Forty-nine people developed pancreatic cancer within 10 years of entering the study. Researchers then compared diets among people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer to those of nearly 4,000 people without pancreatic cancer.
People who ate more selenium were 50% less likely to develop pancreatic cancer compared to those who ate the least amounts of selenium-rich foods. And those whose vitamin C, E, and selenium intake was in the top 75% were 67% less likely to develop pancreatic cancer than those who ate the lowest amount of foods rich in this trio of antioxidants.
Researchers only looked at foods rich in these nutrients, not individual supplements. Vitamin C is found in fruits and vegetables such as :
citrus fruits
red berries
red and green bell peppers
Vitamin E can be found in food such as:
vegetable oils
nuts
seeds
egg yolk
Selenium is a mineral found in soil. Some selenium-rich foods include:
cereal
fish
meat
What Causes Pancreatic Cancer?
The pancreas is a long, flat gland that lies in the abdomen behind the stomach. Its job is to produce enzymes that help with digestion. It also produces certain hormones that maintain the proper level of blood sugar.
Naps are a great way to recharge our brains and boost our energy, but we don't always have time for long siestas. Good news: Research published in Sleep suggests the best nap length is just ten minutes.
