Skip to main content

“This Common Processed Food Ingredient Causes Cancer in Mice” plus 2 more Health – TIME

“This Common Processed Food Ingredient Causes Cancer in Mice” plus 2 more Health – TIME


This Common Processed Food Ingredient Causes Cancer in Mice

Posted: 07 Nov 2016 10:20 AM PST

What’s good for keeping food products stable and safe on the shelf may not be healthy for the body. Researchers report in the journal Cancer Research that emulsifiers create the ideal conditions for triggering colon cancer in mice.

Emulsifiers are chemicals—in some cases detergents, actually—added to blend oily and water-based ingredients in processed foods and to keep them consistently mixed so they don’t separate. Processed foods often contain several of them; food regulations limit the amount of each emulsifier present in a particular food product to 1% to 2%, but they don’t restrict the number of emulsifiers allowed. Emilie Viennois from the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University, who led the new research, showed in earlier work that emulsifiers changed the good bacteria living in the guts of mice. These changes promoted metabolic syndrome, which is a risk factor for certain chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease, and inflammation; those in turn have been connected to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Some cases of IBD can trigger tumors to grow.

In her latest study, Viennois wanted to connect the dots to focus on whether emulsifiers affected cancer risk: specifically colon cancer. After three months of feeding some animals two common ones—polysorbate 80 and carboxymethylcellulose—in their water, she found that animals who consumed emulsifiers showed changes in their gut microbes that were consistent with promoting tumor growth. Using a theoretical model for conditions that promote colon cancer, she found that the higher levels of inflammation created by the microbial changes form the perfect cancer friendly environment.

“We think that can create a niche for tumor development,” she says.

Whether the same thing happens in people to increase their colon cancer risk isn’t clear. But Viennois notes that most processed foods contain several different types of emulsifiers, and in her study, she only tested two emulsifiers in the mice. She is continuing her work to better understand the role that emulsifiers play in tumor growth in the animals, and is also collaborating with other groups to research the connection in people. She plans to look at things such as the gut bacteria populations and how they change, as well as body weight and blood levels of cancer and metabolic markers.

For now, however, “I would tell people to try to cook instead of using food industry products,” she says, since many processed foods contain emulsifiers. “In meals, mix processed foods with some homemade food so you don’t have huge exposure to emulsifiers in one meal.”

What to Do With All Your Election Anger

Posted: 07 Nov 2016 08:11 AM PST

As we move closer to Election Day, many of us are breathing a sigh of relief, but there is another mood percolating. Many of us feel anger, a deep, fire in the belly anger that it has come to this. We may feel like caged lions, spitting mad, but told to quiet down, be civil and act nice.

That seems like excellent advice, given the harm caused by rage, hostility, aggression, but, in reality, the stress we feel from the campaign is not likely to fade and that ongoing political climate could become a continuing assault to our well-being.

Hearing about or seeing vicious personal attacks, criticism of parents who have lost a child to war, accusations of fraud and talk of sexual assault have affected our psyches, souls and bodies.

Stress is the number one worldwide epidemic and threat to health. It is outstripping our capacity to process that stress effectively, so increasingly the brain’s stress switch (hypothalamus) is flipping. That takes our thinking brain with its wise judgment and oversight off line and puts the reptilian brain, which is given to fight or flight extremes. Emotionally, our first response is anger, if we don’t completely dissociate and turn off feelings altogether.

And yet, maybe this election stress is perfect in its own way, as given the likely pile up of charges and counter charges and avalanches of stresses post-election, we will pause for long enough to upgrade our brain’s capacity to process stress, in the spirit of changing the world by changing ourselves.

My colleagues and I at University of California San Francisco have developed emotional brain training (EBT) as a set of skills to improve the brain’s effectiveness in processing stress. Our hunter-gatherer brain adapted to the Paleolithic life of physical stress and sameness, yet we live in a world of emotional stress and overwhelming speed of change. As more than 80 percent of health problems are rooted in chronic stress, we have explored four ways to update our brain’s capacity to process our anger and boost our resilience.

The upside of anger

The first concept in updating how we respond to stress is to stop judging our anger. It is the only negative emotion in the brain associated with approach and power, the one emotion that says, “Cut it out!” It’s our protest emotion that mobilizes us to do something that helps us survive.

Without a robust skill to express anger, we turn that anger in on ourselves, and open the door to depression, anxiety, shame, numbness and false highs. The internalized, suppressed anger causes a rumbling of chronic stress that rears its head as stress symptoms. Those backaches, late night munchies, work stalls, and sleepless nights all add to our health care burden and cause emotional diseases to overtake chronic diseases in mortality rates.

In short, we need to honor our right to feel and express anger effectively, which takes understanding the neurobiology of anger.

Knowing your number

Breakthrough research at New York University Emotional Brain Institute has proposed a new way to think about emotions based circuitry activated at varying levels of stress. When our stress levels are low, we activate emotional circuits that help us take wise actions that protect ourselves and others. When the fight or flight response is spewing stress chemicals through every cell of our being, we activate circuits that takes us to unhealthy extremes.

These new learnings suggest a needed update in how we approach emotions.

EBT uses a five point system of stress in which we do not ask ourselves “How do I feel? but instead we ask ourselves, “What number am I?” that is, we check our stress level or brain state. That gives the thinking brain more power to determine how best to process our emotions, rather than our diving right into our feelings and potentially finding ourselves in a rage or in other destructive emotions, such as depression, panic, anxiety or numbness.

If you like, try using that tool now by taking three deep breaths and asking yourself, “What number am I?”, then using the technique for that stress level that turns destructive emotions into constructive feelings. The emotional technique for Brain State 5 is the damage control tool, that is, taking three deep breaths, then saying repeatedly (sometimes 5 to 20 times) “do not judge, minimize harm, now it will pass.” That calms down the reptilian brain so your thinking brain can be on line and running the show again.

The power of compassion and humor

Once we’re thinking in terms of brain states, it’s natural to start wondering about the brain states of others. Problems in relationships at home or at work are most apt to happen when both people are in the lower brain states.

The reptilian brain is in charge, so not only are emotions extreme, but the brain activates circuits of relationship dysfunction. Our thinking brain remains offline, so analyzing the situation rapidly devolves into catastrophizing, obsessing or ruminating.

The solution is to appreciate that the root cause of all this intense emotion is stress. During stress nobody is “relationship material,” and so compassion and humor (e.g., “I’d like to discuss that but my reptilian brain is in charge right now.”) can go a long way toward melting that stress and hastening a healing moment of reconnection.

Updating your emotional tools

The third idea is to appreciate that there are new tools that can turn negative destructive emotions into positive, constructive feelings. Part of EBT includes learning tools to update our emotional skill set, that you can use internally – so nobody else knows how furious you are or how shut down you feel – that rapidly reduce stress.

Try the flow tool, which is effective at Brain State 3, and easy to learn. Just say the first four words of each sentence, pause so your brain connects and words “bubble up” into your conscious mind to complete the sentence. Express 1 to 10 anger statements, using words that come from your gut – release that anger, and when you do, sadness will arise. Complete one sentence for sadness and each of the other feelings.

The EBT Flow Tool

I feel angry that … I can’t stand it that … I feel furious that . . I hate it that … (up to 10)

I feel sad that … I feel afraid that … I feel guilty that …

I feel grateful that … I feel happy that …I feel secure that … I feel proud that …

Here’s my flow tool in this moment: I feel angry there this election is such a mess. I cant’ stand it that I don’t like either candidate. I hate it that the stress of this has taken its toll on me. I feel guilty that I can’t stop thinking about it … I feel grateful that we have elections. I feel happy that it is a sunny day. I feel secure that I can handle whatever comes and I feel proud that I used this tool. Ahhh . . now I have a smile on my face and a calm in my body. Perfect!

Rewiring unreasonable expectations

The fourth concept is to address why we are so angry. Of course there are logical reasons for being upset, but what is happening in the brain? It’s the clash between our unconscious expectations that were encoded in the past and the realities of our daily lives. When our expectations are out of date and discordant with current realities, stress chemicals surge as if hungry lions were chasing us, even though the threat is posed by dueling circuits within our own emotional brain. The greater the discord, the greater the chemical response, hence explaining why the deeply offensive, divisive election process has been so stressful.

On the bright side, emerging research has shown that these circuits can be aroused, reactivated and updated, so we can revise our out-dated unconscious emotional expectations that is the root cause of the amplification of our normal daily stress. This brain reset has traditionally been the work of psychotherapists in group or individual sessions, but health care is becoming neuroscience-based, so new accessible options are emerging. The EBT approach is to learn a self-directed technique (“cycle tool”) we can use when stressed, that both rapidly reduces our stress and update our circuitry. Attention to accessible techniques like this one will probably grow as our concern about health care expenditure increases.

Trying a little tenderness

How can we boost our spirits during this election countdown? It’s to remind ourselves that the stress of the situation is perfect in its own way. It gives us opportunities to try a little tenderness, becoming more sophisticated in how we approach our emotions, thereby discovering a new zest for life. That zest becomes our gift to ourselves – and to our nation.

Laurel Mellin, Associate Clinical Professor of Family & Community Medicine and Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.The Conversation

How Sunlight Affects Your Mental Health

Posted: 07 Nov 2016 07:13 AM PST

It’s well known that exposure to natural light affects mood, and that shortened days (whether we’re shortchanged naturally by the change the season or manually by the shift from Daylight Saving Time) can make people feel blue. But a new study suggests just how much sunlight really matters to our emotional and mental health. Their findings? A whole lot—more than any other weather phenomenon, to be exact.

“That’s one of the surprising pieces of our research,” Mark Beecher, PhD, clinical professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, said in a press release. “On a rainy day, or a more polluted day, people assume that they’d have more distress. But we didn’t see that.”

To study the link between weather and depression diagnoses, Beecher and his co-authors looked at self-reported mental-health data from more than 16,000 students who, over a six-year period, attended free sessions at BYU’s Counseling and Psychological Services Center. Students are required to complete questionnaires assessing the state of their mental health before every single visit, which proved immensely valuable to this research.

Those questionnaires were then matched with precise weather data, also collected by BYU, down to the minute in the exact area where those students lived. (Names and identifying information for the students was stripped from the analysis.)

“We looked at solar irradiance, or the amount of sunlight that actually hits the ground,” Beecher said. “We tried to take into account cloudy days, rainy days, pollution… but they washed out. The one thing that was really significant was the amount of time between sunrise and sunset.”

In total, the study examined 19 environmental factors, including dew point, cloud cover, rainfall, wind chill, wind speed, barometric pressure, temperature, lunar day, and several measures of air quality. None of these factors were significantly associated with higher levels of emotional distress, however, as long as a given day had adequate sunlight.

As the total sun time decreased seasonally, however, distress levels rose. This applied to all of the students who sought counseling during the study period, the authors note, not just those diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder. (Most students reported attending sessions for issues related to adjustment, anxiety, or general depression.)

Therapists should be aware that winter months will be a time of high demand for their services, say the study authors, as people may be more vulnerable to emotional distress than at other times of the year.

“These findings suggest the need for institutions and public health entities to plan for intervention and prevention resources and strategies during periods of reduced sun time,” they wrote.

The study, which was published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, started with a casual conversation between Beecher and BYU physics professor Lawrence Rees, PhD.

“So one day it was kind of stormy, and I asked Mark if he sees more clients on these days,” said Rees. “He said he’s not sure, it’s kind of an open question. It’s hard to get accurate data.”

Rees realized that he had access to weather readings in the Provo, Utah area, and Beecher had access to emotional health data for students at the university. They added in pollution counts from the EPA, and looped in statistics professor Dennis Eggett, PhD, to combine and analyze the data.

Provo has some of the highest air-pollution levels in the country—especially in the winter, due to an inversion effect caused by nearby mountains. The authors acknowledge that poor air-quality levels could have affected seasonal depression rates, and say that their study should be replicated in different climates.

Additional research is also needed, they say, to explore factors related to sunlight exposure such as vitamin D intake, amount of time spent outdoors and in nature, and tanning-booth use.

The news isn’t all bad for the coming months, though.

“One way to interpret the finding that the other weather and pollution variables did not have a significant impact on mental health is that people and clients are resilient and adaptive,” the authors wrote. “Although it is often assumed that outside elements can greatly affect mood or affect, these results present the possibility that more credit needs to be given to people’s ability to cope and adapt.”

In other words, those early sunsets will still be a bummer—but at least we don’t have to worry so much about the rain.

This article originally appeared on RealSimple.com

loading...

Lexo edhe:

Postimet e fundit






Popular posts from this blog

Trajta e shquar dhe e pashquar e emrit

  Trajta e shquar dhe e pashquar e emrit Trajta themelore e emrit është rasa emërore e pashquar.  Nga trajta themelore ose parësore i fitojmë format e tjera gramatikore të emrit (trajtat). Emrat , si në njëjës ashtu edhe në shumës, përdoren në dy trajta: a) në trajtë të pashquar dhe b) në trajtë të shquar shquar. Emri në trajtën e pashquar tregon qenie, sende ose dukuri në përgjithësi, në mënyrë të papërcaktuar. P.sh.: një nxënës, një punëtor, një mendim , një mace, një laps etj. Emri në trajtën e shquar tregon qenie, sende ose dukuri të tjera, të veçuara nga gjërat e tjera të llojit të vet. P.sh.: nxënësi, punëtori, mendimi, macja, lapsi etj.   Formë përfaqësuese (bazë) e emrit është trajta e pashquar, numri njëjës, rasa emërore : djalë, vajzë, shkollë, lule, letër, njeri, kompjuter, lepur, qen, piano etj. Trajta e shquar e emrit formohet duke i pasvendosur formës përfaqësuese nyjën shquese, përkatësisht mbaresën: a) për emrat e gjin

Ese të ndryshme shqip

Ese dhe Hartime '' Ese dhe hartime të ndryshme shqip dhe anglisht '' Ndalohet rreptësisht kopjimi dhe postimi në një faqe tjetër.  Redaksia Rapitful ka lexuar disa ankesa në emailin e saj të bëra nga disa arsimtarë dhe profesorë ku janë ankuar se nxënësit po i kopjojnë esetë dhe hartimet nga faqja Rapitful dhe me ato ese apo shkrime po prezantohen gjatë shkrimit të eseve dhe hartimeve. Pra redaksia Rapitful kërkon nga nxënësit që të mos kopjojnë esetë dhe hartimet dhe me to të prezantohen para mësimdhënësve por le të jenë këto ese vetëm si një udhërrëfyes se si duhet të shkruhet një ese apo hartim dhe asesi të kopjohen. Ju faleminderit për mirëkuptim. Ese dhe hartime do te shtohen vazhdimisht keshtuqe na vizitoni prap. Nëse dëshironi Analiza letrare të veprave të ndryshme kliko mbi Analiza Letrare Kliko mbi titullin që ju intereson Ese për Diturinë   Për Mjekët! Fakultetet e sotme po kryhen me teste 6 arsye për të mos studiuar mjekësinë P

Tekste shqip: ““Ah Kjo Rruga E Gurbetit” - Shaqir Cërvadiku & Fatjon Dervishi” plus 21 more

Tekste shqip: ““Ah Kjo Rruga E Gurbetit” - Shaqir Cërvadiku & Fatjon Dervishi” plus 21 more “Ah Kjo Rruga E Gurbetit” - Shaqir Cërvadiku & Fatjon Dervishi “Du Me T'pa” - Gjyle Qollaku Nora Istrefi “Kercejna” - Sabiani Feat. Denis Taraj Getoar Selimi “Du Me T'pa” - Lori Bora Zemani “Million” - Melissa
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Labels

Show more