Gene Morphis ' View

Recently there have been medical research reports indicating that all the warnings about consuming too much salt were exaggerated. Perhaps you remember when we were told that consuming eggs would clog our arteries with cholesterol, and anyone eating butter had a death wish. Now, eggs are an ideal source of lean protein and butter not only isn’t bad, it is superior to margarine. In that vein, having seen the newer reports, I was largely ignoring salt warnings (particularly since I can eat my weight in restaurant chips and salsa). Then this report popped-up. Quoting from the study: “…excess dietary salt suppresses resting cerebral blood flow and endothelial function, leading to cognitive decline.”  Cognitive decline, of course, isn’t good. It causes little brains. Research Details Researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College fed mice a high salt diet. Admittedly, it was a very high salt diet. The result was reduced blood flow to the hippocampus and cortex. Our ol...

In our last post, we discussed the research about the cognition benefit from playing Super Mario . New research qualifies the kind of games that might help. Not all will. Kind of Good News About Video Games A large study (2,800+ participants) performed by researchers from Indiana University, South Florida University of South Florida and Penn State University tracked individuals over 10 years. Participant groups received memory, reasoning, or speed of processing training, or were part of a control group. If you’ve had a vision study at your ophthalmologist, you’ve done something like the speed of processing video game used in the study. To play, you must spot something, such as a highway sign on a roadway, and then spot something else in the periphery. The faster you identify and click on the objects, the better you score. As the game proceeds, the background becomes more complex making it harder to find the images. The good news: participants playing that type of game had a ...

Tuesday, the CDC reported that being overweight or obese is associated with higher risk of 13 different cancers. They put it into perspective with two additional pieces of data: first, two-thirds of American adults are overweight , and second, in 2014, there were 630,000 diagnoses of those forms of cancer in the U.S. That is, there were 630,000 cases of the kinds of cancer associated with being overweight. Over a third of Americans are obese. Now, that’s not someone’s judgement call. That is a statistical finding, based on studies of body mass index (BMI). Here's the formula for BMI so that you can calculate it for yourself. You may want to convert your height and weight into meters; some of the formulas I’ve found use the metric system. Here's a converter for inches into meters. A friend of mine said he is writing a three-hundred-page book on diet. On one page it has “Eat Less”. The facing page has “Exercise More”, for all three hundred pages. There is no mystery...

The research team of Dr. Claire J. Steves, Dr. Ted Spector and others at Kings College in London are doing some amazing research on aging (and other important research as well). Much of that examines aging effects on the brain. One of the research studies involved exercise and cognitive decline. Here is a quote from that research : “ A striking protective relationship was found between muscle fitness (leg power) and both 10-year cognitive change… and subsequent total grey matter”. In other words, the women with better leg strength and fitness showed less cognitive decline as they aged. As we continue to note, the link between physical fitness, exercise and so on to maintaining a healthy brain is well known. And, we’ve seen studies where older adults improved cognition with dancing, which obviously requires use of leg muscles. (See Dance Your *** Off; Grow a Bigger Brain ). But this is the first I recall where leg muscles in particular were noted, and the first where a muscle gro...