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Showing posts with label Care. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Care. Show all posts
Saturday, October 19, 2013
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By Unknown in , , , ,
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Cherries: The new melatonin supplement (image via Wikipedia)
June and July are cherry season, one of the last true fruit “seasons,” since cherries are that rare commodity nowadays, a fruit that disappears from store shelves during the rest of the year. But did you know that cherries aren’t just tasty and packed with antioxidants, they can actually help you sleep better?  The fact is that your choice of late-night snack could mean the difference between restless insomnia and deep, health-promoting sleep. Here are the top five foods experts recommend to beat insomnia and send you to sleep.
1. Cherries.
According to agricultural research studies, herries are one of the only natural food sources of melatonin, the chemical that controls the body’s internal clock to regulate sleep. During the ten months of the year when cherries are out of season, dried cherries and cherry juice (especially tart cherry juice, which contains less sugar) are good substitutes. (Grapes also contain melatonin, but you need to eat more of them to get the same effect.) Researchers who’ve studied the melatonin content of cherries recommend eating them an hour before bedtime.
2. Bananas.
Potassium and magnesium are natural muscle relaxants, and bananas are a good source of both. They also contain the amino acid L-tryptophan, which gets converted to 5-HTP in the brain. The 5-HTP in turn is converted to serotonin (a relaxing neurotransmitter) and melatonin.
3. Toast.
Carbohydrate-rich foods cause a spike in blood sugar levels, triggering the body’s production of insulin to bring them back down. This is why you often feel a burst of energy in the first few minutes after eating carbs, then a “crash” of tiredness. At night, this sleepiness can be very useful, making toast the perfect midnight snack. Along with insulin comes a release of tryptophan and serotonin, two brain chemicals that promote relaxation and combat anxiety.
4. Scottish or Irish Oatmeal.
The truth is, ask Dr. Oz and he’ll suggest pumpkin seed powder and the Mexican alcoholic drink pulque before he gets to oatmeal, third on his list of sleep-inducing foods. But oatmeal is certainly more appetizing and easier to stock in your kitchen. Another complex carbohydrate,  oatmeal triggers a rise in blood sugar, which in turn triggers insulin production and the release of sleep-inducing brain chemicals. Oats are also rich in vitamin B6, an anti-stress vitamin, and melatonin.
5. Warm milk.
The experts go back and forth on this on (with the dairy industry funding plenty of research), but there is some evidence that this tried and true sleep aid really does work. Although, according to scientific analysis, combining milk with a carbohydrate-rich food like oatmeal, granola, or toast makes it much more effective. Like bananas, milk contains the amino acid L-tryptophan, which turns to 5-HTP and releases relaxing serotonin. It’s also high in calcium and other minerals, known to have a relaxing effect.
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By Unknown in , , ,
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Would you prioritize sleep if you knew it kept your immune system strong? That’s the question the American Academy of Sleep Medicine wants you to ponder this week. Lost in the hoopla surrounding Independence day was the publication of some eye-opening (or eye-shutting) research by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine showing that the immune system responds sharply to sleep loss.
In the study, intimidatingly named “Diurnal Rhythms in Blood Cell Populations and the Effect of Acute Sleep Deprivation in Healthy Young Men,” Researchers at the Erasmus MC University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the University of Surrey in the UK measured white blood cell counts in young men who sleep eight hours and men whose sleep was restricted, and found a spike in white blood cells, particularly those called granulocytes, released in response to immune system threat.
The researchers’ conclusion: Severe sleep loss jolts the immune system just as stress does (read on for more on stress).
Sleep Loss Quadruples Stroke Risk
In addition to shocking your immune system, lack of sleep also raises your stroke risk – even if you’re relatively young and healthy. New research, presented last month at SLEEP 2012, found that those who cut back their sleep to less than six hours of sleep a night are at 4.5 percent greater risk of having a stroke compared with those who slept 7 to 8 hours a night. Though researchers don’t know the exact mechanism, it seems that chronic lack of sleep causes inflammation, elevates blood pressure and heart rate, and affects glucose levels, leading to a much higher stroke risk in the sleep-deprived.
Most concerning, though, is that the 5,000+ people studied were healthy, middle-aged adults with a body mass index in the normal range — not those typically considered at high stroke risk. And their sleep loss wasn’t as extreme as in the immune study; these folks reported getting less than six hours of sleep a night – the amount that 30 percent of the American population reports getting.
For some tips on getting to sleep more easily, see 5 Foods to Help You Sleep
Stress Sabotages Your Immune System, Too
This isn’t news; study after study has shown that stress raises our risk of cancer, heart disease, allergies, and susceptibility to colds and flu. What’s new is that researchers at Carnegie Mellon think they now know how this works. The key, they say, is cortisol, the stress hormone released whenever we feel fear, worry, or anxiety. Cortisol is supposed to give us a jolt of energy, enabling us to react to and run away from the lion as it were. But it appears that when our systems are constantly bathed in cortisol, the body loses its ability to regulate inflammation.
Here’s how it works. Cortisol has a secondary function of controlling the body’s inflammatory response to immune system triggers. But over time, with constant exposure to stress and therefore cortisol, tissues become less sensitive to cortisol, releasing less of their anti-inflammatory substances. (A similar process occurs with diabetes, as chronically elevated insulin leads to insulin resistance.)
The Carnegie Mellon team, headed by Sheldon Cohen, ran two tests of this theory. First they exposed healthy adults to cold viruses, isolating and monitoring for five days afterwards. People who’d recently been under stress showed increased resistance to cortisol. In a second test, the researchers found that participants had higher numbers of cytokines, which trigger inflammation.


So what does it all mean? That when you get stressed out and stop sleeping, or stop sleeping well, you get sick. (Think back to college, when you’d get a horrible flu or even pneumonia or mono, right after finals were over.) That probably doesn’t seem that concerning; we’ve dealt with the post-all-nighter flu all our lives. But this year has also seen convincing research that the body’s immune response is key to protecting us from serious disease, such as cancer, and that inflammation is a key precursor to heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and other life-threatening diseases. In fact, ongoing research is underway to document the effects of stress and sleep loss on shortening lifespan.

So take your stress reduction strategies seriously and get to sleep, darn it!
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By Unknown in , , , , , ,
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"The brain only has limited energy at its disposal and it appears that it must [choose] between two different functional states - awake and aware or asleep and cleaning up. You can think of it like having a house party. You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house, but you can't really do both at the same time."


When you sleep, your brain undergoes a mop-up process that removes waste products linked to Alzheimer’s and dementia, according to new research published yesterday in the online version of Science.



A Team of researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) used high-tech imaging to look deep into the brains of mice and discovered that the brain functions differently while asleep than awake, ridding itself of accumulated proteins at a much faster rate. (In mice, that is – but researchers use mouse brains because they’re considered surprisingly similar to human brains.)


Nedergaard and her team coined the term “glymphatic system” last year, when they used new imaging technology known as two-photon microscopy to discover a scrubbing process taking place around brain cells, known as glial cells. The mechanism of this cleanup process is fascinating: Nedergaard and colleagues found that cerebrospinal fluid flows through the spaces between neurons, flushing proteins and other neural waste into the circulatory system and away.Led by Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., who co-directs the URMC’s Center for Translational Neuromedicine, the researchers discovered that a waste-draining system they call the “glymphatic system” is ten times more active during sleep than while awake. This nocturnal cleaning system removes proteins called amyloid-beta, which accumulate into the plaques that contribute to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. 

In this year’s research, they discovered that not only does the “glymphatic system” kick into high gear only during sleep, but it also mops up significantly more of the toxic protein amyloid-beta, considered a primary culprit in Alzheimer’s disease. Again using two-photon microscopy, the researchers looked at the timing of this flushing process and discovered that brain cells contract noticeably during sleep, thus expanding the areas between brain cells by as much as 60 percent. With brain cells smaller and the space between them larger, there’s more room for the cerebrospinal fluid to move freely. 

Likening the changes during sleep to “turning on a faucet,” Nedergaard says it appears that a sleep state is necessary for this “active clearance of the by-products of neural activity” to take place. This would offer a convincing explanation of why sleep has such an essential restorative function, she says. 


The discovery of the brain’s nocturnal cleaning service, coupled with previous research out of Washington University showing that levels of beta-amyloid drop during sleep, could open up new avenues of prevention and treatment for Alzheimer’s and dementia, experts say. Previous research found that depriving mice of sleep led to accumulation of amyloid-beta protein, also in mice. A few years ago, aNew York Times report suggested that new insights into how some people’s brains hold on to beta-amyloid plaques more than others offered new hope for Alzheimer’s disease breakthroughs. 


I’ve written before about the dangerous effects of sleep loss on your health, including elevated risk of stroke. Now we’ll need to add the possibility that sleep loss – and possibly sleep problems such as apnea – could increase your risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia.

"Understanding precisely how and when the brain activates the glymphatic system and clears waste is a critical first step in efforts to potentially modulate this system and make it work more efficiently."
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