How Meat Consumption Affects Our Health

In meat-loving America, vegetarians are still trying to find their footing on the kitchen table. They’re usually viewed as the all-stars of health and gurus of how to lose weight, but how healthy is it really? Meat stands to divide people into two different groups, some carrying with them varying morals and in many cases misconceptions about what it means to be healthy.   

Nutrition professionals rarely even use the term “healthy foods,” because the way food is labeled as healthy or not relies heavily upon how much we eat of it, according to the European Food Information Council. Meat consumption is not where the healthy diverge from the unhealthy, but rather where the balancing act changes.

A Meatless Existence

Vegetarians have long been considered the tree-hugging free spirits of the world: They care about the environment, or animals, or their body’s well-being. But since their diet doesn’t involve meat, it’s going against what this country is all about — hamburgers, hot dogs, meatloaf wrapped up in good ol’ red, white, and blue nationalism.Parks and Recreation’s very own Ron Swanson echoes the sentiment:

I call this turf ‘n turf. It’s a 16-ounce T-bone and a 24-ounce porterhouse, also, a whiskey, and a cigar. I am going to consume all of this at the same time because I am a free American.”

When did becoming a carnivorous being stand to represent the American way? More than one-third of adults in the United States are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the kids are catching up.  The average American eats 270 pounds of meat a year, which is double what the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends. It’s just too much animal protein for our bodies to process, especially when a large majority of the country is living a sedentary lifestyle.  

Eating all that meat and other animal products like cheese and eggs, while ignoring the basic nutritional necessities found in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, doesn’t come without consequences.

Researchers from the University of Southern California found people with diets rich in animal protein were four times more likely to die of cancer than those who ate a low-to-moderate amount. By just dropping down to a lower daily quantity of meat, cheese, and eggs, and replacing them with some high-quality vegetables, nuts, and grains, your body will thank you — but only if you make sure you're fulfilling your dietary needs with the right stuff and not just a load of macaroni and cheese just because it's meatless.

"Being vegetarian does not guarantee health," Nutritionist Jaime Mass, the founder of Jaime Mass Nutritionals, told Women’s Health. "It's how you approach a vegetarian lifestyle that matters. A vegetarian who consumes legumes, fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts will have a different health profile than a vegetarian who consumes a diet high in refined carbohydrates like muffins, pasta, cookies, and cakes."

Be mindful of what you’re putting into your body. Vegetarianism is not synonymous with good health. An illuminating study was published last year in the journalPLoS ONE, in which an Austrian team of researchers found when comparing omnivores to herbivores, “vegetarians are in a poorer state of health compared to the other dietary groups,” the authors wrote.

The study was very limited in how it compared the diets. Even the researchers admitted to faults on how their small 1,000 some odd participants could not represent the entire world. American vegetarians alone eat very differently than those found in other countries. It just depends how you lineup your everyday diet. Potato chips and cinnamon buns are vegetarian, but that doesn’t mean you should eat them on a regular basis; in fact, far from it.

"Any time you cut out a food group, there is a risk you could be missing out on certain nutrients," Mass said. Vegetarians need to focus on getting enough protein into their diet while vegans need to prioritize iron, calcium, vitamin B12, and zinc. Vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acid supplementation may also be needed to sustain an active lifestyle.

Bottom line: Neither group should badger the other for their personal eating habits so long as they have a balanced variety of nutrient-rich proteins, carbohydrates, and healthy fats. A carnivorous flexitarian diet full of bountiful fruits, vegetables, and whole grains is completely possible to incorporate into a healthy lifestyle. Meat isn’t the end-all, be-all. 

Rhodalia Rosea May Be Good Alternative To Drugs For Depression Treatment

Nearly 40 percent of American adults believe in the power of alternative medicine to treat various conditions, from sleep disorders to obesity, and these treatments include everything from popular diets to herbal supplements to meditation. They’re so widely used because sometimes, the benefits of using them outweigh those of using prescription drugs. And now, a new study shows how this could apply to people with major depressive disorder (MDD) who take the the European folk medicine roseroot, also known asRhodiola rosea.

While there hasn’t been enough scientific evidence to prove its benefits — this is the case with a lot of alternative medicine — it’s been suggested the plant may be useful for people suffering altitude sickness, sexual dysfunction, irregular heartbeats, high blood pressure, and even more serious conditions like cancer and diabetes. The new study supports previous researchin finding roseroot may help people with depression as well.

Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania compared roseroot’s effects to those of sertraline, which often goes by the name Zoloft, and a placebo. They found that those who took sertraline were 1.9 times more likely than those taking a placebo to report their depressive symptoms had improved, while those who took roseroot were 1.4 times more likely to report the same.

The researchers said that while sertraline was obviously more effective, the side effects patients felt while on it could offset the benefits when considering roseroot is a viable alternative — albeit only people with mild to moderate depression. Twice as many patients on sertraline reported side effects than on roseroot. They included nausea and sexual dysfunction.

The study was small, however, including only 57 adult participants who qualified for MDD under guidelines provided in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. All patients had symptoms like weight loss, mood changes, loss of interest, insomnia, inability to concentrate, and recurrent thoughts of death. Each underwent an intervention for 12 weeks with one of the treatment options or a placebo.

“These results are a bit preliminary but suggest that herbal therapy may have the potential to help patients with depression who cannot tolerate conventional antidepressants due to side effects,” said Dr. Jun Mao, an associate professor of family medicine, community health, and epidemiology. “Larger studies will be needed to fully evaluate the benefit and harm of R. rosea as compared to conventional antidepressants.

Our Brains Sees Familiar Words As Pictures, Not Individual Letters

Once you were a child who took pains to “sound out” each letter as a way to comprehend an entire word. Now you are an adult who is breezing through these sentences without effort yet still understanding the meaning of each and every word. What changed? According to a team of researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center, neurons in one area of your brain are now responding to complete words, not pieces of them or individual letters. In fact, when you look at any familiar word, the visual word form area of your brain sees it as a complete picture, not a group of letters to be processed.  

These new findings, the researchers say, not only show how the brain processes words, they also offer insight helpful to people with reading disabilities.

To begin the study, co-authors Dr. Maximilian Riesenhuber and Dr. Laurie Glezer asked 25 adults to learn a set of 150 nonsense words. However, both before and after this training, the researchers peeked into the brains of volunteers by using an scanner. Specifically, they used fMRI-rapid adaptation, a technique that traces brain plasticity as it happens. After first observing the impact made by nonsense words, the researchers could see changes as they occurred in the brain while the volunteers learned the made-up words.

Visual Word Form Area

Our neurons respond differently to real words than to nonsense words, the researchers explained. In fact, one small area of the brain is precisely wired to recognize not parts of words but complete words. Neurons in a small brain area, called the visual word form area, remember how the whole word looks.

It does this by “using what could be called a visual dictionary," said Riesenhuber, who is leader of GUMC's Laboratory for Computational Cognitive Neuroscience. Very simply, our visual word form area recognizes familiar words as distinct blocks. The visual word form area is located in the left side of the visual cortex, opposite from the fusiform face area (which remembers faces) on the right. They sit, then, like mirror images in opposite positions within your brain.

"One area is selective for a whole face, allowing us to quickly recognize people, and the other is selective for a whole word, which helps us read quickly," Riesenhuber said in a press release. During the study, then, the neurons in the visual word form area began to respond to the learned nonsense words like they were real words.

The visual word form area does not care how the word sounds, just how the letters of the word look together," Riesenhuber said. In fact, after publishing a previous study about this, a number of people with reading difficulties contacted him to report how learning words as visual objects helped them learn to read. More proof that understanding the brain helps us get the most out of it.

Color Of Lettuce Decides How Fast Antioxidants Act

If you spend the majority of your time in the produce aisle deciding between romaine and iceberg lettuce, you may want to refocus your decision on the color of your lettuce. A recent study conducted by Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) Kinetics has revealed that the color of your lettuce, whether it be green, semi-red, or red, could determine how fast its antioxidants act.

“The fact that there are compounds that act at different speeds does not mean that some are better or worse than others,” Dr. Usue Pérez-López, from the Department of Plant Biology and Ecology of the UPV/EHU's Faculty of Science and Technology, said in a statement. “If we eat foods that can generate free-radical activity, there will be some compounds that act to eliminate them more quickly.”

Pérez-López and his colleagues used Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) techniques to analyze the compounds found in three varieties of lettuce: the green-leaf “Batavia,” the semi-red-leaf “Marvel of Four Seasons,” and the red-leaf “Oak Leaf.” Lettuce is loaded withantioxidants that protect against cell damage and various disease caused by free radical processes. Active compounds found in lettuce include phenolic acids, flavonoids, anthocyanins, and vitamins A and C.

Findings showed that green-leaf lettuce contains water-soluble, antioxidant compounds that act at a slow to intermediate speed. Semi-red-leaf is home to three kinds of compounds that act at a rapid, intermediate, and slow speed. Lastly, red-leaf lettuce has compounds that act at an intermediate and rapid speed.

“It is also important that our bodies should acquire foods with antioxidants that have slower kinetics so that the latter will continue to act over a longer period of time,” Pérez-López explained. “That is why people say that it is very interesting to mix different types of lettuce because they have different, complementary characteristics.”

The research team plans on using the results of this study to enhance the health benefits of all three varieties of lettuce. They aim to expose each variety of lettuce to abnormal conditions, such as watering them with saline water, subjecting them to high lighting intensity, or working with raised concentrations of CO2. Exposing lettuce to these conditions activates its defense functions which, in turn, boosts the antioxidant qualities of the plants.

What matters in this process is not to lose productivity, and that is why we apply short-intensity stresses,” Pérez-López added. “With excessive stress, we could reach a point in which plant growth is reduced, and we are not interested in achieving greater quality at the cost of a reduction in size. The aim is to maintain production and achieve greater quality in this production.”

Researchers Want To Rename Schizophrenia

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) defines schizophrenia as “a serious mental illness that interferes with a person’s ability to think clearly, manage emotions, make decisions and relate to others.” But lately, more people are speaking out against the term schizophrenia — translated from the Greek phrase skhizein phren, or "to split mind" — which saying the word itself is stigmatized and harmful to use. So a new study published inSchizophrenia Research suggests the illness be categorized as something else entirely.

Researchers from the University of Verona (UV) in Italy, the Association for the Improvement of Mental Health Programs in Switzerland, and The Australian National University reviewed previously published literature on the issue of renaming schizophrenia, weighing the pros and cons of those changes. In total, there were 47 papers, and among them, researchers found the advantages outweighed the disadvantages. Renaming schizophrenia would “reduce stigma and benefit communication between clinicians, patients, and families.”

“The literature, from both Eastern and Western countries, consistently shows that the term schizophrenia holds a negative stigmatizing connotation,” Dr.Antonio Lasalvia, lead study author of the department of public health and community medicine at UV, told The Daily Beast. “This negative connotation is a barrier for the recognition of the problem itself, for seeking specialized care, for taking full advantage of specialized care. It is therefore useless and sometimes damaging.”

The Daily Beast reported of the words used to categorize mental illness, so many are used to connote “being broken or disorganized.” There are even those who use the term to generally refer to anything at all that seems insane, crazy, or unhinged. And for patients who are actually diagnosed with the disorder, they’re afraid to say so for fear of others writing them off as a crazy.

However, schizophrenia stems from problems with brain chemisty and structure, NAMI reported; it’s a combination of genetic and environmental factors not unlike many other medical illness. Cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown to be particularly effective in treating schizophrenia patients, and psychosocial rehabilitations can help patients “successfully live in independent housing, pursue education, find jobs, and improve social interaction.”

Schizophrenia wouldn’t be the only mental illness to undergo a name change. Multiple personality disorder, for example, is now referred to as dissociative identity disorder. Lasalvia and his team added that while these changes reduce stigma, and ultimately better the state of mental health care, there need to also be “parallel changes in legislation, services, and the education of professionals and the public.”

How to Be a Better Spouse

Before you get married, everyone tells you that marriage takes work. I never really believed it until my husband and I landed in therapy after four years, two kids and one seismically stressful cross-country move. Turns out you really can't just flip the switch to autopilot and trust love to take care of itself; you have to devote actual time and effort to understanding and appreciating your spouse. Anyone who is married knows that's not always a simple feat. Here's what relationship research (and a touch of game theory) tells us about how to become a better spouse.

#1 Be nice as often as you can. A lot of modern relationship therapy is based on the research of John Gottman, a prolific psychologist famous for videotaping thousands of couples and dissecting their interactions into quantifiable data. One of his most concrete findings was that happier couples had a ratio of five positive interactions to every negative interaction. “That just leapt off the pages of the data analysis,” he says. It was true in very different types of relationships, including those in which the people were very independent and even distant or argumentative. These positive interactions don't have to be grand gestures: “A smile, a head nod, even just grunting to show you're listening to your partner—those are all positive,” Gottman says.

#2 Think about what your partner needs, even when fighting. To resolve conflicts, Gottman says we can learn from game theory—the study of conflict and decision making used in political science, sociology and economics. It used to be widely accepted that negotiations were mostly zero-sum situations, meaning one party's gain was the other party's loss. In 1950 mathematician John Nash proved there was another, better outcome: a solution in which the parties may have to compromise, but in the end all of them come out satisfied. (This now famous “Nash equilibrium” won him a Nobel Prize in 1994.) I'm reminded of a recent situation in my own marriage—my husband hated the house we bought a couple of years ago and wanted to move to a different neighborhood; I liked the house just fine and didn't want to go anywhere. After much discussion, we realized that what we both really want is to settle in somewhere for the long haul. If the current house is not a place my husband feels he can settle in, then I can't truly settle in either. So we're moving next month, for both our sakes! Find the Nash equilibrium in your conflict, and you'll both get your needs met.

#3 Just notice them. “People are always making attempts to get their partners' attention and interest,” Gottman says. In his research, he has found that couples who stay happy (at least during the first seven years) pick up on these cues for attention and give it 86 percent of the time. Pairs who ended up divorced did so 33 percent of the time. “It's the moment we choose to listen to our partner vent about a bad day instead of returning to our television show,” explains Dana R. Baerger, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “In any interaction, we have the opportunity to connect with our partner or to turn away. If we consistently turn away, then over time the foundation of the marriage can slowly erode, even in the absence of overt conflict.”

#4 Ignore the bad, praise the good.Observations of couples at home reveal that people who focus on the negative miss many of the positive things that their partners are doing. Happy spouses, however, ignore the annoyances and focus on the good. “If your wife is irritable one morning, it's not a big deal. It's not going to become a confrontation,” Gottman says. “Then when she does something nice, you notice and comment on that.” Guess what that breeds? More of the good stuff.

It's this lesson that I'm going to try to implement right away. The guy I'm married to leaves dirty shirts balled up on the floor, never loads the dishwasher correctly and can be prickly when he hasn't had enough sleep—but he is an amazing husband. He's honest, shares his feelings, hugs and kisses me, and basically acts like I matter. I want to show him how much he matters, too, and that all the other stupid little stuff doesn't.

Flibanserin Makes 3rd Bid For FDA Approval, Could Become First Pill To Treat Low Libido In Women

Drugmakers of a female libido-boosting pill submitted a third application Tuesday to the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA has twice shot down Sprout Pharmaceuticals' application for the drug flibanserin, intended to treat pre-menopausal women with low sex drive. As reported by The Associated Press, an FDA panel failed to find that the drug’s benefits outweighed its risks. The company re-submitted its application after adding the requested results of a study comparing women’s driving ability after taking flibanserin with women who had taken a placebo and a common sleeping pill.

If passed, it would become the first pill for women who report lack of sexual desire. However, Sprout Pharmaceuticals claims its drug’s failure to meet FDA standards is more a political issue than a medical one. 

After flibanserin was first rejected in 2010, its creators at Boehringer Ingelheim sold the drug to Sprout, a start-up company based in Raleigh, N.C. After undergoing additional safety and effectiveness testing, Sprout re-submitted flibanserin in 2013, but it was once again rejected. It was at this point that Sprout enlisted help from a number of women’s groups in a drive to headline the approval of what would become “the female Viagra.”

“There are 24 approved medical treatments for male sexual dysfunction and not one single treatment yet approved for the most common form of female sexual dysfunction,” states a letter Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and two other Democratic congresswomen submitted to the FDA last January, AP reported.

Low libido is a problem experienced by sexually active women of all ages. According to Everyday Health, as many as 43 percent of women report experiencing some type of sexual dysfunction, low libido being the most prevalent, but in many cases, it happens for no apparent reason. Hormonal changesassociated with pregnancy and menopause can cause decreased libido, as can stress and poor body image.

It’s believed that very low levels of testosterone may also contribute to decreased libido in women, but according to theNorth American Menopause Society, there are no testosterone products approved for treating sexual problems in women in the U.S. or Canada.

Unlike testosterone treatment, flibanserin would attempt to increase sexual desire by action on the brain chemicals linked to appetite and mood.  

Correction: The original story stated that flibanserin would be used to treat post-menopausal women with low libido, but, in truth, if passed it would be labelled for premenopausal women with low libido. 

Cheat Meals Actually Boost Your Metabolism And Help You Lose Weight

Dieting is a fickle beast. Some days, eating just enough chicken, rice, and vegetables to function is fine. Other days, the overwhelming need to eat an entire pizza pie is almost too much to handle. Thankfully, any diet can handle motivation-saving cheat meals. A free meal that allows you to indulge in whatever your heart (and taste buds) desire may seem too good to be true, but cheat meals are actually essential for a healthy diet. Having said that, there’s a right way to do a cheat meal that will aid in weight loss and there’s a wrong way that could end up hindering your overall weight loss goal.

The 90/10 Rule

First thing's first: It’s a cheat meal, not a cheat day. Cheat meals should be a part of your diet, but cheat days will ruin your diet. Nutrition experts agree that any diet should adhere to the 90/10 rule, meaning 90 percent of the diet should be focused solely on healthy food, while the remaining 10 percent can be devoted to cheat meals. For example, if you’re looking to follow a dieting plan that allows five smaller meals throughout the day, then you will be consuming 35 meals a week. By following the 90/10 rule, three to four meals a week can be devoted to indulging your sweet tooth.

“Cheat days serve a couple of purposes. First, it is important to clarify that a cheat day is most successful when a single meal that day is regarded as the cheat. If you allow all of your hard work to unravel for an entire day, you can quickly void the progress you have been making all week, especially if weight loss is a goal.” Jillian Guinta, professor in the Health and Physical Education Department at Seton Hall University

Why Should You Eat A Cheat Meal?

That coveted cheat meal you’ve been powering through cups of vegetables and chicken breasts for is more than loading up on junk food. Psychologically, it’s about making your diet seem more feasible. Even the most chiseled gym rat would lose their mind sticking to a strict diet over the course of 12 weeks. Let’s say Monday through Saturday are healthy eating days and Sunday is the day for your cheat meal. Sticking to your diet six days out of the week seems a lot more attainable with some scoops of Ben & Jerry’s waiting at the end.

“There is a psychological component to the cheat day. Without rewards, it can become mundane to keep a healthy lifestyle day in and day out. Oftentimes, it may take several weeks to see the scale budge, so knowing that a cheat day is coming can help keep up motivation,” Guinta explained.

There’s also a scientific approach to why we need an occasional cheat meal. It all starts withleptin, a protein produced by fat tissue that helps regulate body weight and fat mass by impacting appetite and the body’s energy balance. Constant dieting will eventually lead to caloric deficits which causes our energy levels to plummet. A calorie bomb provided by your cheat meal will help the body maintain energy levels needed to continue dieting and exercising.

When Should You Eat A Cheat Meal?

While your goal should be to fully satisfy your junk food desires, cheat meals still require some form moderation and compromise. Remember, your body still needs the three essential macronutrients, protein, carbohydrates, and fat, for energy and to build muscle. Think of your cheat meal as a time for you to enjoy “bad” protein, carbs, and fat. For some people that means switching from grilled to fried chicken for one meal out of the week or complex carbs to simple carbs. Also consider saving your cheat meal for post-workout when the body is ready to make use of every macro, “good” or “bad.”

“Here is one more way that your cheat meal can be used: There are significant weight loss benefits in changing your calories intake for a couple days in a row,” Guinta added. “For example, keeping a 1,400 per day calorie diet for four consecutive days and adding on 200-300 calories for the remaining three days can aid in success. By occasionally boosting your caloric intake, you encourage your body to burn calories more rapidly instead of allowing it to adjust completely to the lower calorie lifestyle.

Scientists Claim Millions Of Dollars In Metals Can Be Found In Human Feces

It’s possible there’s gold in your poop, according to a group of scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Millions of dollars in it.

In addition to the food we eat, human waste contains a variety of metals and minerals — including gold, copper, and silver, which find their way into waste through beauty products, detergents, and other products. In their study, the researchers measured the amount of gold in human waste product, and found that they were at the “level of a minimal mineral deposit,” Kathleen Smith, a USGS geologist who worked on the study, said. This means that if those levels were found in rock, they’d be considered a possible mining prospect.

Mining for gold…in poop? It sounds crazy, but here’s how it could potentially work. Human waste gets flushed down the toilet, where it travels to a wastewater treatment plant. There, it’s separated into biosolids and treated water through a series of physical, biological, and chemical processes. Half of the biosolids, or about 3.5 million tons in the U.S., is sent to landfills or incinerated. The other half is used as a fertilizer. But what if scientists were able to use biosolids to mine for gold?

Smith and her team note that miners use certain chemicals called leachates to pull metals out of rock, and this same technique could be used to pull gold out of waste. The researchers took waste samples from small towns in the Rocky Mountains, rural areas, as well as cities. They found a variety of minerals and metals in biosolids; mining them could provide us with a new way to get gold, silver, and other rare elements like palladium and vanadium — which are used in electronics and alloys.

“If you can get rid of some of the nuisance metals that currently limit how much of these biosolids we can use on fields and forests, and at the same time recover valuable metals and other elements, that’s a win win,” Smith said in a press release.

She continued: “We have a two-pronged approach. In one part of the study, we are looking at removing some regulated metals from the biosolids that limit their use for land application. In the other part of the project, we’re interested in collecting valuable metals that could be sold, including some of the more technologically important metals, such as vanadium and copper that are in cell phones, computers and alloys.”

They will be presenting the research at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Fiber-Famished Gut Microbes Linked to Poor Health

KEYSTONE, Colo.—Your gut is the site of constant turf wars. Hundreds of bacterial species—along with fungi, archaea and viruses—do battle daily, competing for resources. Some companies advocate for consuming more probiotics, live beneficial bacteria, to improve microbial communities in our gut, but more and more research supports the idea that the most powerful approach might be to better feed the good bacteria we already harbor. Their meal of choice? Fiber.  

Fiber has long been linked to better health, but new research shows how the gut microbiota might play a role in this pattern. One investigation discovered that adding more fiber to the diet can trigger a shift from a microbial profile linked to obesity to one correlated with a leaner physique. Another recent study shows that when microbes are starved of fiber, they can start to feed on the protective mucus lining of the gut, possibly triggering inflammation and disease.

"Diet is one of the most powerful tools we have for changing the microbiota,"Justin Sonnenburg, a biologist at Stanford University, said earlier this month at a Keystone Symposia conference on the gut microbiome. "Dietary fiber and diversity of the microbiota complement each other for better health outcomes." In particular, beneficial microbes feast on fermentable fibers—which can come from various vegetables, whole grains and other foods—that resist digestion by human-made enzymes as they travel down the digestive tract. These fibers arrive in the large intestine relatively intact, ready to be devoured by our microbial multitudes. Microbes can extract the fiber's extra energy, nutrients, vitamins and other compounds for us. Short-chain fatty acids obtained from fiber are of particular interest, as they have been linked to improved immune function,decreased inflammation and protection against obesity.

Today's Western diet, however, is exceedingly fiber-poor by historical standards. It contains roughly 15 grams of fiber daily, Sonnenburg noted. For most of our early history as hunter-gatherers, we were likely eating close to 10 times that amount of fiber each day. "Imagine the effect that has on our microbiota over the course of our evolution," he said.

Your bugs are what you eat
Not all helpful fiber, however, needs to come from the roots and roughage for which our ancestors foraged, new research suggests. Kelly Swanson, a professor of comparative nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his team found that simply adding a fiber-enriched snack bar to subjects' daily diets could swing microbial profiles in a matter of weeks. In a small study of 21 healthy adults with average U.S. fiber intake, one daily fiber snack bar (containing 21 grams of fiber) for three weeks significantly increased the number of Bacteroidetes bacteria and decreased the number of Firmicutes compared with levels before the study or after three weeks of eating fiber-free bars. Such a ratio—of more Bacteroidetes to fewer Firmicutes—is correlated with lower BMI. The findingswere published in the January issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

"We've known forever that if you eat a lot of fiber, you lose weight," Swanson says. His and other recent studies suggest that our gut microbes are a key player in this relationship. In addition to identifying groups of bacteria, a genome scan revealed a shifting pattern of genes active in the gut microbes. As fiber consumption increased, the activity of genes associated with protein metabolism declined, a finding that researchers hope will help them understand the complicated puzzle of diet and weight loss. "We're getting closer to what is actually cause and effect," Swanson says. 

Feed the microbes so they don't feed on you
As gut microbes are starved of fermentable fiber, some do die off. Others, however, are able to switch to another food source in the gut: the mucus lining that helps keep the gut wall intact and free from infection.

In a recent study presented at the Keystone meeting, Eric Martens of the University of Michigan Medical School, postdoctoral researcher Mahesh Desai and their colleagues found that this fuel switch had striking consequences in rodents. A group of mice fed a high-fiber diet had healthy gut lining, but for mice on a fiber-free diet, "the mucus layer becomes dramatically diminished," he explained at the meeting. This shift might sometimes have severe health consequences. Research by a Swedish team, published last year in the journalGut, showed a link between bacteria penetrating the mucus layer and ulcerative colitis, a painful chronic bowel disease.

A third group of mice received high-fiber chow and fiber-free chow on alternating days—"like what we would do if we were being bad and eating McDonald's one day and eating our whole grains the next," Martens joked. Even the part-time high-fiber diet was not enough to keep guts healthy: these mice had a mucus layer about half the thickness of mice on the consistently high-fiber diet. If we can extend these results to humans, he said, it "tells us that even eating your whole fiber foods every other day is still not enough to protect you. You need to eat a high-fiber diet every day to keep a healthy gut." Along the same lines, Swanson's group found that the gut microbiomes of his adult subjects reverted back to initial profiles as soon as the high-fiber bars were discontinued.

Martens and his colleagues also observed that mice on the consistently high-fiber diet consumed fewer calories and were slimmer than those on the fiber-free diet, showing that fiber benefits the body in multiple ways. "Studies like this are great because it's getting at the mechanisms to explain why fiber is beneficial," Swanson says.

As all this work underscores, the gut microbiome is exceptionally plastic. Such rapid, diet-influenced changes likely served us well over the course of our evolutionary history—shifting faster than our own physiology could, wrote Justin Sonnenburg and Erica Sonnenburg in a November 2014 article in Cell Metabolism. "In delegating part of our digestion and calorie harvest to our gut residents, the microbial part of our biology could easily adjust to day-to-day or season-to-season variation in available food," they noted. New studies continue to demonstrate that microbial changes due to diet are "largely reversible on short time scales." But the question remains as to how chronic low-fiber intake—over a lifetime or generations—might permanently alter our guts and our health.

Memories May Not Live in Neurons’ Synapses

As intangible as they may seem, memories have a firm biological basis. According to textbook neuroscience, they form when neighboring brain cells send chemical communications across the synapses, or junctions, that connect them. Each time a memory is recalled, the connection is reactivated and strengthened. The idea that synapses store memories has dominated neuroscience for more than a century, but a new study by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, may fundamentally upend it: instead memories may reside inside brain cells. If supported, the work could have major implications for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition marked by painfully vivid and intrusive memories.

More than a decade ago scientists began investigating the drug propranolol for the treatment of PTSD. Propranolol was thought to prevent memories from forming by blocking production of proteins required for long-term storage. Unfortunately, the research quickly hit a snag. Unless administered immediately after the traumatic event, the treatment was ineffective. Lately researchers have been crafting a work-around: evidence suggests that when someone recalls a memory, the reactivated connection is not only strengthened but becomes temporarily susceptible to change, a process called memory reconsolidation. Administering propranolol (and perhaps also therapy, electrical stimulation and certain other drugs) during this window can enable scientists to block reconsolidation, wiping out the synapse on the spot.

The possibility of purging recollections caught the eye of David Glanzman, a neurobiologist at U.C.L.A., who set out to study the process in Aplysia, a sluglike mollusk commonly used in neuroscience research. Glanzman and his team zapped Aplysia with mild electric shocks, creating a memory of the event expressed as new synapses in the brain. The scientists then transferred neurons from the mollusk into a petri dish and chemically triggered the memory of the shocks in them, quickly followed by a dose of propranolol.

Initially the drug appeared to confirm earlier research by wiping out the synaptic connection. But when cells were exposed to a reminder of the shocks, the memory came back at full strength within 48 hours. “It was totally reinstated,” Glanzman says. “That implies to me that the memory wasn't stored in the synapse.” The results were recently published in the online open-access journal eLife.

If memory is not located in the synapse, then where is it? When the neuroscientists took a closer look at the brain cells, they found that even when the synapse was erased, molecular and chemical changes persisted after the initial firing within the cell itself. The engram, or memory trace, could be preserved by these permanent changes. Alternatively, it could be encoded in modifications to the cell's DNA that alter how particular genes are expressed. Glanzman and others favor this reasoning.

Eric R. Kandel, a neuroscientist at Columbia University and recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on memory, cautions that the study's results were observed in the first 48 hours after treatment, a time when consolidation is still sensitive.

Though preliminary, the results suggest that for people with PTSD, pill popping will most likely not eliminate painful memories. “If you had asked me two years ago if you could treat PTSD with medication blockade, I would have said yes, but now I don't think so,” Glanzman says. On the bright side, he adds, the idea that memories persist deep within brain cells offers new hope for another disorder tied to memory: Alzheimer's.

Effect of Meth

Meth, scientists from the Italian Institute of Technology and UC Irvine say, causes abnormalities in the fat metabolism of cells and this triggers a rise in a type of molecule which promotes cell death. Understanding this, they say they can prevent the drug’s radical effects.

Physical Effects 

Users say meth creates a feeling of euphoria along with increased energy and reduced appetite. A psychostimulant, meth is highly addictive despite, or perhaps, because of the fact that it causes profound and long-lasting damage to the brain. Post-mortem studies link the drug to diseases of aging, including coronary atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and pulmonary fibrosis (scar tissue in the lungs). Something is happening at the cellular level to cause these strange physical effects, but what is it?

For the current study, experiments on rats and mice allowed the researchers, in their own words, “to investigate the molecular mechanisms of systemic inflammation and cellular aging related to methamphetamine abuse.” Specifically, they focused on the ways meth induces abnormalities of lipid metabolism in select regions of the brain and peripheral organs and tissues. Through experimentation, the scientists observed how meth accelerated "cellular senescence" — arrested cell growth — and influenced inflammation and other processes of cell regulation.

The chemical cascade caused by meth within each cell involves a specific protein, known as nuclear factor kappa beta. Under healthy conditions, this protein helps regulate other proteins that keep our bodies functioning. However, as each individual cell is overwhelmed by meth-induced signaling, nuclear factor kappa beta begins its own excessive signaling, which triggers a dramatic increase in the production of ceramide. Normally, this lipid molecule regulates energy production and nutrient use within a cell, so when it’s suddenly amplified, every aspect of metabolism speeds up as well.

“We found this signaling process to be key for advanced cellular aging,” Dr. Daniele Piomelli, the Louise Turner Arnold Chair in the Neurosciences at UCI, stated in apress release.

Having identified meth's effects on cells, Piomelli and his co-researchers decided to figure out a possible way to prevent the drug's effects on the body. If we can stop nuclear factor kappa beta, they reasoned, by increasing the body's natural inhibitors of that protein, then we can limit the production of ceramide. This, in turn will prevent the harmful effects of meth — fast-forwarded cell aging and systemic inflammation.

These results suggest new therapeutic strategies to reduce the adverse consequences of meth abuse and improve the effectiveness of abstinence treatments,” said Piomelli, who is working with colleagues at the Italian Institute of Technology to create new drugs targeting the specific cellular mechanisms identified in this research.

Cosmetic Surgery For Vaginas Has Risen In Popularity Among Young Women

In the world of cosmetic surgery, breast augmentations and nose jobs are among the top requested surgery, and now vagina modifications are moving higher in rank. The rise in popularity for reducing the size of the vagina’s labia has turned into a designer demand.

The National Health Service (NHS) has performed five times as many labiaplasties since 2001, making it the most popular request by women 18 to 24 years of age. Each year, an average of 1,150 women had undergone labia reduction surgery in the past four years in order to create a “designer vagina” to conform to what they believe a normal vagina should look like.

According to a study published in December 2013 from the University of Queensland, women don’t realize how much vagina appearances can vary. After showing women images of surgically modified vaginas and non-surgically modified vaginas, women were more likely to believe the surgically modified labia was “normal” and “society’s ideal.” “The rise in genital cosmetic surgery for women is a very worrying trend,” the study's lead researcher, Claire Moran said in a press release.

The data was released by UK-based Transform Cosmetic Surgery, who wrote on their website, “cosmetic surgery isn’t just about enhancing the way we look. It’s about making us feel better about ourselves too.” They go on to say they want to disseminate the stigma of talking about surgery for the vagina, and encourage people to stop feeling embarrassed when they inquire about a labia reduction surgery. The labia comprises the inner and outer folds of the vagina. The labia majora are the larger, outer lips that serve as the first wall of protection, while the labia minora is the smaller inside flap.

The surgery is for the smaller of the two, which can change shape after childbirth, or from the natural aging process it can lose tone or seem enlarged. In certain situations, women can be born with a large or thick labia, known as labial hypertrophy, which could cause discomfort or sexual discomfort and confidence, according to the Center for Young Women’s Health.

“We've been helping patients for 40 years and in that time there's been a massive change in what they enquire about. We've had 350,000 from all over the country in the last four years alone,” Patricia Dunion, chief operating officer of Transform Cosmetic Surgery told The Telegraph UK..

But for those who are doing it solely for aesthetic purposes, there is cause for concern because they’re trying to alter their bodies to fit the images seen in pornographic videos or the misconstrued perceptions they have of other women’s vaginal areas.

“There are misconceptions around normal genital appearance,” Moran said as she explained why she wanted to further explore the reason behind this new trend. “This is due to airbrushing, lack of exposure to normal women's genitals, greater genital visibility due to Brazilian and genital waxing and the general taboo around discussing genitals and genital appearance.”

Sexual Regret Differs Between Men And Women

According to a new studyconducted by the University of Texas at Austin, and published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, women and men both have regret when it comes to sex, but the type of regret differs according to gender.

Both sexes regretted having sex with someone who was not physically attractive. Twenty four percent of women regretted losing their virginity to the wrong person, while 27 percent of men regretted forgoing the chance of having a prospective sexual partner. Other regrets for women included cheating on a past partner and moving too fast sexually. Men, on the other hand, regretted not being more sexually adventurous when they were younger or single. In comparison, gay men, lesbian women, bisexual men, and bisexual women had a similar pattern.

“For men throughout evolutionary history, every missed opportunity to have sex with a new partner is potentially a missed reproduc[tion] opportunity — a costly loss from an evolutionary perspective,” Martie Haselton, a UCLA social psychology professor said in astatement.

The study was broken up into three experiments. For the first one, 200 participants evaluated hypothetical scenarios in which someone regretted pursuing, or were not able to pursue, an opportunity to have sex. They were then asked to rate their regret on a five-point scale. The second experiment asked 395 participants to write a list of common sexual regrets, and asked them to identify which ones they had experienced personally. The final experiment mirrored the second one, but on a larger scale, and produced the same results — it included 24,230 individuals who were heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. 

“For women, reproduction requires much more investment in each offspring, including nine months of pregnancy, and potentially two additional years of breastfeeding,” Haselton said in the statement. “The consequences of casual sex were so much higher for women than for men, and this is likely to have shaped emotional reactions to sexual liaisons even today.”

This might also be a reason why studies have found a link between casual sex and depression, especially at a young age. Casual sexual relationships may hurt the ability of young adults to develop committed relationships at an important time in their development, Claire Kamp Dush, assistant professor of human sciences at Ohio State, said in a press release for the study. This might hinder a person’s opportunity to thoroughly understand the implications behind sex in order to correctly choose the correct partner — from an evolutionary standpoint.

This all might seem antiquated and we may have come a long way since our hunter-gatherer days, but the mindset of these regrets seems to have ties to ancestral links. “We have reliable methods of contraception. But that doesn't seem to have erased the sex differences in women's and men’s responses, which might have a deep evolutionary history,” said Haselton.