Category: Health & Fitness

New research explores the effect of chemicals in everyday plastic items on mouse fat cells.

• Changes in diet and exercise do not fully explain the steep rise in overweight and obesity over recent decades.
• One theory claims that chemicals in everyday plastic products promote weight gain by changing human metabolism.
• A new study found that a range of plastic household items contain thousands of chemicals, many of them unknown.
• One-third of the items contained chemicals that, after extraction, caused the growth and proliferation of mouse fat cells in the lab.

Chemicals in plastic household items such as drinks bottles, yogurt pots, and freezer bags may be contributing to the global epidemicTrusted Source of obesity, a new study suggests.

The chemicals may alter human metabolism by promoting the growth of fat cells, or adipocytes. 

According to the World Health Organization (WHO)Trusted Source, the number of people with obesity has nearly tripled globally since 1975. 

The WHO estimates that in 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults were overweight. Of these individuals, more than 650 million had obesity.

Having excess body weight increases a person’s risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, non-alcohol-related fatty liver disease, stroke, and certain types of cancer. 

Research suggests that factors such as changes in diet are insufficient to explain the scale of the obesity epidemic and the speed with which it has spread around the world. 

One possible culprit is the effect of synthetic chemicals in our environment called endocrine disruptors. These influence the endocrine system, which includes the hormones that regulate appetite, metabolism, and weight, among other bodily functions. 

Continue reading… “Chemicals in everyday plastic items may lead to weight gain”

Schematic illustration of loss of resilience along aging trajectories.

By GERO

The research team of Gero, a Singapore-based biotech company in collaboration with Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo NY, announces a publication in Nature Communications, a journal of Nature portfolio, presenting the results of the study on associations between aging and the loss of the ability to recover from stresses.

Recently, we have witnessed the first promising examples of biological age reversal by experimental interventions. Indeed, many biological clock types properly predict more years of life for those who choose healthy lifestyles or quit unhealthy ones, such as smoking. What has been still unknown is how quickly biological age is changing over time for the same individual. And especially, how one would distinguish between the transient fluctuations and the genuine bioage change trend.

The emergence of big biomedical data involving multiple measurements from the same subjects brings about a whole range of novel opportunities and practical tools to understand and quantify the aging process in humans. A team of experts in biology and biophysics presented results of a detailed analysis of dynamic properties of the fluctuations of physiological indices along individual aging trajectories.

Healthy human subjects turned out to be very resilient, whereas the loss of resilience turned out to be related to chronic diseases and elevated all-cause mortality risks. The rate of recovery to the equilibrium baseline level after stresses was found to deteriorate with age. Accordingly, the time needed to recover was getting longer and longer. Being around 2 weeks for 40 y.o. healthy adults the recovery time stretched to 6 weeks for 80 y.o. on average in the population. This finding was confirmed in two different datasets based on two different kinds of biological measurements — blood test parameters on one hand and physical activity levels recorded by wearable devices on the other hand.

Continue reading… “Scientists Have Found a Way to Break the Limit of Human Longevity”

Taking small steps for our well-being can help us combat virtual fatigue and burnout.

By Bryan Robinson, Ph.D., 

For many people, burnout from virtual fatigue has been a built-in feature of the pandemic. A new study from Superhuman found “email fatigue” to be the cause of rising dissatisfaction with remote work.More than one-third of employees said email and message overload may lead them to quit their jobs. The survey found half of remote workers (50%) spent their own money on tools to help manage their productivity, and another 17% plan to do so in the future. Plus, new Stanford research reveals how the shift from in-person meetings to virtual ones has taken its toll, particularly among women. Overall, one in seven women (13.8%) compared with one in 20 men (5.5%) reported feeling “very” to “extremely” fatigued after Zoom calls. Researchers found what contributed most to the feeling of exhaustion among women was an increase in what social psychologists describe as “self-focused attention” triggered by the self-view in video conferencing.

Continue reading… “The New Science Of “Micro Self-Care””