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Category Archives: Mind Building
Food Logging
If you’d like to raise your awareness about what you’re actually eating and how it affects you, food logging is a simple and effective way to do this.
Six weeks ago I decided to start keeping a log of everything I ate in a small notebook. I also keep track of calories. I wanted to raise my awareness of what I was eating and how calorically dense each meal was.
Computing the calories is easy. I use a small kitchen scale to weigh quantities of foods, and then I just ask a nearby smart device what the calories are. Usually Google or Alexa can give the correct response to a question like, “How many calories are in 200g of strawberries?” And if not then I can just look it up online.
Once I’ve already figured out the calories for a given meal, I don’t have to recalculate it, so this gets easier over time.
I know that some people use apps for this purpose. I prefer to use the small notebook and a pen.
I also don’t worry about perfection, so sometimes I just guesstimate calories, especially for water-rich veggies which don’t have many calories anyway. If I’m off by +/- 50 calories at the end of the day, that isn’t a big deal. I want to keep the tracking simple.
In the six weeks that I’ve been logging, I lost 8.2 pounds without really trying, so about 1.4 pounds per week. I felt no deprivation, didn’t skip meals, and always ate when I was hungry. I could tell that I was eating less food and making slightly different choices though.
The daily logging helped me see how satisfying each meal was relative to its calories. While calories alone aren’t a perfect measure, they’re a useful data point. Just seeing the calories connected to each meal and reflecting on my satisfaction after eating helped me make some simple changes.
I learned that large green smoothies don’t give me much enduring satisfaction. They’re tasty and I enjoy them, but the satiety doesn’t last long. It’s easy to make a 500+ calorie smoothie, drink it, and feel hungry an hour later. I might feel equally satisfied by eating two large peaches, which would only be 140 calories total. Or I’ll make a simple shake with a banana, 10g of walnuts, some maca powder, ice, and water for about 200 calories.
Similarly, I learned that I can easily make a 700-calorie salad, but I might actually be more satisfied with a bowl of brown rice and steamed broccoli for half the calories.
I’ve been eating far fewer bananas lately, probably just one per day on average. I’m eating a lot more peaches, strawberries, blueberries, apricots, and clementines. A couple of apricots makes a nice little snack for only 50 calories.
Peaches have been one of my favorite foods lately. A ripe peach or two is so delicious and satisfying relative to its calories. I’ve eaten as many as five in a day, which is still only 350 calories. I also love combinations like a bowl of sliced peach with strawberries or blueberries. Steel cut oats with peaches, blueberries, or strawberries is my most common breakfast these days.
I’ve also learned to be very conservative with oils and other fats, which can be nice for extra satiety by slowing the digestion of a meal. Adding 4-6g of coconut oil to a bowl of oatmeal adds 35-55 calories, but it makes the meal feel more satisfying. Same goes for adding 1 tsp of hemp seeds or 6-10g of walnuts to a modest smoothie or shake. A little bit of added fat here and there can be a nice addition, but it’s really easy to add extra fat to a meal and not make it any more satisfying.
I still eat salads often, but I greatly limit the sources of added fat like avocados and olive oil. In the past I would often have half of an avocado on a salad, and now I just have a quarter or skip the avocado entirely.
The tracking is super easy and doesn’t feel tedious at all. Actually I enjoy doing it because it’s an interesting learning experience. Doing this is a simple habit now, so I’ll continue doing for more weeks ahead as I keep learning how different trade-offs affect me.
Another thing I’ve learned from this is that I usually get hungrier on days when I don’t exercise. I go for a morning run 5-6 days per week, which burns 700-800 calories before breakfast, according to my Apple Watch. On those days I’ll typically eat around 2100 calories. But when I don’t exercise, I’m more likely to eat 2300-2400 calories. Again, I’m not trying to hold back on food intake, so I eat when I’m hungry. I just found it interesting that running in the morning doesn’t make me want or need more food; I actually feel satisfied with less on those days.
I’ve also learned that if I come in relatively low on calories one day, I’ll naturally want to eat more the next day. Having a lower calorie day will especially make me feel hungrier the next morning. So I haven’t seen any value in deliberately trying to cut calories by eating less.
Overall this experiment is helping me see that more food doesn’t necessarily mean more satiety. I actually feel more satisfied with my daily meals now than I did before this experiment, perhaps because I’m paying more attention to satisfaction and thinking about that when I prepare meals. I’ve also removed any potential justification for not eating when I’m hungry.
I’ve done a lot of different diet experiments over the years, including those involving raw foods, juicing, intermittent fasting, and water fasting, and this has to be the easiest one I’ve ever done. It would be no sweat to keep doing this for several months since it only takes a few extra minutes per day and doesn’t involve any kind of deprivation or sacrifice.
I’d recommend trying this for yourself for several weeks if you’d like to raise your awareness in this area and especially if you’d like to lose some weight with relative ease. Lately I’ve heard people saying that they’ve been gaining weight (against their wishes) while spending more time at home due to the coronavirus pandemic. This may be an easy way to counter that effect while also learning more about your body’s responses.
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Promising treatment to slow kidney disease doesn’t prove out in clinical trial
Historically, half or more of people with type 1 diabetes develop kidney disease, which frequently progresses to kidney failure requiring hemodialysis or a kidney transplant for survival. The high rate of this diabetic complication has dropped slightly in recent years, with the advent of better ways to control blood glucose (sugar) levels and improved blood pressure drugs, “but diabetic kidney disease is still a huge problem,” says Alessandro Doria, MD, PhD, MPH, Senior Investigator in Joslin Diabetes Center’s Section on Genetics and Epidemiology.
Progression of kidney disease in type 1 diabetes is correlated with increased amounts of a compound in the blood called uric acid. Hoping that a drug that reduces these uric acid levels would slow the disease, Doria and his colleagues launched a multi-institution randomized clinical trial that enrolled 530 participants with type 1 diabetes and early-to-moderate kidney disease.
Results of the Preventing Early Renal Loss in Diabetes (PERL) study were just published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the leading clinical research journal. Unfortunately, this study did not show the desired clinical benefits. “This is not the result that we wanted,” says Doria, “but it does give a very clear answer to an important scientific question.”
A second trial by Australian researchers on patients with a variety of chronic kidney diseases, some with diabetes, published alongside the PERL study in the NEJM, found similar results.
The PERL trial grew out of several studies that followed a cohort of people with type 1 diabetes, including one in which Doria partnered with Andrzej Krolewski, MD, PhD, head of the Section on Genetics and Epidemiology. In a 2011 paper, the Joslin scientists demonstrated that in this cohort, people with higher levels of uric acid in their blood were more likely to display a high rate of kidney function loss. Two other research groups in Denver, Colorado and Copenhagen, Denmark obtained similar results.
“This was an actionable discovery, because allopurinol, a drug that’s been on the market since the 1960s, can easily reduce uric acid,” says Doria, who is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Allopurinol is prescribed for gout, an inflammatory condition caused by excess uric acid, he explains. It’s an inexpensive generic drug with known side effects that can largely be avoided. Additionally, allopurinol produced apparent benefits in much smaller clinical trials among people with chronic kidney disease, a minority of whom had diabetes.
Doria teamed up with S. Michael Mauer, MD, of the University of Minnesota Medical School to design and carry out a clinical trial with support from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) and JDRF. The PERL consortium eventually grew to 16 sites.
Participants in the three-year, placebo-controlled and double-blinded trial received the current standard of care, including a renin-angiotensin system inhibitor — an existing type of drug shown in the 1990s to slow kidney damage, albeit incompletely.
The key measurement of kidney function for PERL was glomerular filtration rate (GFR), a measure of how much blood is filtered every minute by the kidneys. GFR drops as kidney disease progresses.
Over the three years of the study, levels of uric acid dropped about 35% on average among people given allopurinol compared to those who weren’t. “But despite this very nice reduction in uric acid, we could not see any effect on GFR,” Doria says.
He and his colleagues will continue to follow participants through their medical records and through national databases that track people who eventually progress to dialysis or kidney transplants.
Researchers at Joslin and other institutions continue to examine other potential routes to guard against kidney disease among people with type 1 diabetes.
Despite its disappointing conclusion, “PERL was a textbook example of using epidemiology to find treatment targets, and then designing a study to translate those findings and try to find a new intervention,” Doria says. “In this case, it didn’t work. But this is exactly why we do epidemiological studies, and how our scientific understanding advances.”
Massive Saharan dust aerosol blanket
Dust storms from Africa’s Saharan Desert traveling across the Atlantic Ocean are nothing new, but the current dust storm has been quite expansive and NASA satellites have provided a look at the massive June plume. NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite showed the blanket of dust had moved over the Gulf of Mexico and extended into Central America and over part of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
NASA uses satellites and other resources to track aerosol particles made of desert dust, smoke, and volcanic ash. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard Suomi NPP provided a visible image while the Ozone Mapping and Profiling Suite (OMPS) Nadir-Mapper (NM) instrument aboard the Suomi-NPP satellite provided absorbing aerosol index values. The OMPS index indicates the presence of light absorbing aerosol particles (ultraviolet (UV)-absorbing particles in the air) such as desert dust. The absorbing aerosol index is related to both the thickness and height of the aerosol layer.
The Absorbing Aerosol Index is useful for identifying and tracking the long-range transport of volcanic ash from volcanic eruptions, smoke from wildfires or biomass burning events and dust from desert dust storms. These aerosol particals can even be tracked over clouds and areas covered by snow and ice.
Colin Seftor, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., created imagery from the Suomi NPP OMPS absorbing aerosol index and visible imagery from the VIIRS instrument He said that on June 23 and 24 the dust plume had moved completely over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, up through the Gulf of Mexico and into southern Texas. “At that point, the situation becomes more complicated because the absorbing aerosol index signal seen further north into Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, etc., is probably a mix of dust and smoke from the numerous fires burning in the southwest U.S. You can also see that the dust traveled over Central America and out into the Eastern Pacific Ocean.”
On June 25, an animation that combined OMPS aerosol index and VIIRS visible imagery from NASA/NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite was created at NASA Goddard showing the movement the Saharan dust cloud from June 15 to 25, 2020,. The animation showed the dust plume streamed from Africa’s west coast over the Atlantic into the Caribbean Sea and up through the Gulf of Mexico over some of the Gulf states.
Aerosol particles absorb and scatter incoming sunlight, which reduces visibility and increases the optical depth. Aerosol particles have an effect on human health, weather and the climate. Aerosol particles are produced from many events including human activities such as pollution from factories and natural processes such as smoke from fires, dust from dust storms, sea salt from breaking waves, and volcanic ash from volcanoes. Aerosol particles compromise human health when inhaled by people with asthma or other respiratory illnesses. Aerosol particles also affect weather and climate by cooling or warming the earth as well as enhancing or preventing cloud formation.
On June 18, NASA’s Earth Observatory noted the thickest parts of the plume appeared to stretch about 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) across the Atlantic Ocean. By June 24, the plume extended over 5,000 miles.
Dust from Africa can affect air quality as far away as North and South America if it is mixed down to ground level. But dust can also play an important ecological role, such as, fertilizing soils in the Amazon and building beaches in the Caribbean. The dry, warm, and windy conditions associated with Saharan Air Layer outbreaks from Africa can also suppress the formation and intensification of tropical cyclones.
“While Saharan dust transport across the ocean to the Americas is not uncommon, the size and strength of this particular event is quite unusual,” Seftor said. “Also, if you look off the coast of Africa you can see yet another large cloud coming off the continent, continuing to feed the long chain of dust traveling across the Atlantic.”
Story Source:
Materials provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Original written by Rob Gutro. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Health24.com | Your genes may affect how you’ll heal if wounded
- Our genes influence the bacteria found in wounds
- This influences the rate at which wounds heal
- Such knowledge can help medical professionals predict the course of wound healing
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Your genes may have a big impact on bacteria in your wounds and how quickly you heal, new research shows.
The researchers said their findings could help improve wound treatment.
Chronic wounds – ones that don’t show signs of healing within three weeks – can be costly, and bacterial infection slows the process.
A range of bacterial species are present in chronic wounds, but it’s not clear why certain ones are found in some wound infections and not others.
Variants in people’s genomes
In order to learn more, the researchers investigated the link between genes and bacteria diversity in chronic wounds.
They linked variations in two key genes – TLN2 and ZNF521 – to both the number of bacteria in wounds and the abundance of harmful ones, primarily Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus epidermidis.
Pseudomonas-infected wounds had fewer species of bacteria – and wounds with fewer species were slower to heal, the investigators found.
The results suggest that genetic variation influences the types of bacteria that infect wounds as well as the healing process.
The study by Caleb Phillips, an assistant professor of biology at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, and colleagues was published online on 18 June 18 in the journal PLOS Pathogens.
The authors described their study as the first to identify how genes influence wound bacteria and healing.
“This study demonstrates the ability to find variants in people’s genomes that explain differences in the microorganisms that infect their wounds. Such information is expected to guide new understanding about the mechanisms of infection and healing, and the establishment of predictive biomarkers that improve patient care,” the authors said in a journal news release.
Image credit: iStock
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International team of scientists warns of increasing threats posed by invasive species
In a new study, scientists from around the world — including a professor at the University of Rhode Island — warn that the threats posed by invasive alien species are increasing. They say that urgent action is required to prevent, detect and control invaders at both local and global levels.
Alien species are plants, animals and microbes that are introduced by people, accidentally or intentionally, into areas where they do not naturally occur. Many of them thrive, spreading widely with harmful effects on the environment, economy, or human health.
The study, published in the journal Biological Reviews, was carried out by a team of researchers from 13 countries across Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, and North and South America. It states that the number of invasive alien species is increasing rapidly, with more than 18,000 currently listed around the world.
According to Laura Meyerson, URI associate professor of natural resources science, the escalation in biological invasions is due to the increase in the number and variety of pathways along which species spread, and to the increasing volume of traffic associated with those pathways. For example, she notes the role played by emerging pathways such as the online trade in unusual pets and the transport of species across oceans on rafts of plastic.
The researchers note that the scale of the problem is enormous. A 2017 analysis of global extinctions revealed that alien species contributed to 25 percent of plant extinctions and 33 percent of terrestrial and freshwater animal extinctions. Meanwhile, annual environmental losses caused by introduced species in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, India and Brazil have been calculated at more than $100 billion.
The study also shows how drivers of global change, such as climate change, land-use change, and international trade, are exacerbating the impacts of biological invasions. Species transported through shipping can now thrive in new regions, for instance, owing to climate warming. And the permanent opening of the Arctic Ocean due to global warming is allowing marine species to move between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The research paper is part of an initiative called World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, which calls for urgent change in stewardship of the Earth and the life on it. The first notice, in 1992, was supported by 1,700 eminent scientists from around the globe who warned that humanity was on a collision course with the rest of the natural world. Twenty-five years later, a follow-up evaluation supported by 15,000 scientists declared that humanity had failed to make sufficient progress in dealing with the environmental challenges. Indeed, they found that most of these problems had worsened.
The authors of the new paper stress that biological invasions can be managed and mitigated. They point to approaches that are working around the world and make specific recommendations for improved management. For example, the introduction of more stringent border controls, including X-ray machines and detector dogs, has led to a progressive decline in the rate of fungal plant pathogens entering New Zealand.
Professor Petr Pyšek of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Charles University in Prague, lead author of the study, said: “As our knowledge about invasive alien species increases, the problems associated with biological invasions are becoming clearer. The threats posed by invasive alien species to our environment, our economies and our health are very serious, and getting worse. Policy makers and the public need to prioritize actions to stem invasions and their impacts.”
Professor David Richardson of the Centre for Invasion Biology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, the other lead author, added: “Nations such as Australia and New Zealand have made biosecurity a national priority. South Africa has invested heavily in a massive national programme focussed on reducing the negative impacts of widespread invaders on ecosystem services, especially the delivery of water from catchments invaded by alien trees. But action is needed more widely at both national and international levels in order to tackle the challenges effectively.”
Meyerson, who contributed to the paper and is leading the chapter on trends in invasions for a report on invasive alien species for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, said, “It has been so exciting to see developments in our knowledge and understanding of biological invasions in recent decades, achieved through truly inspiring global collaborations. It is so important that we continue to share our knowledge and engage with relevant stakeholders across sectors and borders.”
