While an alkaline diet may help lower blood pressure, a new protein has been discovered that can help prevent hypertension.

Researchers from the University of Iowa indicated that the protein channel ASIC2 helps trigger sensors in blood vessels to keep blood pressure in check. When ASIC2 is not present in the body, the brain never receives the message that hypertension is occurring.

Study head Dr. Frank Abboud indicates that blood pressure can rise in an instant when something is making an individual frustrated or angry, and the sensors alert the brain to calm the nerve system down immediately.

It is when ASIC2 is missing from the body that blood pressure stays high all the time, which could lead to various health risks.

Abboud is hopeful that the discovery of this protein channel’s function will lead to new treatments for hypertension.

“By knowing more about what makes these sensors — known as baroreceptors — malfunction, we may be able to find ways to make them work properly and prevent high blood pressure,” Abboud said.

A new study conducted by Danish scientists has found that vitamin C-deficient babies may be at a higher risk for mental development and memory problems.

A team of researchers from the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Copenhagen showed that guinea pigs with moderate vitamin C deficiency develop 30 percent fewer hippocampal neurons and have significantly worse spatial memory than animals fed a normal diet.

The choice of animals was dictated by the fact that guinea pigs, like human beings, are dependent on getting vitamin C through their diet.

“[Our research suggests] children [may develop] learning disabilities because they have not gotten enough vitamin C in their early life,” says Professor Jens Lykkesfeldt, who led the research group.

“This is unbearable when it would be so easy to prevent this deficiency by giving a vitamin supplement to high-risk pregnant women and new mothers,” he adds.

Vitamin C is also a known antioxidant and is believed to boost immunity and lower the risk of infections such as seasonal flu, so those concerned about their intake may turn to nutritional supplements.

There are over 5 million patients who suffer from the disease, which deals with the plaque build up in arteries that can limit blood circulation to the limbs, which can ultimately cause an amputation.

According to a study found in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it was revealed that exercises helps with the creation of a protein known as PGC-1alpha, which helps with the generation of new blood vessels in leg muscles. The protein senses poor circulation in the body and works to fix the problem. Researchers noticed that exercise helps boost this process, known as angiogenesis, faster.

“Our data strongly suggest a new paradigm for the process of angiogenesis in response to exercise, demonstrating that upstream beta-adrenergic signaling, likely stemming from increased nerve activity, triggers angiogenesis,” the authors wrote.

Findings in the journal Cell Metabolism are reporting that it may be a good idea to avoid fatty acids. An alkaline diet approach may be one way to do this, as it is a diet high with fruits and vegetables.

Tlr4, an immune system receptor that is used to protect the body against harmful cells, is compromised by dangerous fatty acids when they take the form of other cells.

This allows the dangerous cells to get past the receptor, and ultimately damage the immune system, which can cause it to feel inflamed.
The researchers came across a finding that could help kill off the offending fatty acids, however it’s still relatively new and not that well known. The researchers determined further testing needed to be done on these kinds of drugs.

In the meantime, it is recommended to stay away from large amounts of saturated fat to keep the immune system healthy.

A study done from researchers in the UK found that an overall healthy diet comprising a high proportion of fruits, fish and vegetables, protected middle aged people against depression compared to a processed food diet containing a high proportion of high fat dairy food, processed meat, fried food, refined grains and sugar-laden desserts.

The study was the work of researchers based at the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London (UCL), UK and the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), University of Montpellier, France, and is published in the November issue of the The British Journal of Psychiatry which is available online.

In their background information the authors explained that much research on diet and depression tends to focus on individual nutrients so they thought they would look at links between overall dietary patterns and depression.

For the study they looked at data covering 3,486 participants of average age 57 years (nearly three quarters were men) who were part of the Whitehall II study.

The Whitehall II study was set up by co-author and UCL Professor Sir Michael Marmot to investigate links between disease and social class, psychosocial factors and life style. It began by looking at the health of working people, and is now also looking to answer questions about how previous and current circumstances affect health and quality of life in an ageing group of participants.

The data allowed the researchers to identify two dietary patters: a whole food diet and a processed food diet. The whole food diet comprised mainly fresh fruits and vegetables and fish, while the processed diet comprised mainly sweetened desserts, fried foods, high fat dairy foods, processed meat and refined grains.

To assess depression, the researchers used self-reported data that had been gathered five years after the dietary data using the CES-D scale.

CES-D, short for Center for Epidemiologic Studies – Depression scale, is a commonly used self-report questionnaire for assessing depression. It asks a series of multiple choice questions about how the participant has been feeling over the past week, covering topics such as concentration, loss of appetite, worry, how well they have been able to shake off depressive moods, quality of sleep, feelings of loneliness, self-worth, energy levels, and so on.

When they analysed the results and ruled out potential confounders such as age, gender, education, smoking, exercise, and chronic diseases, the researchers found that:

• Participants in the top 33 per cent (top tertile) of the whole food diet pattern, ie whose diet most closely matched the whole food diet, had a 26 per cent lower risk of receiving a CES-D depression assessment five years later (odds ratio 0.74, with 95 per cent probability of this being in the range 0.56 to 0.99) compared to the bottom 33 per cent (bottom tertile), ie whose diet least closely matched the whole food diet.
• In contrast, participants whose diet was high in processed foods had a 58 per cent higher risk of receiving a CES-D depression rating five years later.

The researchers concluded that:

“In middle-aged participants, a processed food dietary pattern is a risk factor for CES-D depression 5 years later, whereas a whole food pattern is protective.”

According to BBC News, co-author Dr Archana Singh-Manoux, who works at UCL and INSERM, suggested there was a possibility that the finding could be explained by a lifestyle factor they had not accounted for.

In other words the study does not prove that a processed food diet causes depression: it could be that people destined to become depressed become inclined to eat more processed foods, that there is a yet undiscovered factor behind both.

However, when results as strong as these emerge, and a consistent pattern linking diet and depression is found by several studies, it would tend to suggest that a healthy diet does protect against mental ill health.

The Chief Executive of the UK-based Mental Health Foundation, Dr Andrew McCulloch told the BBC that:

“This study adds to an existing body of solid research that shows the strong links between what we eat and our mental health.”

He said major studies like this were crucial in helping us understand more about how diet contributes to mental illness. He said people in the UK were increasingly adopting unhealthy diets, and eating less nutritious and fresh food and more saturated fats and sugars.

According to Reuters, the study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that people who drink water tend to eat a diet higher in fiber and lower in sugar and calorie-dense foods.

According to researchers involved with the study, the findings do not prove that drinking water makes people eat healthier. Rather, it suggests a connection between the two.

Health experts recommend staying hydrated with water as an important part of a proper diet since it is calorie-free and can help make the stomach seem full.

Some claim alkaline water is an even better choice. According to ImmuneSystemRemedies.com, ionized alkaline water is a powerful antioxidant, effective detoxifier and superior hydrator, compared to conventional drinking water. In addition, it can help with weight loss, allows for better absorption of the nutrients from food and can make skin appear healthier through effective hydration.

Insufficient water intake may cause individuals to experience routine fatigue, dry skin, headaches, constipation and a decrease in normal bodily functions.

She went on to have two daughters, and she may have boosted their chances of avoiding becoming obese, like her two older children are.

That’s the implication of research suggesting that something in an obese woman‘s womb can program her fetus toward becoming a fat child and adult. It’s not about simply passing along genes that promote obesity; it’s some sort of still-mysterious signal.

The idea has only recently entered conversations between doctors and female patients, and scientists are scrambling to track down a biological explanation. That knowledge, in turn, may provide new ways to block obesity from crossing generations.

While there’s some disagreement on how important the womb signal is, “the evidence is building and building that it is a substantial issue,” said Dr. Matthew Gillman of Harvard Medical School, who studies prevention of obesity.

Others agree. “I think it could be a hugely significant factor,” said Robert Waterland of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who studies the effect in mice.

Dr. Rudy Leibel, an obesity expert at Columbia University, says he doubts it plays a huge role, but still believes it’s worth studying. If scientists can uncover its biological underpinnings, he said, they may be able to use that knowledge to prevent or treat obesity from other causes.

Perusse, 39, of Three Rivers, Quebec, knows the effects of being very fat. Before her weight-loss surgery in 1995, she packed 284 pounds on her 5-foot-2 frame. She could not ride a bike or climb stairs to her second-floor home without stopping to rest.

Now, although she’s still overweight, those limitations are history, she said through an interpreter.

But her older children struggle with their weight. At 5-foot-3 and 300 pounds, her 22-year-old daughter can’t bathe her own two children, Perusse said. Her 16-year-old son weighs 230 pounds and stands 5-foot-6.

They were born before she had the weight-loss surgery. Her two younger daughters, ages 4 and 7, came along afterward. Their weights are normal so far, though Perusse said her older children weren’t overweight at those ages either.

So she’s using diet and exercise to try to protect them against what she called rotten genes, including those from their 400-pound father. She said she isn’t optimistic.

But Dr. John Kral of the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in New York says his research suggests that obese women who lose weight before pregnancy may be helping the next generation keep off excess pounds — even if fat-promoting genes run in the family.

With researchers at Laval Hospital in Quebec, Kral has studied children of severely obese women who were born before or after their mother’s weight-loss surgery. They found that, in comparison to children born before surgery, those born afterward were far less likely to be severely obese.

In addition, those born afterward showed lower levels of blood fats and indicators of future diabetes.

Kral says families typically don’t change lifestyle or diet after surgery, so that doesn’t explain the outcome.

Instead, he says, the surgical bypass operation made the women’s bodies less efficient at digesting and absorbing food, and lowered levels of sugar and fat in the blood. That, in turn, would reduce the number of calories delivered to the fetus to levels like those provided by a normal-weight mother, he said.

And the women’s shedding of pounds before the pregnancy would also help, he said.

While scientists are still trying to explain just how obesity could be transmitted from the womb, it makes sense that a mother’s obesity could affect her children’s long-term weight, Waterland said. Cues in early life, including some in the womb, guide the development of a person’s brain circuitry for controlling the balance between calories consumed and those burned away, he said. So a signal there could have a long-lasting impact.

Or, maybe such a signal predisposes the child to make more fat-storing cells, others said.

It’s still not clear just what in the womb could create such effects — high levels of blood sugar and certain fatty acids are some leading candidates.

Waterland has found evidence it may have to do with how critical genes are regulated. Chemical tags attach to the chromosomes and act like dimmer switches to modulate how hard certain genes work.

Waterland studied mice genetically prone to porkiness and found the fatter the mom, the heavier her offspring tended to be. But that effect was blocked when researchers fed pregnant mice a cocktail of substances that encourage the chemical tags to attach to the chromosomes.

What does that suggest? Maybe a mom’s obesity somehow interferes with the regulation of certain genes, and the chemical cocktail overcame that, Waterland says.

Those genes might affect the offspring’s long-term weight if they’re involved in the brain’s regulation of appetite and activity levels, Waterland proposes. He also says it’s too soon to tell whether an obesity-blocking supplement could work in women as well as in the mice.

Once scientists identify the obesity signal, they may be able to recommend ways to suppress it, perhaps through diet or behavioral strategies.

In the meantime, experts say, obese women can take their own steps.

• Avoid pregnancy until you’ve lost weight. That’s wise anyway, since obesity in pregnancy raises the risk of complications like diabetes, cesarean deliveries and stillbirth.

• If pregnant, hold down the weight gain during pregnancy. The Institute of Medicine recently recommended that an obese woman gain 11 to 20 pounds, rather than the 25 to 35 pounds allowed for healthy women of normal weight.

• After giving birth, get down to a healthy body weight to prepare for the next pregnancy.

Dr. Laura Riley of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said she gets her patients’ attention when she tells them their obesity could promote the same problem in their children.

“I’m a mother,” Riley added. “Believe me, it caught my eye.”

Additionally, many high protein diets are high in saturated fat and low in fiber, a combination that can increase cholesterol levels and raise the risk of heart disease and stroke.

High protein diets have also been shown to cause higher than normal calcium excretion through the urine, which over a prolonged period of time can increase the risk of osteoporosis and kidney stones. And a recent study suggests that a high protein diet may actually cause brain shrinkage and an increased “susceptibility to or progression of Alzheimer’s disease.”

The discovery was an unexpected one, found while studying the effects of different diets on mice bred to develop Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The mice were fed either a regular diet, high fat/low carb custom diet, high protein/low carb version or a high carb/low fat option. When the researchers looked at the brain and body weight of the mice, as well as plaque build-up and differences in the structure of several brain regions involved in the memory defect underlying AD, they were surprised to find that the brains of the mice fed a high protein/low carb diet were 5 percent lighter than all the others and the regions of their hippocampus were less developed.

The researchers theorize that the high protein diet may leave neurons more vulnerable to AD plaque. “High protein diets are used for weight control, and those diets sometimes combine high fat and high protein, which may be doubly damaging, if the high fat increases the accumulation of plaques and the high protein sensitizes nerve cells to the poison released by plaques,” said lead author Sam Gandy, a professor at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a neurologist at the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in New York. “Given the previously reported association of high-protein diet with aging-related neurotoxicity, one wonders whether particular diets, if ingested at particular ages, might increase susceptibility to incidence or progression of Alzheimer’s disease.”

Gandy believes the only way to know for sure if these findings have implications for the human brain is to perform prospective randomized double blind clinical diet trials. “This would be a challenging undertaking but potentially worthwhile. If there is a real chance that the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease might be slowed or avoided through healthy eating,” he said. “Such trials will be required if scientists are ever to make specific recommendations about dietary risks for Alzheimer’s disease.” Previous research has shown a Mediterranean-style low-calorie, low-fat diet rich in vegetables, fruits, and fish might delay the onset or slow the progression of AD.

AD is the most common type of dementia, affecting as many as 5.3 million Americans. Brain lesions, called amyloid plaques and tangles, accumulate, destroying brain cells, causing memory loss and problems with thinking and behavior severe enough to affect work, social life and even the ability to cope with everyday life. Over time, AD gets worse and is fatal. Currently, there is no cure for AD, but researchers around the world continue to search for better ways to treat the disease, delay its onset, or prevent it from developing.

The Mediterranean diet, already thought to protect against heart disease and cancer, may also help to prevent depression, Spanish researchers say.

They found depression was more than 30% less likely to develop in people who followed a diet high in vegetables, fruit and cereals, and low in red meat.

They studied 10,094 healthy adults over four years, the Journal of the American Medical Association reports.

However, the team stressed additional, larger-scale studies were required.

Researchers at the Universities of Las Palmas and Navarra recruited university graduates to take part.

Dietary patterns

They completed questionnaires and the researchers calculated their adherence to the Mediterranean dietary pattern (MDP) for an average of four-and-a-half years.

Participants who had a strong adherence to the MDP tended to be male, ex-smokers, married and older individuals.

They were more active physically and showed a higher total energy intake.

The researchers identified 480 new cases of depression during the follow-up period – 156 in men and 324 in women.

They found that those with the highest adherence to the MDP were more than 30% less likely to develop depression.

They took into account marital status, the number of children and factors associated with a healthy lifestyle and found the relationship did not change.

Even taking account of personality traits, such as competitiveness and anxiety, had no effect on the results.

‘More research needed’

Professor Miguel Martinez-Gonzalez, of the University of Navarra, said the results would have to be confirmed in longer trials with more participants but they had found a strong inverse association between the Mediterranean diet and depression.

“Thirty per cent is a large reduction in the risk and this could be very important considering the large burden of disease represented by depression.

“We know how important the Mediterranean diet is in reducing cardiovascular risk factors and the same inflammatory proteins are also raised in patients with depression.”

He said it was likely that the overall dietary pattern was more important than the effect of single components and “may exert a fair degree of protection against depression”.

Dr Cecilia D’Felice, a clinical psychologist, said there was mounting evidence for the importance of diet in treating depression.

She said: “What we do know is that a diet high in olive oil will enhance the amount of serotonin or brain transmitter available to you.

“Most anti-depression drugs work to keep more serotonin available in the brain.”

Children with self-esteem problems are more likely to be obese as adults, a research team has found.

A study of 6,500 participants in the 1970 British Birth Cohort Study found that 10-year-olds with lower self esteem tended to be fatter as adults.

The effect was particularly true for girls, researchers from King’s College London reported.

One obesity expert said the results highlighted that early intervention was key to tackling obesity.

This is not about people with deep psychological problems, all the anxiety and low self-esteem were within the normal range Professor David Collier, King’s College London

The children had their weight and height measured by a nurse at the age of 10 and they self-reported when they were 30.

Their emotional states were also noted, the researchers reported in the journal BMC Medicine.

Children with a lower self-esteem, those who felt less in control of their lives, and those who worried often were more likely to gain weight over the next 20 years, the results showed.

Professor David Collier, who led the research, said: “What’s novel about this study is that obesity has been regarded as a medical metabolic disorder – what we’ve found is that emotional problems are a risk factor for obesity.

“This is not about people with deep psychological problems, all the anxiety and low self-esteem were within the normal range.”

Strategies

Another researcher, Andrew Ternouth, said: “While we cannot say that childhood emotional problems cause obesity in later life, we can certainly say they play a role, along with factors such as parental weight, diet and exercise.

“Strategies to promote the social and emotional aspects of learning, including the promotion of self-esteem, are central to a number of recent policy initiatives.

“Our findings suggest that approaches of this kind may carry positive benefits for physical health as well as for other aspects of children’s development.”

Dr Ian Campbell, of the charity, Weight Concern, said: “This study presents some disturbing evidence that, as we suspected, childhood psychological issues have an influence on future weight gain and health.

“Many of the adults we work with have identifiable underlying emotional and self esteem issues and are often resistant to treatment.

“The message here is that early intervention, in childhood, can be the key to combating adult obesity.

“That requires much more than health practitioners can deliver alone and needs greater alertness from parents, teachers, and anyone involved in the welfare of children.”

Sources: http://news.bbc.co.uk