While consuming less fattening foods and following an alkaline diet of fruits and vegetables may help decrease artery blockage, a study has found that exercise may help patients with peripheral artery disease.

There are more than 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 help 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.

According to researchers from the University of Delaware, despite gaining the ability to move without pain and increasing the rate of exercise, more patients who have knee replacement surgery are likely to gain weight.

The study examined 106 individuals who had knee replacement surgeries and a control group of 31 healthy individuals who had not had the treatment. Of the people who had the surgery, 66 percent gained an average of 14 pounds over the next 2 years. The control group did not have the same problem.

Researchers believe the solution relies on the physical therapist, who can help people that have the surgery retrain to become active again.

“For physical therapists and surgeons, the common thinking is that after a patient’s knee has been replaced, that patient will be more active,” said researcher Lynn Snyder-Mackler. “But the practices and habits these patients developed to get around in the years prior to surgery are hard to break, and often they don’t take advantage of the functional gain once they get a new knee.”

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.

That’s according to a new analysis of more than 1,000 adults who took part in The Polyp Prevention Trial, which tested the impact of a low-fat, high-fiber diet on the recurrence of colon polyps — benign growths which may raise a person’s risk of developing colon cancer.

After 4 years of the trial, researchers saw no difference in the rate of polyp recurrence between the intervention group and the control group. However, the number of dietary goals met by the intervention group varied greatly, which may account for the lack of observed effect.

To investigate this theory, Dr. Leah B. Sansbury of the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues revisited the data and looked at just how compliant the study subjects were with the low-fat, high-fiber diet.

They report in the American Journal of Epidemiology that of 821 participants in the intervention group who completed the study, 30 percent were classified as poor compliers, 45 percent as inconsistent compliers, and 26 percent as super compliers.

Subjects classified as super compliers consistently reported that they met or exceeded all of the dietary goals at all four yearly checkups.

Super compliers, Sansbury and colleagues discovered, had a 30% lower likelihood of developing a recurrent polyp, compared with controls, and nearly a 50 percent decreased odds of developing more than one recurrent polyp.

The findings support current recommendations to eat a low-fat, high-fiber diet for colon health and overall health.