Blog
Research
The Benefits of Cognitive Reserve
by Joe Hardy, PhD
Exercising your brain at a young age can protect your cognitive abilities as you get older, a team of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco recently reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Led by Dr. Kristine Yaffe, the researchers followed a group of close to 1000 individuals for nine years, measuring brain function and taking blood samples along the way.
They found that levels of several compounds in the bloodstream – called beta-amyloids – predicted subsequent cognitive decline. These compounds are related to Alzheimer’s Disease, so this relationship is not entirely surprising. The protective effects of brain exercise were more interesting. The researchers found that people with high levels of cognitive reserve – as measured by previous experiences with cognitively stimulating activities like education – were relatively protected against cognitive decline associated with these chemical changes. In other words, if you take two people with the same levels of blood plasma beta-amyloids, the person with more cognitive reserve (built up through prior brain exercise) is likely to have better cognitive fitness down the road.
The message is clear: cognitively stimulating activity is critical for brain health and fitness. The more you exercise your brain now, the better off you’ll be later.
Reference: http://www.lumosity.com/blog/the-benefits-of-cognitive-reserve
About Joe Hardy
Dr. Joe Hardy is the Vice President of Research and Development at Lumos Labs. Joe works with an international team of researchers uncovering the secrets of cognitive enhancement. He has over 7 years of R&D… [ read more ]
Outdoor Activity and Its Positive Effects on Well-Being
April 26, 2012. Written by Adam Rankin
Can anyone remember the last time we’ve had a stretch of weather that has been this good? There surely is no better time than now to get outdoors and take advantage of all the health and wellness benefits that the great outdoors has to offer. In fact, a Swedish study recently showed that 99% of women and 95% of men who participated thought that being outdoors had a positive effect on well-being. Outdoor recreational activities include not only sports and exercises. It includes walking, sunbathing, bird watching and even camping.
Enjoying the great weather with friends and family has powerful effect on not only physical well being, but also rejuvenates mindset and spirituality. How many times have you had a stressful day at work, come home and go for a walk or run, or play out in the yard with the dogs, or go sunbathing and afterwards you’ve totally forgotten about what you were stressed about in the first place? Just being out in the sunlight helps release vitamin D into our bodies and releases endorphins into our bloodstream. This will make us feel better throughout the day, and give us energy to sustain our desired activities.
Performance Wellness Research: March
Movement
“No pill or nutritional supplement has the power of near-daily moderate activity in lowering the number of sick days people take,” says David Nieman, director of Appalachian State University’s Human Performance Lab in Kannapolis, N.C. Dr. Nieman has conducted several randomized controlled studies showing that people who walked briskly for 45 minutes, five days a week over 12 to 15 weeks had fewer and less severe upper respiratory tract infections, such as colds and flu. These subjects reduced their number of sick days 25% to 50% compared with sedentary control subjects, he says.
Medical experts say inactivity poses as great a health risk as smoking, contributing to heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, depression, arthritis and osteoporosis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 36% of U.S. adults didn’t engage in any leisure-time physical activity in 2008.
Dr. Nieman, of Appalachian State University, says that during exercise, two types of immune cells circulate more freely in the blood, neutralizing pathogens. Although the immune system returns to normal within three hours, the effect of the exercise is cumulative, adding up over time to reduce illness rates, he says. He compares the process to “a cleaner who comes in for an hour a day, so by the end of a month, your house looks much better.”
Source: Wall Street Journal, The Hidden Benefits of Exercise, January 5, 2010
Nutrition
Multigrain and whole grain are not interchangeable terms. Whole grain means that all parts of the grain kernel — the bran, germ… [ read more ]
Performance Wellness Research: February
Movement
REFERENCE: Supervised exercise versus non-supervised exercise for reducing weight in obese adults. Nicolai SP et al. J Sports Med Phys Fitness. 2009 Mar;49(1):85-90. This research study looked at the effects of training with supervision/instruction (i.e. a qualified trainer) versus “advice.”
Group one met a trainer twice a week for 4 months (as a group).
Group two received basic advice to increase physical activity and were given access to a fully equipped gym (any exercise they did was unsupervised).
The group with supervision lost on average 362% more fat over a 4-month period. (Total fat loss of 13.4lbs in the coached group – and only 3.7lbs in the advice-only group).
Interesting Side Note: They made these improvements without ANY dietary advice given.
This is not a new finding, nor is it that surprising as a good coach or training partner/team can really help with your results. The fact that the group exercised together only served to improve those results further (as social support is one of the key variables in fat loss success) so I’m not sure that the supervision and instruction alone was entirely responsible for the enhanced results – or the social support was part of it. However, it’s clear that together it’s an unbeatable combination. And perhaps that’s one of the reasons why small group training seems to get better results than one-on-one training.
Performance Wellness Research: December
Movement
The benefits of exercise appear to be significant even without reaching the recommended 150 minutes per week based on results of previous research. “Exercising at very light levels reduced deaths from any cause by 14 percent,” said study senior author Xifeng Wu, M.D., Ph.D. The study also found that a person’s risk of death from any cause decreased by 4 percent for every additional 15 minutes of exercise up to 100 minutes a day over the course of the study. Those exercising for 30 minutes daily added about four years to life expectancy.
(Source: Science Daily, August 16, 2011)
Nutrition
Increased protein intake is now linked to lower saturated fat and lower caloric intake, study suggests. In the study, 70% of the increased energy intake on the lower protein diet was attributed to snacking. When the protein content was further increased to 25%, however, the researchers observed no change in behavior relative to the 15% protein diet. The findings have considerable implications for bodyweight management in the current nutritional environment, where foods rich in fat and carbohydrate are cheap, palatable and available to an extent unprecedented in our history.
(Source: Science Daily, October 12, 2011)
Rest & Recovery
The investigation conducted by the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle involved 400 patients who had low back pain, the majority of which were middle aged, Caucasian and female. Researchers found those who were given a series of relaxation massage or structural massage were better able to work and be active… [ read more ]
The Best Interval Training Protocols
By: Adam Rankin
20/10 Tabata Protocol: Commonly known as the “Tabata” protocol, the 20 seconds of work, 10 seconds of rest is one of the best and widely used work to rest ratio’s used in interval training. For good reason, this protocol has proved to be more effective than 60 minutes of steady state cardio. In fact, the interval protocol got it’s name from the study that proved maximal gains can be made in minimal time, if the intensity of the training is maximal. In this groundbreaking cycling study, researchers discovered that only four minutes of a 20-10 interval protocol (20 seconds of maximum effort followed by 10 seconds of rest) provided greater fat loss and conditioning than 60 minutes of steady-state cardio.
Now, one of the problems with this study is that in the real world most people aren’t able to perform multiple bouts of max effort for the same exercise with short rest periods (in fact, most of the elite cyclists in the study couldn’t complete all four minutes of the 20-10 protocol because it was too intense). This is exactly why it is important to employ non-competitive exercises (upper body exercise superset with a lower body exercise) so that high intensity work can still be accomplished with very short rest.
8-12 Sprint Protocol: Since we’ve already determined that short bouts of high intensity are better than long, slow steady state cardio, what do you say we ramp up the intensity even more than the Tabata Protocol. With… [ read more ]
Sleep It Off
Written by Natalia Kielcz
Do you ever think that there are just not enough hours in the day to get everything done? Do you sacrifice sleep in order to have “more” hours of productivity, but you still feel like you are just scraping by? If you do, stop now! Sleep is just a high a priority as anything else in your life, and sleeping less negatively effects how you function inside and out!
Studies on sleep have repeatedly shown that getting quality snooze time in plays a vital role in promoting physical health, longevity, and emotional well-being. The Institute of Medicine recently estimated in its report, Sleep Disorders and Sleep Deprivation: An Unmet Public Health Problem, that “hundreds of billions of dollars a year are spent on direct medical costs related to sleep disorders such as doctor visits, hospital services, prescriptions, and over-the-counter medications.” Sleep problems and lack of sleep can affect everything from personal and work productivity to behavioral and relationship problems. Over time, chronic sleep deprivation may lead to an array of serious medical conditions like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even early death. Who would have thought that something as simple as hitting the sheets could cut medical costs and improve your quality of life overal.
In our fast paced, achievement oriented society, we often push sleep aside to get as much as we can done in our waking hours…but without adequate sleep, judgment, mood, and ability to learn and retain information are greatly reduced. This explains… [ read more ]
What’s For Breakfast?
By: Andrew Pescovitz
It has become many people’s usual routine to get out of bed, get ready for work, and grab that cup of coffee calling that their “breakfast.” I mean let’s face it, fixing breakfast takes up time that we could be using to get more sleep, get dressed, take a shower, or extend the time for any necessary morning activity. Could this be one thing holding you back from reaching your weight loss goals? There is plenty of evidence to show that simply by eating breakfast alone, this has a very large impact on losing weight, and lots of it. Skipping breakfast not only sets the body into starvation mode which is not ideal for calorie burning, but it also causes people to do thoughtless snacking over the course of the day and possibly even bingeing at lunch or dinner. Definitely not the ideal environment for weight loss.
Two particular studies done by The Journal of the American Dietetic Association can back up this evidence. One of the studies followed 2000 girls from the age of 9 to 19 and clearly showed that the girls who ate cereal for breakfast everyday had a very low percentage of weight problems at an older age compared to the group of girls who did not eat breakfast. Another study was done on 4200 adults which showed that the people who ate breakfast were not only more likely to exercise, but generally ate fewer calories over the course of the day.
If… [ read more ]
Napping is Natural
Napping is Natural by: Natalia Kielcz
Many people have the misconception that napping is something for the lazy and a waste of time. In fact, did you know that most mammals sleep for short periods throughout the day? Our bodies are actually programmed for two periods of severe tiredness: from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. and from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., and our reaction time, alertness, coordination, memory, and mood and profoundly effected. Many studies have come out in the last few years showing that taking a midday nap increases alertness, mood, and productivity for later hours in the day. That’s not all – naps have also shown health benefits such as reducing the risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and excessive weight gain.
In order to reap the benefits of taking a midday snooze, you need to understand your body first to find out when, and how long your nap needs to be, you need to understand your body. If you are the type of person that ideally prefers to get up early and go to sleep early, you are going to feel that need for a nap around 1/1:30 p.m. If you like to stay up late and sleep in a bit, your need for a nap will be more around 2/2:30 p.m. If you need to get more accomplished after your midday snooze, limit your nap to 20-45 minutes. You will stay in a light Stage 2 sleep and when you… [ read more ]
Children’s Brain Development Linked to Physical Fitness
A neuroimaging investigation of the association between aerobic fitness, hippocampal volume and memory performance in preadolescent children.
Chaddock L, Erickson KI, Prakash RS, Kim JS, Voss MW, Vanpatter M, Pontifex MB, Raine LB, Konkel A, Hillman CH,Cohen NJ, Kramer AF.
Department of Psychology & Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Abstract
Because children are becoming overweight, unhealthy and unfit, understanding the neurocognitive benefits of an active lifestyle in childhood has important public health and educational implications. Animal research has indicated that aerobic exercise is related to increased cell proliferation and survival in the hippocampus as well as enhanced hippocampal-dependent learning and memory. Recent evidence extends this relationship to elderly humans by suggesting that high aerobic fitness levels in older adults are associated with increased hippocampal volume and superior memory performance. The present study aimed to further extend the link between fitness, hippocampal volume, and memory to a sample of preadolescent children. To this end, magnetic resonance imaging was employed to investigate whether higher- and lower-fit 9- and 10-year-old children showed differences in hippocampal volume and if the differences were related to performance on an item and relational memory task. Relational but not item memory is primarily supported by the hippocampus. Consistent with predictions, higher-fit children showed greater bilateral hippocampal volumes and superior relational memory task performance compared to lower-fit children. Hippocampal volume was also positively associated with performance on the relational but not the item memory task. Furthermore, bilateral hippocampal volume was found to mediate the relationship between fitness level (VO(2) max) and relational memory. No relationship between aerobic… [ read more ]