1. EMPATHY - BEST SPEECH OF ALL TIME By Simon Sinek | Inspiritory 10 mins
2. Sweet Uncle Billy
Mushrooms boost immunity, suggests research
University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, April 13. 2021
Could a mushroom a day help keep the doctor away?
1. EMPATHY - BEST SPEECH OF ALL TIME By Simon Sinek | Inspiritory 10 mins
2. Sweet Uncle Billy
Mushrooms boost immunity, suggests research
University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, April 13. 2021
Could a mushroom a day help keep the doctor away?
A new University of Florida study shows increased immunity in people who ate a cooked shiitake mushroom every day for four weeks.
Of the thousands of mushroom species globally, about 20 are used for culinary purposes. Shiitake mushrooms are native to Asia and are cultivated for their culinary and medicinal value.
A study led by UF Food Science and Human Nutrition Professor Sue Percival, 52 healthy adults, age 21 to 41, came to the Gainesville campus, where researchers gave them a four-week supply of dry shiitake mushrooms. Participants took the mushrooms home, cleaned and cooked them. Then they ate one, 4-ounce serving of mushrooms each day during the experiment.
Through blood tests before and after the experiment, researchers saw better-functioning gamma delta T-cells and reductions in inflammatory proteins.
"If you eat a shiitake mushroom every day, you could see changes in their immune system that are beneficial," said Percival, an Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences faculty member. "We're enhancing the immune system, but we're also reducing the inflammation that the immune system produces."
To be eligible for the study, participants could not be vegans or vegetarians. They also could not drink tea, take antioxidant supplements or probiotics before the study. They also could not consume more than 14 glasses of alcoholic beverages per week or eat more than seven servings of fruits and vegetables per day during the experiment.
Percival explained the dietary restrictions as follows: Fiber, tea and probiotics help the body's immune system, so researchers didn't want to start with people who already had a strong immune system. Additionally, that much alcohol could suppress immunity, she said.
The study was published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.
Metabolic changes in fat tissue in obesity associated with adverse health effects
University of Helsinki (Finland), April 9, 2021
Researchers at the Obesity Research Unit of the University of Helsinki have found that obesity clearly reduces mitochondrial gene expression in fat tissue, or adipose tissue. Mitochondria are important cellular powerplants which process all of our energy intake. If the pathways associated with breaking down nutrients are lazy, the changes can often have health-related consequences.
A total of 49 pairs of identical twins discordant for body weight participated in the study conducted at the University of Helsinki: their body composition and metabolism were studied in detail, and biopsies from adipose and muscle tissue were collected. Multiple techniques for analysing the genome-wide gene expression, the proteome and the metabolome were used in the study.
The study was recently published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine.
According to the findings, the pathways responsible for mitochondrial metabolism in adipose tissue were greatly reduced by obesity. Since mitochondria are key to cellular energy production, their reduced function can maintain obesity. For the first time, the study also compared the effects of obesity specifically on the mitochondria in muscle tissue in these identical twin pairs: muscle mitochondria too were found to be out of tune, but the change was less distinct than in adipose tissue.
The study provided strong evidence of a connection between the low performance of adipose tissue mitochondria and a proinflammatory state. Furthermore, the findings indicate that metabolic changes in adipose tissue are associated with increased accumulation of fat in the liver, prediabetic disorders of glucose and insulin metabolism as well as cholesterol.
"If mitochondria, the cellular powerplants, are compared to the engine of a car, you could say that the power output decreases as weight increases. A low-powered mitochondrial engine may also generate toxic exhaust fumes, which can cause a proinflammatory state in adipose tissue and, consequently, the onset of diseases associated with obesity," says Professor Kirsi Pietiläinen from the Obesity Research Unit, University of Helsinki.
"What was surprising was that the mitochondrial pathways in muscle had no association with these adverse health effects," Pietiläinen adds.
Obesity also affected amino acid metabolism
In the study, changes in mitochondrial function were also seen in amino acid metabolism. The metabolism of branched-chain amino acids, which are essential to humans, was weakened in the mitochondria of both adipose tissue and muscle tissue.
"This finding was of particular significance because the reduced breakdown of these amino acids and the resulting heightened concentration in blood have also been directly linked with prediabetic changes and the accumulation of liver fat in prior twin studies," says Pietiläinen.
Obesity, with its numerous associated diseases, is a common phenomenon that is continuously increasing in prevalence. While lifestyle influence the onset of obesity, genes also have a significant role.
"Identical twins have the same genes, and their weight is usually fairly similar. In fact, studying twins is the best way to investigate the interplay between genes and lifestyle. In spite of their identical genome, the genes and even mitochondria of twins can function on different activity levels. We utilised this characteristic in our study when looking into the effects of weight on tissue function," Pietiläinen says.
Research suggests selenium supplementation may extend lifespan
Orentreich Foundation for the Advancement of Science (Cold Spring), April 12, 2021
Adding the nutrient selenium to diets protects against obesity and provides metabolic benefits to mice, according to a study published in eLife.
The results could lead to interventions that reproduce many of the anti-aging effects associated with dietary restriction while also allowing people to eat as normal.
Several types of diet have been shown to increase healthspan - that is, the period of healthy lifespan. One of the proven methods of increasing healthspan in many organisms, including non-human mammals, is to restrict dietary intake of an amino acid called methionine.
Recent studies have suggested that the effects of methionine restriction on healthspan are likely to be conserved in humans. Although it might be feasible for some people to practice methionine restriction, for example, by adhering to a vegan diet, such a diet might not be practical or desirable for everyone. In the current study, a research team from the Orentreich Foundation for the Advancement of Science(OFAS), Cold Spring, New York, US, aimed to develop an intervention that produces the same effects as methionine restriction, while also allowing an individual to eat a normal, unrestricted diet.
An important clue for developing such a treatment is that methionine restriction causes a decrease in the amounts of an energy-regulating hormone called IGF-1. If a treatment could be found that causes a similar decrease in IGF-1, this might also have beneficial effects on healthspan. Previous research has shown that selenium supplementation reduces the levels of circulating IGF-1 in rats, suggesting that this could be an ideal candidate.
The team first studied whether selenium supplementation offered the same protection against obesity as methionine restriction. They fed young male and older female mice one of three high-fat diets: a control diet containing typical amounts of methionine, a methionine-restricted diet, and a diet containing typical amounts of methionine as well as a source of selenium. For both male and female mice of any age, the authors found that selenium supplementation completely protected against the dramatic weight gain and fat accumulation seen in mice fed the control diet, and to the same extent as restricting methionine.
Next, they explored the effects of the three diets on physiological changes normally associated with methionine restriction. To do this, they measured the amounts of four metabolic markers in blood samples from the previously treated mice. As hoped, they found dramatically reduced levels of IGF-1 in both male and female mice. They also saw reductions in the levels of the hormone leptin, which controls food intake and energy expenditure. Their results indicate that selenium supplementation produces most, if not all, of the hallmarks of methionine restriction, which suggests that this intervention may have a similar positive effect on healthspan.
To gain insight into the beneficial effects of selenium supplementation, the researchers used a different organism - yeast. The two most widely used measurements of healthspan in yeast are chronological lifespan, which tells us how long dormant yeast remain viable, and replicative lifespan, which measures the number of times a yeast cell can produce new offspring. The team previously showed that methionine restriction increases the chronological lifespan of yeast, so they tested whether selenium supplementation might do the same. As it turned out, yeast grown under selenium-supplemented conditions had a 62% longer chronological lifespan (from 13 days to 21 days) and a replicative lifespan extended by nine generations as compared with controls. This demonstrates that supplementing yeast with selenium produces benefits to healthspan detectable by multiple tests of cell aging.
“One of the major goals of aging research is to identify simple interventions that promote human healthspan,” notes senior author Jay Johnson, Senior Scientist at OFAS. “Here we present evidence that short-term administration of either organic or inorganic sources of selenium provides multiple health benefits to mice, the most notable of which being the prevention of diet-induced obesity. In the long term, we expect that supplementation with these compounds will also prevent age-related disease and extend the overall survival of mice. It is our hope that many of the benefits observed for mice will also hold true for humans.”
Adherence to Mediterranean Diet Is Associated With Lung Function in Older Adults
Kapodistrian University (Greece), April 3, 2021
Objective: The aim of this work was to examine the association between adherence to a Mediterranean diet (MD) and lung function in older adults.
Design: This was an observational and cross-sectional study.
Setting: This research was conducted among community-dwelling older adults from the 2014 Health and Retirement Study (HRS).
Subjects: Subjects were 2108 adults aged 50 years or older, 1234 (58.5%) of whom were female.
Measures: Dietary intakes from respondents of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) were used for the current analysis. Adherence to MD was evaluated using the MedDietScore, while lung function was evaluated through peak expiratory flow rate (PEF; l/min). Multiple linear regression and logistic regression were performed, adjusted for potential confounders, to examine the relation between adherence to MD and lung function.
Results: Mean MedDietScore was 28.0 (± 5.0), indicating a moderate adherence to MD. Multiple linear regression showed a significant association between the MedDietScore and lung function (β = 0.072, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.039–0.104) after adjusting for age, gender, body mass index, race, comorbidities, education, height, grip strength, smoking history, physical activity, and daily caloric intake. Specific food groups such as grains, dairy products, and fish consumption were also associated with PEF rate (p
