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brainfit tagged articles (0-22 of 22)

  • Brain Fitness Case Study: Kris Kringle - How BrainFit is the man in the big red suit? Does old St. Nick adhere to the four cornerstones of brain fitness to take good care of his egg's noggin? All in all he seems to do a fairly good job, but let's take a closer look. First off is Nutrition.
  • Make Love, Not Stress - The role of stress reduction is important to almost any health plan. Keeping your brain fit is no different. Constant stress, which plagues many in today's society, causes an elevation of hormones, including cortisol, that can be bad for your health. Now, let's get something straight before we go any further. Cortisol is not some evil hormone that's sole job is to make you fat and sick, as many late night infomercials would have you believe. It is a necessary part of your physiology and you would be dead without it.
  • Nap Today, Perform Better Tomorrow. - A couple of new reports came out this week addressing sleep in our culture. Everyone knows that they feel a little cranky when they don’t get enough sleep. It’s therefore no surprise that sleep affects your mood. What may be surprising, though, is that scientists know very little about why that’s true. We understand quite a bit about why sleep disrupts your immune function, your metabolism and your ability to learn and remember things. I have discussed each of these in past articles. But we don’t know much about how sleep regulates mood. An interesting new study published in Current Biology by Michael Walker, sheds some light on this subject. A loss of reason A complex brain circuit that involves both higher thinking centers and reactive centers controls your emotions. It’s the higher thinking centers that separate us from other animals.
  • Are You Changing Your Genes? - Living healthy not only affects you, it affects your potential offspring…and yes, fellas, this applies to us too. But isn’t this something we already knew? It is true that we inherit our genes from our ancestors (parents, grandparents, and so on) and our genes impact how you develop and influence your vulnerability to disease….but there is more to the story. A recent episode of NOVA titled, “Ghost in Your Genes”, gave a fantastic overview of some research investigating the influence that our ‘epigenome’
  • BrainFit for Life: A User's Guide to Life-Long Brain Health and Fitness. - As the Brain Fitness industry continues to gain momentum, and people explore all the incredible brain-training tools being developed, we hope that enthusiasts don't take their eye off the importance of...
  • Fishing for Neuroticism - It seems like every time I turn around there's another cool study on omega-3s, this time linking neurotic behavior to low levels of omega-3s in the blood. Researchers looked at measures of anxiety, angry hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsivity and vulnerability. Amazingly, all but 'vulnerability' correlated with omega-3 and omega-6 concentrations in the blood.
  • Ready, Set, Think - Studies are piling up showing how exercising your body boosts the fitness of you brain as well. Exercise has documented benefits for learning and memory, executive decision making function, mood regulation, and even protection against brain injury from an accident. The latest piece comes from Dr. Ronald Duman's group at Yale, just published in Nature Medicine. Using a high tech screening approach, researchers looked at how certain genes change their activity levels in the brain after exercise.
  • Is Kevin Bacon Controlling Your Health? - You probably played the Kevin Bacon game at some point in your life. Someone names an actor and you have to connect that actor back to Kevin Bacon through other actors who have worked together. The theory goes that we are all connected by six degrees of separation or less. I know someone who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows you. Scientists are now looking at social networks in the world of health behavior. An old Russian proverb says "Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are". Also, personal development gurus claim that we are they average of the five people we hang out with the most.
  • A Soda for Your Thoughts? - Everyone knows that sucking down too much soda contributes to a growing waistline. But did you know that studies also suggest that it may contribute to your mental decline? High sugar beverages are well-established risk factors for developing obesity and type II diabetes. There is also a link between type II diabetes and risk of Alzheimer's disease that we don't yet fully understand.

  • Are Kid's Growing Bellies Increasing Their Odds of Alzheimer's? - The title question may be a bit of a stretch, but you only need to connect a couple of research dots to get from childhood obesity to reduced brain fitness in older age.
  • Valentine Brain Fitness - A recent article in the New York Times highlighted new studies directed at figuring out how long-time married couples can keep their romance alive. The answer was very simple. Do something different. In one ten-week study, researchers worked with 53 couples.
  • Use More of Your Brain to Get Things Done - Recent advancements in brain imaging show us that older people use more of their brain to perform tasks than younger people do. Scientists interpret this to mean one of two opposite things: First, older people recruit more brain activity to do the same things in order to compensate for degeneration of specific brain circuits that can no longer get the job done by themselves. This is the compensation hypothesis. Think of it like one brain region asking for help from another brain region in order to do something that, in its younger days, it could do on its own.
  • An Apple a Day Keeps the Brain Doctor Away - Age-old wisdom tells us that we should eat fruit to stay healthy. Once again, science catches up to the old adage. A new study suggests that compounds in fruit, especially apples, may promote brain fitness as you age. Specifically, researchers found that phenolics, extracted from apples, bananas and oranges protected neuron-like cells from dying in a dish. But before we get into the new results let's cover a little background on what the fruits may be doing to protect your brain. Too much oxidative stress can lead to Alzheimer's disease One of the things that can damage bodily tissues and cause disease is oxidative stress.
  • Tai Chi for Your Head and Your Heart - We've written before about the benefits of Tai Chi for your brain fitness and your immune system. Now a new study shows some striking effects of a year-long Tai Chi program at dramatically reducing cardiovascular disease risk factors. The new paper published by Chin Lang et al. in the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine details the evaluation of 53 patients with clinically problematic high cholesterol or triglycerides. About half of the patients in this study participated in a 12-month Tai Chi program while the other half continued their typical sedentary lifestyle.
  • A Donut is not Always a Donut - Timing is Everything - Do you have a sweet tooth in the morning? Do you crave that bowl of high-sugar cereal or a donut with your coffee? We all know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and getting something for breakfast is likely better than getting nothing at all. However, a new study from a group in Australia tells us that if you must eat those sweet, high carbohydrate foods, you would do much better putting them off until lunch and grabbing some more protein in the morning. A g'zillion different studies show us why it is so important to eat a morning meal. Breakfast eaters have an easier time controlling their weight, better energy throughout the day and higher performance on the job or at school.
  • Climbing the Corporate Ladder of Brain Fitness - Does your job have anything to do with your odds of getting Alzheimer's disease down the road? Studies have come out recently linking intellectually challenging careers to reduced risk of dementia. Other studies link education level to cognitive health in later years.
  • Does Increasing Lifespan Also Increase Brainspan? - We have are fortunate enough today to expect to live about 20 years longer than our grandparents did. Since the 1950s, we have enjoyed a two-decade increase in lifespan. The downside is there is a big difference between lifespan and healthspan, which is the number of years that you remain healthy. A new editorial in Archives of Internal Medicine looks at the health of people reaching 100 years of age. Today there are 55,000 centenarians in the US. The people that make it that far today generally fare pretty well.
  • This is Your Brain on Stress - Remember the Bugs Bunny cartoons where Yosemite Sam would get so angry and stressed out that steam would come out of his ears. In fact, this seemed to happen to a lot of cartoon characters that lost there cool. Were these guys actually frying there brains? If so, could they get those fried brain cells back after they calmed down? It seems that cartoonists may have correctly predicted some neurobiology of stress.
  • There's More than Meets the Taste Buds - Many of us have a sweet tooth. It's hardwired into our brains. Several thousand years ago, when we went long periods of time between meals, we needed to get all the calories we could whenever we had the chance. Sweet and fatty foods are high in calories, so our brains made them taste good to get us to eat them. It was a survival instinct back then that made for fit brains. It doesn't work so well for us now. Taste Isn't Everything We've known this for some time. We know that when you eat something sweet you light up pleasure centers, driven by dopamine, in your brain. New research shows it's not just the sweet flavor that pleasures us.
  • Easy Living - Good or Bad for Brain Fitness? - If you talked to a person from the 1950s about all the modern marvels we have today they'd likely drool at the mouth. What? You don't have to get up to change the TV channel? You can reheat leftovers in 1 minute? You can access any information at any time without leaving your house? No way! Be Careful What You Ask For But are our lives really getting any easier? Do all these time saving devices allow us to work less? Well, sort of. It certainly takes less work to do any specific task. When I was in graduate school writing my thesis, I thought of the poor slobs who had to do that without the aid of a computer or the internet. It must have taken people an entire day to go to the library to find references that I can now get in 10 minutes (God bless Google).
  • Feed Your Brain - Keep Your Mind - For some time now, we've been promoting the role of a healthy lifestyle in maintaining brain fitness. Another new study lends more support, but before we get into that we thought we'd focus on some common-sense topics as to why this is true.
  • Ask Not What the HealthCare System Can Do for You . . . - With the presidential debates gearing up again we are sure to hear more about health care. But we propose a slightly different question. In addition to asking how we can get more people healthcare coverage, we should also ask why so many people are sick in the first place. The words of John Kennedy might today be, "Ask not what the health care system can do for you. Ask what you can do to reduce the health care burden". But before delving into what we can do, let's take a look at some realities that our next president could face in their first 'State of the Union' address. On the downside - * We are not healthy: 60% of adults and 20% of kids are overweight;

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