Life is short.

What is Life?

It is the flash of a firefly in the night.

It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time.

It is the little shadow which runs across the grass

and loses itself in the Sunset."

 Crowfoot on his deathbed, April 1890

 

Alzheimer's Protection

Some people do brain exercises to stave off this building epidemic...


Studies say fasting twice a week staves off Alzheimer's


 By Makiko Kitamura / Bloomberg News


LONDON -- For the past year, Stuart Adams has been fasting twice a week. While he has lost 15 pounds, the real reason he's depriving himself is to stave off brain disorders including schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease.

"There's a virulent strain of madness running through my family, and I reckoned my chances of going down that route were pretty high," said Mr. Adams, 43, a freelance translator and interpreter in London who learned of a possible link between Alzheimer's and diet while watching a BBC documentary last year. "Anything that could help with that was of great interest."

Because there is no cure for Alzheimer's, which afflicts more than 35 million people, any possibility of prevention holds huge potential. 

Mr. Adams was inspired to try the diet last year after the BBC documentary called "Eat, Fast and Live Longer" cited a study in mice that suggested intermittent fasting could delay the onset of cognitive disorders.

The study was led by Mark Mattson, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and senior investigator at the U.S. National Institute of Aging. Mr. Mattson is planning a new project to measure how fasting twice a week for two months affects human brain function and early signs of Alzheimer's.

While this and other similar diets are gaining in popularity even as they spawn a steady outpouring of new books on the subject, some experts have doubts.

"This is part of a never-ending carousel of diet books," said Kelly Brownell, former director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University and now dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.
"There will be some buzz and then the diet will go away, never to be heard of again."

Nonetheless, the studies and the books keep coming. Another examination into the fasting-dementia link will be led by Krista Varady, an associate professor of kinesiology and nutrition at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on alternating a normal diet with eating 500 or 600 calories every other day. Nutritionists recommend men consume about 2,500 calories a day and women 2,000 calories.

While research on fasting diets and dementia still has a long way to go, the early evidence is promising.

The mouse study led by Mr. Mattson found that intermittent fasting may have protected the function of brain cells, even if it didn't reduce levels of the plaque and tangles that are typical signs of Alzheimer's.

At the same time, fasting is increasingly seen as playing a role in the prevention of other diseases including breast cancer and diabetes.

That's paved the way for a flurry of how-to books including Ms. Varady's "The Every-Other-Day Diet," which goes on sale Dec. 24. Competing with that is "The Fast Diet" by science journalist Michael Mosley, who was behind the BBC documentary Mr. Adams watched, and lifestyle writer Mimi Spencer. Their regimen is known as the 5:2 diet.

There's also "The 2-Day Diet" by dietitian Michelle Harvie and Tony Howell, a professor of oncology at the University of Manchester in England. Their approach was developed specifically to help prevent breast cancer, for which obesity is a known risk factor.

Health experts say fasting diets can't substitute for eating healthy foods.

"In general, intermittent fasting is a good thing if it's done properly," said Dean Ornish, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and a physician consultant to former President Bill Clinton. "But if you're already eating very healthily, then you may not need to do that."

In a study conducted with Mr. Mattson and published this year, they found the two-day diet led to greater drops in body fat and insulin resistance in women with high breast-cancer risk after three months, compared with a diet where calories are cut every day, suggesting that intermittent fasting is an easier approach to follow.

The bottom line, though, is that any fasting diet needs to be undertaken thoughtfully, including eating healthy foods on non-fasting days, Ms. Harvie said.









Link:  http://www.post-gazette.com/news/healthscience/2013/11/03/Studies-say-fasting-twice-a-week-staves-off-Alzheimer-s/stories/201311030147

Prostate Diseases

2013 Annual Report on Prostate Diseases

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• Contents
• Excerpt
• Customer Reviews (9)

Most men eventually develop some type of prostate problem, and when they do there are usually no easy solutions. The three most common prostate problems are benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), prostatitis, and prostate cancer. Men with the same condition and symptoms might opt for very different treatments — or choose to do nothing at all.

A number of exciting new treatment options have emerged for prostate diseases, including new medications and refined surgical techniques. But daunting challenges remain. A major disappointment has been in the area of chemoprevention — an approach that uses drugs or supplements to try to reduce risk of prostate cancer. Two leading contenders — 5-alpha reductase inhibitors and vitamin E supplements — not only don’t seem to prevent prostate cancer but actually may increase risk of developing it. And in a major development, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has recommended against routine prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening — arguing that for most men screening does not save lives and causes more harm than benefit.

That’s why this unique publication is more than a primer on prostate conditions; it includes roundtable discussions with experts at the forefront of prostate research, interviews with patients about their treatment decisions, and the latest thinking on complementary therapies.

The goal of this publication is not to relate easy answers. Rather, our mission is to provide you with the information you need to understand the current controversies, avoid common pitfalls, and work with your doctor to make informed choices about your prostate health.


Prepared by the editors of Harvard Health Publications in consultation with Marc B. Garnick, M.D., Clinical Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Hematology/Oncology Division, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. 136 pages. (2013)

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why men have deep voices

Roar of the rutting stag: why men have deep voices
Saturday, October 05, 2013 4:06 PM

The behaviour of rutting stags helps explain why men have evolved descended larynges

It's the rutting season. From Richmond Park to the Isle of Rum, red deer hinds will be gathering, and the stags that have spent the past 10 months minding their own business in bachelor groups are back in town, with one thing on their minds. A mature male that has netted himself a harem is very dedicated. He practically stops eating, focusing instead on keeping his hinds near and his competitors at bay. If you're a red deer stag, one of the ways you make sure that your adversaries know you mean business – and that you're big – is roaring. And you don't let up. You can keep roaring all day, and through the night too, twice a minute, if necessary.

While female red deer prefer the deeper roars of larger stags, roaring also appears to be part of how stags size one another up, before deciding whether or not to get engaged in a full-on physical fight. Most confrontations are settled without locking antlers. In male red and fallow deer, the voicebox or larynx is very low in the throat – and gets even lower when they roar.

Strap-like muscles that attach to the larynx contract to drag it down towards the breastbone – lengthening the vocal tract and deepening the stag's roar.
Deepening the voice exaggerates body size.

Over generations, stags with deeper roars presumably had more reproductive success, so the position of the larynx moved lower and lower in the neck. When a red deer stag roars his larynx is pulled down so far that it contacts the front of his breastbone – it couldn't get any lower.

In human evolution, much is made of the low position of the larynx in the neck. So much, in fact, that it has been considered to be a uniquely human trait, and intrinsically linked to that other uniquely human trait: spoken language. 

But if red and fallow deer also have low larynges, that means, first, that we're not as unusual as we like to think we are, and second, that there could be other reasons – that are nothing to do with speaking – for having a descended larynx.

The relative position of the larynx tends to be lower in men than in women, and as far as speaking goes, this may actually be a disadvantage. The human female vocal tract is capable of making a larger range of discrete vowel sounds than the male. It's safe to assume that the comparatively low position of the male voicebox hasn't evolved to improve the production of intelligible speech.

But when we listen to someone speaking, we gain far more information than is contained in just the words themselves. Even though we may not always be aware of it, we size people up by their voices. The deep human male voice, exaggerating body size just as it does in stags, could have come about because women found men with low voices more attractive – perhaps we could call this the "Barry White effect".

This isn't just idle speculation; a recent study from the University of Aberdeen found that women expressed a preference for deep voices. It also turned out that women tended to remember information better when they'd been told it by a man with a low voice.

But it could also be that men, like stags, have evolved low voices in order to deter sexual competitors. In support of this idea, it's been found that men modulate the pitch of their voices when they're in competition with one another, as revealed by a dating game, played in the interests of science, at the University of Pittsburgh. Male students were pitted against an unseen male rival in order to win a date. Each participant had a conversation with the adversary, so they had an opportunity to "size him up".

The results of those conversations were fascinating: participants who believed themselves to be more physically dominant than their rival lowered their voices. But students who thought they were less dominant raised their voices to a higher pitch. The men were sizing each other up, just like rutting stags. But they were also changing their voices in a way that suggests they were – without being aware of it – managing the confrontation to avoid conflict. A man who thought he was more dominant lowered his voice to emphasize his dominance and intimidate his competitor. A man who thought he was likely to lose the game, just by listening to his adversary, spoke in a higher voice: don't bother fighting me – you've won, mate.

The low voice of men, like stags, is a trait that probably evolved through sexual selection. 

This isn't just about being attractive to the opposite sex, it's also about beating same-sex rivals. A deep voice may prove an advantage in both cases, helping a man to exclude other, apparently less dominant men, from the mating game, as well as making him more attractive to the opposite sex. 

A win-win situation. 

Unless, of course, you're a well-built man with a mellifluous tenor voice, who's bucked the trend, or a woman who prefers Justin Timberlake or John Lennon to Jim Morrison or Eddie Vedder.

This is biology, after all – variability is what makes it so interesting.
    Evolution
    Animal behaviour
    Dating
    Biology

Alice Roberts

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