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...
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 the physical health of the brain and all the systems it communicates with. The brain is unique in that it houses our cognitive and emotional capacities in the form of the mind. It is a 'cognitive' organ that hungers for stimulation from new experiences and challenges. Many brain fitness programs...
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...
Is Fish Oil a Quick Fix for Your Memory?
? A lot research has focused on omega-3 fats as good for body and brain function. Scientists have scrutinized these fats in everything from heart disease and diabetes to depression, bipolar illness, schizophrenia, ADHD and Alzheimer's. The latest papers to add to the experimental pile come from a recent edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
The new studies evaluate omega-3s in people in their 70s and 80s and relate to cognitive function, mood and mental well-being. The bottom...
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...
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.
Belly Fat and Brain Fitness are Related
First, a recent meta-analysis from researchers at Johns Hopkins University verified that the odds of getting Alzheimer's and other types of dementia increase as you gain weight. A meta analysis takes all previous studies on a particular topic and looks at them together to improve the...
Can Giving Improve your Brain?
? Altruism, the act of giving unselfishly, is an enigma to neuroscience. The theory of evolution says that organisms will behave in a way to ensure their own survival and that of their offspring. So how did altruistic behavior come to be? Is it beneficial to the giver?
Giving Activates Brain Circuits
Some interesting recent research begins to unveil pieces of the puzzle. When neuroscientist monitor the brains of people either giving or getting there are some commonalities. Especially in a...
Dont Stress It
Copyright (c) 2007 The Brain Code LLC
A new report in the Journal of Neuroscience is the latest in a long line of studies showing that stress is bad news for the brain. The new issue looked at the brains of rats that had been bullied' by other, bigger rats relative to those that had no such demeaning experience.
Rats are social and territorial animals and when one rat is introduced into the cage of another rat, they will quickly establish who is dominant usually the home cage rat wins....
21 Times a Day
That's the number of food ads that elementary school age kids see every day. The vast majority of them are for junk foods. This is according to the largest study ever done looking at TV advertising to kids by Kaiser Family Health and the University of Indiana.
The study evaluated advertising on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, PBS, Cartoon Network, Disney, MTV and Nickelodeon. Researchers found that 8 12 year olds viewed the most TV food ads at 21 per day. Teenagers see about 17 food ads per day and 2...
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