Scienceblogtwo

According to a recent study from the Butler Columbia Aging Center at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the answer to a seemingly simple question — how does what we eat affect how we age — is unavoidably complex. While the majority of analyses had focused on the effects of a single nutrient on a single outcome, a traditional, unidimensional approach to understanding the effects of diet on health and aging no longer gives us the full picture. A healthy diet needs to be thought of based on the balance of ensembles of nutrients, rather than by optimizing a series of nutrients one at a time. Up until recently, little was understood about how dietary variety that occurs naturally in humans impacts aging. The journal BMC Biology has posted the findings online. According to Alan Cohen, PhD, associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia Mailman School, "Our ability to understand the problem has been complicated by the fact that both nutrition and the p...

The "sweet spot" for reducing your risk of disease and mortality is 10,000 steps per day, but recent research suggests that your walking speed may be just as significant. The studies, which tracked 78,500 participants with wearable trackers and were published in the journals JAMA Internal Medicine and JAMA Neurology, are the largest to systematically examine step count in connection to health outcomes. Achieving 10,000 steps per day is linked to a lower risk of dementia, heart disease, cancer, and death, according to studies from the Universities of Sydney in Australia and Southern Denmark. A power walk, however, demonstrated advantages above and beyond the amount of steps completed. "The take-home message here is that people could not only ideally aim for 10,000 steps a day for protective health benefits but also aim to walk faster," said Dr. Matthew Ahmadi, co-lead author and Research Fellow at the Charles Perkins Centre and Faculty of Medicine and Health at the U...