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...

According to research published today in the European Publication of Preventive Cardiology, a journal of the ESC1, drinking two to three cups of coffee per day is associated with a longer lifetime and a lower risk of cardiovascular disease.1 The conclusions held true for decaffeinated, instant, and ground variants. According to study author Professor Peter Kistler of the Baker Heart and Diabetes Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, "in this large, observational study, ground, instant, and decaffeinated coffee were associated with equivalent reductions in the incidence of cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular disease or any cause." The findings imply that a mild to moderate intake of ground, instant, and decaffeinated coffee should be regarded as a component of a healthy lifestyle. The effects of various coffee preparations on heart health and survival are poorly understood. Using data from the UK Biobank, which included adults between the ages of 40 and ...

The ease of pre-cooked and instant meals may make it simple for many Americans to overlook the less-than-ideal nutritional information, but after finding a connection between the frequent consumption of ultra-processed foods and an elevated risk of colorectal cancer, a group of researchers led by those at Tufts University and Harvard University hope that will change. According to a study that was released on August 31 in The BMJ, men who consumed a lot of ultra-processed foods had a 29% higher risk of getting colorectal cancer, which is the third most common cancer diagnosed in the country, than those who consumed far less of it. In women, they did not discover the similar relationship. Lu Wang, a postdoctoral scholar at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and the study's principal author, said, "We initially thought that colorectal cancer could be the cancer most impacted by food compared to other cancer types." "The majority of u...

In conjunction with Queensland Health Forensic and Scientific Services, researchers from The University of Queensland have discovered the secret of how the uncommon, beneficial sugar found in stingless bee honey is produced. The research team discovered that the bees' guts create the sugar trehalulose, which is not present in other honey or as a significant component in other foods. Dr. Natasha Hungerford, an organic chemist and research director at UQ, said that since significant amounts of sugar trehalulose were found in stingless bee honey, the origin of this unusual sugar has remained a mystery. Dr. Hungerford stated, "We did not know if the trehalulose was originating from an external source — possibly from natural vegetation. As opposed to European honey bees, who only store their honey in honeycomb made entirely of beeswax, stingless bees store their honey in small pots made from a mixture of beeswax and tree resins, so it may have been something in the resin from the t...