Michael Graham Richard

This video is an hour and a half long, but I think it’s worth watching:

• Sugar: The Bitter Truth

For more on how the Western Diet (high in refined carbohydrates) is causing metabolic syndrome, I also recommend “Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health” by Gary Taubes.

Cities Are Attention Whores
Cities bring a lot of benefits to their inhabitants, but we haven’t evolved to live in them and that has an impact on many facets of our lives, including our mental health.

Just being in an urban environment, [scientists] have found, impairs our basic mental processes. [...]

A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren’t distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power. [This depletes our ability to focus and interferes with our self-control].

It will be unsurprising to anyone who has studied evolutionary psychology to learn that a good way to give your brain a break is to spend some time in a natural setting. In fact, some studies show that just looking at some trees or grass through a window or on a picture can be beneficial.

I wonder if house plants can have the same effect…

In any case, this is just one of many examples among man-made systems that we could design better using knowledge of our brains and bodies and the evolutionary forces that shaped them.

Source: Boston Globe

Photo: Trey Ratcliff

I’ve been convinced for a while that taking vitamin D supplements is worth it, and study after study seems to confirm my choice.

Here’s what the most recent one from the University of California Riverside has to say:

In a paper published in the August issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, [Anthony Norman, an international expert on vitamin D,] identifies vitamin D’s potential for contributions to good health in the adaptive and innate immune systems, the secretion and regulation of insulin by the pancreas, the heart and blood pressure regulation, muscle strength and brain activity. In addition, access to adequate amounts of vitamin D is believed to be beneficial towards reducing the risk of cancer.

Norman also lists 36 organ tissues in the body whose cells respond biologically to vitamin D. The list includes bone marrow, breast, colon, intestine, kidney, lung, prostate, retina, skin, stomach and the uterus.

According to Norman, deficiency of vitamin D can impact all 36 organs. Already, vitamin D deficiency is associated with muscle strength decrease, high risk for falls, and increased risk for colorectal, prostate and breast and other major cancers.

The study’s recommendation for all adults is to have an average daily intake of at least 2000 IU. Levels under 10,000 IU/day are considered safe (more about toxicity here).

If you think you’re getting enough vitamin D just from the sun, the only way to know is to get a blood test for 25(OH) levels. A study showed that over half of residents of Miami, Florida, were deficient in vitamin D, and it gets worse as you go Northward. According to Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who strongly recommends vitamin D supplements, even a tan doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not vit D deficient, especially if you’re older (the skin loses its ability to generate vitamin D as you age).

Personally, I currently take 4,000 IU per day (in gelcaps like these, not dry tablets, because vitamin D is fat-soluble). If you decide to buy some, make sure to get D3 (cholecalciferol) and not the more expensive but less effective D2 (ergocalciferol).

About cost: 4,000 IU per day of Vitamin D costs me about $25.20 per year. There’s really no reason not to do it. And while you’re at it, also get a good multi-vitamin and some Omega 3 (I take around 1200 EPA + 600 DHA per day).

Update: Vitamin D deficiency might be linked to Parkinson’s disease.

Update: Monthly vitamin D supplement safe and effective.

Source: EurekAlert

Eddie Germino of BetterHumans.com conducted an interesting interview with biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey.

You can also read Germino’s review of Ending Aging, the book that De Grey wrote with Michael Rae about his “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” (SENS).

If you want to contribute to the fight against aging, please donate to the Methuselah Foundation.

See also:

• Videos from Aging 2008 Conference
• Interview with Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey
• Longevity Research Needs your Help
• More Methuselah Foundation Good News
• A Message from Aubrey de Grey
• LysoSENS Update
• Cemetery Excursions: Hunting Bacteria to Help LysoSENS

Videos from the first day of the Aging 2008 conference that took place a month ago in Los Angeles are now online.

If you are not familiar with the fight against aging, I recommend starting with Aubrey de Grey’s two presentations (one, two), or his TED talk (which has better audio).

If you want to dig deeper in this topic, the next logical step is the book Ending Aging, and a good way to keep up with the latest developments is FightAging.org. If you want to help fund research, please donate to the Methuselah Foundation.

On Friday, June 27th, leading scientists and thinkers in stem cell research and regenerative medicine will gather in Los Angeles at UCLA for Aging 2008 to explain how their work can combat human aging, and the sociological implications of developing rejuvenation therapies.

Aging 2008 is free, with advance registration required at http://www.mfoundation.org/Aging2008/

There’s a press release here, and you can find more information on the official Aging 2008 website.

If you are not familiar with longevity science, Aubrey de Grey’s TED talk is a good starting point. If that intrigues you, his book Ending Aging is the next logical step.

Update Great news! I email Jeff Hall, the coordinator of Aging 2008, to ask if videos of the event would be made available online. He answered that they will “be filming the entire event and putting it up on youtube.”

I wouldn’t normally do this, but my Fold It: The Protein Folding Game post generated quite a bit of attention, and it is obvious that many people are curious about the protein-folding game. So I figured that a central repository of media coverage might be helpful – more information might push a few people over the edge and convince them to try the game. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

• University of Washington Official Announcement (which was reprinted on Science Daily and Physorg, among others): Computer game’s high score could earn the Nobel Prize in medicine
• Howard Hughes Medical Institute Announcement: Researchers Launch Online Protein Folding Game
• The Economist: Return to the fold
• Technology Review: Biologists Enlist Online Gamers
• Slashdot (misleading title): Folding@Home 2.0 – An Online Protein Folding Game
• Penny Arcade (last paragraph): Je Parle Un Peu
• Nature Magazine Blog: Addictive protein folding game
• Seattle Times Blog: Free video game from UW: Wiggling and shaking for science
• Kotaku: Foldit Makes Protein Folding A Game
• Seattle PI: Scientists tap gaming’s power

If you see Fold It mentioned in the mainstream media or on a popular website, let me know in the comments and I’ll add it to the list.

A few months ago I discovered Futures in Biotech, a podcast that “explores the world of genetics, cloning, protein folding, genome mapping, and more” by Marc Pelletier. The episode that first caught my attention was an interview with Dr. Vijay S. Pande of Folding@home. In fact, I might have found Futures in Biotech via a link on the Folding@home blog.

Anyway, I had a look at their archives and saw that they didn’t have anything about Aubrey de Grey or the Methuselah Foundation. I figured it would be a perfect fit and that their listeners would be interested by the SENS platform.

So I found Marc’s blog and I either emailed him or left a comment (can’t remember) suggesting that he interview Aubrey de Grey, and gave some links to check out.

Today, I returned to Futures in Biotech and was very happy to see that their latest episode is an interview with Aubrey de Grey! I haven’t listened to it yet, and I can’t be sure that it was my comment/email that was the seed from which this grew, but whatever the cause was, I’m quite happy that a few more people will be exposed to SENS.

Maybe some of the listeners of that show are biology students or research scientists and this will start a chain of events that will lead them to help healthy life-extension research directly or indirectly, or maybe some of the listeners will donate to the Methuselah Foundation. This can only help.

You can listen to the interview here.

Update: I’ve now listened to the interview and it’s quite good. Unfortunately, the sound quality for Aubrey’s side of the conversation isn’t very good and I missed some of what he said.

I encourage you to listen to the interview, but know that it is not the best introduction to the SENS platform. A better start would by this TED talk, and the most complete and detailed overview is Aubrey’s book.