Altering diet to add a decade
Simply making small changes to one’s diet can add as much as 10 to 13 years to life, according to a new study.
Norwegian researchers found that a 20-year-old woman who replaces refined grains with whole grains and legumes, as well as eats more fish and nuts, is less likely to develop heart disease and cancer, and can benefit from an additional 10 years of life.
For men, those changes could mean an additional 13 years of life.
The results do not take into account nutritional requirements, but focus more on caloric intake and the type of food consumed.
Black women who experience racism before age 20 are more likely to have depression, a new study shows.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill say 1,600 Black women in Detroit age 25 to 35 took part in the study and nearly 66% said they had experienced some form of racism as a child. Nearly 33% said they had symptoms of depression.
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The study authors noted that the findings show that racism can damage the mental health of young people and affect health later in life.
Source: Journal of Urban Health
Daily chores good for heart
There’s a silver lining to daily chores.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, say daily chores may reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease.
Activities such as cooking, cleaning and gardening promote movement, which reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease, researchers say.
Participants with at least four hours of daily movement had a 43% lower risk of major cardiovascular disease, a 30% lower risk of stroke and a 62% lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease.
Source: Journal of the American Heart Association
A new study suggests that how you prepare your vegetables could provide different benefits.
Researchers at the University of Oxford found that those who consumed more raw vegetables experienced less cardiovascular disease and lower incidence of death from CVD. There was not a similar association with cooked vegetables.
The researchers looked at dietary information of nearly 400,000 United Kingdom adults and compared the data with cardiovascular disease incidence in a 12-year follow-up period.
Researchers say that does not mean that eating raw vegetables directly reduces risk of developing heart disease, because other factors such as socioeconomic status can have an effect as well. However, researchers say that cannot exclude this possibility.
Source: Frontiers in Nutrition journal
Less meat, less cancer risk?
People who eat small amounts of meat or who are vegetarians may be able to lower their risk of developing cancer, a new study says.
Researchers at the University of Oxford analyzed the data of 470,000 people collected as part of a UK Biobank medical database project. When recruited, the participants did not have cancer.
Just over 50% of participants were regular meat-eaters, while a little less than half ate meat five times per week or less. About 11,000 participants were pescatarians, who eat fish, and 8,700 were vegetarians or vegans.
Researchers discovered that regular meat-eaters had the highest risk for all cancers. Those who followed a low-meat diet had a reduced risk for colorectal cancer, and vegetarian postmenopausal women had a lower risk for breast cancer.
Male vegetarians or pescatarians had a reduced risk for prostate cancer.
Source: BMC Medicine journal
