Newsletter #80: Cooling the Racing Mind for Better Sleep, and Ugly Produce 🧠❄️
Hello Friends!
Welcome to the newest humanOS newsletter! 🤓 Here is where we share our work, plus the various studies and media that caught our attention this week.
This Week’s Research Highlights
🩸 The built environment influences cardiovascular risk.
Researchers analyzed neighborhood walkability and cardiovascular health in nearly 45000 individuals aged 40 to 74 living in 15 major urban centers in Ontario. They found that people living in neighborhoods considered to be least walkable were up to 33% more likely to have a high predicted 10-year cardiovascular risk, compared to individuals in the most walkable areas. Individuals in least walkable neighborhoods also had significantly higher blood pressure and higher odds of a diagnosis of diabetes. Urban design can have a remarkable hidden impact on public health.
🧠 High intensity exercise improves memory in older adults.
Researchers recruited 64 sedentary adults between the ages of 60 and 88. Over a 12 week period, in three sessions per week, these subjects performed either high intensity interval training, moderate-intensity continuous training, or stretching (control). Participants in the high intensity group showed significant improvements in memory performance, a boost of up to 30%, compared to the moderate intensity group and the controls. Improvements in fitness levels directly correlated with improvement in memory performance.
😴 Chronic sleep deprivation may accelerate biological aging.
Four hundred eighty healthy volunteers wore Fitbits and submitted one week of sleep data for the study. In addition to this data, the research team collected data for cardiovascular disease risk factors and performed whole-genome sequencing. The team found that participants who slept less than five hours per night were twice as likely to have shortened telomeres, compared to those who got seven or more hours of sleep per night. They also had higher BMIs and larger waist circumferences, suggesting increased cardiovascular risk.
🍽️ Eating a diet dominated by ultra-processed foods is probably not great for your heart.
Researchers at the CDC reviewed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) collected between 2011 and 2016. They zeroed in on results from 13446 adults who had completed a dietary recall and answered questions about their cardiovascular health. They found that every 5% increase in calories from ultra-processed foods a person ate came with a corresponding decrease in overall cardiovascular health. Subjects who ate ~70% of their calories from ultra-processed foods were half as likely to have "ideal" cardiovascular health ( as defined by the AHA), compared to people who ate 40% or less of their calories from such foods.
New humanOS Content
🔬 In this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Eric Nofzinger. Dr. Nofzinger is a renowned expert in the science of sleep who has spent more than 35 years practicing sleep medicine and studying the neurobiology of insomnia at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
🤔 As a researcher at Pittsburgh, Dr. Nofzinger frequently interacted with patients with insomnia. They would often attribute their inability to sleep to a “racing mind.” Furthermore, they would often claim to have hardly slept at all, even when polysomnography showed that they had experienced normal sleep. He, along with other scientists in the field, suspected that there was a biological basis for these commonly reported complaints.
🧠 To gain meaningful insight into what was going on, he couldn’t just look at sleep patterns – he needed to look inside the brain. To that end, he started conducting functional imaging studies on patients with insomnia to examine patterns of brain activity and metabolism during sleep. Sure enough, individuals with insomnia exhibited significantly higher cerebral glucose metabolism while they slept, and their brains were much more active than those with normal healthy sleep patterns.
❄️ This observation inspired Dr. Nofzinger to develop Ebb, a sleep therapy unlike any other out there. It has been known for some time that application of a cooling stimulus to the head can lower the brain temperature in the underlying cortex. This, in turn, reduces brain metabolism and cools down the facing mind. In this way, Dr. Nofzinger and colleagues hope to target insomnia at its root cause, non-invasively and without using pharmaceutical interventions. To learn more, check out the interview!
Podcasts We Loved This Week
- Stephan Guyenet: Are Popular Nutrition & Health Books Trustworthy, Accurate & Health-Promoting?Via Sigma Nutrition.
- Linda Geddes: A New Science of Sunlight.Via Sleep Junkies.
- Robert Bilott and Sharon Lerner: PFAS Chemicals and You.Via Science Friday.
Products We Are Enjoying
Misfits Market.
Misfits is a subscription service that sources fresh certified organic produce that farms and stores can’t sell due to cosmetic defects, and ships them to your door in eco-friendly packaging. The “misfit” produce is always an interesting mix - sometimes they’re weirdly ginormous, sometimes they’re itty bitty, some are ugly, and a few will look perfectly normal. Flavor, happily, does not seem to be affected by their gnarly appearance.
To give you an idea of what you might be getting, my box today included radicchio, persimmons, avocados, pomegranate, purple and orange carrots, celery, onions, potatoes, fresh mint, romaine, and more. Different stuff comes in every box, so it never gets boring (you can see what is currently appearing in boxes here).
humanOS Catalog Feature of the Week
Want to watch this course with us this week? First lesson is just a little over 3 minutes long, and should give you a quick sense for the style of the course. Not yet a Pro user of humanOS? No sweat, this initial module is available for everyone, so give it a shot.