Newsletter #100: 8000 Steps, Duolingo, & Elderberry
Hello Friends!
Welcome to the latest edition of the humanOS newsletter! Below is our work, and a roundup of the various studies and media that have captured our attention this week.
This Week’s Research Highlights
😷 Specific demographic and lifestyle factors strongly influence risk of severe symptoms of COVID-19.
Physicians in Shanghai analyzed data from 30 studies conducted between December 2019 and February 2020, involving ~53000 patients with confirmed cases of COVID-19. Most of the studies were performed in Wuhan and other Chinese cities. They found that people aged 50 and older were found to be about 2.5 times more likely to progress to a severe case of COVID-19. Cases were considered to be severe if they had symptoms such as shortness of breath requiring 30 or more breaths per minutes; dangerously low levels of oxygen in the blood; and radiographic evidence of lung damage that had grown by 50% or more within a 24 to 48 hour period. Being male was shown to increase odds of progressing to severe illness by 1.3 times. Smoking made it 1-2.5 times more likely. And people with COPD were shown to be somewhere between 2.5 to nearly 11 times more likely to get severely ill.
🏃♀️ More steps mean reduced risk of death, even if you’re moving slowly.
Researchers analyzed data from a representative sample of 4840 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), who wore accelerometers for up to seven days between 2003 and 2006. These subjects were then followed through 2015. The researchers calculated associations between mortality and steps after adjustment for demographic and behavioral risk factors, body mass index, and health status at the start of the study. They found that taking 8000 steps per day was associated with a 51% lower risk of all-cause mortality, compared to taking 4000 steps. Taking 12000 steps per day was even better - it was associated with a 65% lower risk. The authors found no association between step intensity (meaning how fast they were moving) and risk of death, after accounting for the total number of steps taken per day.
🥤 Distraction may diminish the taste of food, and in turn drive overeating.
Forty-one healthy participants drank chocolate milk in an MRI scanner while performing a computer task. Sometimes the task was highly distracting and sometimes less so. The researchers analyzed the imaging to determine how brain regions that are involved with the sensation of taste were responding to the chocolate milk. They found that the two areas of the brain that are predominantly responsible for taste processing were interacting less effectively with each other when the subjects were distracted while eating. Furthermore, reduced activations of the insula, due to the distracting task, was associated with the participants eating more at a later time.
🧠 Levels of dopamine signaling in the brain affect motivation to work, and may explain how stimulants help with attention deficit disorder.
Researchers recruited 50 subjects, and assessed their striatal dopamine levels through brain imaging. They then administered a series of increasingly difficult cognitive tests, which could be exchanged for specific amounts of money. More difficult tasks were linked to more money as a reward. They found that participants with lower dopamine synthesis capacity were more likely to avoid the most demanding tasks. Importantly, they were more likely to focus upon the cognitive cost of performing the test, whereas the subjects with higher dopamine levels focused on the potential rewards. However, when the participants with lower dopamine took methylphenidate (Ritalin), dopamine levels were boosted, and their willingness to allocate cognitive effort in turn was also boosted. This suggests that stimulants, which are commonly associated with improved cognition, are working at the motivational level.
Podcasts We Loved This Week
- Michael Osterholm: COVID-19—Lessons learned, challenges ahead, and reasons for optimism and concern. Via The Drive with Peter Attia.
- Roxanne Khamsi & Brian Resnick: Airborne, Explained. Via Reset.
- Joel Goldberg & Jon Cohen: Why some diseases come and go with the seasons. Via Nature Podcast.
Products We Are Enjoying
Duolingo
If you’re looking for an enjoyable and semi-productive way to spend the extra time that you’re no longer investing in commuting, socializing, work/school, etc., why not try learning another language? Duolingo is a fun and accessible platform for language learning that offers bite-sized image-driven lessons and positive reinforcement for daily use (the owl will infamously hunt you down with push notifications if you are slacking). Best of all, it’s free, though it does also provide a premium service if you are keen to avoid ads.
New humanOS Content
- humanOS Blog: Does Elderberry Boost Your Immune System?
Around this time of year, there is often increased interest in supplements to boost the immune system. That has never been more true than now, as most of the world is now under varying levels of lockdown, preoccupied with the growing threat of the novel coronavirus. The idea of taking an extract to make the immune system stronger is very enticing, especially at a time like this. Many of us are desperately looking for something to do, some way to protect ourselves, in an unprecedented situation where we have little control. We naturally crave to take action.
One supplement that often pops up in these discussions is elderberry. Elderberry has been used for thousands of years by Native Americans and people of the Mediterranean basin. Indeed, medicinal and dietary applications of elderberries date back at least to the Ancient Egyptians. For most of us today, the most familiar use for elderberry is as a supplement to prevent respiratory illness.
But are the claims regarding elderberry as an immune system booster legit? What does the highest quality research tell us about elderberry? In this blog, we take a look at what a recent meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials found about this plant, and more broadly about the state of natural product research.
