Newsletter #103: Mindful Yoga, Ugly Produce, & Ergogenics 💪🏽
Hello Friends!
Welcome to the latest edition of the humanOS newsletter! Here we present our work, plus a roundup of the various studies and media that have captured our attention this week. 🤓
This Week’s Research Highlights
🚬 Exposure to parental smoking in childhood and adolescence is associated with poorer cognitive function in midlife.
Researchers analyzed data from a population-based cohort of children and adolescents aged 3-18 years who were followed between 1980-2011. The subjects were divided into three different groups based on exposure to parental tobacco smoke. Cognitive testing was performed in 2011 on 2026 participants when they were 34-49 years old. Compared to those who had two non-smoking parents, those who had been exposed to parental smoking in their formative years were at higher risk for poor performance on measures of memory and learning, and this association was present regardless of whether the participants themselves were smokers. The difference in cognitive performance between those participants who had been exposed to parental smoking and those with non-smoking parents was equivalent to the difference caused by up to five years of aging.
🧠 Supplementation with specific probiotic strains boosts cognitive performance in older adults.
Sixty-three healthy older adults (≥ 65 years) were randomly assigned to consume either placebo or probiotics containing Bifidobacterium bifidum BGN4 and Bifidobacterium longum BORI (1 × 109 CFU per day) for 12 weeks. The probiotics group showed greater improvement in a test of mental flexibility compared to placebo, as well as significantly increased BDNF levels. Elevations in BDNF seemed to be associated with shifts in gut microbes.
🧘🏽 Mindful yoga practice alleviates symptoms and lowers androgens in women with PCOS.
Researchers recruited women with PCOS aged 22-43 and randomly assigned them into a group, either with no intervention or one in which they would participate in mindful yoga practice. These yoga sessions were an hour long and took place three times a week over the course of three months. The women in the yoga group showed, on average, a 29% drop in testosterone levels. Additionally, depression and anxiety levels improved by 55% and 21% respectively. These improvements occurred in the absence of weight loss.
👀 Men may be more vulnerable to COVID-19, at least in part, for anatomical reasons.
Data from multiple countries suggests that men who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 are more likely to show severe symptoms and to die from COVID-19. One reason is that they appear to clear the virus more slowly. Researchers in India followed 48 men and 20 women with the virus and found that the women tested negative much more rapidly than the men did. The researchers then consulted three different databases to find levels of ACE2 expression throughout the body. Sure enough, the testes, along with the lungs and kidneys, were among the areas with the highest ACE2 expression. Whether SARS-CoV-2 does indeed infect and multiply in testicular tissue, however, still needs to be confirmed.
Podcasts We Loved This Week
- Benjamin Thompson, Noah Baker, and Amy Maxmen: Coronapod—Troubling news. Via Nature Podcast.
- John Barry: 1918 Spanish flu pandemic—historical account, parallels to today, and lessons. Via The Drive with Peter Attia.
- Alan Flanagan: Diet and inflammation. Via Sigma Nutrition Radio.
Products We Are Enjoying
Imperfect Foods.
If you are trying to minimize trips to the grocery store but still want to eat healthy fresh foods, a delivery service might be a smart idea. Imperfect Foods is a subscription service that sources fresh produce and pantry items that farms and retailers are not able to sell, usually due to cosmetic defects, and ships them to your door in eco-friendly packaging, and at a discount of up to 30% from retail. I like this service particularly because it is fully customizable, like if you aren’t comfortable with getting a surprise box of fruits and vegetables and other stuff. You have the option to receive shipments as frequently or infrequently as you wish, and you can pick every single thing in the box if you prefer.
Worth noting that the actual quality (and flavor) of the foods that you receive should not be compromised - I’ve never received an item from them that was in really poor condition or couldn’t be eaten. Actually, the random gnarly appearance of the foods can be part of the fun. Sometimes they’re freakishly ginormous, sometimes they’re itty bitty, some are just ugly, and then a bunch of them will look perfectly normal.
New humanOS Feature: Revival Daily
This week, we are launching Revival Daily, a new program built in collaboration with Shanna Guzman and Misbah Haque out of Marcus Filly’s gym, Revival Strength in San Rafael. The workouts contain three types of sequences: Tabata, Functional Bodybuilding, and Bodyweight Flow. With this release, we also have created an entirely new way to deliver the workouts.
As you can see, the workouts open with their own specially-designed player, which walks you through each exercise in complete sequences. The player shows you a moving image of each exercise so you can model how the exercise should look, and the player also contains audio beeps for the timed parts of the sequence. To explore these workouts, please add the Revival Daily tile to your Dashboard on humanOS (See “Add Tiles” at the bottom of your Dashboard). Give it a shot and get ready to work up a sweat. 😅
New humanOS Content
The market for dietary supplements to enhance sports performance has exploded in recent years. Dietary intake of these substances can, in theory, affect training adaptations in a couple different ways. They can achieve this by simply increasing the exercise stimulus from a single training bout - basically just enabling an athlete to train longer or harder, or reducing perceived exertion. But they may also be able to affect gains in endurance by altering cellular responses to exercise-induced stress. Importantly, these changes in cell signaling may not be universally beneficial from the standpoint of adaptation.
This raises a number of interesting questions. How significant is the impact of these supplements from a practical standpoint? And how do we separate acute effects on training duration and intensity from chronic effects on training adaptations? Is it possible that a supplement could simultaneously make it easier for an athlete to exercise hard, but also have effects on cellular signaling that actually have a long-term negative impact on the adaptive response to training?
On this episode of humanOS Radio, we welcome Jeff Rothschild to the show. Jeff recently wrote a fascinating review exploring the impact of dietary supplements on adaptations to endurance training. He came on the show to discuss his findings, and what they might mean for athletes and generally active people who want to maximize the time and effort that they dedicate to their training. To learn more about how various nutritional supplements might affect your training - both short and long-term - check out the interview!