Newsletter #108: Indoor Air Quality, Spices, and Avocados 🥑
Hello Friends!
Welcome to the latest edition of the humanOS newsletter! 🤓 Below is our work, plus a roundup of the various studies and media that we stumbled upon this week. 👇
This Week’s Research Highlights
🌶 Adding spices to food may attenuate postprandial inflammation.
Twelve men with overweight/obesity participated in a 3-period crossover study. In random order, subjects consumed: 1) a high-fat high-carb meal, that meal containing 2 g spice blend, or a that meal containing 6 g spice blend. The spice blend consisted of basil, bay leaf, black pepper, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, ginger, oregano, parsley, red pepper, rosemary, thyme, and turmeric. Compared to the meal without added spice, IL-1β secretion from LPS-stimulated peripheral blood mononuclear cells was significantly reduced (1314%) at 240 minutes after consumption of the 6 gram spice blend.
🥤 Soft drink intake is associated with weight gain - regardless of physical activity levels.
Researcher analyzed data on soft drink intake, physical activity, and anthropometrics from 1268 health workers and their families, who were assessed at baseline (2004-2006), and then at follow-up (2010-2012). They found that an increase in one serving per day of soft drinks was associated with 0.10 kg increase in weight per year. Importantly, this association was not modified by leisure-time physical activity; people who complied with the WHO physical activity guidelines gained a similar amount of weight in relation to soft drink intake, compared with those who did not engage in sufficient exercise. The truism that you cannot outrun a bad diet seems to be, at least to some degree, accurate.
🥓 Meals high in saturated fat, as well as endotoxemia, are linked to poorer ability to focus.
Researchers had 51 women complete the Continuous Performance Test (a neuropsychological test that measures a person's sustained and selective attention), and then randomly assigned them to consume a meal that was either high in saturated fat, or high in high-oleic sunflower oil. The participants then completed the cognitive test again five hours after the meal. The women who consumed the meal high in saturated fat were less able to sustain attention, compared to when they ate the meal high in unsaturated fats. Furthermore, women with high baseline levels of blood markers related to endotoxemia, like LPS binding protein, performed more poorly regardless of what they ate.
Podcasts We Loved This Week
- Lydia Bourouiba: How diseases and epidemics move through a breath of air. Via TEDMED.
- Sigal Samuel: How coronavirus spreads outdoors vs. indoors. Via Vox.
Products We Are Enjoying
Ball mason jars, wide mouth lid..
These classic mason jars have become ubiquitous with good reason- they are incredibly versatile. I like to use them for smoothies, overnight oats, chia pudding, fermenting vegetables, or just as a drinking vessel.
New humanOS Features
New humanOS Content
- humanOS Radio: Avocatin B from Avocados Fights Obesity and Diabetes. Podcast with Dr. Paul Spagnuolo
🎧 On this week’s episode of humanOS Radio, Dan spoke with Paul Spagnuolo, a professor at the Department of Food Science at the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada. Dr. Spagnuolo’s lab has been focused on identifying and developing nutraceuticals as novel therapeutic agents, and figuring out the molecular and cellular mechanisms through which these food-derived bioactive compounds influence cell biology.
🥑 Dr. Spagnuolo and his team discovered avocatin B, a mixture of polyhydroxylated fatty alcohols that is found exclusively in avocados. Avocatin B is a potent inhibitor of fatty acid oxidation (FAO), which makes it a promising candidate as a drug to block or delay some of the cellular processes that lead to insulin resistance and diabetes. In theory, reducing FAO in skeletal muscle and in pancreatic beta cells would force cells to burn glucose instead of fatty acids, which would be expected to lower blood sugar levels and restore insulin sensitivity.
🧐 But of course, the only way to know whether it actually works is to put it to the test. Paul and his team wanted to explore whether this avocado compound could indeed help with metabolic syndrome. To that end, they recently performed a series of experiments testing avocatin B in rodent models of obesity and insulin resistance, as well as a randomized controlled clinical trial in humans. To learn what they found, check out the interview!
