Newsletter #110: Potassium Bicarbonate FTW 🍌🥑✨
Hello Friends!
Welcome to the latest edition of the humanOS newsletter! Here, as always, is our own work, plus a roundup of the various studies and media that we came across this week. 👇
This Week’s Research Highlights
🥤 Drinking sugary soft drinks may be linked to greater risk of cardiovascular disease.
Researchers analyzed data from 106178 participants in the California Teacher’s Study, a cohort of female teachers and administrators who were followed since 1995. After adjusting for potential confounders, they found that drinking one or more of any type of sugary beverage daily was associated with a 26% higher likelihood of needing a revascularization procedure (like angioplasty or bypass), and a 21% higher likelihood of having a stroke, compared to women who rarely or never drank sugary beverages.
🏋 Small amounts of physical activity may cut heart disease risk in half for people with overweight or obesity.
Researchers examined a dataset from more than 22000 adults, derived from NHANES, which included self-reported activity levels, broken down into three categories: no exercise at all, exercising for 1-149 minutes per week, or exercising for more than 150 minutes per week. They found that obese adults who completed 150+ minutes of moderate or vigorous exercise each week had 50% lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease over 10 years. But even small doses of exercise - like ten minutes at a time - were linked to a 34% reduction in risk. Similarly, overweight adults who exercised any amount at all had nearly 50% reduced risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
🥑 Dietary fiber intake is inversely associated with all-cause mortality.
Researchers conducted a large-scale population-based cohort study in Japan, in which dietary fiber intake was calculated from a validated questionnaire and divided into quintiles. After a mean follow-up of 16.8 years, researchers found that participants with the highest quintile of dietary fiber intake had 23% (men) and 18% (women) lower mortality, compared with the lowest quintile. It is worth noting that fiber intake, as a whole, seemed to be quite low in this cohort - the highest quintiles of fiber intake for men and women was ≥15.7 and ≥17.4 respectively. As our friend Nick Hiebert has pointed out, benefits associated with dietary fiber intake increase linearly up to 63 grams per day.
💦 Lower humidity may be linked to higher occurrences of COVID-19 cases.
Researchers in Australia studied 749 locally acquired cases of COVID-19 between February 26 and March 31. The team matched the patients' postcodes with the nearest weather observation station and studied the rainfall, temperature and humidity for the period January to March 2020. The study found lower humidity was associated with increased case notifications. Specifically, a reduction in relative humidity of 1% was predicted to be associated with an increase of COVID-19 cases by 6%. Why? When humidity is lower, air is drier, which in turn makes infectious aerosols smaller. These aerosols remain suspended in air for longer, which increases risk of exposure. Humid air, in contrast, results in bigger and heavier aerosols, which fall down more rapidly.
Podcasts We Loved This Week
- Samuel Walker & Alyasah Ali Sewell: The Police’s Impact On Public Health. Via Science Friday.
- Francisco Gonzalez-Lima: Methylene Blue and Near-Infrared Light as Therapies for Cognitive Disorders. Via STEM-Talk.
- Austin Baraki: Potential Harms of Screening, Overdiagnosis and Overtreatment. Via Sigma Nutrition.
Products We Are Enjoying
Matcha Love Ceremonial Green Tea Powder.
This makes the brightest and prettiest green tea that I have ever seen. 🍵 Matcha, in case you don’t know, is a powder made from finely grinding green tea leaves. Because you are ingesting the whole plant, as opposed to an infusion like when you use tea bags, you are getting way more bioactive catechins, like EGCG (be aware that this also means a bit more caffeine).
New humanOS Content
🔬 On this episode of humanOS Radio, Dan spoke with Lynda Frassetto. Lynda is a Professor Emeritus of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology at UCSF. She has explored how the ratios of potassium to sodium, as well as base to chloride, differ in the modern diet versus the ancestral diet, and how these changes may be linked to greater risk of chronic disease as we get older.
🧂 It is thought that ancient hominids consumed far less sodium and far more potassium, and specifically more potassium alkali salts (primarily from wild plants). The reduction in potential base in the modern diet increases the net systemic acid load, and this in turn may take a physiological toll in myriad ways. Chronic acid load appears to play a role in osteoporosis, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and even age-related decline in growth hormone secretion.
🤔 So, which nutritional components determine whether a diet is net acid-producing? And what can we do about it on an individual basis? Should we take potassium supplements to rectify the imbalance? Could restoring a healthy sodium-to-potassium ratio be a hidden anti-aging tool? Check out the interview to learn more 👀