Newsletter #131: Recovering from the Election & Wearing Blue-Blockers 🤓
Welcome to the post-election week hangover edition of the humanOS newsletter!
Hopefully, we can offer you a tiny respite from the recent chaos with some science news. This week, we learned that a higher intake of specific phytochemicals found in plants is linked to lower blood pressure; playing videogames as a child might change your brain into adulthood even if you stopped playing; wearing blue-light-filtering glasses can help you sleep better and enhance your work performance the next day; and infants fed from plastic bottles may consume millions of tiny plastic particles daily (but there are things you can do about it).
Scroll down for more info, and stay safe everyone. 👇
This Week’s Research Highlights
🍎 Higher habitual intake of flavan-3-ols in the diet is associated with lower blood pressure.
Flavan-3-ols are a subclass of flavonoids (a group of polyphenolic compounds found in plant foods) which have been shown to be associated with improved vascular function in intervention trials. In this study, researchers analyzed data from 25618 participants in a large prospective cohort to try to tease out the long-term effects of flavan-3-ol intake on cardiovascular risk markers. Sure enough, they found that participants with higher habitual flavan-3-ol intake had on average significantly lower blood pressure - and the magnitude of difference was comparable to that of adherence to moderate salt reduction.
But what really sets this study apart is that they used nutritional biomarkers from bloodwork to estimate intake, rather than rely on self-reported data (which is not necessarily the most reliable information). If you’d like to boost your own flavan-3-ol intake, they are found abundantly in a lot of tasty foods and beverages, including tea, cocoa, grapes, apples, berries, and wine.
👓 Wearing blue light filtering glasses improves sleep at night as well as work productivity during the day.
Researchers collected data from 63 company managers and 67 call center representatives at Brazil-based offices for an American multinational financial firm. Participants were randomly assigned to wear either glasses that were designed to filter blue light or placebo glasses with no such filtering capacity. They found that participants who wore the blue-filtering glasses shortly before going to bed got a better night’s sleep, but also showed enhanced performance at work the next day. Specifically, subjects showed greater work engagement, task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and less counterproductive work behavior. Notably, effects were stronger for “night owls,” perhaps because they have to deal with greater misalignment between their internal clock and their socially controlled work time.
🎮 Playing video games as a child has lasting effects on cognition into adulthood.
Previous research has shown that playing video games results in structural and functional changes in the brain. For example, regions of the brain linked to visual-spatial skills and working memory become larger, and there is an increase in the speed of information processing in gamers. When do these changes occur, and how long do they endure? To answer this question, researchers recruited 27 people between the ages of 18 and 40, some with and some without experience with video gaming. The researchers analyzed subjects’ cognitive skills at three points: before starting training in video gaming (Super Mario 64), at the end of the training, and fifteen days later. All participants improved their gaming over the course of the study. However, as one of the researchers noted: "People who were avid gamers before adolescence, despite no longer playing, performed better with the working memory tasks, which require mentally holding and manipulating information to get a result." This illustrates how our previous experiences can produce long-lasting effects on our brain performance and suggests that video games, despite being often maligned, could actually have some beneficial effects.
🍼 Bottle-fed babies may ingest more than a million microparticles of plastic every day.
Researchers looked at the rate of microplastic release in 10 types of baby bottles or accessories made from polypropylene, the most commonly used plastic for food containers. Over a 21-day test period, the team found that the bottles released between 1.3 and 16.2 million plastic microparticles per liter. They then used this data to model the potential global infant exposure to microplastics from bottle-feeding, based on national average rates of breast-feeding and estimated milk intake volumes. They determined that the average bottle-fed baby could be ingesting 1.6 million plastic microparticles every day during the first 12 months of their lives. The authors indicated that sterilization and exposure to high water temperatures had the biggest effect on microplastic release, going from 0.6 million particles per liter on average at 25°C (77°F) to 55 million per liter at 95C (203°F). Caregivers can lower levels by taking a few additional steps, like rinsing bottles with cold sterilized water and preparing formula milk in a non-plastic container before filling the bottle. Health risks of ingestion of microplastic remain uncertain and need to be explored further.
Question of the Week
What are some simple adjustments you can make in your daily (or nightly) routine right now that can boost your productivity and quality of life?
Podcasts We Loved This Week
- Alan Flanagan: Coffee & Health. Via Sigma Nutrition Radio.
- Deirdre Barrett: Why COVID Dreams Are Weirder Than Normal. Via Science Friday.
- Dan Riskin: Vampire Bats Just Want To Be Friends. Via Science Friday.
Products We Are Enjoying
Blue Light Blocking Computer Glasses
These glasses are very inexpensive, come in lots of colors and styles, and are just perfect if you have a job that involves looking at a computer screen at night (or any other type of light-emitting device). They can also be a lifesaver if you spend a ton of time reading on screens in general - I have noticed that they seem to help prevent eye strain. What makes them really useful is that they filter UV and some blue light, but they appear to be almost entirely clear, without any orange tint, so your vision isn’t distorted. Plus they look pretty cool if you ask me.