New information about metabolism

Using data collected over 40 years from half a dozen labs and 6,500 test subjects ages 8 days to 95 years, researchers (80 of them!) have upended some conventional assumptions about metabolism, most notably that our metabolisms slow down around middle age and that women have slower metabolisms than men. It turns out that neither is true. (Metabolism, by the way, is the sum of all chemical reactions in our bodies, but more easily understood as the breakdown of food and its transformation into energy—aka calorie burning.) As one scientist remarked: “We will have to revise some of our ideas. It will be in textbooks.”

Specifically, the researchers learned that metabolism differs for all people across four distinct stages of life:

• Infancy up until age 1: Calorie burning is at its peak, accelerating until it is 50 percent above the adult rate.
• Ages 1 to 20: Metabolism gradually slows by about 3 percent a year.
• Ages 20 to 60: Metabolism holds steady.
• After age 60: metabolism declines by about 0.7 percent a year.

As you can see, your metabolism rate depends on your age, and the slowdown doesn’t start at 40. Thus, if you started gaining weight after 40, you can’t blame it on metabolism. You’ll have to wait until you’re over 60 to do that. As you can see also, if you just graduated from college, you’re burning fewer calories than you did when you were a freshman.

While the above results were true for the general population, a few people had metabolic rates 25 percent below the average for their age and others have rates 25 percent higher than expected. These outliers will open a number of research questions, such as understanding the characteristics of such people and whether there is a relationship with obesity.

I started gaining weight in my 50s, as do many women in that age bracket. I blamed it on menopause (I still do). But I can’t blame it on a slower metabolism.

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GMO food (redux)

 GMO stands for genetically modified organism. Example: A purple tomato created by inserting a snapdragon gene into it, making the tomato high in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds. (Cancer-prone mice lived longer than mice fed the same quantity of ordinary tomatoes.)

I have no problem with GMO food, but plenty of people do. Even though a 2016 report by the National Academy of Sciences declared that GMOs were safe, the market for products certified to be non-GMO has increased more than 70-fold since 2010. Because of fear of the unknown, consumers are willing to pay 20 percent more to avoid them. Of course, through crossbreeding, almost everything we eat has had its DNA altered extensively. But it takes much longer to alter foodstuffs this way—150 years in some cases.

Monsanto introduced the first GMO in 1996. It was an herbicide-resistant soybean. Clever. Now farmers could slather their soybean fields with Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup without harming their crop. Monsanto became the largest producer of genetically engineered seeds, including corn, sugar beets, and canola. By the way, farmers are not allowed to save seeds from these crops. At one time, Monsanto had a 75-person team dedicated to investigating seed-saving farmers in order to prosecute them on charges of intellectual-property infringement. 

Unfortunately, this sleazy beginning tarnished the whole GMO technology, which has the potential to improve food production where it’s most needed. For example, Golden Rice was created by a pair of university researchers hoping to combat vitamin A deficiency, a devastating ailment that causes blindness in millions of people in Africa and Asia annually. In the Philippines, anti-GMO groups destroyed the crop. Nevertheless, a few crops, such as disease-resistant papayas, have been successfully introduced. (See my earlier post on GMOs for more information on this.)

Because of FDA and USDA regulations, only big conglomerates have the means to go through the GMO approval process—a process costing millions of dollars. Lately, because the USDA has updated its regulations, some universities have managed to get through the process, and seeds for the purple tomatoes will be on the market next spring. I’m going to get some.

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Omega-3 fats: a cure for migraines?

I’ve never had a migraine headache, but some members of my family have them, as do twelve percent of all Americans. Migraine sufferers don’t get much help from meds. A few years ago, the National Institutes of Health conducted a clinical trial with test subjects who suffered five to 20 days of migraines a month. The trial, which lasted only 16 weeks, examined whether increasing the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in the test subjects’ diets would reduce their headaches. Some of the test subjects also reduced their intake of omega-6 fatty acids.

The diet emphasized eating more fish and, for some, eating less foods, such as potato chips, that are fried in vegetable oil. The diet worked best for those who both increased their consumption of fish and decreased their consumption of vegetable oils. Those people who ate the diet high in omega-3 fats and low in omega-6 fats had 30 to 40 percent reduction in “headache hours” each day. One participant, who stayed on the diet, said, “I haven’t had a migraine, not even a mild one, in over two years. Going from having one a week to not have any was just amazing to me.”

Researchers discovered that those who increased their consumption of fish had greater blood levels of oxylipins, compounds that are involved in soothing pain. They had particularly high levels of 17-HDHA, an oxylipin that has been shown to reduce pain in people with arthritis.

If you want to experiment with increasing your omega-3 intake and decreasing your omega-6 intake—

• Eat more—fish, especially fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel, sardines, (also caviar and oysters!); cod liver oil and flaxseed oil; flaxseed, walnuts, chia seeds.
• Eat less—omega-6 oils such as safflower oil, sunflower oil, corn oil, soybean oil, and foods fried in these oils.

If you’re a migraine sufferer, it seems like this diet is worth a try.

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OTC pain relievers

 I take Advil about four times a week for the pain I get in my legs from sustained exercise (golf, house cleaning, yardwork.) Advil definitely helps, but I’ve discovered that it’s probably implicated in my occasional bouts of acid reflux—a new thing for me. So I’m looking at alternative over-the-counter pain relievers. Here are the common ones:

Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS): Because these drugs work by blocking certain enzymes (COX-1 and COX-2) that are involved in the inflammatory process, they impede inflammation and the pain it can cause. They work outside the central nervous system and at the site of tissue damage. All are better than Tylenol (acetaminophen) for inflammatory injury or disease.

•  Advil, Midol (ibuprofen): best for quick action; better than Aleve for acute pain; because it is short acting, it must be taken more often than Aleve; it can cause damage to the stomach and intestines and can cause heartburn.
•  Aleve (naproxen): lasts longer than Advil; better than Tylenol for pain involving inflammation; associated with fewer side effects than Advil, although has a higher risk of stomach ulcers.
• Aspirin: as good as other NSAIDs for pain relief (and is cheaper). However, it’s more of an irritant to the stomach and can cause bleeding.

With the exception of aspirin, the risks of overdoing NSAIDS include an increased risk of heart attack or stroke. This risk is actually quite small, but increases with chronic usage, higher doses, and for people with known cardiovascular disease.

 Tylenol (acetaminophen): This drug works inside the central nervous system, has fewer side effects than other OTC pain medications and doesn’t interact negatively with most common drugs. However, it doesn’t reduce inflammation. Scientists don’t know exactly how it works. One theory is that it uses the same communication systems in the brain as those used by opioids such as morphine. When over-used Tylenol can damage the liver, especially if combined with alcohol.

The last time I walked the golf course, I tried taking Aleve instead of Advil. It didn't do much good (I have a torn meniscus, sciatica, and bursitis). I'll try aspirin next, but am not very hopeful. I'll probably have to stick with Advil, but will use it only twice a week instead of four times. I'll just suffer through house cleaning and yard work. Or maybe aspirin will work.

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About those 10,000 steps

 We’re told we're supposed to take 10,000 steps a day for the sake of health and longevity. As I write this, it’s 2:00 in the afternoon. I spent the morning cleaning house. According to my Apple watch, I have taken 3,673 steps and walked 1.65 miles so far. I’ll be walking some more before bedtime, but of course I won’t come close to 10,000 steps. Must I walk more?

 Actually, that 10,000-step goal (about five miles) was not based on science. It began as a pedometer maker’s marketing ploy but has managed to stick in our consciousness as scientific truth. We now know that 10,000 is more than you need—but not a whole lot more. It looks like 7,500 steps is the new “sweet spot,” which still seems like a lot to me.  

 In one study, researchers found that women in their 70s who managed as few as 4,400 steps a day reduced their risk of premature death by 40 percent, compared to women completing 2,700 or fewer steps a day. For those women who took more than 5,000 steps a day, the risks for early death continued to drop, but plateaued at about 7,500 daily steps. In an experiment with 5000 middle-aged test subjects, researchers found that the people who took about 8,000 steps a day were half as likely to die prematurely from heart disease or other illness than those who accumulated only 4,000 steps a day.

 So, you only need to take 7,500 steps, not 10,000. If I want to hit that goal today, I’ll need to take another 3,500 steps before bedtime. It’s not going to happen. Besides, I’m a few weeks away from turning 85. What do they mean by longevity? How old am I supposed to get?

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.