Ok well it is the New Year, but a lot of people already seem to be gloomy – what with the financial state of the country, and the risk of more snow looming, to name just a few. That is why I decided to make this blog a bit more positive.
Follow these seven simple steps to better health. They might not be quite as difficult as you would think. There are plenty of less obvious, even counterintuitive, ways we can extend our lives and improve our health this year….
1. Don’t diet too much: being slightly overweight is good for you
Until last year, the commonly accepted marker of a healthy weight-for-height was the BMI: your weight in kilograms divided by the square of your height in metres. BMI charts originally identified 20-25 as the target range for the lowest risk of future ill health: below 20 and you were too thin; above 25 and you were overweight; above 30 and you were obese.
But that changed in 2010. It seems a higher BMI score, of 25-27.5, is at least as healthy in terms of cardiovascular risk as one of 20-22.5. You really don’t need to worry if you are a little overweight – provided you aren’t more than around 5kg from the ideal weight for your height. The new emphasis is on waist measurements: men should aim for less than 38 inches and women should aim for 34 inches or less.
2. Exercise only in moderation
Do excercise, but not too much!
BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) was a buzz word for fitness researchers in 2010. BDNF stimulates the formation of new connections between brain cells.
Regular exercise increases levels of BDNF, so it should be good for you – but there’s a snag – too much exercise lowers BDNF levels. Does that have a damaging effect on brain cells? We don’t yet know, but anecdotal evidence of the breakdown in health of athletes who train to near-exhaustion every day tends to suggest that it does.
The main message, though, is to give your body time to recover after exercise. The current advice is to exercise to breathlessness for around 30 minutes, and avoid exercising more than three or four times a week.
3. It’s not how much fruit and veg you eat, but which type
According to American, Chinese and Finnish studies, eating lots of green, leafy vegetables helps to prevent type-2 diabetes, even if you don’t lose weight in the process.
However, the big finding for 2010 was that particular foods can lower the rates of specific diseases. For example, chives, leeks, shallots, onions and garlic are linked with much reduced rates of stomach and colon cancer, and it is claimed, in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, that tomatoes help to protect against prostate cancer. It seems cooking tomatoes, especially in olive oil, or eating them in ketchup, is even more effective than eating them fresh. Best get shaking that ketchup bottle then!
4. Get more light
One way to improve your brainpower may be simply to sit in bright light for a few hours each day. Research has found that people performed better in mental tests when under bright light. The brighter the light, the more effective it is (pale blue light is even better).
I find this one particularly interesting because I would always rather sit or work in a bright room, rather than a dull gloomy room. Never knew that I might have been expanding my brain at the same time!
5. Throw away your vegetable peeler
It is important to eat more of the skin, core and stem of fruit and veg
Now I don’t know about you, but I have heard before that it is better to eat the skins of fruit – full of fibre and other nutrient goodness.
But today’s buzzword is biosynergy, the theory that each part of a fruit or vegetable combines with the other parts to reinforce its nutritional benefit. Apparently we shouldn’t just be tucking into the skin of fruit and veg, but the stalks and cores also protect against cancer and boost nutrition. Dr Marilyn Glenville, former president of the Food & Health Forum at the Royal Society of Medicine has listed the fruit that she would persuade us to eat whole. This includes bananas – the peel is high in serotonin, needed in the brain to lighten mood and ease depression – and kiwi fruits, whose skin is high in antioxidants and is claimed to have anti-inflammatory properties (golden kiwis have thinner, sweeter skins, so could be more acceptable eaten whole). She also advises eating the cores of pineapples, which contain twice the levels of bromelain, a digestive enzyme that protects the stomach lining, and orange and tangerine peel, which contain super-flavonoids that can improve your chances of avoiding a heart attack or stroke. Broccoli stalks contain more calcium, vitamin C and fibre than the florets too.
So how can we consume this food? I can’t say I could see myself tucking into banana or tangerine peel, the skin would be too chewy. Well, Glenville recommends adding grated citrus peel to your food or putting the whole, unpeeled fruit into a juicer. Garlic skin, for contains six separate antioxidant compounds, according to Japanese researchers. Glenville recommends roasting garlic whole, along with other Mediterranean vegetables. Well that doesn’t sound too bad and maybe a relatively easy Resolution for 2011!
6. Limit your alcohol consumption
The news about health and alcohol isn’t so surprising. Generally, we are drinking far more than any previous generation, increasing problems of failing livers and brains. Not only do we drink much more, but what we drink contains much higher levels of alcohol. Beers are stronger, while the alcohol content of wines has risen from around 8% to around 13%, and we drink them in 250ml rather than 125ml glasses. So the message of drinking in moderation remains the same – and make sure you know what a unit is too
The idea that red wine has specific health advantages (because it contains the magic flavonoids) doesn’t really hold up, either. It is wiser to eat blueberries instead. According to recent research from Reading University, blueberries improve our attention levels and possibly our memories, too.
7. Learn an instrument, at any age
For a long time, medical consensus was that our brains were fully developed by our late teens, and that we started to lose neurones after that point. If we did keep on learning from then on, we were using nerves and pathways that were already established: we couldn’t “grow” more neurones or connections. But according to the European Journal of Neuroscience, we may be able to train our brains to develop even once we are adults, even though it may be more difficult than in childhood. Research done with London taxi drivers provided evidence of new connections between the two halves of the brain after they learned “the Knowledge”.
Professional musicians have the same new connections as did the taxi drivers. Brain scans show that many areas of the brain light up when we perform the simplest of tasks, and that musical training improves and widens these connections. So become proficient in any instrument and you should improve your dexterity, intellectual capacity and resistance to age-related dementia. Hmm possibly another good new Year’s resolution to add to the list – I have always wanted to learn how to play the piano properly….
The full details of these 7 health tips for 2011 can be found in the Guardian, dated 1st January here
