Eating two servings of avocados a week linked to lower risk of cardiovascular disease

Harvard School of Public Health, March 30, 2022 

Eating two or more servings of avocado weekly was associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, and substituting avocado for certain fat-containing foods like butter, cheese or processed meats was associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease events. Researchers believe this is the first, large, prospective study to support the positive association between higher avocado consumption and lower cardiovascular events, such as coronary heart disease and stroke. “Our study provides further evidence that the intake of plant-sourced unsaturated fats can improve diet quality and is an important component in cardiovascular disease prevention,” said Lorena S. Pacheco, Ph.D. in the nutrition department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.”

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Exercise may reduce depression symptoms, boost effects of therapy

Iowa State University, March 30, 2022

Exercising for half an hour may reduce symptoms of depression for at least 75 minutes post-workout and amplify the benefits of therapy, according to two new studies led by researchers at Iowa State University. For the first study, the researchers recruited 30 adults who were experiencing major depressive episodes. The participants filled out electronic surveys immediately before, half-way-through and after a 30-minute session of either moderate-intensity cycling or sitting, and then 25-, 50- and 75-minutes post-workout. Those who cycled during the first lab visit came back a week later to run through the experiment again with 30-minutes of sitting, and vice versa. During the cycling experiment, participants' depressed mood state improved over the 30 minutes of exercise and consistently up to 75 minutes afterward. The improvement to anhedonia started to drop off at 75 minutes post-exercise, but still was better than the participants' levels of anhedonia in the group that did not exercise.

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Mindful People Often Have Better Blood Sugar Levels

Brown University, February 25, 2022

“Everyday” mindfulness is an awareness of your thoughts and feelings. And people who have it tend to have healthy glucose levels, new research shows. They also are less likely to be obese and they’re more likely to believe they can change many of the important things in their life—two factors that scientists suspect may contribute to the healthy glucose levels. Their overarching hypotheses are that people practicing higher degrees of mindfulness may be better able to motivate themselves to exercise, to resist cravings for high-fat, high-sugar treats, and to stick with diet and exercise regimens recommended by their doctors. Participants with high levels of mindfulness were about 20 percent less likely to have type 2 diabetes, but the total number of people in the study with the condition may have been too small to allow for definitive findings.

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Being overweight linked to poorer memory

University of Cambridge (UK), March 26, 2022

Overweight young adults may have poorer episodic memory - the ability to recall past events - than their peers, suggests new research from the University of Cambridge, adding to increasing evidence of a link between memory and overeating. In a preliminary study published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers found an association between high body mass index (BMI) and poorer performance on a test of episodic memory. Although only a small study, its results support existing findings that excess bodyweight may be associated with changes to the structure and function of the brain and its ability to perform certain cognitive tasks optimally. In particular, obesity has been linked with dysfunction of the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in memory and learning, and of the frontal lobe, the part of the brain involved in decision making, problem solving and emotions, suggesting that it might also affect memory; however, evidence for memory impairment in obesity is currently limited.