Tag Archives: Featured

New Studies: Beneficial Effects Of “18-Hour Intermittent Fasting” On Health And Aging (NEJM)

From a New England Journal of Medicine online release:

In humans, intermittent-fasting interventions ameliorate obesity, insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, hypertension, and inflammation. Intermittent fasting seems to confer health benefits to a greater extent than can be attributed just to a reduction in caloric intake.

Evidence is accumulating that eating in a 6-hour period and fasting for 18 hours can trigger a metabolic switch from glucose-based to ketone-based energy, with increased stress resistance, increased longevity, and a decreased incidence of diseases, including cancer and obesity.

The New England Journal of Medicine Logo

Preclinical studies and clinical trials have shown that intermittent fasting has broad-spectrum benefits for many health conditions, such as obesity, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and neurologic disorders. Animal models show that intermittent fasting improves health throughout the life span, whereas clinical studies have mainly involved relatively short-term interventions, over a period of months.

Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease New England Journal of Medicine December 26 2019

BOOMERS-DAILY.COM “18-HOUR INTERMITTENT FASTING DIET” STUDY

How much of the benefit of intermittent fasting is due to metabolic switching and how much is due to weight loss? Many studies have indicated that several of the benefits of intermittent fasting are dissociated from its effects on weight loss. These benefits include improvements in glucose regulation, blood pressure, and heart rate; the efficacy of endurance training; and abdominal fat loss.

To read more

Inline image

Healthiest Adults: Early Risers With 7-8 Hours Of Sleep, No Insomnia Or Daytime Drowsiness

From a European Heart Journal study:

European Society of Cardiology logoWhen the five sleep factors were collapsed into binary categories of low risk vs. high risk (reference group), early chronotype, adequate sleep duration, free of insomnia, and no frequent daytime sleepiness were each independently associated with incident CVD, with a 7%, 12%, 8%, and 15% lower risk, respectively (Table 3). Early chronotype, adequate sleep duration, and free of insomnia were independently associated with a significantly reduced risk of CHD; while only adequate sleep duration was associated with stroke.European Society of Cardiology Sleep patterns, genetic susceptibity and incident cardiovascular disease a prospective study of 385,292 participants lowest risk factorsCardiovascular disease (CVD), including coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke, is among the leading causes of mortality globally.1 In addition to traditional lifestyle behaviours, emerging evidence has implicated several unhealthy sleep behaviours were important risk factors for CVD.2,3 For example, short or long sleep duration,4–9 late chronotype,10,11 insomnia,12–17 snoring,18,19 and excessive daytime sleepiness20,21 were associated with a 10–40% increased CVD risk. European Society of Cardiology Sleep patterns, genetic susceptibity and incident cardiovascular disease a prospective study of 385,292 participants

 

To read more: https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/eurheartj/ehz849/5678714

Health Studies: “Why Your Brain Needs Exercise” (Scientific American)

From a Scientic American online article:

Scientific American logoIn our own study of more than 7,000 middle-aged to older adults in the U.K., published in 2019 in Brain Imaging and Behavior, we demonstrated that people who spent more time engaged in moderate to vigorous physical activity had larger hippocampal volumes. Although it is not yet possible to say whether these effects in humans are related to neurogenesis or other forms of brain plasticity, such as increasing connections among existing neurons, together the results clearly indicate that exercise can benefit the brain’s hippocampus and its cognitive functions.

New Neurons in Aging Brains Why Your Brain Needs Exercise Scientific American December 18 2019

In fact, a growing body of research suggests that exercise that is cognitively stimulating may indeed benefit the brain more than exercise that does not make such cognitive demands. For example, Gerd Kempermann and his colleagues at the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden in Germany explored this possibility by comparing the growth and survival of new neurons in the mouse hippocampus after exercise alone or after exercise combined with access to a cognitively enriched environment. They found an additive effect: exercise alone was good for the hippocampus, but combining physical activity with cognitive demands in a stimulating environment was even better, leading to even more new neurons. Using the brain during and after exercise seemed to trigger enhanced neuron survival.

To read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-your-brain-needs-exercise/

MIT AgeLab: Consumer Product Companies Need To Make Older Adults A “Core Constituency”

From an MIT Technology Review article by Joseph F. Coughlin:

MIT Technology Review Old Age Is Over October 2019Technologists, particularly those who make consumer products, will have a strong influence over how we’ll live tomorrow. By treating older adults not as an ancillary market but as a core constituency, the tech sector can do much of the work required to redefine old age. But tech workplaces also skew infamously young. Asking young designers to merely step into the shoes of older consumers (and we at the MIT AgeLab have literally developed a physiological aging simulation suit for that purpose) is a good start, but it is not enough to give them true insight into the desires of older consumers. Luckily there’s a simpler route: hire older workers.

Of all the wrenching changes humanity knows it will face in the next few decades—climate change, the rise of AI, the gene-editing revolution—none is nearly as predictable in its effects as global aging. Life expectancy in industrialized economies has gained more than 30 years since 1900, and for the first time in human history there are now more people over 65 than under 5—all thanks to a combination of increasing longevity, diminished fertility, and an aging Baby Boom cohort. We’ve watched these trends develop for generations; demographers can chart them decades in advance.

To read more click on the following link: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614155/old-age-is-made-upand-this-concept-is-hurting-everyone/

WHO SHAPED THE 1960’S?: CULTURAL CHANGE SWEPT UP THE BOOMERS, IT JUST DIDN’T BEGIN WITH THEM

From a New Yorker article by Louis Menand:

Woodstock GenerationAlthough the boomers may not have contributed much to the social and cultural changes of the nineteen-sixties, many certainly consumed them, embraced them, and identified with them. Still, the peak year of the boom was 1957, when 4.3 million people were born, and those folks did not go to Woodstock. They were twelve years old. Neither did the rest of the 33.5 million people born between 1957 and 1964. They didn’t start even going to high school until 1971. When the youngest boomer graduated from high school, Ronald Reagan was President and the Vietnam War had been over for seven years.

The boomers get tied to the sixties because they are assumed to have created a culture of liberal permissiveness, and because they were utopians—political idealists, social activists, counterculturalists. In fact, it is almost impossible to name a single person born after 1945 who played any kind of role in the civil-rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the New Left, the antiwar movement, or the Black Panthers during the nineteen-sixties. Those movements were all started by older, usually much older, people.

To read more click on the following link: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-misconception-about-baby-boomers-and-the-sixties

Top Travel Experiences: Remote Lakeside Camping In The Adirondack Park Reached By Floatplanes

From a New York Times article by Zach Montague:

The Adirondack Park In Upstate New York MapAway from Lake Placid, Lake George and other more crowded regional hubs, are several smaller hamlets that provide access to a handful of exceptionally remote lakeside campgrounds reachable only by pontooned floatplanes. With round-trip charters typically priced at $150 or less per person, some of the most secluded frontiers of the Adirondack Park are accessible even to travelers on a limited budget. Over the years, this little-utilized route into sequestered backwoods sites has become a prized secret among my close friends and family, and since my maiden trip with my father six years ago, I have been back every year with a rotating cast of companions.

An Adirondack Wilderness All Your Own New York Times July 2019
A floatplane arrives at the isolated Pine Lake camping site in the Adirondacks. Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

To read more click on following link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/travel/an-adirondack-wilderness-all-your-own.html

Boomers Health Podcast: “Human Flourishing And Public Health” (Harvard)

From Harvard School of Public Health website:

What does it mean for someone to flourish? Flourishing is more than just being happy—although that’s a part of it. But the idea of flourishing expands beyond happiness to look at a person’s overall well-being, taking into account things like life satisfaction or someone’s sense of purpose. That’s why studying flourishing is an interdisciplinary science drawing on public health, philosophy, psychology, and more.

In this week’s episode we’re talking to two researchers from Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University who are tackling big questions about flourishing: What does it mean for people to flourish? How do we measure it? And are there things that make people more or less likely to flourish?

Our guests are Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program and John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard Chan School, and Matthew Wilson, associate director of the Human Flourishing Program and a research associate at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

Website: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/multimedia-article/harvard-chan-this-week-in-health-archive/

Boomer Music: The Rolling Stones “No Filter 2019” Tour Celebrates 57th Year As A Band

From Rolling Stone magazine article by Patrick Doyle:

The Rolling Stones No Filter Tour 2019After a dramatic intro set to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the band kicked off with “Street Fighting Man,” a song Keith Richards recently told Rolling Stone “can’t be topped as a set opener. It’s clear why — Jagger came out firing, dancing in a yellow leather jacket, moving to each of Keith Richards’ powerful Telecaster riffs. He strode down to the B-stage during a wildly fun “Tumbling Dice.” His manic command reached a new level during “She’s So Cold” — a rarity that won the nightly fan online vote. As Richards wrung licks out of his Gibson hollow-body and Ronnie Wood played a twangy solo, Jagger danced furiously.

On Sunday night, Mick Jagger paused his band’s show at Massachusetts’ Gillette Stadium to take in the perfect New England summer evening. He said he hoped everyone had a great July 4th weekend — and added that the Fourth had always been a “touchy holiday for us Brits.” “In fact, the President made a very good point in his speech the other night,” Jagger deadpanned. “He said, ‘If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us.’”

It’s a great gift that the Rolling Stones are still on the road in the summer of 2019 — their 57th year as a band — let alone having as much fun as they are. Sunday’s show was the fifth date of their No Filter tour, which was postponed this spring so that Jagger could undergo heart surgery. (“Sorry for changing the date on you and screwing up your plans,” Mick told the crowd.) He seemed to have even more energy than on their last U.S. tour four years ago, whether he was prowling the catwalk howling a chilling “Gimme Shelter” or punching the air during “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

Rolling Stones No Filter 2019 Tour Dates

Read more by clicking link below:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-live-reviews/rolling-stones-review-massachusetts-no-filter-856257/

 

TOP RV CAMPGROUNDS IN AMERICA: Slough Creek In Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

“The most primitive of Yellowstone’s campgrounds and sites, the accommodations are distributed among the banks of the stream, meadow land, and forest.” (Fodor’s Travel)

Slough Creek Campground Yellowstone Top Campground

Slough Creek Campground—elevation 6,250 feet (1905 m)—is located in Lamar Valley near some of the best wildlife watching opportunities in the park. Located at the end of a two mile graded dirt road, this campground is best suited for tents and small RVs. There are plenty of hiking opportunities in the area, including the Slough Creek Trail which begins nearby. Nighttime offers a quiet, unimpeded view of the stars and the possibility of hearing wolves howl.

https://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/sloughcreekcg.htm

(As rated by Fodor’s Travel)

“An Ode To The Land Of Little Rivers”: A Poetic Short Film Tribute To Fly Fishing In The Catskills

“An Ode To The Land Of Little Rivver” is a gorgeously filmed promotional short film celebrating the beautiful Catskills region of New York State. Filmed on location at the Livingston Manor Fly Fishing Club for the design and lifestyle firm Homestedt by Peter Crosby of  Bullrush Films.

An Ode To The Land Of Little Rivers Cinematic Poem Short Film Directed By Peter Crosby (2019)

An Ode To The Land Of Little Rivers Cinematic Poem Short Film Directed By Peter Crosby (2019)

An Ode To The Land Of Little Rivers Cinematic Poem Short Film Directed By Peter Crosby (2019)

Website: https://cinematicpoems.com/2019/06/28/an-ode-to-the-land-of-little-rivers-a-cinematic-poem-short-film-directed-by-peter-crosby-2019/