An exciting new study came out this week that is sure to add fuel to the debate about cutting physical education from schools. Study after study shows the cognitive benefits of physical activity in school age kids. The new research adds to previous findings in a well-controlled experimental design.

Researchers from the Medical College of Georgia worked with nearly 200 sedentary and overweight kids between the ages of 7 and 11 years old. They divided the kids up into three groups, including a control group that did no physical activity after school, a group that did 20 minutes of vigorous activity after school and another that did 40 minutes of activity. Each of the activity groups worked out 5 days a week for three months.

The kids wore heart monitors to track their activity levels while they played running games like tag, relay races, jump rope, etc. All the kids took cognitive tests for math, reading and executive function (planning, organizing, focusing and impulse control) before they started the program and at its completion.

In the end, the kids in the 40-minute exercise group showed significant improvement on cognitive tests, those in the 20-minute group showed about half the improvement and those in the sedentary group showed no improvement at all. Brain scans supported the results, showing increased activity in brain regions involved in executive function in the activity group kids.

In addition, the kids in both exercise groups showed some improvement in math skills but no groups showed improvement in reading skills. These results are all consistent with other studies done in adults. Previous studies have shown increased grey matter in exercising older adults and increased performance on cognitive tests.

Yet we stand by and allow cutting of PE programs from our schools due to budget constraints. Isn’t improvement on test scores one of the major areas that schools are focusing on today? If daily physical activity improves test scores, shouldn’t we make it a priority for kids to get that?

In fact a Canadian study showed just that. Those researchers split kids into two groups; half took PE once a day and the other half received extra classroom instruction. Again, the PE group outperformed the non-PE group on tests, even in subjects where the non-PE group was getting extra instruction.

One problem is that 20 years ago, when many of today’s parents were kids, we were able to get plenty of unstructured activity after school all by ourselves. Today kids’ time is sucked up by an abundance of homework, free access to TV and video games and generally busy schedules. Plus, they just don’t have the freedom to run around the neighborhood like we used to.

Last year the American Academy of Pediatricians released a statement encouraging more ‘free and unstructured play’ in kids. Not only does this get kids the physical activity that they need but it allows them to employ their imagination and build their creativity levels and social skills as well.

If we won’t pay for more PE programs in schools, then we have to do something else. We should all strive to get our kids huffing and puffing on a regular basis in activities not always dictated by parents or over-structured sports coaches (of which I’m one).

We have to get them excited about physical activity again by bringing back the fun in it all. We should be begging them to come in before it gets too dark, not begging them to get out and away from the TV.

Living healthy not only affects you, it affects your potential offspring…and yes, fellas, this applies to us too. But isn’t this something we already knew? It is true that we inherit our genes from our ancestors (parents, grandparents, and so on) and our genes impact how you develop and influence your vulnerability to disease….but there is more to the story.

A recent episode of NOVA titled, “Ghost in Your Genes”, gave a fantastic overview of some research investigating the influence that our ‘epigenome’ has on our lives, and in turn, the influence that our lives have on our epigenome.

You have more control of your genes than you think.

Your genome is the total set of genes that you inherited from your parents and your epigenome (literally translating as “on top of” or “in addition to” the genome) is partially inherited and partially created by your experiences. Your epigenome is a collection of physical modifications of your genes.

How is epigenetic control different from genetic control over our lives? Well, both the genome and the epigenome control how genes turn “on” or “off” to influence the health of our brains and bodies. One of the main differences is that your epigenome changes throughout life, while your genome is relatively unchanging from the time your were conceived.

This means that the genetic factor is more influential early in life, assuming that everyone has reasonably nurturing parents. But once we get past the early stages of development we gain some control over our genetic destiny.

Think about it kind of like driving a car. Early on, you are safe if your parents are good drivers, but once you get your own license your safety is in your own hands.

One of the most striking examples of epigenetics comes from studies in identical twins. Even though identical twins come from the same egg and start with the same genes and initial epigenome, their experiences throughout life alter their epigenetic makeup. This ultimately affects how their genes turn on and off and how this controls their health and longevity.

When are you absolved of your responsibility?

Now, keep in mind that these epigenetic changes are inheritable…..meaning you can pass the changes that you make to your offspring. So, how many generations can these effects last for, you ask? So far, researchers have data suggesting that epigenetic alterations can have effects on several generations down the line.

Since the epigenome can also be influenced by lifestyle choices (i.e. diet, smoking, exercise) and environmental factors (i.e. pollution) the choices we make today can influence several generations to come.

So aside from the birthday cards, hand-knit sweaters, and rolls of pennies, your grandparents may have also given you epigenetic predispositions for increased or decreased odds of getting diabetes and several other diseases. What kind of grandparent do you want to be?

The silver lining in all of this is that even though we start with a set of genes and an epigenetic fingerprint, we have the ability to influence our epigenome by the lifestyle choices that we make. And, since the epigenome can turn genes on or off, we ultimately have some control over our genes. So even if you don’t care about your health, think about how you might be influencing the health of your grandchildren.

Why does stress overwhelm some people while others come through it just fine? A very elegant new study came out this month in the high impact scientific journal, Cell, addressing this question. Researchers investigated some brain functions underlying why some people are highly susceptible to stress and others seem relatively resistant. Although the studies were done in mice, the potential application to humans, which I will discuss below, is not a stretch.

Stress can lead to depression . . . sometimes

The researchers used a basic model to stress mice by placing them in the same cage with a ‘bully’ mouse for about 15 minutes a day, for ten days in a row. This experimental paradigm is accepted as a model for how humans experience social stress; for example interacting with a jerk for a boss at work, or at bully at school.

After exposure to this social stress, researchers tested the mice for other behaviors that indicate depression, anxiety or stress disorders. Yes, mice and rats can show these behaviors if you know how to look for them.

We can’t give them a questionnaire to explore how the feel. But we can look at things like how willing they are to work for a reward (like sugar water) or how adventurous they are at exploring new environments or new social interactions. All of these are indicators of ‘mood’.

Whenever researchers do these types of studies there is always a variety of responses from the animals. Some will be susceptible to the bullying treatment and show signs of depression behavior and others will be resilient.

Sometimes it’s good to forget

The new studies looked at the underlying neurochemistry in a part of the brain called the VTA, which regulates mood, and found something very interesting. Mice that had lower activity of a specific brain hormone, called BDNF, in the mood regulating brain region were more resilient.

The paradox is that BDNF is important for learning and memory and mice that are low in BDNF activity typically have learning and memory problems. The new study suggests that under some conditions (i.e. stress) being a poor learner is an advantage because you won’t get too hung up on the bad experience.

The mice in these experiments were, in a sense, predetermined to be susceptible or resilient to stress based on their learning skills. The point is that you have certain predispositions as to whether or not you will succumb to bad experiences and develop a stress disorder.

Can you blame it on your brain chemistry?

This seems a bit fatalistic to me, and I like to believe that humans have more control. We have a big cortex, which is the part of the brain that allows us to reason. We can choose how much value we put on an experience and alter the ability to learn.

Learning anything requires some degree of salience. The more important or the stronger we feel about an experience the better it will be burned into our memories. So how does this help?

With practice, we can control the intensity of our emotions in any given situation. We can, in a sense, choose if an experience will have a long-term effect. The stronger the experience, the more difficult it will be to exert control, but it is still there.

For example, participating in battle in war is an extremely strong experience and our ability to control our susceptibility to that will be limited. Whereas having someone call you a bad name should be much easier to get over and forget about.

Still, some people can come through war with few psychological problems while others may develop a stress disorder. On the other end of the spectrum, someone may be distraught for a lifetime after getting their feelings hurt once.

You don’t lack control

The point I am trying to make is that, with a practice of optimism you can tip the scales in favor of being resilient. You can, to some degree, use your cortex (reason) to remove the emotional strength of a bad experience and make it more difficult for that experience to take you down.

I make this point because the media jumped quickly on the conclusions from the new study that indicated a ‘predetermined’ response to handling stress. I see a dangerous trend in many neuroscience studies trying to blame behavior on our brain chemistry. While this may be true in animals, I don’t believe that people are that ‘hard-wired’ and think we need to maintain a greater standard of personal responsibility.

Type II diabetes and depression are co morbid, which means they happen together more than expected based on the rates of each disease alone. The question among scientists is whether one disease can cause the other or whether there are factors that lead to both at the same time.

For example, having type II diabetes might cause people to feel more depressed because they are sick. Likewise, having depression might cause people to not eat healthy or get any exercise and lead to diabetes. The relationship might be as simple as that.

Is there more to the story?

Many scientists, me included, feel that there are common lifestyle factors that lead to type II diabetes and depression at the same time. There are an abundance of studies implicating exercise (or lack of it) in the onset of both diseases. There are also many studies highlighting the role of nutrition in both diabetes and depression.

Now, a new study, published in the October 2007 edition of PLOS Biology, sheds more light on this relationship with a focus on insulin at the center. Anyone with diabetes is well versed in the importance of insulin. It is a primary hormone that controls blood sugar levels, which the body needs to maintain tight control over for survival.

Insulin has many jobs

Your pancreas releases insulin into your bloodstream whenever blood sugar levels rise. It then goes around knocking on the doors of cells throughout your body telling them to take some sugar out of the blood and use it to make or store energy.

In type II diabetes two things go wrong. One, your pancreas becomes less responsive to making and releasing insulin; and two, cells throughout your body start to ignore the insulin that is released. Since insulin is important in so many different body functions, this becomes a serious problem.

The findings in the new study revolve around another role of insulin in the brain. The researchers discovered that dopamine activity in a part of the brain that promotes feelings of pleasure and reward are dependent upon insulin. In my opinion, this has a couple of far reaching implications.

Does insulin promote addiction?

The research suggests that diabetics, who lack the ability to produce insulin, will have a more difficult time feeling joy and pleasure because the brain circuits that control these feelings will be less active. This may be one link between the co-occurrences of type II diabetes and depression.

From a scientific perspective, this is a very interesting finding. But from a health perspective how does it help us prevent these diseases in the first place? This is where the next implication comes in.

The new research suggests that rises in insulin might boost the activity of pleasure and reward centers, the same ones that are stimulated by addictive drugs like amphetamine and cocaine.

When does your insulin go up? It goes up after a high sugar meal. What does this mean? It means that high sugar meals might stimulate addictive centers in the brain.

I’ve been touting the benefits of feeding yourself and your kids low-glycemic (essentially low sugar) meals for some time. This new research adds fuel to that argument by suggesting that sugar might actually be addictive. Maybe not in the same sense that elicit drugs are addictive, but that they have some degree of addictive tendencies themselves.

The irony is that eating high-glycemic meals actually makes you feel good in the short-term by increasing insulin and boosting activity of your brain’s pleasure centers. But after years of eating sugar your pancreas will eventually burn out and lead to type II diabetes and possibly depression, leaving you with the opposite feelings that you ate the sugar for in the first place.

The take home message?

Get the high sugar cereals and other foods out of your house. Don’t set yourself and your kids up for a lifetime of battling the cravings for these disease promoting foods.

Most people think of aging in association with a decline of the brain and body. While it’s true that your body systems tend to breakdown faster the older you get, this is not out of your control. You do not have to allow your physical or mental capacities to weaken with time. You can do something about it and keep your Brain Fit.

Befriending Grandfather Time

It’s not about trying to prevent aging, that’s impossible. But you do have a lot of control over how gracefully you enter your older years and you can work on your brain at any age, in fact, the sooner the better.

While there is no magic elixir of youth, many nutrients show a benefit of keeping minds sharp throughout life. A couple of new studies highlight a few of these nutrients in particular.

Eat your spinach

One nutrient, folate, has long been suspected to provide benefit to the brain. It’s known that folate is a crucial nutrient during pregnancy for appropriate neurological development, but it seems to play a significant role in the older adult brain as well.

Several studies show that people with higher levels of folate in their blood do better on cognitive tests. Now, new data using a large population of participants from 60 to 90 years old, add fuel to that argument.

Researchers studied over a thousand older adults by looking at their folate levels, performance on cognitive tests and brain scans to determine how all of these related. They found that higher folate levels associated with better performance on mental tasks, especially related to processing speed.

They also found that higher folate levels associated with fewer breakdowns of white matter tracts in the brain. White matter is like the ‘wiring’ that connects different parts of the brain together. So maintaining your white matter ‘wiring’ literally allows you to connect your thoughts.

What foods are high in folate? Spinach, asparagus, lentils and garbanzo beans are some of the best folate sources. A half cup of all these foods provides about 200 micrograms, which is half of your minimum daily requirement of 400 micrograms.

Teaching old dogs new tricks

Another couple of nutrients, alpha-lipoic acid (LA) and acetyl-L-carnitine (ALC), also received recent high marks in brain research recently. This study used dogs and provided some insight into the brain boosting benefits of these two nutrients. While dogs are not people, they provide a good model for studying certain aspects of cognitive decline.

LA and ALC have been implicated in brain health in the past, both individually and as part of complex food mixtures. They most likely work by protecting the health of your mitochondria, which are the power plants in all of your cells. Brain cells in particular require a lot of energy to do their job and mitochondria are very important.

The new study looked at LA and ALC acting together, given as supplements. The results showed that old dogs that received the supplement had a striking improvement in the ability to learn new tricks, especially related to spatial learning.

Wide varieties of animal and plant sources contain these nutrients. LA is high in kidney, heart and liver as well as spinach and broccoli. A form of ALC is high in beef, chicken and dairy. But this mostly lacks the acetyl part, which is good for making brain chemicals involved in memory. The best source of the right form of ALC for brain health is probably supplements.

You are what you eat

These studies don’t suggest that you can just start popping supplements in order to ensure life-long brain health and fitness. However, they do support the notion that some nutritional supplements can help, especially if combined with a healthy diet and regular moderate exercise.

The old adage that ‘you are what you eat’ applies to your brain as well. In fact, it probably applies to your brain more than anything else since the brain uses 5 to 10 times it’s share of the energy that you get from your food. Even though the brain only weights about 2% of your body, it uses 10 – 20% of the calories that you consume.

Your diet literally goes to your head.

Conscientiousness refers to your willful desire to work in a dependable manner with attention to detail. Since the 1940s, the psychology field has considered conscientiousness as one of five major personality traits, the others being neuroticism, extraversion, openness and agreeableness. Now, new research shows that your level of conscientiousness may affect your level of Brain Fitness.

A little extra effort may be good for your brain

Researchers tested nearly a thousand older adults that were free of any kind of dementia, rated them on the five personality traits and then followed them for 12 years. They discovered that high scores in conscientiousness were protective against developing Alzheimer’s disease down the road.

Previous studies had already shown that Alzheimer’s disease patients have lower scores of conscientiousness. What was not known, is whether conscientiousness simply declined with the disease or whether having low conscientiousness scores in the first place put you at higher risk for getting the disease, which the new data confirms.

The reason high conscientiousness might protect you from late-life dementia is not clear, but the research team offered some speculation. They first considered that people with higher degrees of conscientiousness take better care of themselves and are therefore in better cardiovascular health, which also relates to Alzheimer’s disease. However, when they controlled for this by comparing high and low conscientious people in similar cardiovascular health, it did not explain the difference.

Another area they speculated on related more to the idea of cognitive reserve, that I have discussed in the past. They used the term ‘resilience’, stating that conscientious folks typically have greater coping skills and are more capable of dealing with big stressors. This goes back to the whole notion of increased brain fitness and suggests that working on your level of conscientiousness may be another tool to boost your cognitive health.

The same thing might be good for your pocket book

It’s interesting to me that a completely different field, business philosophy, has focused on conscientiousness for different reasons. The well known business philosophers, Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn and Brain Tracy, have all focused on this in different ways.

One of Zig’s most famous lines is “help enough people get what they want and you can have everything that you want”, Brian’s number one piece of advice is “Do what you resolve to do”, and Jim is continually preaching the benefits of service to others. All of these suggest that your level of conscientiousness is directly proportional to your personal and financial success.

The three biggest goals that almost anyone has relate to a health goal, a relationship goal and a financial goal. Old advice and new research come together to support the idea that your level of conscientiousness is a primary predictor of your ability to succeed in all of these areas.

Live long and prosper

Sometimes it’s difficult in today’s fast paced, stressed out society, to slow down and do the best job possible at whatever you do. Whether it’s your career, your hobbies, your volunteer work, your health or your valued relationships. But maybe if we all worked on our level of conscientiousness a little bit more we could set ourselves up for a much better future, financially and cognitively.

In the words of Dr. Spock (the Vulcan, not the baby doctor), “Live long and prosper”.