Age-old wisdom tells us that we should eat fruit to stay healthy. Once again, science catches up to the old adage. A new study suggests that compounds in fruit, especially apples, may promote brain fitness as you age.

Specifically, researchers found that phenolics, extracted from apples, bananas and oranges protected neuron-like cells from dying in a dish. But before we get into the new results let’s cover a little background on what the fruits may be doing to protect your brain.

Too much oxidative stress my lead to Alzheimer’s disease.

One of the things that can damage bodily tissues and cause disease is oxidative stress. This is essentially a process that usually happens during the manufacturing of energy. Just like a nuclear reactor makes energy very efficiently, but at the same time produces toxic by-products, so do our tissues.

Usually these toxic by-products are well controlled, but occasionally they escape into our cells and tissues and do a little damage. If left unchecked, this damage can accumulate and eventually lead to disease.

Since the brain gets dibs on about 20% of the calories that you eat, it has a lot of energy production going on and is at risk of oxidative stress. In fact, many studies indicate that Alzheimer’s disease brains are highly susceptible to oxidative stress and that this may be one causative factor in developing the disease in the first place.

Fruit helps protect the brain from oxidative stress.

That’s the bad news, now here’s the good news. Antioxidants found in fruits and vegetables can help prevent oxidative stress by neutralizing the toxic by-products of the energy production process. That’s why it’s so critical to get your recommended five to nine servings a day. This gives your brain and body what it needs to fight oxidative stress.

In new research, scientists from Korea and Cornell, extracted specific nutrients, called phenols, from apples, bananas and oranges and used them to save neuron-like cells grown in a dish. They treated the cells with hydrogen peroxide, which will cause oxidative stress and tested if the fruit extracts could save the cells from damage and death.

Apples help neurons and blood vessels.

First, researchers looked at damage to the protective membrane that surrounds the cells to see if the fruit extract could prevent them from springing leaks caused by the toxic peroxide. Second, researchers measured the actual peroxide-induced death of the cells and the ability of the fruit phenols to save them.

It turned out that all the tested fruit extracts were effective at protecting membrane damage and cell death, but apple extract was the most potent.

In a related experiment researchers from the University of California at Davis, also tested the ability of apple extract to prevent cells from dying. But in this experiment they used endothelial cells, which are the cells that make up the walls of blood vessels.

Again, since the brain utilizes a big share of the bodies oxygen supply, blood delivery through a healthy circulatory system is a huge factor. And, the health of the endothelial cells that make up the vascular system is extremely important for overall brain health and fitness.

In this experiment, the apple extract met the challenge again. Researchers treated endothelial cells in a dish with a toxin known to kill them, and were able to prevent the cell death with the apple extract.

So there you have it. We should remember all that stuff our grandmother told us and take heed. An apple a day really may keep the doctor away and help maintain good brain function as we age.

References:

Journal of Food Science Vol. (2008) In Press

Experimental Biology and Medicine (2006) 231:594-598

Remember the Bugs Bunny cartoons where Yosemite Sam would get so angry and stressed out that steam would come out of his ears? In fact, this seemed to happen to a lot of cartoon characters that lost their cool. Were these guys actually frying their brains? If so, could they get those fried brain cells back after they calmed down? It seems that cartoonists may have correctly predicted some neurobiology of stress.

Stress biology has been a hot topic in neuroscience for many years and research emerges all the time to further our understanding of why stress is so bad for the brain. A new study reveals an important finding that sheds more light on maintaining brain fitness during these bouts of stress. But before getting into the new data, let’s back up a little.

Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist at Stanford, has been a prevailing voice in stress biology for some time. He proposed theories over a decade ago that suggested stress was actually killing brain cells in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, a structure crucial for learning and memory.

In fact, the last ten years or so have revealed some interesting things about the hippocampus, especially as it relates to stress. Contrary to years of dogma, we discovered that the hippocampus is an area of the brain that is continually giving birth to new neurons. For many years, we believed that the brain was incapable of making new neurons after development, but we now know that’s not true. New neurons are being born (and dying) in the hippocampus all the time.

The trick is to keep the rate of neuron birth in check with that of neuron death. If you lose more neurons than you gain, your hippocampus can shrink and whither; and your ability to learn and remember declines.

Sapolsky’s early work showed that stress was a bad thing for this process. Stress slowed the rate of new neuron birth, to tip the scales in favor of neuron death. Not only does this hamper your cognitive abilities, but it may leave you more susceptible to prolonged stress and create a viscous cycle.

Later work by a Yale researcher, Ron Duman, showed that anti-depressants often require new neuron birth in the hippocampus to have their affect. One a side-note, exercise is one of the most potent ways to stimulate new neuron birth in the hippocampus. This is probably why exercise is such a great anti-depressant.

New research from Duman’s group has now pinpointed on of the big players in how stress works to stop neuron birth in the hippocampus. They discovered a molecule called IL-1beta (Interleukin-1 beta) is responsible for putting the breaks on hippocampal neuron birth. We already knew that IL-1beta is a hormone involved in inflammation, increased by stress. We also knew that IL-1beta, itself, could increase some effects of stress.

What the new finding tells us is that if we focus on reducing IL-1beta during unhealthily long periods of stress, we may counter some of the cognitive problems that too much stress creates. I’m sure this discovery has peaked the interest of many pharmaceutical companies with anti-IL-1beta drugs, but there is already a simple way to reduce this hormone.

Previous studies showed that omega-3s can reduce many hormones involved in inflammation and that they can specifically counteract increases in stress, caused by IL-1beta. Putting this older research in light of the new study, suggests that omega-3s might actually be able to protect the hippocampus during stress.

So again, discoveries in molecular biology take us back to benefits of brain fitness cornerstones that we have been promoting for some time; in this case, exercise and quality nutrition. Exercise can increase the birth of new neurons in your hippocampus and omega-3s may protect them from stress-induced IL-1beta.

References:
PNAS 2008 105(2) 751–756
J. Lipid Res. 2003 44(10):1984-91

OK, are you ready for this one? A British company is testing a helmet that they are touting to be the future of treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. The company, Virulite, has created a helmet that bathes the brain in infrared light for 10 minutes a day and potentially reverses (not just slows) Alzheimer’s disease.

The technology stems from a study in older mice that showed infrared light exposure improved performance in a memory test. Infrared light is a normal part of the sun’s spectrum and important for many facets of life on this planet. The authors cite several examples of UV light treatment benefits.

In the study, which is in press in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, researchers treated middle-aged mice (with minor cognitive deficit), with infrared light for 6-minutes per day over 10 days. Then they compared these mice in a maze test with similar aged mice that did not get the light treatment and with younger mice as well.

The data show that the infrared treated mice did perform a little better than the non-treated controls, and approached the performance of the younger mice in many of the tests. So at first glance their appears to be something to this claim of cognitive benefit, but don’t rush out to buy yourself an infrared oven to stick your head into just yet.

First of all, as I mentioned above, infrared light is a normal part of the sun’s spectrum, which the control mice were not getting. Comparing mice stuck in the basement of a research lab is very different than comparing people who will be walking around outside getting their normal dose of sunlight.

Second, in the study, researchers bathed the entire mouse with infrared light, not just their noggin. Even though they assume that the improved memory-performance was due to brain exposure, that’s not necessarily true and requires a closer look. It’s feasible that infrared light could affect body tissues, which are more accessible to the light, and carry a metabolite back to the brain.

Third, infrared light is used as a source of heat to cook stuff. Until I see a lot more data on the safety of this approach, I’m not going to stick my brain in that thing.

Fourth, the performance improvements seen in the light-treated animals were very minor. Even if this whole thing pans out to have some validity, I wouldn’t expect any Einsteinian revolution.

You’d be better off sticking to the fundamentals that we have been touting for a while now. Eat well, exercise, keep your mind active and get plenty of rest. Each of these has far more data and far greater magnitude of performance enhancement than dressing up like Darth Vader. Luke, am I your father?

I try not to discount seemingly whacky technologies simply because I don’t understand how they can possibly work, and I will retain that position here. However, I think that this particular approach will need good human data and much research before it will be an accepted therapy for anyone.

Recent advancements in brain imaging show us that older people use more of their brain to perform tasks than younger people do. Scientists interpret this to mean one of two opposite things:

First, older people recruit more brain activity to do the same things in order to compensate for degeneration of specific brain circuits that can no longer get the job done by themselves. This is the compensation hypothesis. Think of it like one brain region asking for help from another brain region in order to do something that, in its younger days, it could do on its own.

Second, the older brain may become ‘over-activated’ when trying to perform a task because it doesn’t do as good of a job at assigning the task to a specific region. This is the de-differentiation hypothesis. Think of this explanation as different brain regions being unsure whose job it is to do something and then getting in each other’s way.

Do older brains cooperate or compete?

A Belgium group used an elegant approach, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, to try to figure out which one was correct. The first hypothesis predicts that increased brain activation is a sign of participation, so should improve performance. The second hypothesis predicts increased activation is due to competition, so should decrease performance.

Researchers asked younger (20-25 year old) and older (62-72 year old) participants to perform a simple motor task while the investigators watched their brain activity. Participants simply moved their hands and feet in the same direction (easy task) or in opposite directions (harder task) while undergoing a brain scan to determine which brain regions became active. In the end, the older folks that performed better had more active brain regions, supporting the first hypothesis. The increased activity in older brains, while performing a task, appears due to participation between different regions.

Tying it back to lifestyle

This study is important because it supports the notion of cognitive reserve and EPIC performance that we have discussed in previous articles. To give a brief re-cap, the more you learn and experience in life, the more connections you make in your brain, and the more easily it will be to recruit other brain regions to get things done.

When you give yourself different experiences, you force your brain to look at new situations from different perspectives. This may help ‘link-up’ brain regions and make it easier for them to communicate with each other as you age, at a time when they become more dependent upon each other.

If you create enough different brain connections throughout your life by committing to life-long learning, you may protect yourself from losing mental performance as you age. Even though your brain will inevitably age, you ensure that the different regions cooperate with each other when necessary and keep your mental capabilities sharp.

The best way to do this is to adhere to the four cornerstones of brain fitness that we have discussed in the past.

1. Feed your brain healthy foods, as they are the raw materials for building brain circuits.
2. Exercise your body since it improves the blood supply to your brain.
3. Exercise your brain by continually learning new things and challenging your mind.
4. Get plenty of rest and sleep to allow your brain to rebuild and regenerate.

Boosting the odds to maintain life-long brain fitness is simple. You don’t have to understand all the science that supports these lifestyle choices, but it’s nice to know that it’s there.

Reference: The Journal of Neuroscience, January 2, 2008, 28(1):91-99

Written by Simon J. Evans, PhD and Paul R. Burghardt, PhD.

With the presidential debates gearing up again we are sure to hear more about health care. But we propose a slightly different question. In addition to asking how we can get more people healthcare coverage, we should also ask why so many people are sick in the first place.

The words of John Kennedy might today be, “Ask not what the health care system can do for you. Ask what you can do to reduce the health care burden”. But before delving into what we can do, let’s take a look at some realities that our next president could face in their first ‘State of the Union’ address.

On the downside –

• We are not healthy: 60% of adults and 20% of kids are overweight; 30% of today’s kids are anticipated to become diabetic; 20% of high school kids have early stages of heart disease. The estimated economic burden of depression for the year 2000 (most recent estimate) was $83.1 billion, and this is just one of many brain-related diseases
• We are aging: within the next couple of decades, about 20% of the population will be of retirement age; 4.5 million people already have Alzheimer’s disease and by 2050 there will be 16 million cases.
• We are heavily medicated: anti-depressants are the leading selling drugs in the United States; record numbers of children are on these and anti-psychotics; for adults, cholesterol and blood pressure medicines are becoming as common as breakfast cereal.

On the upside –

• The US government estimates that healthier lifestyles could save $71 billion per year in health care costs and another $14 billion in lost productivity.
• 1 out of 7 deaths are premature and could be avoided with better diets and active lifestyles.

Perhaps the next president should spend a little effort promoting methods to improve these statistics. But how?

We typically think of heart disease, diabetes, depression, and Alzheimer’s dementia as very different problems. But the more we learn about disease, the more we realize that these seemingly different diseases often have a lot in common at the cellular and molecular level. They also have a lot in common when it comes to how they gained a foothold in your brain and body to get started in the first place.

However, we have an arsenal of tools proven to help reduce common cellular damage to maintain fit brains and bodies. What are those tools? Some high tech drugs and medical equipment that is out of reach for much of the population lacking health care insurance? Actually, no. These tools are very low tech and available to everyone. They are:

1. Eating a quality diet
2. Getting regular physical activity
3. Keeping your mind active and engaged
4. Getting enough sleep and rest

Sounds easy, right? So why don’t we all do it, and why didn’t we have all of these problems 50 and 100 years ago?

First of all, in yesteryear a breakfast muffin contained about 150 calories. Today that muffin is 400 calories. A large drink at the soda fountain totaled 12 ounces. Today, that drink is the smallest size on most menus. Yes, we are suffering from proportion distortion. We love to eat, and it ain’t peas and carrots we are a cravin’.

Second, for many people going to work actually meant going to work, physically. Today, the extent of our office exercise is finger aerobics on our QWERTY keyboards. Physical activity used to be a regular part of everyday life, not a chore that you have to schedule into your day.

Third, as Alvaro pointed out on a recent Sharp Brains blog, many of us ‘outsource our brains’ and no longer think for ourselves. With mass media messages, GPS systems, calculators, spell checkers and electronic organizers, we must ask the question how well we could function without them. I know I am guilty of this one, myself.

Finally, we are staying up later and getting up earlier to meet those deadlines. On average, we get 1.5 hours less zzzzzs than we did about 100 years ago. Not only that but we spend far more time busy, busy, busy when we are awake than we ever used to.

Now, change happens. We shouldn’t expect to always do things the way we used to, and we’re not suggesting that. Food, in all its irresistible varieties, is much more available. Are we supposed to just not eat it. Well, uh, it wouldn’t hurt to pass on the second helping of triple chocolate cheesecake now and then.

And no, we can’t jog around our office but we can do simple things to introduce more activity into our day. Walk instead of drive those 1-mile errands. Park further from the door, take the stairs . . . you’ve heard all this before. So why don’t we do it?

One reason is that no one likes to be told what to do and subjected to some guilt trip, most people just don’t respond to that. Also, most people haven’t really thought about what they really want their health to look like or developed a reasonable plan to reach their health-goals. As the old adage says, “If you don’t know where you are going, you are sure to get there”, plus it helps to have a map. Finally, even with a plan many folks will give up after the first sign of failure or fatigue. These changes don’t become easy until we make them an integral part of our lives.

So how do you motivate people to take action to maintain their health? Since everyone is different, many options exist. The obvious answer, that will motivate the most people, is money, money, money . . . money (did you hear ‘The Apprentice’ theme song).

At a policy level, it would be exceptionally helpful if the next president worked to create incentives for healthy lifestyles and behaviors. Now, I know this is easy to say, probably not as easy to do (and keep everyone happy), but you have to walk before you run.

What if the next presidential administration actually incentivized (is that a word yet?) us to take better care of ourselves? What if health insurance companies gave discounts to people that tried to live a healthy lifestyle? What if the government gave us tax breaks to eat healthier food and exercise? What if each individual had one government subsidized continuing education, or self-enrichment class each year? Would this reduce the overall health care burden for employers and make it more affordable to cover more people? Help reduce sick days and increase productivity and creativity? Hmmm….

We realize there are many caveats to implementing such a plan but something has to be done and maybe some bright politician can figure out how to do it. Who would lose if the country were to improve their health?

Insurance companies wouldn’t have to fork out as much. Medical providers would be able to divert more of their attention to preventing disease, instead of managing chronic illness. The government wouldn’t be in such a hot seat for the health care crisis. Big Pharma might sell fewer drugs, but there are several new health-related industries that they have the expertise to tap into. Basically, we would all win.

So back to our initial question: “Why are we so sick in the first place?” If you step back and see the forest for the trees, our world has changed drastically in the last 50 to 100 years. With technology, and the availability it brings, we may have become a little complacent, a little too trusting that the magic cure-all pill is there for us.

It is true that we are living longer. But I’m sure with increased longevity, everyone would want at least a reasonable quality of life and currently that isn’t the status quo. So the answer to our question seems to be….lifestyle choices. Making the best lifestyle choices, and maintaining them, isn’t always easy but the best things in life rarely are.

So Madam or Mister President, will you help us help ourselves?

Written by Paul R. Burghardt, PhD

A recent article in the New York Times by Tara Parker-Pope delves into the potential health risks of clutter. I was skeptical at first, but sadly as I read on, I started to recognize some of those traits…..in myself!

How did it come to this?

Well one thing is for sure, it is partially due to genetics. If my parents are reading, I’m sure they won’t protest too much, since they were put at a genetic disadvantage as well. As for my grandparents, I knew my great-grandmother on my mother’s side, and well, my grandparents were pretty screwed too. Now I want to be clear, this is clutter, not filth. Things are moved, dusted and vacuumed, but there is a lot of stuff. Hopefully my family won’t hold this against me.

That being said, science has shown us again and again that much of behavior (as well as disease) is also due to environment. This is a pretty complex aspect and may be related to the people that are around you and how they handle clutter.

Current social issues probably play a large role too, from my interactions with people that lived through the great depression I’ve noticed that they tend to be very thrifty and don’t like to throw things away.

Another thing that I’ve noticed is a lot of people tend to “fill the space.” You move to a bigger house or apartment and something has to go into the corner, and your current couch and recliner just won’t do the trick.

How does this tie into health and brain fitness?

Well, the article mentioned “hoarding,” and it got me to thinking… ‘hey, I know animals do this and most of them don’t use coffee mugs all that much.’ But they do eat food. One of the behaviors that animals will exhibit if there is a potential lack of food, or if it is something particularly tasty, is (drum-roll)….hoarding!

In fact, the brain appears to default towards hording for food and energy stores (i.e. fat). The general consensus is that the wiring of our brains, particularly the hypothalamus which is one of the main areas where energy management is controlled, is weighted toward storing energy versus expending it. So it makes sense that other things that we view as resources or that have emotional value to us would also be potential candidates for hoarding.

Why would we do this to ourselves?

Although this is problematic for us now, it helps to step back and view this from a historic reference….even a recent perspective sheds light on the issue.

Currently, we live in a time of relative bounty (at least in the US and other industrialized nations) where we don’t have to work as hard to obtain our food. I would also argue that for the average Joe (or Josephine) we don’t have to work as hard to obtain the money to buy our food. I always try to imagine what people had to do 50-60 years ago on a daily basis. Now, a greater proportion of the population is sitting behind a computer at a desk, as opposed to smelting iron, digging ditches or whatever else went on in the early to mid 1900’s. Technology has reduced the effort required for a lot of manual labor.

A few decades ago even meal preparation required significantly more time and energy. Use of the microwave oven wasn’t widespread until the 1970’s, a pretty recent social development.

So historically things like food were (comparatively) more difficult to come by, but in general energy expenditure was a part of daily life for most people. It’s probably fair to say that in the past a lot of other things were not readily available (tools, books, hairbrushes, etc), and so people tended to hang on to them, but things have changed. Today these things are easy to come by, but we still don’t want to throw them away when they are no longer of use to us.

Unclutter your environment, unclutter your mind!

The NYT article mentions compulsive hoarders, which is an extreme behavior. But is moderate clutter a result of a bigger health problem? I don’t think there are any data to support that claim, so we don’t really know and I wouldn’t get too worried.

Could control of clutter and better organization help improve our health? I would bet yes. Actually the article hinted at this point when it mentioned “How are you going to shoot a couple of hoops with your son if you can’t even find the basketball?” This is a great point.

Organization would also help reduce stress. Ever had to quickly find a receipt that you set down somewhere only to spend an hour and a half (and expend lot of patience) searching for it? Not so good for the stress level, and it takes up a lot of time that could be spent relaxing, exercising, or learning something new.

So there isn’t a lot of advice on this post, but I thought the NYT article was interesting. Plus this is a worthwhile personal aspect to consider working on. Just remember that you may be battling against some inherited tendencies, but you can ultimately turn something that requires effort and thought into habit. For me this will be a priority for the new-year (a sort of resolution if you will), to organize and simplify… for clarity and my health.

Paul Burghardt, PhD
Brain Fit For Life