Regular Sex Means Longer Life, Heart Health
Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):
1. Regular Sex Means Longer Life, Heart Health
2. High Blood Sugar Levels Add to Heart, Stroke Deaths
3. Why It's Good to Be a Health ‘Nut’
4. Simple Light Can Fight Tumors
5. Artificial Pancreas Soon a Boon for Diabetics
1. Regular Sex Means Longer Life, Heart Health
Regular and enthusiastic sex is good for you, finds a 10-year study conducted by the Irish and published by the Brits in the British Medical Journal. Sex offers a host of benefits including increasing life span, boosting the immune system, and aiding pain relief, urinary control, and weight loss.
For over a decade, researchers from Queens University in Belfast followed the sexploits of about 1,000 middle aged men of comparable health and financial backgrounds. They discovered that men who had the highest frequency of orgasm had half the death rate. A follow-up to the Queens study found specifically that men can reduce their risk of stroke or heart attack by half by having sex three or more times a week.
Other studies have claimed additional benefits of intercourse several times a week for women as well as men:
Improved sense of smell. It seems that after sex, there is a surge in the production of a hormone that makes stem cells in the brain develop new neurons in the brain's olfactory bulb.
Better fitness. Intercourse burns about 200 calories, which is the equivalent of running 15 minutes on a treadmill.
Depression relief. An American psychologist reported that sexually active women whose male partners did not use condoms were less prone to depression than those whose partners did. The theory is that prostaglandin, a hormone found only in semen, is absorbed in the woman's genital tract and modulates female hormones.
Pain relief. Levels of the hormone oxytocin surge to five times their normal level during sex, triggering the release of endorphins and thereby relieving the pain of everything from headaches to arthritis to migraine. It even prompts the production of estrogen, which reduces pain from PMS.
Immune system boost. A study from Wilkes University in Pennsylvania shows that individuals who have sex several times a week have a 30 percent higher level of an antibody called immunoglobulin A, which boosts the immune system.
Bladder control. Sex has been shown to improve bladder control because the same muscles used for bladder control are exercised during sex.
Lessens cancer risk. Sex makes prostate glands less vulnerable because it flushes out any concentrated carcinogens that might be hanging around.
One doctor, in typical British understatement, summed everything up when he said, "The relationship found between frequency of sexual intercourse and mortality is of considerable public interest."
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2. High Blood Sugar Levels Add to Heart, Stroke Deaths
High blood sugar levels cause about three million deaths worldwide each year linked to heart disease and strokes as well as diabetes, researchers said on Friday.
Scientists in the United States and New Zealand have calculated that in addition to the 960,000 diabetes deaths worldwide each year, raised blood sugar levels are linked to 1.5 million deaths from heart disease and 700,000 from strokes.
"A lot of people are dying as a result of their blood glucose being elevated even though many may well be below the clinical threshold of what we call diabetes," Dr Majid Ezzati, of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Mass., said in an interview. Blood sugar level is the amount of glucose in the blood. People with higher than optimum levels fall below the limit of being diagnosed as diabetic but can still suffer damage to blood vessels and have an increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
Ezzati and his team analyzed the impact of higher than optimum glucose levels on deaths in 2001 from heart disease and strokes by gathering data from 52 countries around the world.
Their findings, published in The Lancet medical journal, put the total mortality figure from high blood sugar at 3.1 million.
It is more than the 2.4 million deaths attributed to being overweight or obese but less than 4.8 million caused by smoking and 3.9 million by high cholesterol, according to the researchers.
"Even people who are in pre-diabetes level have blood glucose levels that from a cardiovascular perspective has some risk associated with it," said Ezzati.
"The small risks are accumulating and causing a lot of deaths even though they don't fall into any clinical classification," he added.
© Reuters 2006.
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3. Why It's Good to Be a Health ‘Nut’
The nutritional value of nuts has been established for decades, but their high-caloric content has made many weight-conscious dieters shy away from them. New research, however, shows that not only do the benefits of nuts far outweigh the calories, eating them may even help you lose weight.
Walnuts, for instance, might be called the "king" of nuts in many ways, because they are high in vitamin E, folate, and B vitamins, as well as a heart-healthy plant-derived omega-3 fatty acid. They are also rich in melatonin, which can contribute to a good night's sleep. Walnuts can even help people lose weight if eaten in the proper amounts at the proper time, according to a new study out of Loma Linda University School of Public Health. Joan Sabate, M.D., and a professor at Loma Linda said, "Walnuts help alleviate hunger [providing] many essential nutrients for a relatively small percentage of daily calories." The study showed that eating a few walnuts before meals decreased hunger levels in subjects and led to the consumption of fewer total calories at the dinner table.
If walnuts are "king," almonds are perhaps "queen." The Almond Board of California cites one study, for instance, that shows almonds help reduce inflammation of blood vessels by about the same amount as taking some drugs. The Almond Board also pointed to studies showing almonds contain a unique combination of antioxidants that feature 20 different flavonoid compounds, including some that are like those found in highly-touted green tea.
The nut most eaten in the American diet, however, is neither the walnut nor the almond, but the pedestrian peanut, which is really not a nut at all but a legume. One of the most popular ways of consuming peanuts is in peanut butter, and research on peanut butter indicates a probable protective effect against gallstone risk and diabetes. The risk of Type 2 diabetes, for instance, can be reduced by over 20 percent by eating just five or more serving of peanuts or peanut butter per week.
Much of the research on nuts and peanuts centers on their benefits to heart health. Penny Kris-Etherton, Ph.D., and a distinguished professor of nutrition at Penn State University said, "There is a large database showing a dose-response relationship between nut consumption and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease [CVD]. In fact, consuming nuts and peanuts five times a week or more decreases risk of CVD 40 to 50 percent. A recent study has shown as little as two servings per week decreases risk of sudden death."
Also, according to Kris-Etherton, research shows "High consumers of nuts and peanuts have a lower body mass index — not a higher one — compared with non-nut and non-peanut consumers," she said. "When eaten in moderation and incorporated in the diet to meet energy needs, there is no reason to expect weight gain."
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4. Simple Light Can Fight Tumors
Scientists in Israel say they hope to use highly concentrated light from commercial light bulbs to fight tumors, providing an effective and cheap replacement for laser surgery.
"We used off-the-shelf technology as an alternative to laser beams," said Jeffrey Gordon of Ben-Gurion University in southern Israel, lead researcher in a new study on the subject.
The study, recently published in the Journal of Biomedical Optics, showed that light from an ultra-bright commercial bulb, similar to that used in movie projectors, could be concentrated by a special optical system to burn away healthy tissue in rats.
"For the first time ever we were able to kill tissue using the non-laser lamp," Gordon said on Tuesday.
He said the tests would be repeated on cancerous tissue in larger animals and eventually in humans in the next few years, in the hope of producing similar results with malignant tumors.
Laser systems currently used to treat tumors can cost up to $100,000. Gordon said the new light bulb systems may eventually be sold for about $1,000.
© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.
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5. Artificial Pancreas Soon a Boon for Diabetics
An artificial pancreas being developed at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom promises a better life for sufferers of Type 1 diabetes, often called juvenile diabetes because it usually first strikes in childhood or young adulthood. The device will not only free Type 1 diabetics from constant blood tests and injections, but will also do a more precise job of monitoring blood glucose levels as well as administering insulin. Approximately 350,000 Britons have Type 1 diabetes, and about a million people have it in the United States.
The new device, which begins trials in January, monitors the patient's blood sugar levels by means of an under-the-skin glucose meter that wirelessly sends the information to a computer. The computer then relays another wireless signal to an insulin pump worn on the patient's belt, which administers the exact amount of insulin called for. The key is the computer program, which determines the precise dose.
In Type 1 diabetics, the islet cells of the pancreas are destroyed by the patient's own immune system, preventing the pancreas from producing insulin to control blood-sugar levels. While diabetics can do a fair job of monitoring their sugar levels during the day, they cannot monitor their levels at night, which causes great difficulty in keeping the insulin/sugar levels on an even keel. The new machine will be used only at night in the first stage of trials, in which 12 children between the ages of 5 and 18 will be fitted with a glucose monitor and insulin pump. The computer at this point will not be portable, but a hand-held computer is envisioned for use in controlling glucose levels during the day.
Researchers believe quick administration of insulin by the device will reduce long-term complications common to diabetics such as blindness and loss of sensation in the feet, which often results in ulceration and even amputation. Karen Addington, chief executive of the U.K.'s Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation said, "Achieving good blood-glucose control dramatically lowers the risk of serious complications, by as much as 75 percent for some problems."
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