Blueberries have gotten a lot of attention for their content of resveretrol, the compound that can turn on genes that favor longevity, but that’s not all that blueberries seem to offer to someone looking to age against the machine. Recent research publishing the Journal of Nutrition has found benefits from blueberries not only for general aging but for control of blood sugar and vascular disease as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Resveratrol shows promise as a great anti-aging compound, which is why we’ve talked about it several times. It’s found naturally in red wine as well as grapes and peanuts, and is now available in most vitamin stores as a supplement. However, some experts think it’s very difficult to get enough resveratrol into your system to have any sort of meaningful result. There is new research on resveratrol showing more benefits, and calling into question just how much is beneficial.

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In 1819 when German analytical chemist Friedrich Ferdinand Runge was hard at work in his lab on the way to becoming the first person to isolate caffeine from coffee, he likely thought nothing of the Ethiopians who first cultivated the plant. He also likely gave little thought to the 15th century Sufist monks who cultivated and brewed coffee as a medicinal. He did, no doubt, have in mind how coffee had already become a ubiquitous breakfast beverage in much of the world.

Making this new discovery, Runge and his good friend Goethe were no doubt as excited as researchers publishing in the recent special issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease focused entirely on the effects of caffeine on neurologic diseases. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve talked a lot about the benefits of berries and grapes thanks to their high concentrations of resveratrol, a compound that activates longevity chemistry at the cellular level. Researchers at the University of Michigan have been taking a harder look at grapes and found that the benefits may run deeper than just longevity. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve talked before about how too little sleep can result in memory problems, depression, appetite control issues, an increased risk of cancer, and increases in visceral fat. Even normal levels of sleep paired with eating in the middle of the night can cause weight gain. Today we have more news about sleep; and if you don’t get enough, it is not good news.

First, we have a team of researchers who did a meta-study of 16 studies involving over 1,300,000 people, of whom over 100,000 died. That’s a huge amount of information and not easily discounted. Looking over all that data, they found that “people who sleep for less than six hours each night were 12% more likely to die prematurely than those who get the recommended 6-8 hours.” While there was also an increased risk of death for those who sleep more than 9 hours a day, they determined “whilst short sleep may represent a cause of ill-health, long sleep is believed to represent more an indicator of ill-health”. In other words, they slept a long time because they were ill, rather than illness being caused by too much sleep.