Category: Body & Mind

Mindfulness Meditation Effective in Improving Sleep

Mindfulness meditation is already pretty great, and it keeps getting better! Not only can it help you go amongst your day in a more thoughtful, productive, focussed manner, it can even help you sleep!

A six week trial of getting people who had trouble sleeping to mediate proved to help them get better rest.

Importance
Sleep disturbances are most prevalent among older adults and often go untreated. Treatment options for sleep disturbances remain limited, and there is a need for community-accessible programs that can improve sleep.

Objective
To determine the efficacy of a mind-body medicine intervention, called mindfulness meditation, to promote sleep quality in older adults with moderate sleep disturbances.

…

Conclusions and Relevance
The use of a community-accessible MAPs intervention resulted in improvements in sleep quality at immediate postintervention, which was superior to a highly structured SHE intervention. Formalized mindfulness-based interventions have clinical importance by possibly serving to remediate sleep problems among older adults in the short term, and this effect appears to carry over into reducing sleep-related daytime impairment that has implications for quality of life.

Read more.

Drinking Coffee Regularly Decreases DNA Damage

I start my day with coffee and writing a post about good news. Today those two things merged rather well: it turns out drinking coffee regularly can lower the chances that one’s DNA will get messed up.

DNA is always doing bizarre things and if those things get too bizarre then it can cause some very bad mutations. For some reason coffee keeps your DNA doing the right thing.

As one commentator on Reddit said:

Their findings indicate that those who drank 750 ml (~3 cups) of coffee per day experienced 27% fewer strand breaks in white blood cells than those who only drank water, controlling for diet and body weight.

Here’s the paper’s abstract:

Abstract
PURPOSE:
Coffee consumption has been reported to decrease oxidative damage in peripheral white blood cells (WBC). However, effects on the level of spontaneous DNA strand breaks, a well established marker of health risk, have not been specifically reported yet. We analyzed the impact of consuming a dark roast coffee blend on the level of spontaneous DNA strand breaks.

METHODS:
Healthy men (n = 84) were randomized to consume daily for 4 weeks either 750 ml of fresh coffee brew or 750 ml of water, subsequent to a run in washout phase of 4 weeks. The study coffee was a blend providing high amounts of both caffeoylquinic acids (10.18 ± 0.33 mg/g) and the roast product N-methylpyridinium (1.10 ± 0.05 mg/g). Before and after the coffee/water consumption phase, spontaneous strand breaks were determined by comet assay.

RESULTS:
At baseline, both groups exhibited a similar level of spontaneous DNA strand breaks. In the intervention phase, spontaneous DNA strand breaks slightly increased in the control (water only) group whereas they significantly decreased in the coffee group, leading to a 27 % difference within both arms (p = 0.0002). Food frequency questionnaires indicated no differences in the overall diet between groups, and mean body weight during the intervention phases remained stable. The consumption of the study coffee substantially lowered the level of spontaneous DNA strand breaks in WBC.

CONCLUSION:
We conclude that regular coffee consumption contributes to DNA integrity.

See the full paper here.

Discard These 20 Things to Improve Your Health

There are some minor things you can do around your home to improve your health and the health of the planet. These things range from where you plant trees and what you buy, Time magazine has looked in the opposite direction: what to throw away. They have a list of 20 things that (if you’re buying) you should discard.

Your stash of diet soda

If you haven’t already, you may want to reconsider your diet soda habit—especially if you’re trying to lose weight. A much-buzzed-about study published in the journal Nature found that non-caloric sweeteners such as saccharin (Sweet-n-Low), sucralose (Splenda), and aspartame (Equal) may mess with the gut bacteria that play a key role in healthy metabolism. Researchers found a link between these sweeteners, altered gut microbes, glucose intolerance and metabolic syndrome (both precursors to Type 2 diabetes) in mice and humans.

Read more.

The 20 Safest Cities in the World

The Economist safe cities list (pdf link) has been released and the results are pretty neat! There are some cities that you’d expect to be there and some surprise too!

The analysts looked at digital, health, and personal security of every city on the list plus the condition of the city’s infrastructure.

Is you city on the list?

3. Osaka

The Japanese city of 2.6 million ranks second in personal safety and sixth in health security. As with Tokyo, Osaka is relatively wealthy, and it ranks second for GDP per capita among upper-middle-income cities.
The city ranks lower in digital security than Tokyo, as it has fewer cybersecurity teams and privacy policies.

See the full list.

Travel to Become a Better Person

When friends ask for life advice tell them to leave. Over at BBC Travel they have an article about how travelling can make you a better person. So what are you waiting for? Get out and explore the world!

You’ll gain a broader perspective

As Twain’s quote emphasises, travel can open people’s minds and allow them to see things from a new perspective.

“When you travel, you are faced with alternative cultures that have a different way of doing, thinking and believing,” said Simon Huggins. “It challenges your assumptions and makes you shift your way of looking at things. When you get home, you come back to your own culture with different eyes and a more questioning mind.”

Read more.