Health and Care

My grandma developed Alzheimer’s disease in her seventies, and from that point on my mum started doing crosswords and Sudoku puzzles every day because she was sure that keeping her mind active would reduce the chance that she would develop that horrible, cruel disease too.

It seems she was on to something, because research carried out recently found that staying active (mentally and physically) can reduce your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

You don’t have to run around the block ten times or do a thousand sit-ups: even very gentle exercise (such as chair-based circuit, or doing the housework) can help, as this can help your mental wellbeing as well as your physical fitness.

So even if you can’t access the gym or sports clubs rest assured that by doing the housework and gardening you are doing enough to reduce your risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s.

The research looked at more than 700 elderly people over just ten days; they monitored their levels of activity during that time by using computerised motion-sensors. Then they kept them under review for the next four years, over which time their mental health was evaluated.

The results were that those people who moved the most were the least likely to develop dementia or Alzheimer’s.

Lead researcher Dr Buchman of Rush Medical Centre, Chicago, said, “This suggests that people in their 80s who can’t participate in formal exercise still get a benefit by leading a more active lifestyle. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re chopping onions or walking up and down stairs or on an exercise machine.”

Some exercise is better than none, so even if you can’t get involved in masses of strenuous physical activity then at least do what you are physically capable of doing. And getting out the crosswords might not be a bad idea, either.

Most people are aware that ‘high energy’ and fizzy drinks contain high levels of sugar. But despite the fact that they are sweet-tasting, ‘healthy’ drinks like fruit smoothies are not perceived to be as bad in terms of sugar levels.

Of course, fizzy drinks and ‘high-energy’ drinks contain other things that perhaps aren’t great for your body – things like caffeine, sweeteners, sodium and acids. But fruit smoothies aren’t great either.

If you eat a banana, it contains fewer calories than if you mash it up and put it in a smoothie first. Weird, huh? Well, it’s true. When we eat fruit, our teeth munch it up small enough to swallow, and then our stomach begins the rest of the digestive process. That process involves leeching energy and other qualities from the food (such as vitamins and minerals). How much is leeched depends on how mashed up (easily-digestible) the food is – the more mashed up it is, the more energy is leeched out. If it is already mashed up by the time we consume it (because it’s been put in a smoothie) the energy (sugars) are much more easily absorbed, so we consume more calories than we would if we just ate the banana whole in the first place.

A study by Glasgow University study found that this sort of information is not widely known and that many people do not perceive smoothies (or milkshakes, energy drinks or fruit juice) as being high in sugar. The researchers asked 2,000 people to estimate, in terms of spoons, how much sugar was contained in various types of drink.

Participants vastly underestimated how many spoons of sugar were contained in fruit juice, high energy juice and milkshakes.

Most of those participants were drinking far more calories than they had thought and were not reducing the number of calories they were eating to compensate accordingly.

Consuming too much sugar (whether it’s eaten or drunk) contributes to obesity and related health conditions. It also causes tooth decay: beware though – switching to low-calorie fizzy drinks will still expose your teeth to acids that will cause decay too. Drink water or very diluted fruit juice to reduce your sugar intake and protect your teeth.

Anyone who works shifts can tell you that they are often tired. Humans are designed to be awake and alert during the day and to sleep at night. It is possible to adapt to sleeping during the day and working at night, but people who do so need to make sure that they make up for the lack of Vitamin D that they would otherwise get from exposure to the sun.

However, it is very, very hard to adapt to different shift patterns. Learning to sleep in the day and be awake at night takes time to adjust to and swapping and changing shifts takes its toll on a body.

New research, by Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the USA, has found that people who work shifts and get too little sleep or sleep at the ‘wrong’ time of day are at risk of developing diabetes and becoming obese. The study was rather small-scale, using only 21 subjects – the researchers took 21 people and controlled their sleep routines and mealtimes. They also exposed the subjects to dim light so that natural light couldn’t help to re-set their body clocks (workers in factories and hospitals are not normally within sight of natural light during their shifts).

But the basic results were clear: changes to normal sleep patterns had a negative impact on the body’s ability to control sugar levels – to the extent that within the few weeks over which the study was conducted some subjects developed diabetes.

It has long been known that working shifts has a negative impact on the human body. One of the researchers, Dr Orfeu Buxton said, “We think these results support the findings from studies showing that, in people with a pre-diabetic condition, shift workers who stay awake at night are much more likely to progress to full-on diabetes than day workers. Since night workers often have a hard time sleeping during the day, they can face both circadian [body clock] disruption by working at night and insufficient sleep during the day. The evidence is clear that getting enough sleep is important for health, and that sleep should be at night for best effect.”

Diabetes UK supports the call for more research into the health-effects of shift-working. Dr Matthew Hobbs of Diabetes UK’s research centre said, “This is an interesting study which shows that under extreme conditions involving sleep deprivation and ‘tricking’ the body clock, participants produced less insulin and therefore had higher blood glucose levels then when they were able to sleep normally and live according to normal daily rhythms.” However, he adds, “Clearly, this does not equate to the normal experience of shift workers who are able, for example, to use bright lights when not sleeping. The study also involved only 21 people. For these reasons, it is not possible to conclude that the findings would translate to real conditions in the wider public.”

It’s widely known that junk food like greasy burgers and chips or fattening snacks and ready meals is bad for your physical health. It can cause obesity, heart disease and any number of cancers.

But recent research has found that there is also a link between eating junk food and being depressed. The study, carried out by researchers at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, found that people who regularly ate junk food were 51% more likely to become depressed compared to people who ate healthily. That likelihood increased in the individual with the amount of junk food eaten – so if they ate a lot of junk food they were most likely to become depressed and if they ate a little junk food regularly then the risk was lower.

The data also found that people who ate junk food regularly were also likely to be less active, eat fewer of the ‘good’ foods advocated by healthy eating advisors, and also were more likely to be single, smoke and work more than 45 hours a week.

The people studied were not already diagnosed with depression and had no history of depression. Yet during the research period, around 500 of the roughly 9,000 participants had been diagnosed with depression and/or had been prescribed antidepressants.

It is not known how much of this is due to a causal relationship: does eating the junk food cause depression? Some previous studies have suggested that eating healthily increases the amount of omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin B and olive oil, all of which might combat the onset of depression. The alternative is that eating junk food correlates with becoming depressed – after all, being single, working long hours and being overweight could all be associated with eating junk food, since people often turn to junk food to cheer themselves up.