Brains Need Grains

All cells in the body require glucose for energy. The cells that make up the human brain (neurons) require twice as much energy than any other cells in the body. And if anyone else has ever been set to a task of arduous problem solving knows that thinking makes you damn tired. But what sorts of fuel is really needed to power the brain? Like anything to do with the complex machines we call our bodies the answer is complicated.

Glucose is the energy needed for cellular metabolic reactions. In short glucose its self is a simple sugar chain consisting of Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen. The energy that cells get from this elemental cocktail is hidden in its design. The bonds that hold the compound together are strapped to laws of physics, breaking bonds releases potential energy, energy which cells use to fuel everyday cellular needs and in turn keeps the entire machine (your body) functioning. There are two types of sugars, simple and complex.

Simple sugars are simple short molecular chains, which the body breaks down quickly and easily.  Simple sugars are broken down and absorbed through the stomach wall and instantly reaches the blood stream. Before you get all excited about simple sugars being the fasts way to feed your body read on. Simple sugars (processed foods, sugary snacks and soft drinks) provide a quick spike in blood sugar levels. This sugar concentration signals your pancreas to secrete insulin, insulin triggers the cells in your body to pull the glucose out of your blood stream and store it for later use. This sudden drop in glucose levels is your body crashing after the sugar high, but what it is really doing is starving your neurons which are the only cells unable to store glucose, the feeling of disorientation and lack of concentration is called hypoglycemia and if sustained for too long can lead to unconsciousness.  Years of rushed sugar exposure and then sudden starvation swings blood sugar levels to a point at which the body can no longer regulate and respond properly to insulin, hormone receptors become insulin resistant and Type 2 diabetes is born.

Whereas, complex sugars or carbohydrates are long chains of sugar molecules that are taken to the liver and broken down piece by piece, time released energy. Complex carbohydrates and foods with low glycemic index are gradually broken down and released over time to the bloodstream. A steady stream of energy for all cells in your body means no storing followed by starvation and  the result is optimal brain function. This is not a golden ticket to run off and stuff your face with white breads and power bars because despite what you may have been taught these items are NOT healthy and certainly not low on the glycemic index. Because so much of the “food” found in grocery stores are nutritionally designed to be exactly what our bodies crave and manufactured by companies looking to turn a profit choosing the right brain food can be complicated. Luckily nature was kind enough to supply us with foods over the history of gradual crawl out of the primordial ooze in perfect packages for our survival. Or more accurately we co-evolved with our environments which provided necessary sustenance for our survival.

Grains for brains might have been a misleading, albeit it witty title.  Grains are one good options for time released healthy energy, but they aren’t the only one. And some people’s ideas of grains are very different from others. When I say grains I mean whole chunky unprocessed real grain foods like, buckwheat, millet, chickpeas, barley, brown rice, and quinoa. Not whole wheat bread found on a non refrigerated shelf in the grocery store (you know why it doesn’t mold, it doesn’t have enough nutritional value to grow fungus). Whole wheat bakery bread (especially rye and pumpernickel) that will get stale if you don’t eat it that day is good bread. Other foods to consider for optimal blood sugar levels are things like; sweet potatoes (not sweet potato fries), fibrous fruits such as apples, bananas, kiwis and cantaloupe (there are many more and fruit juices don’t count because the fiber has been removed and all you are drinking is the fructose), beans of all kinds, veggies of all kinds. Now the truly great thing about these non grain foods is that they contain other little miracles, like vitamins and minerals that your body also required to maintain normal healthy function. Beans provide protein, fruits and vegetables contain vital vitamins and minerals as well fiber which is necessary on many levels which I will not touch on here for brevity sake, let’s just say though your colon and digestive track will thank you later. Has the message sunk in yet?

If not here it is in short, your brain like any other part of your body is made of cells, highly specialize signal transmitters. Without proper energy they start to shut down, then you start to shut down, and deprivation of energy leads to all manner of late in life diseases. Oh! And long periods of starved cells will start to pull energy from any source available for your neurons that happens to be the fatty tissue that makes up your surrounding brain mass. Think microscopic cannibalism, now go eat yourself an apple.

Forgive the totally lame image, not alot of sexy pictures of complex carbs out there.

Biological Vignettes PT2

AIDS has got to be one of the most feared, and most concerning health topics of the last 30 years. The virus’ ability to take over a person’s immune-response system is astonishing, and leaves a patient without any natural ability to fight the infection. It has been found however that a allele mutation on CCR5 if inherited as a homozygous trait a person is resistant to HIV-1 infections.

AIDS starts as an HIV infection, a virus that is thought to have been acquired from monkeys in the late 19^th to early 20^th century. HIV or  Human immunodeficiency virus is a type of retrovirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).  In a nut shell, the virus enters the blood stream, is taken into white blood cells to be killed, hijacks the cell, then the entire immune system, a person’s body is then unable to fight even the most common of flu germs.

The CCR5 or Delta35 mutation is through to have occurred in correlation to the Black Death in Northern Europe. Individuals tested in African and Asian populations showed no Delta35 mutations but 5-14% of Northern Europeans tested did. This mutation also seems to show protection against West Nile Virus as well as mediating response to Smallpox.  It seems likely that the mutation plays a role in infection response however the exact function is unclear.

While to complete understanding of this human gene mutation in unclear, the responses to it seem very clear. An AIDS patient in 2007 was diagnosed with Leukemia, a bone marrow transplant from a Delta32, within 600 days of transplant there were no traceable sings of the HIV virus in the person blood stream. Today the patient is still HIV free.

Careful testing is being done on Delta32 and AIDS, scientists working on these experiments are hoping they can find a use of the mutation and understand how quickly if at all the virus can evolve past the Delta32 block.

* please forgive grammer mistakes, i had to write these for a class and the turned in version had to be hand written, the vingnettes are just hasty drafts.

Soy-A-No-No

“Soy is making our kids gay”, or so says an article I read today on soy. The proof (although improperly applied) lies in truth, soy has large quantities of phytoestrogen. A protein compound similar enough to the human hormone estrogen that it binds to estrogen receptors, which in turn triggers increased estrogen production in the body.  It is true this happens in both men and women. But the application is far more complicated than a simple influx of estrogen turning us all into sobbing overly effeminate messes. In woman the consumption of soy and subsequent estrogen-palooza usually manifests in pre-menstrual and menstrual side effects. In doing so it can trigger the same growth hormones that are triggered in pre-menstrual cycles that store fat for the possible embryo plantation (this is why weight fluctuates during monthly cycles). In a nut shell it can cause: hot flashes, mood swings, depression, weight gain and chemical imbalances in woman. In men by way of increasing estrogen production in the body, sperm counts are lowered, and long term damage to the testes from a correlating decrease in free testosterone and dihydotestosterone can occur.  

What about Asian populations and their consumption of soy? Asian communities on a whole eat much less soy that we Americans are led to believe. On average about two tablespoons a day. If you are the type of person who eats fast food hamburgers you may be surprised to know that 40-80% of that meat burger is actually soy protein, and as most fast food burgers are at the very least a ¼ pound of “meat”, you are consuming about 8 TBL of soy.  And that’s just the hamburger its self, not to mention the bi produced from soy used as bread preservatives, diets foods, dried milks, imitations and non dairy creamers, margarine and vegetable oils, and of course any vegan meat substitutes. At the end of the day a majority of a person’s diet could consist of soy without them realizing it. Aside from the frightening realization that one could eat for a whole day and not know exactly what types of food they have consumed, there is also the fact that most people of European descent are allergic to soy.

Soy requires certain stomach enzymes and bacteria to properly break down the complicated protein complexes and be absorbed into the body. Just like the first European man that consumed cow milk got sick, so to the first Asian person probably got pretty ill after having eaten the first soy bean. Over a long stretch of time, stomach flora evolves and the ability to eat foods common in geographic diets increases. Due to common eating habits, culture plus a very long history of experimenting and perfecting fermentation methods, Asians have not only evolved to digest soy products they have also created methods of properly preparing the food source. American treatment of soy products and bi-products are not as perfect, combine that with a low likelihood of having gained the digestive flora necessary to process the food, we are in for a serious stomach ache (also bloating, IBS, and a myriad of other less pleasant digestive side effects).

So does soy really make a person gay. I seriously doubt it. Though it does increase estrogen production and cause some pretty harmful chemical side effects. Obviously I would suggest to stay away from fast food, a suggestion that really has no root in the soy problem, just don’t eat fast food you’ll thank me later. My main message and concern is for all my vegan and veg friends. Yes eating meat does have negative health implications, but so does soy. If you make the switch to a no meat diet don’t fill your life with soy burgers, tofu ribs, soy cheese sandwiches, or soy milk. If you really want to do yourself a favor regardless of the degree of meat eating you engage in, your protein and food consumption should always come from the least processed forms available.

Ghrelin or Why You Crave That Junk Food

Ever wonder why sometimes you are perfectly happy eating healthy foods, and some days all you want to eat is a bag of cheetos and a box of brownies? The answer is ghrelin, and the fact that humans have mentally evolved much faster than we have biologically.

Ghrelin is a hormone produced by the hypothalamic glands where it stimulates the secretion of growth hormones in the anterior pituitary gland. It is a G-protein  coupled receptor, that is also produced by the cells lining the human stomach and the epsilon cells of the pancreas. In simple terms the cells that produce this hormone stimulate hunger and the production of growth hormones that in turn tells your brain you are hungry and tells your body to store and create fat mass.

This is a natural biological process and at the basic chemical levels this process is not only a necessary trigger as it is regulatory process. However, our lives have changed dramatically while our evolutionary progress has very little. We as a species have evolved very little since civilized societies of humans have swept the world. We have no need. As our brains have evolved and our cognitive processes have become more complex, we as a species no longer have to evolve to adapt to our environments, we now change our environments to suit our needs. So while we have become smarter our bodies have changed very little. One of the very earliest adaptation mechanisms animals have is the ability to sense food sources, whether it be sight, smell or other more complex triggers, animals can tell where the most calorie rich food sources can be found, and in nature this is found mostly as the flavor sweet, or in other animals in the form of fats. Humans are animals and we are evolutionarily predisposed to know where fat and sugar are and to crave them when our bodies trigger our brains for energy needs, enter ghrelin.

The problem really presents itself now that we have advanced enough to not have to depend on natural environments for our energy sources. We depend on grocery stores, and restaurants, and unfortunately due to a number to FDA laws, reductionist nutrition and capitalized food companies, we now have a plethora of high octane foods available in about every flavor you could hope for. The majority of our food sources have been reduced to the bare minimum, sugar. Whether it be potato chips with its fat, sugar and salt ingredients, or soda with its many sugar sources or even a fast food hamburger (fat and added sugar for flavor). We literally can’t help ourselves, these foods were designed for us, designed to be made of exactly what our bodies crave. However, due to our sedentary life styles (we no longer have to hunt and gather for livelihood), we aren’t burning the calories we take in. So while we are evolutionarily primed to crave the food available, biologically speaking we no longer need it.

The solution? I don’t have one for your. Your body is different, your biological and chemical needs are different from mine, and everyone else’s on the planet. But eating a good breakfast full of protein, fruits and/or veggies will help regulate your insulin and ghrelin levels throughout the day. Understanding what cravings really are also helps and listening to your body. If you haven’t eaten anything with protein for a few hours, don’t run out and eat junk food, or breads or protein bars (which are chock-a-block full of sugar), find yourself some fat in the form of a cheese snack, or a bit of chicken, or even whole wheat toast and peanut butter, nuts snacks or dried fruit. If are craving sugar try eating fruit or veggies and drinking lots of water. These cravings can easily be controlled, and by making the right eating decisions you will be controlling your body’s own hormone and insulin levels and avoiding any catastrophic problems down the road.

More Junk-Food Benny can be found here : http://www.messymsxi.com/junkfoodbenny.htm

Biological Vignettes

I have been writing a series of short essays on topics covered in my biology class for extra credit. They are pretty basic, but the research is good, so I thought maybe some of you may find them interesting.

The first is on telomeres which are essentially junk DNA that is added onto to helix ends to protect your DNA from getting lost during replication.

Aging is an inevitable truth, and the search to reverse this has been long and futile. But scientists are coming closer to understanding why. It seems our DNA has an expiration date. And once this is hit, coding sections are dropped, miscoding for proteins begin to occur and diseases begin to pop up more often, and people begin to show signs of serious age.

Human DNA is protected at each end of each chromosome with repeat non coding nucleic acids hundreds of codes long. As cells divide, so does DNA, and when it is replicated from the parent strand only one end is left whole, the 3’-5’ coding side which runs in the opposite direction needed for DNA polymerase, requires a primer to start each segment and ends up dropping the last set during replication. Due to this lagging strand drop, each time a cell replicated one half of the DNA is shortened. Once the telomeres have all been dropped off, DNA starts getting dropped in replications, errors begin to occur and cell, due to complex regulatory and trigger mechanisms destroy themselves.

The most rapid growth of the human body is during the stages of development, and luckily these cells are protected by enzymes called telomerase which bind the telomeres to DNA and protect the rapidly dividing cells of embryos. Many studies have focused on gene therapy putting telomerase in adults organisms, and while it has shown some minor results in reversing aging in lab mice. However higher levels of telomerase in adult humans have shown a significant link to cancer. And recent studies of sea birds have shown no tie to telomere length or telomerase concentration in the bird’s physical age.

Continued study of the connection to telomere length, telomerase concentration and aging in eukaryotic organisms will probably go on for decades before it is fully understood. Whether or not that means a cure for aging can be found is unknown, for now all that is known is that in humans there seems to be a connection between the two.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

Losing My Mind (assuming I had one to begin with)

I am one of those rare few people that out performs in crisis mode. If there is something that needs to happen, I can put aside every single emotion known to mankind and get things done. The only major problem with this is, since I am not dealing with emotions in the heat of the moment, they tend to bubble up when I least expect them and often forget what caused the upset in the first place. Enter this week.

I have been going to school part time to accumulate enough pre-requisite classes to apply to medical school. I also work full time. I have a dog, a boyfriend, friends, a pretty addictive photography habit, and I refuse to eat fast food. What does this mean?! Not enough time to do anything ever. So crisis mode is sort of a constant companion.

To get an idea of what this like let me explain. I am currently taking 200 level biology classes. This includes genetics, and taxonomy of ever creature under the sun, literally, except archeas. I am in class 8 hours a week, with at least 20 hours of homework and studying required to maintain A grades which are required for maintaining scholarships. That’s 28 hours of school a week at least. Add that to a 40-50 hour work week, at an office, which adds approximately 5 hours of driving time to and from work. Plus on days that I have class, the distance traveled between by school, office and home are too great to traverse between activities so I go from work to class adding an extra 4 hours to my school time. Leaving my out of home time commitments at about 87 hours a week. Assuming I get 6-8 hours of sleep a night, that is a total of 48-56 sleeping time. In summation I have already accounted for 143 hours of my week of which is there is only 168, leaving me 25 hours to: play with my dog, spend time with a boyfriend that means to world to me, see my friends (who are truly incredible people), keep my house clean, feed myself, keep myself clean, grocery shop, get some exercise, as well as work on scholarship and grant applications, taxes, mortgage payments, house projects and maybe if I have one second of one moment I would like to just sit and not do anything (but this never actually happens). Week over, lights out, goodnight, my brain has left the building.

Why am I torturing myself like this? Because I hate my job, and I am slowly (very slowly) working my way to a goal that makes me so excited sometimes I could cry. Properly understanding the human body, our interactions with food, the environment and our world at large is an amazing journey.  I cannot wait to be a Naturopathic Physician, I have never in my life felt this kind of joy and pull toward doing something with the exception of photography and dance. And as the days and weeks and months progress, I get busier trying to keep up on everything. It is very easy to lose focus and not spend enough time on one of the aforementioned activities of everyday living. Currently it seems to be seeing my friends and sleeping.

This week has been a particularly good week though. I have gotten to spend, not enough time but, a decent amount of time with the boyfriend. Had a wonderful date, turned in a bunch of papers and homework (a head of time!!!!! holy crow), have managed to utilize more of my commuting time by finding some books I have been meaning to read on CD at the library (The Greatest Show on Earth currently in the player), have gotten a decent amount of sleep (though not enough) and even managed to run a couple miles. And then I started crying. Why?! I honestly dont know, but I am sure it was built up from trying to organize scholarships, and get Christmas together on top of all my other every day duties as well as trying to get my house ready to sell. And while I had a couple days of blissful peace my exhausted body said finally! now it’s time to panic.

The moral of this story is twofold. One, if I have been cranky, moody, flighty and/or irritable towards any of my  favorite people this is why. And two, I need to take more breaks so the bottled up panic can work its way out more evenly. Sadly this state of being is only going to get worse once I start grad school, so maybe it times for me to be better at organizing and simplifying my life, but that in its self is just yet another project that requires time. I think it’s time to start petitioning  for a 12 day week.

                                         worn out, just like me

on flickr @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamhoej/

not for the alliumphobia sufferers

The last couple of weeks in my lab have been dedicated to testing the effectiveness of natural antibiotics to pharmaceuticals on varying strains of bacteria. It’s sort of gross, and smells about as great as you can imagine. But the most interesting effects (in my opinion) that came out of the tests were the differences between commercially prepared garlic and fresh garlic.

Garlic has been used historically for many medicinal purposes for anything from cold and flu symptoms to the regulation of blood sugar levels. There have been scientific studies connecting garlic consumption with heart health, as well as the treatment of stomach and colon cancers. Louis Pastuer used it to help prevent gangrene throughout World War I and II. It has been used in homemade mouth washes to prevent mouth infections, gargled to stop throat and respiratory infections. The Cherokee used it for coughs and croup. Sailors used it to prevent scurvy. It can prevent beriberi by increasing the body’s ability to absorb thiamin. It has been known to help treat cryptosporidium, and toxoplasmosis  in Aids patients. And it has been known to help treat a random assortment of chest infections, digestive issues and fungal infections like thrush.

I would love to continue pushing garlic, but in my research I feud that some people can be severely allergic to it and as always before making any  dietary changes a person should have a food allergy test, anaphylactic shock is not something to play around with. It has been known to cause burns when administered topically, it thins the blood and should not be eaten in conjunction with insulin shots unless cleared by a physician.  But none of these are common, and occurred when garlic was consumed in larger than normal quantities (more than 2 whole cloves a day for a prolonged period of time).

The  active anti fungal, bacterial and microbial qualities in garlic can be attributed to allicin and phytoncide. These two compounds exist in the garlic clove and are not activated until the clove its self is crushed. And while these properties are present in very large quantities, the longer they sit the less active they become. Peel, crush consume all within a half an hour to receive the most benefit of your garlic as well as taste. So while fresh garlic is not only delicious, if prepared properly can perform some truly amazing feats of health. Wild garlic is best, organic, then non organic fresh, and commercially prepared is best  avoided.

I say avoid not because it doesn’t taste as good (which is certainly true) but also because in the tests my lab partner and I preformed commercially prepared garlic was not only out preformed by fresh garlic (remembering the time sensitive nature of allicin and phytoncide) but grew some curious additions that were definitely not the bacteria we inoculated the dishes with. And by curious I mean fungal, colorful, fuzzy, gross!

This brings me back to many of the arguments being presented by organic, whole food eaters. While garlic is just one type of food, the point was pretty clear to me. As consumers we put our trust in the rules and regulation presented by the FDA. We assume that things bought in the grocery store are things that can and should be eaten. But as I find more evidence to the contrary, I find more I am spending more time in local produce markets and less time at grocery chains. In this case particularly,  I would like to know how the commercially prepared garlic is…prepared. I would very much like to know how these beautiful fungal colonies came to be and well as what kind. Bust mostly I would like to know what other presumably fresh looking foods offers this array of diversified hitchhikers so I can avoid them as well.