Health Adda

Up until now, we have been brought up to believe that many of our physical traits such as shape (thinness or chubbiness), height, prone ness for metabolic illnesses, kidney stones or gout were all decided by either our genes that we inherit from our parents, or the environment in which we live and eat! A startling new discovery is now pointing to yet another “third” factor, something that that we could not have imagined five years ago! Let us start with a simple observation. We know that fatness, or obesity, for example, runs in families. It is therefore reasonable to assume that this trait got passed down from overweight parents to one or more children through “genes”. To explain why some sibs had more fat than others we invoked additional environmental factors such as gluttonous consumption of fatty and starchy food and perhaps a sedentary or lazy life style. But when you look around with greater scrutiny you often come across someone who seems a “one-off” in the fa...

While excessive computer use can lead to conditions such as attention deficit disorder, depression anxiety an d proneness to violence, recent research has shown that internet is not all that bad after all! The web may in fact be teaching our brains, subtly rewiring the way we respond, think and behave. The book iBrain Surviving the Technological Alterations of the Modern Mind, by Dr Gary Small, provides new insight through research undertaken at UCLA, and reveals that an hour of internet use every day may boost brain function. We learn to react more swiftly to visual stimuli, improve our ability to sift through large amounts of information, and decide what is important and what isnt”. This training is most evident when we scan our e-mails, quickly deciding and deleting what is spam, while focussing on those that are important. If you never use computers, then start, Professor Small recommends. As we found, even an hour a day can vastly improve yor information processing ...

If some of you are feeling low, suffering from fatigue and having a disturbed sleep cycle these days, you could be suffering from “Winter Blues”. In these foggy wintery times, when the days are not just cold, but dull and dark, you may find yourself feeling more lethargic, gloomy and down overall. A more serious form of this mood change during winters is called SAD or seasonal affective disorder. It is associated with sadness, dullness and negative thoughts that affect normal relationships at home or work. Usually seen in women, SAD sets in every year when the sun starts loosing its brightness to fog and clouds, the day begins to shorten and the temperature dips and remains low. The primary culprit of both the winter blues and SAD is the lower level of natural sunlight we are exposed to in winter. This leads to: 1. Dips in serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates mood 2. Disruptions in circadian rhythms (your body’s internal clock), which help control slee...

The buck-you-up cup that gets us going in the morning has indeed survived intense scientific scrutiny for 20 years regarding its health safety, and has emerged largely unscathed with, in fact, some benefits to claim instead. A recent study showed that moderate coffee drinkers were less likely to develop liver cirrhosis, degenerative brain disorders, and heart disease. Scientists, still groping for a cause of the enigmatic Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative condition of the brain that wipes off its victim’s memory and higher mental functions, were surprised to find that those who drank 3-5 cups of the brew a day had a lower chance of having the disease. A similar “protection” was also seen from another degenerative condition of the nerves and brain, called Parkinson ’s disease. Coffee, a drink made from brewing beans of the coffeacute plant, contains several chemical compounds that affect the human system. Apart from caffeine, the main constituent that pro...

Our health depends on four factors: genes. food, lifestyle and stress. As there is not much that can be done about your genetic make up it is the FOOD we consume that deserves our greatest attention. Our relation with food is paradoxical: essential for survival (cliché), but also emerging as the biggest killer of our times, pushing us towards diabetes, hypertension, fatty liver disease, heart disease, stroke and cancers that account for 70% of India’s u rban ailments and deaths. Scientists have listed these 4 foods as the main health hazards of our time: 1. Sugar This ubiquitous simple looking white shiny crystal found in every home in abundance that was our commonest calorie support during physical work is emerging as the modern age “poison ” in these sedentary times, dethroned fats to assume numero uno position. Its consumption goes far beyond our calorie needs and by continuously stimulating the pancreatic Beta cells to produce more and more insulin, ti...

I have often resorted to music for relaxation and prescribed it to patients for managing stress, but my recent escapade with it has been indeed startling. One evening when Neal, our emotional and sensitive 10 year old labrador, was restless and disturbed with the sounds of crackers and thunder, I happened to be exploring various types of music on my I-pad. My casual search for “relaxing music for dogs” indeed took me to a piano album that was meant to relax canines. When I started playing it on our Bose speaker, to my surprise, he did calm down and dozed off within 5 minutes. Neuroscientists have shown that some portions of the brain show electrical activity when we listen to music. One of the methods being used by them therefore is to use music to stimulate these portions that have been knocked down by stroke. Indeed regular exposure to music has been shown to enhance recovery of both mental and physical functions in stroke patients. Music, which started from 7 basic m...

Air pollution is no longer just another topic for conversation in parties or sloganeering by politicians. It is cutting our lives down by several years. It was a short trip to the pristine Garo hills in Meghalaya a year ago that made me realize how bad things were in northern India. The air and sky there seemed suddenly so clear as though I had wiped my glasses clean with a lens cleaner. There were a lot more shining stars in the sky at night. In  the day, I could see each tree even in the far away hills. And the colors were so much more vibrant – leaves in different glowing shades of green and flowers radiating bright red and yellow hues. The familiar haze was absent. What was more surprising was that I felt a lot more energetic. I could walk up the hills without feeling so drained. And my once familiar sense of humor was back. As soon as we landed back in Delhi we could “smell” the acrid air when the door of the aircraft was opened. The air here had toxins sixteen ti...