Many older adults are deficient in vitamin B12 and folate

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Key findings:

  • One in eight adults over 50 were low to deficient in vitamin B12 while one in seven were low to deficient in folate

  • The prevalence of low or deficient folate increased with age, from 14% among those aged 50-60 years to 23% among people over 80 years old. Low folate status was also more common in smokers, the obese, and those who lived alone

  • Low or deficient vitamin B12 was more common in smokers (14%), people who lived alone (14.3%) and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds (13%)

  • Use of both vitamin B12 and folic acid supplementation was low, with higher rates among women than men but less than 4% overall taking supplements of either vitamin

Read the source article here.

Vegetarian or ‘Flexitarian’ Diet Benefits Waistline and Pocket

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Adopting a vegetarian or semi-vegetarian diet to lose weight and improve health may not be as onerous as is typically assumed, as people can experience health benefits even if they only partially switch to plant-based foods. In addition, the diets may cost less than other healthy diets, suggests new research presented here at the European Congress on Obesity (ECO) 2018.

Access the full article here.

The comments are the best part of this article.

Risk of Type 2 Diabetes Among Lesbian, Bisexual, and Heterosexual Women: Findings From the Nurses’ Health Study II

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CONCLUSIONS Findings indicate that LB women develop type 2 diabetes at younger ages than heterosexual women. Higher BMI in LB women is an important contributor to this disparity. Public health and clinical efforts to prevent, detect, and manage obesity and type 2 diabetes among LB women are warranted.

Source article here.

Researchers Figure Out Why Coffee Is Good For The Heart

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The team focused on a protein called p27, which is known among other things to influence the cell cycle. The team found that caffeine triggered the movement of p27 into the mitochondria of heart cells in mice, and in particular, the migration of the heart’s endothelial cells, which line the blood vessels. How well the endothelial cells were able to migrate, they found, relied strongly on the presence of p27, which again is bolstered by caffeine. 

Read the Forbes article here.

Nutrition 2018: New data confirm health benefits of plant-based diet

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We present some top-line findings from these studies below. When reading these summaries, it is important to bear in mind that while the abstracts presented at Nutrition 2018 were evaluated and selected by a committee of experts, the papers have not undergone the same rigorous standard of peer review that is applied to scientific journals.

So, we should consider these findings as “preliminary results,” until they are properly assessed.

Read the abstracts at this link.

People with family history of alcoholism release more dopamine in expectation of alcohol

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People with a family history of alcohol use disorder (AUD) release more dopamine in the brain’s main reward center in response to the expectation of alcohol than people diagnosed with the disorder, or healthy people without any family history of AUD, reports a new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

This explains a lot.

Read about this small interesting study here.