Acai berry - Six ways this superfood can change your health

If you've never heard of the acaiberry, you're missing out on the enormous benefits this superfood offers.

Acai berry contains anthocyanins and antioxidants - elements that have been linked to a slowing of the body's aging process. Studies indicate that acai berry has 10 times more antioxidants than grapes and fully twice as many as blueberries, making it extremely beneficial for those of us trying to thwart the aging process.

How does a boost of energy sound?  Acai berry is known to increase energy levels, and that's a plus considering the willy-nilly, hectic pace of life these days. There are times when we can all use some help maintaining enough energy to fulfill our daily life obligations (both at work and play). That is especially true for those of us who work a non-traditional shift, like day-evening, or evening-night shifts (we're pretty much designed to be awake during the day and asleep at night). Studies indicate regular Acai berry supplementation can boost your body's energy levels; increased energy levels mean more work gets done, making you more productive and valuable.

Keep your ticker ticking better. Acai berry has been found to improve overall cardiovascular health by improving the flow of blood and other nutrients to the heart and other organs. Acai berry is rich in omega-6 and omega-9 fatty acids, which are known to lower levels of bad cholesterol in the body. It's well known that bad cholesterol can accumulate in the form of plaque along the walls of your arteries and if not properly treated (or prevented in the first place), can eventually block blood vessels, causing stroke, heart attack or even sudden death. Acai berry also contains anthocyanins, the same substance found in red wine (which has also been shown to improve cardiovascular flow and function).

Good for hearts - and minds. Data shows that acai berry is good for both body and mind, by balancing the body's nervous system. "Most neuro-psychiatric problems arise from the imbalance of the nervous system," "Depression is also prevented if the stability of the mind and body is maintained. When the physical body is stable and functioning properly, the mind is also in harmony to the body preventing mental health problems..."

Take the extra pounds off. When eaten in conjunction with a healthy diet, acai berry can contribute to weight loss by boosting both metabolism and your energy levels. Also, the antioxidants, vitamins and fatty acids are much safer than many of the so-called "diet pills" and other products. What's more, acai berry is not known for harmful side effects.

Keep the extra pounds off. Once you reach your diet goals, you want to keep the pounds off; acai berries can help because, again, they work to increase metabolism in a way that is healthy and not harmful. Increased metabolism means food is digested faster and, thus, less likely to create fat stores.

Though research is limited, "Acai berries are widely touted as a so-called superfood, with proponents claiming that they are helpful for a variety of health concerns, including arthritis, cancer, weight loss, high cholesterol, erectile dysfunction, detoxification and improving general health," says registered dietician Katherine Zeratsky.

The one bad thing about acai berries is that in order to eat them fresh, you have to live in a region where they grow. That's because they are perishable within 24 hours of being picked. Lucky for Americans they can be freeze-dried, powdered and put into supplements.

Where does the acai berry rank on a list of superfoods? For Dr. Nicholas Perricone, noted dermatologist and nutritionist, the acai is number one.

"Harvested in the rainforests of Brazil, acai tastes like a vibrant blend of berries and chocolate. Hidden within its royal purple pigment is the magic that makes it nature's perfect energy fruit. Acai is packed full of antioxidants, amino acids and essential fatty acids. Although acai may not be available in your local supermarket, you can find it in several health food and gourmet stores (often in juice form). A new product featuring the unsweetened pulp is now also available, and I highly recommend that you choose this form of acai," he says.

Cold Temperatures and Chili Peppers Help Burn Fat

What do low temperatures and chili peppers have in common? They both could help burn fat, a new study shows.

Exposure to cold and consumption of chemicals found in chili peppers both appear to increase the number and activity of so-called brown fat cells, which burn energy, rather than store it as typical "white" fat cells do, said Takeshi Yoneshiro, a researcher at Hokkaido University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan.

The study is the first to show that brown fat activity can be induced in people who appeared to have very few or no brown fat cells, said Dr. Clifford Rosen, a professor of medicine at Tufts University who wasn't involved in the study. Participants in the study who were exposed to cold also had less "bad" white fat at the end of the experiments.

Cold burns fat

Brown fat cells are currently a subject of intense research as a target for anti-obesity drugs, said Dr. Soren Snitker, a medical researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who wasn't involved in the study.

In the new study, researchers exposed eight people with little or no brown fat cells to moderately low temperatures of 63 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours daily, over the course of six weeks. Compared with the control subjects, who went about their normal lives, the cold-exposed people had about 5 percent less body fat at the end of the study, and also burned more energy when exposed to cold, according to the study. The researchers also looked at people who ate capsinoids, which are normally found in chili peppers, for six weeks, and found they also burned more energy than the control group when exposed to cold, but didn't lose any more white fat than the control group.

Yoneshiro said the experiment might not have continued for long enough to see white-fat-burning effects of the compounds. A previous study that lasted 12 weeks found the capsinoid ingestion led to significant body fat decreases in mildly obese people.

The new results help explain the results from a recent study co-authored by Snitker, which found that people who ate capsinoids had increased levels of fat breakdown, and smaller waists after a six-week period, compared with people who took placebos.

The brown and the beige

It was once thought that brown fat, also known as brown adipose tissue (BAT), was present only in babies. But three research groups independently discovered in 2009 that brown fat exists in adults, concentrated in the upper chest and neck of some adults, Rosen said. It appears reddish-brown because it contains many mitochondria, cellular factories that release energy, Rosen said. In 2012, scientists found yet another type of BAT called "beige fat," which is a subset of brown fat but is formed from white fat cells. Rosen said that the "brown fat" cells induced by cold and capsinoids are indeed likely beige fat, because they don't show up on scans used to detect concentrated regions of brown fat cells.

"The most interesting thing about this study from a treatment point of view is the capsinoids," said Jan Nedergaard, a physiologist at Stockholm University in Sweden who wasn't involved in the study. Reduction of fat from cold exposure was expected, he said, but "as everybody realizes, that's a difficult thing to put into practice."

Drug development?

The study is exciting because it suggests chemicals that induce brown fat could be used to fight obesity, although they'd probably work better at keeping healthy people from becoming fat, rather than making obese people skinny, Nedergaard said. "Everybody would like to take a fat person and make him slim, but that demands a high-burning capacity that BAT probably doesn't have."

Capsinoids appear to induce brown fat in the same way as cold, by "capturing" the same cellular system that the body's nervous system uses to increase heat production, Yoneshiro said. Drug developers want to use similar drugs to activate this system, but capsinoids themselves probably won't be used because they already exist in nature and thus cannot be patented, a major way that pharmaceutical companies make money, Nedergaard said.

Capsinoids come from "sweet" chili peppers that don't taste hot, but produce some of the same physiological effects — for example, producing sweat, Nedergaard said.

Musical Training Has Positive, Long-Term Effects on Brain Function

Studies by researcher Nina Kraus have shown that lifelong musical training is associated with the ability to hear and understand sounds in a noisy environment, even as we age. But what about people who have had limited musical training — four or five years of piano or guitar lessons as a child, for example? A recent study by Kraus's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University suggests that even limited exposure to music may help inoculate us from some types of age-related declines in brain functioning. The study found that four to 14 years of musical training early in life is associated with faster neural timing in response to speech. Test subjects listened to a synthesized speech sound ("the syllable "da") by itself - without any other competing noise - and also amid other, background noises. She found that the group of test subjects who had had some musical training responded neurally to the syllable both in quiet and in noise more quickly than did the groups of test subjects without musical training. This result is relevant especially to older people, who often show difficulty processing fast-changing speech elements - consonant to vowel transitions, for example.

Other studies by Kraus have shown that musical training correlates to a better ability to pick out key sounds, such as spoken words, in noisy environments (see video), and a better ability to recognize the emotional content of sound.

Kraus is the Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology at Northwestern University. Much of her research is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Eating chocolate 'reduces body fat level'

Despite being high in calories, chocolate might actually encourage lower levels of body fat, according to a recent study.

Researchers at the University of Granada, Spain measured the body fat of nearly 1,500 adolescents from around Europe between the ages of 12 and 17 years.

They found that regardless of their sex, age, diet and how much they exercised, subjects who ate lots of chocolate tended to be slimmer than those who did not. According to Magdalena Cuenca-Garcia, the study's lead author, this could be down to the fact that chocolate is rich in healthy flavonoids, especially catechins.

"These compounds have important antioxidant, antithrombotic, anti-inflammatory and antihypertensive effects and can help prevent ischemic heart disease," she explained.

However, the researchers stressed that chocolate can still be unhealthy if not eaten in moderation.

"As they say, you can have too much of a good thing," they said.

Brain may play crucial role in development of type 2 diabetes

New research has found that the brain may play an essential role in glucose regulation and the development of type 2 diabetes.

In a study, researchers suggested that glucose regulation is controlled by coordinated interactions between both the brain and insulin-producing tissues in the pancreas – a theory that could eventually pave the way for new treatments for the disease.

Based on a review of both human and animal studies, the researchers speculated that while the pancreas reacts to increased levels of blood glucose by releasing more insulin, the brain is also heavily involved in helping the body maintain normal glucose levels. Type 2 diabetes occurs when both of these systems fail.

Currently, treatments for type 2 diabetes rely almost exclusively on methods that attempt to either increase insulin or regulate the body’s sensitivity to insulin. However, if the researchers are correct in their hypothesis that failures in the brain are crucial to the development of type 2 diabetes, it could lead to new, more effective methods by which to treat – or even reverse – the disease.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it is estimated that 50 percent of the population will have developed diabetes by 2050.

Drink Water, Lose Weight

One of the most familiar pieces of weight-loss advice is also among the simplest: Drink lots of water. It makes you feel fuller, for one, so you don't eat as much junk later on (and maybe you won't drink sodas or other sugar-filled drinks).

Now, a new study adds some scientific heft to that advice. People who drank more water, researchers found, stayed slimmer than those who drank less. The study followed more than 120,000 people for about two decades, checking in on their lifestyle habits and weight every four years.

Overall, people in the study gained a small amount weight during each four-year span. But each cup of water a person drank per day meant they gained, on average, nearly three-tenths of a pound less during that time. The more water they drank, the less weight they put on – a noteworthy finding for a study that, for most participants, spanned a large chunk of middle age.

Fruit juice and sugar-sweetened beverages like soda, on the other hand, made participants gain more weight; each cup per day led to half a pound and four-fifths of a pound more weight gain in four years, respectively. Subbing water for a sugary drink, then, would likely have an even bigger impact, says An Pan, a public health researcher at the National University of Singapore who helped lead the study. Swapping a 12-ounce soda for a large glass of water every day would lead to a 1.25-pound smaller weight gain over four years.
If you tire of constantly sipping plain water, the researchers found that coffee had a similar slimming effect, too – though unlike water, it's easier to drink too much joe, which can have some downsides.

New Drug May Someday Battle Obesity and Diabetes

A new diabetes drug may one day perform double duty for patients, controlling both their blood sugar levels and helping them lose weight, researchers report. In mouse trials, doctors found the drug prompted weight loss, in addition to managing blood sugar levels.

"That [weight loss] is not what this drug was designed to do, but it's a very attractive additional benefit," said study co-author Richard DiMarchi, a research chemist at Indiana University in whose lab the drug was created. The injectable medication is based on a single molecule that combines the properties of two hormones that send chemical signals to the pancreas, said DiMarchi. "They signal to the pancreas that you are taking a meal," DiMarchi said. "The pancreas then responds by secreting insulin and to synthesize additional amounts of insulin for subsequent use."

People with type 2 diabetes have lower levels of these pancreas-signaling hormones, which are known as incretins, explained Dr. John Anderson, president of medicine and science at the American Diabetes Association. "The incretin defect in type 2 diabetes is well known, and it's only within the last few years we have had agents to treat it," Anderson said.

Human and primate trials revealed that the new drug controls blood sugar with fewer side effects than other diabetes medications. Those side effects can include nausea, vomiting and stomach pain. "In this study, the degree of gastrointestinal discomfort is much more modest than is experienced in conventional drugs," DiMarchi said. "We get beneficial glycemic control with this combination drug, and it seems to be with less adverse drug effect."

The medication combines the action of the hormones GLP-1 and GIP. Current diabetes medications of this sort target GLP-1 receptors in the body; studies involving GIP have produced mixed results. GLP is known to suppress appetite, and DiMarchi said the weight loss observed in mice might be occurring because the second hormone, GIP, is somehow "turbo-charging" that appetite suppression.

In the mouse trials, a drug based on GLP-1 alone decreased body weight by an average 15 %. But the new drug combining GLP-1 and GIP decreased body weight by nearly 21 % as well as controlling blood glucose and decreasing appetite.

A six-week human trial involving 53 patients with type 2 diabetes found that the medication effectively controlled their blood sugar levels. However, the researchers did not note any change in weight during the relatively short study period. The higher potency of the combined molecule suggests it could be administered at lower doses than other incretin-based medications, reducing side effects and making the drug easier to take.

"Currently approved drugs are quite effective," DiMarchi said, "but they are insufficient in normalizing glucose, and they certainly don't cause much loss of body weight."

High Smog Levels Tied to Serious Heart Problems

High levels of particulate air pollution - commonly known as smog - raise the risk of heart attack and other serious heart problems, according to a new study.

Particulate air pollution refers to tiny particles in the air known as PM10. The European Union's PM10 safety threshold is 50 micrograms per cubic meter (mcg/m3), but this study suggests that the harmful effects of PM10 may occur below that level.

The researchers compared data on average daily concentrations of PM10 in Brescia, Italy, between 2004 and 2007 and daily hospitalizations for cardiac events during that period. They found a significant association between PM10 levels and the number of admissions for heart attack and other acute coronary syndromes (an umbrella term for conditions where blood supply to the heart muscle is suddenly blocked), heart failure, worsening heart failure and heart rhythm disorders. For every 10-microgram increase in PM10 levels, there was a 3 percent increase in hospital admissions for serious heart problems, according to the study.

The researchers also found that men and people older than 65 were especially vulnerable to having acute coronary syndromes or heart rhythm disorders with increasing PM10 levels. In addition, people who had previously been hospitalized for heart problems were more likely to be admitted to the hospital with heart problems when PM10 levels were higher. "We need to pay particular attention to protecting patients who are older and who have had a previous heart attack or other heart problem, as they are more vulnerable to having another cardiac event," study author Dr. Savina Nodari said.

"Previous studies support the hypothesis that air pollution may increase cardiovascular-event rates because PM10 can induce processes that are bad for the heart, including inflammation and coagulation," she added.

Nodari said the current PM10 threshold is too high, and the cutoff should be reduced to 20 to 30 mcg/m3 or less, "because, like cholesterol, the risk is continuous -- the higher the levels the greater the risk. If we can obtain a lower level of PM10 probably we will lower the risk of heart disease."

Secondhand smoke really does cause heart attacks

Even legislation declaring only some public places off-limits to smoking reduced the rate of heart attacks by 11 percent, researchers have found. The greatest benefits were seen among women, all adults between the ages of 65 and 74, and non-smokers.

Coronary heart disease is the number one killer in the world, and was responsible for 9.2 percent of all deaths in Spain in 2011. More than 50,000 people were hospitalized in that year for heart attacks (acute myocardial infarctions) alone. Researchers estimate that 20 percent of all heart disease in European countries is caused by tobacco smoke.

"Smoking and second-hand smoke are major and preventable public health hazards and risk factors for coronary heart disease, the single most common cause of death and morbidity worldwide," the researchers wrote.

Ban provides immediate benefits

In 2006, a law went into effect in Spain banning smoking in the workplace or in any hospitality establishment larger than 100 square meters. It also imposed new regulations on the advertisement and sale of tobacco, but did not regulate smoking in hospitality establishments smaller than 100 square meters. Smoking in such establishments was finally banned in 2011.

To assess whether the partial ban had reduced the rate of heart attacks in the intervening years, the researchers analyzed information on 3,703 heart attacks that occurred in the province of Girona between the years of 2002 and 2008. Heart attacks occurring between 2002 and 2004 (before the implementation of the partial ban) were analyzed separately from those occurring between 2006 and 2008 (after the implementation).

Prior studies on the connection between second-hand smoke and heart attacks have typically used data from hospitals. The limitation of such studies; however, is that only one-third of all heart attacks occur in hospitals. In the current study, researchers used a population-wide database to gather more accurate results.

They found that the total heart attack rate in the province dropped by 11 percent following the law's implementation, even among those not treated at a hospital. Among nonsmokers, the rate of heart attacks was reduced by 15 percent, whereas among those over age 65, it was reduced by 18 percent.

The researchers believe that "the population group that has benefited the most from the law passed in 2006 is that of non-smokers, since their passive exposure to tobacco smoke has decreased."

The researchers were unable to study the effects of the more complete public smoking ban implemented in 2011, but they believe that it is likely to reduce heart attack rates even further.

Coronary heart disease is characterized by an insufficient blood supply to the heart. This may eventually starve the heart of oxygen, causing the cell death known as a heart attack. Coronary heart disease is estimated to cost the Spanish public approximately 1.46 billion Euros per year. 

Vitamin D deficiency linked to childhood obesity

The role of vitamin D is increasingly recognized as important for maintaining health, not only for metabolism of calcium in bone health, but also for other conditions as well. This fact makes the current widespread vitamin D deficiency all the more compelling, and a study published in the May issue of Journal of Adolescent Health has found that serious deficiency and insufficiency of vitamin D exist among obese adolescents.

The retrospective study, done at Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, RI, looked at blood levels of 25(OH) D for 68 obese adolescents, and found that all of the girls had low vitamin D, with 72 percent deficient and 28 percent insufficient. Among the boys, 91 percent had low levels, with 69 percent deficient and 22 percent insufficient.

Pediatrician Zeev Harel, lead author of the study, said, "It is possible that the association between obesity and low vitamin D status is indirect, arising from obese individuals having fewer outdoor activities than lean individuals, and therefore, less exposure to sun. Likewise, is it also possible that obese individuals do not consume enough foods that contain vitamin D." Other studies have also found a link between obesity and vitamin D deficiency, possibly from storage of vitamin D in fat tissue

The Hasbro Children's Hospital study also found a disturbing difficulty in treating the problem. About two thirds of the patients had follow-up measurements of vitamin D after treatment, and of that group, only 28 percent reached normal levels. The other patients did not attain a normal level even after multiple treatments.

Harel said of this problem, "The prevalence of low vitamin D status among obese adolescents in this study is greater than previously reported for this age group. It is concerning to us that only 28 percent of the adolescents were able to reach normal vitamin D levels through one course of treatment of the recommended dose of vitamin D, while the other 72 percent failed to normalize their levels even with repeat treatments."

All individuals with low vitamin D are at increased health risks. There is evidence linking healthy levels of vitamin D to protection against certain types of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune disorders, as well as other diseases. Vitamin D is also thought to help boost the immune system to protect against infections. Adverse health conditions in adolescents have been found linked to low levels of vitamin D