Brain deterioration doesn't have to happen

Interesting story today about a women who lived to be 115 but had perfectly good cognitive functioning. According to the article:

A series of neurological and psychological examinations were performed when the patient was 112 and 113 years old. The results were essentially normal, with no signs of dementia or problems with memory or attention. In general, her mental performance was above average for adults aged 60 to 75.

Further,

As planned, her body was donated to science when she died at age 115. At the time, she was the world's oldest woman. Examination after death found almost no evidence of atherosclerosis (narrowing of the arteries) anywhere in her body. The brain also showed very few abnormalities--the number of brain cells was similar to that expected in healthy people between 60 and 80 years old.

Of course, I'm sure genetics has some role in her resilience to cognitive and cardiac dysfunction.

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Vitamin D helps prevent type 1 diabetes?

Interesting story today on sciencedaily.com, about a new study that found a correlation between sunlight exposure and incidence of type 1 diabetes in children.

Yesterday I posted about auto-immune disorders, of which type 1 diabetes is one having to do with dietary lectins. I wonder how these two hypothesis would relate if they're on the right track?

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Dietary lectins cause auto-immune disorders?

I watched this video about a week ago, but I'm just now getting around to blogging about it.

Basically, in the video below, Dr. Loren Cordain is discussing a model of auto-immune disorders in which he believes that they are all caused by dietary lectins in genetically susceptible individuals. So, what's a lectin?

From the current issue of the Paleodiet Newsletter:

The word “lectin” is derived from the Latin verb legere, meaning to “select,” and because of their high affinity to bind just about everything in biological systems, lectins indeed “select.” Lectins were originally defined by their ability to agglutinate (clump) erythrocytes (red blood cells) in tissue cultures, but more recently have been described by their ability to reversibly bind specific monosaccharide (simple) or oligosaccharide (complex) sugars. Lectins are omnipresent proteins found in the plant kingdom and likely evolved as toxic defensive mechanisms to ward off predators. Most dietary lectins are benign and non-toxic to humans, however the primary exceptions are those lectins capable of binding to gut tissue.

Read the rest here, although this particular article is about how lectins may contribute to heart disease, not auto-immune disorders.

If you, or anyone you know is suffering from an auto-immune disorder, you may want to check this video out.

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Brief and intense exercise good for the heart

I pick this up on science daily today, an article about a new study showing that brief, but intense exercise is equally good for heart health as low/moderate intensity exercise of 45+ minutes.

From the article

The research compared individuals who completed interval training using 30-second "all-out" sprints three days a week to a group who completed between 40 and 60 minutes of moderate-intensity cycling five days a week.

It found that six weeks of intense sprint interval exercise training improves the structure and function of arteries as much as traditional and longer endurance exercise with larger time commitment.

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