Old age

Elizabeth Renter ~ Energetic Walking Found To Increase Brain Size, Preserve Cognition

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NaturalSociety  March 30 2014

BriskWalkingTaking a brisk walk just a few times a week could be enough to increase the size of your brain and even help stave off age-related dementia, according to recent research. A new study from researchers with the University of Pittsburgh found those who walked for 40 minutes, three times a week reaped the benefits of a larger hippocampus—the brain’s “memory hub”.

“You don’t need highly vigorous physical activity to see these effects,” explained Dr. Kirk Ericson, lead researcher. “This may sound like a modest amount, but it’s like reversing the age clock by a couple of years.”

Previous research has associated walking in nature with a decreased risk of depression, prostate cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and more.

For the 120 participants aged 55 to 80 in this latest study, 40-minute walks three times a week resulted in hippocampus growth of up to 2 percent after one year. Another group, assigned to daily stretching exercises actually saw hippocampus shrinkage of 1.5 percent, coinciding with the natural age-related shrinkage that occurs in the brain. Continue reading →

The Future Of Planet Earth

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Global Research  December 12 2013

Dr. Bertell
Dr. Bertell

How grateful we must be for this magnificent gift of life and all we have needed to sustain it over the last hundreds of thousands of years! Yet, today it is under threats never felt before in its entire unfolding journey!“ Rosalie Bertell (Slowly Wrecking Our Planet, 2010)

We are presented with the chance of an awakening from the deceptive dream of a righteous way how things are working. We have the opportunity to recognize that in the end what counts are only the recognition and practice of the joy of living and the love of life! However, this life as it is possible on this earth – unique in our cosmos – is incredibly endangered today. If we manage to recognize this, then paradoxically we can grow toward the ability of perceiving and experiencing this joy and this love anew or maybe for the first time in its full dimension – and this time without any naivety, but rather as an answer to the question about what we can actually really do in face of this fear provoking threat towards life and the earth: Namely to stand up for them – beyond feelings of fear and anxiety – what else!?“ Claudia von Werlhof (Two Years Of Planetary Movement for Mother Earth: The Fear and – What to do?“, 6th Letter of Information of the PMME, June 2012)

Interviewer: I think you did a lot of research about the radiation, even when it is a low radiation where usually it is said: “Don’t worry, no problem at all”. What have you found out about the effects of low radiation in the long run?

Bertell: Well, my background is as a researcher. And I started by studying the effects of medical diagnostics x-ray, dental x-ray and chest x-ray. We had a huge population that was followed over three years. So we had about 64 million person years in the study, it is very big. If you have a big population like that and you have measurable x-ray exposures, you can see what happens in the population. I am coming from looking at medical x-rays, and then seeing environmental pollution as bigger.

With many other researchers studied the atomic bomb and they go down to these low levels and I said: Oh it´s not anything! So a lot depends on your perspective. So when you look at a large population and you start saying and you ask what happens when they were exposed to radiation, I think generally the question has been wrong. People ask: How many cancers does it cost. I don’t think that is the answer. Because if you look at live in general, the most obvious thing is we grow old. And we grow old in a kind of systematic way and even the cancers are old age diseases. So what I did was to change the question. And I said: How much medical x-ray would you need to be exposed to so that you get the equivalent of one year of natural aging. That is a very different research question. In order to measure natural aging I use the non-lymphatic leukaemia. They go up in a large population like compound interest, ranging from about age 15 every year there is a 3% to 4 % increase in the rate of the non-lymphatic leukaemia. It is just when you have money in the bank that interest is not very big when you are 16 or 20 years old, but by the time you get to 60 that is a large amount of money, it is also a large rate of this cancer. That is why they come at the end.

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