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Did you know that sodium is the bad guy in salt, raising your risks for high blood pressure and other heart ills? Luckily for Americans, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is working to make it easier for you and your family to eat food with less sodium. Because more than 70% of the sodium you eat comes from processed foods and restaurant fare, the FDA is working closely with the food industry to slowly lower sodium levels across a wide range of foods. In the meantime, you and your family can also find ways to lower the amount of sodium you eat. The recommended limit for sodium is 2,300 milligrams (mg) per day for people aged 14 and older. Unfortunately, Americans consume about 3,400 mg of sodium each day, on average. That’s more than 50% above than the recommended limit, the FDA noted in a news release. Consuming too much salt can trigger high blood pressure, a leading cause of heart disease and stroke, and 90% of Americans are eating more sodium than is recommended. While almost 5 in 10 Americans have high blood pressure, almost 6 in 10 Black adults have the condition. Even children and adolescents eat too much sodium. Evidence shows that children who eat foods higher in sodium can carry those poor eating habits into adulthood, the FDA added. What can… read on > read on >

Folks who struggle to reduce their carb intake might be able to blame ancient DNA still lurking in humans, a new study suggests. Humans carry multiple copies of the salivary amylase gene (AMY1), which helps begin breaking down starch in the mouth — the first step in digesting carb-laden foods like bread and pasta, researchers said. The duplication of this gene might have occurred as far back as more than 800,000 years ago, long before the advent of farming, and it helped shape human adaptation to starchy foods, researchers argue. Amylase is an enzyme that breaks down starch into glucose, and it also gives bread its distinctive taste, researchers said. “The idea is that the more amylase genes you have, the more amylase you can produce and the more starch you can digest effectively,” said researcher Omer Gokcumen, a professor of biological sciences with the University of Buffalo. For the study, researchers analyzed the genetics of 68 ancient human bodies, including a person who lived 45,000 years ago in Siberia. They found that pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers carried an average of four to eight AMY1 copies in their genetic makeup, suggesting that people already had adapted to eating starchy foods long before they began growing foods like wheat and potatoes. AMY1 gene duplications also were found in ancient human ancestors like Neanderthals and Denisovans, the researchers added.… read on > read on >

Kids with good physical fitness are more likely to grow into teens with better mental health and brain function, a new study has found. Children who performed better at shuttle sprints scored better on cognitive tests as teenagers, researchers found. In addition, better cardio fitness in childhood added up to lower levels of stress and depression among teenagers, results show. “Our results should encourage policymakers as well as parents and guardians to see the significance of physical fitness more holistically, as poor physical fitness can increase mental health challenges and impair cognitive skills needed for learning,” said lead researcher Eero Haapala, a senior lecturer of sports and exercise medicine at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland. In the study, researchers followed the physical fitness of 241 Finnish kids for eight years, tracking them from childhood through to adolescence. Tests of physical fitness were compared to scores of kids’ thinking ability and emotional health. The findings, published recently in the journal Sports Medicine, showed that the more fit the kids were, the less stress and depression they reported as teenagers. This could be because kids with better physical health have more self-esteem and better mental resilience, researchers said. However, the researchers warned that kids who spend more times with screens might find the benefits of physical fitness blunted a bit. “The whole of society should support… read on > read on >

Depression can make it tougher for athletes to recover from a concussion, and vice versa, a new study finds. Student athletes who have both concussion and depression have significantly worse symptoms for both conditions, researchers reported recently in the journal Brain Research. What’s more, electrical signals in the brain are more disrupted among people with both concussion and depression than among those with only one of these conditions, the researchers noted. “We wanted to measure — both subjectively and objectively — whether these two neurological conditions also have a compounding effect on each other, and our study demonstrated that they do,” said lead researcher Owen Griffith, a doctoral candidate in kinesiology with Penn State. For the study, researchers studied 10 male and 25 female college athletes. All received EEG brain scans and underwent screenings for concussion and depression symptoms. Those who had both depression and concussion reported nearly twice as many symptoms of depression as those who had either condition alone, results showed. Likewise, those with both depression and concussion reported significantly worse and more prolonged post-concussion symptoms than those who suffered a concussion but no depression. The EEG brain scans showed that people had less coherent brain wave patterns if they suffered both concussion and depression, researchers said. These EEG measurements show that functional connectivity between brain areas is significantly disrupted in people with… read on > read on >

Is vaping finally losing its coolness for American teens? The latest tally of federal data finds that 550,000 school kids, mostly high schoolers, quit using e-cigarettes in 2024. Vaping rates fell from 10% of high school students in 2023 to 7.8% this year, “reaching the lowest level ever measured” by the National Youth Tobacco Survey, reported a team of researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Reaching a 25-year low for youth tobacco product use is an extraordinary milestone for public health. However, with more than 2 million youth using tobacco products and certain groups not experiencing declines in use, our mission is far from complete,” Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, said in a news release announcing the new data. Rates of use of traditional cigarettes are also extremely low: Only 1.4% of middle- and high-school kids now smoke, the report found. The only bit of bad news: A relatively new tobacco product on the scene, nicotine-laden tobacco pouches, which people place between the cheek and gum, are showing upticks in popularity among teens. Pouches now rank as the second most popular tobacco product, with 2.4% of high school students using them regularly. “Nicotine pouch sales have substantially increased nationwide since 2016,” noted the team led by CDC investigator Ahmed Jamal, and “nearly one million (890,000)… read on > read on >

Weight-loss and diabetes drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro or Zepbound appear to help people battle alcoholism and opioid addiction, a new study finds. People taking this class of drugs, called glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1), have a 50% lower rate of drunkenness than people with addiction disorders not on the meds, researchers reported Oct. 17 in the journal Addiction. GLP-1 patients also have a 40% lower rate of opioid overdose, results show. GLP-1 drugs “exhibited a strong protective association with alcohol intoxication among those with alcohol use disorder,” concluded the research team led by Fares Qeadan, an associate professor of biostatistics at Loyola University in Chicago. “Related prescriptions additionally displayed a strong protective association with opioid overdose among individuals with opioid use disorder,” the researchers added in a journal news release. GLP-1 drugs promote weight loss by mimicking a hormone produced in response to eating. Taking the drug helps stabilize blood sugar levels, decrease feelings of hunger and slow digestion, researchers noted. The brain region targeted by GLP-1 “overlaps with the same processes that are responsible for the development and maintenance of addictive behaviors such as chronic substance use,” the researchers said. For this study, researchers analyzed data on more than 500,000 people with a history of opioid addiction and 817,000 with a history of alcoholism. The data, drawn from 136 U.S. health systems, spanned… read on > read on >

A new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or other dementia often spurs a person to move from their home, new research shows. “One possible explanation is that individuals with dementia and their caregivers may choose to move closer to family or informal caregivers, either with independent housing arrangements or entering formal long-term care services,” wrote a team led by Momotazur Rahman, an associate professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown University in Providence, R.I. The study was published Oct. 14 in the journal JAMA Network Open. The researchers used Medicare data on the residential histories of over 1.6 million Medicare beneficiaries. All had received a diagnosis of either dementia, heart attack, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or colon cancer in 2016. Each person’s domicile (including nursing homes) was tracked over the eight years before and after the 2016 diagnosis — 2012 through 2020. In the four years before a dementia diagnosis, there was no difference observed in where people lived or whether they relocated, the study found. However, within the four years of a dementia diagnosis, 22% of people moved to a different U.S. county, Rahman’s group found. That’s a 40% jump in relocations compared to folks who’d been diagnosed with other conditions, such as heart attack or COPD. People with a dementia diagnosis were also more likely to move to another state, the study… read on > read on >

Doctors might be overprescribing sedatives to stroke survivors, a new study warns. About 5% of people are prescribed a benzodiazepine following a stroke, to help calm anxiety and improve sleep, researchers found. Benzodiazepine meds include Valium, Ativan and Xanax. But these prescriptions often are for pills that last longer than a week, which could hamper a person’s recovery and increase their risk of addiction. “We found a pattern of potential oversupply with these initial benzodiazepine prescriptions, which would be enough for patients to become long-term users or possibly addicted,” said researcher Julianne Brooks, a data analytics manager at Massachusetts General Brigham in Boston. “The benzodiazepine prescriptions given under these circumstances may lead to dependence.” For the study, researchers analyzed a decade’s worth of Medicare claims data on first-time prescriptions for benzodiazepines among more than 120,000 stroke victims aged 65 and older. “For this older age group, guidelines recommend that benzodiazepine prescriptions should be avoided if possible,” Brooks said. These sedatives increase the risk of falls, broken bones, memory problems, confusion and other harmful effects, the researchers said. “However, there may be cases where benzodiazepines are prescribed to be used as needed,” Brooks noted. “For example, to treat breakthrough anxiety, a provider may prescribe a few pills and counsel the patient that the medication should only be used as needed.” Researchers found that about 5% of… read on > read on >

Alzheimer’s disease might damage the brain in two distinct phases, a new study suggests. An early phase that occurs slowly and silently appears to lay the groundwork for a second, more widely destructive phase of Alzheimer’s, according to sophisticated brain scans. “The results fundamentally alter scientists’ understanding of how Alzheimer’s harms the brain and will guide the development of new treatments for this devastating disorder,” said Dr. Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging. Previous studies have suggested that the damage caused by Alzheimer’s occurs in several stages, characterized by increasing levels of neuron death, inflammation and accumulation of toxic proteins in the brain. But these results indicate there really are just two phases of Alzheimer’s, with most of the traditional symptoms and brain damage happening rapidly during the second phase, researchers said. Brain scans of 84 people suggest that the first phase occurs prior to any memory problems that might develop. During this phase, damage occurs to a type of brain cell called an inhibitory neuron that might trigger the neural problems that underlie Alzheimer’s, researchers said. Inhibitory neurons send calming signals to other cells, researchers said. Losing these cells might strip the brain of a key level of protection. The first phase also is marked by a slow accumulation of toxic protein plaques, activation of the brain’s immune system, and damage… read on > read on >

A young Israeli researcher who lost a sibling in the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians said the tragedy has spurred her to study the unique aspects of grief at the sudden loss of a brother or sister. The research by Master of Arts student Masada Buchris, of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal and will become part of her thesis. But it’s already showing that grief over lost siblings differs from grief felt by the loss of a parent, partner or child. “This research is deeply personal for me,” Buchris said in a university news release. “Losing my sibling on October 7th was a life-altering event, and it became clear that many bereaved siblings face ‘unrecognized grief.’ This study is the first step towards understanding the profound consequences of such a loss and ensuring that siblings receive the support they need.” Buchris’ work focused on 444 people who lost a sibling in the Oct. 7 attacks, which killed over 1,200 people, according to the U.S. Department of State. The bereaved siblings averaged about 32 years of age, and just over two-thirds interviewed were women. Buchris said she used various standard psychological measurements to gauge each person’s “emotional distress, negative thoughts and coping mechanisms.” Her study so far has discovered that grief at the loss of a… read on > read on >

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All Sauce from Weekly Gravy:

Want to Slowly Cut Down on Dietary Salt? Here’s How

Love Bread & Pasta? Humans’ Hunger for Carbs Has Ancient Roots

Fitness, Activity Boosts Kids’ Mental Health, Too

Sports Concussion Outcomes Can Be Made Worse By Depression

Vaping Rates Hit Record Lows for U.S. High School Students

Weight-Loss Meds Like Wegovy Could Battle Alcoholism

Older People More Prone to Relocating After Dementia Diagnosis

Are Stroke Survivors Getting Too Many Sedatives Like Xanax, Valium?

Silent Damage First: Alzheimer’s Disease Could Have Two Phases

Oct. 7 Tragedy Spurs Israeli Researcher to Study Grief Over Sibling Loss