Years ago I was interviewing a scientist who was part of the team trying to crack the human genome, the so-called ‘blue print’ of our body. He talked about the small amount of the genome that coded for proteins that help determine our genetic profile. He then dismissed the other more than 90% as ‘junk DNA”. I asked him why he called it junk and he said because it doesn’t do anything. I asked if maybe it does actually have a role but we just haven’t figured it out yet. He looked at me as if I were an idiot.

Now, I may well be an idiot but in this case I wasn’t wrong. Today scientists acknowledge that non-coding DNA does seem to have some biological role or function – even if we haven’t figured it all out. So, much like antiques, what was considered junk yesterday is today seen to have value.

Bad reputation

Saints and sinners

The same may well be true of the much-maligned LDL, or so-called ‘bad cholesterol”.

A new study says bad cholesterol may not be all bad at all, and that in fact it may play an important role in our bodies, helping warn us when things are going wrong.

LDL got its name because it tends to build up in the walls of our arteries and slowly, over time, clog them up, increasing our risk of a heart attack. HDL – its blue-eyed, blond haired cousin – is known as ‘good cholesterol’ because it helps remove LDL from our ateries and clean up the mess that LDL left behind.

But now, a study in the Journal of Gerontology, says that LDL may have had a bad rap and that it might be needed to help us build stronger muscles and develop muscle mass, and that a lack of LDL – while seemingly good from a heart-protective perspective – might be bad for our overall health. In fact, in the news release accompanying the study the lead researcher – Steve Riechman of Texas A&M University – says “You simply can’t remove all the “bad” cholesterol from your body without serious problems occurring. It acts as a warning sign that something is wrong and it signals the body to these warning signs.”

Building up a strong argument

Riechman and his colleagues worked with more than 5o adults between the age of 60 and 69. These folks were in reasonable health but had not been physically active and none of them worked out regularly. The researchers put them through a series of fairly tough workouts and then measured their muscle mass and compared it to what it was before the workouts. They found that the folks who gained the most muscle mass also happened to have the highest levels of LDL.

Having strong muscles, particularly as you age, is important because without that you tend to be more vulnerable to falling, to breaking a bone, or just to being stuck indoors, unable to do anything fun. LDL seems to play a role in helping us develop those muscles, so while we need to make sure we keep our LDL under control to keep our hearts healthy, we shouldn’t go so overboard that it interferes with its ability to help our bodies in other ways.

Riechman says that people often say they want to get rid of the bad cholesterol “But the fact is, if you did so, you would die.”

Maybe bad isn’t so bad after all.

Just like our genome, maybe it’s not the DNA that’s junk, maybe it’s the science – or even the scientists.

We are surrounded by information and advice and suggestions about how to lead a better, healthier, happier life. And yet so many people are not only overweight but also miserable. So, maybe it’s time we tried a different approach. Here is an alternative prescription for a “better” life – courtesy of myunusual.com -   So maybe we should give up on offering people “good” advice and just give them advice they want to hear!

Q: I’ve heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life; is this true?

Heart healthy

A:   Your heart is only good for so many beats, and that’s it…  Don’t waste them on exercise . Everything wears out eventually. Speeding up your heart will not make you live longer; that’s like saying you can extend the life of your car by driving it faster.   Want to live longer? Take a nap.

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Q:   Should I cut down on meat and eat more fruits and  vegetables?

Moooo

A:   You must grasp logistical efficiencies. What does a cow eat? Hay and corn. And what are these? Vegetables. So a steak is nothing more than an efficient mechanism of delivering vegetables to your system. Need grain? Eat chicken. Beef is also a good source of field grass (green leafy vegetable). And a pork chop can give you 100% of  your recommended daily allowance of vegetable products.

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Q:   Should I reduce my alcohol intake?

A:   No, not at all. Wine is made from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine, that means they take the water out of the fruity bit so you get even more of the goodness that way. Beer is also made out of grain. Bottoms up!

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Q:   How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?

A:   Well, if you have a body and you have fat, your ratio is one to one. If you have two bodies, your ratio is two to one, etc.

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Q:   Aren’t fried foods bad for you?

A:   You’re not listening….Foods are fried these days in vegetable oil. In fact, they’re permeated in it. How could getting more vegetables be bad for you?

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Q:   Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?

A:   Definitely not! When you exercise a muscle, it gets bigger. You should only be doing sit-ups if you want a bigger stomach.

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Q:   Is chocolate bad for me?

A:   Are you crazy? HELLO Cocoa beans! Another vegetable. It’s the best feel-good food around!!

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Q:   Is swimming good for your figure?

Sperm whale

A:   If swimming is good for your figure, explain whales.

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Q:   Is getting in-shape important for my lifestyle?

A:   Hey! ‘Round’ is a shape! !

Breathing is one of the most basic of human functions. In fact, it is the most basic. Stop breathing and everything else stops too – pretty quickly. We all do it, every single second of every minute of every day of our lives. But often we are not even aware of how we do it, or the fact that we are doing it wrong.

Breathing deeply

How can you breathe wrongly you are probably asking? Well, it’s easy. You do it without even being aware of it.

Next time you are standing in line at Starbucks or waiting for a bus or train, or in line at the supermarket take a look at all the people around you and try to notice how they are breathing. With some people it’s easy to see, or even hear, particularly with someone who is overweight – their breathing is often labored because every movement is more tiring, more taxing on their body. You can hear them breathe, you can see their chest rising and falling, as if everything is a real effort.

With other people it’s less obvious but if you watch closely (not too closely, you don’t want them calling security on you!) you can see them breathing too. It’s often quite short, shallow breaths.

Then notice how you breathe. You might be surprised to notice that you usually breathe in short, shallow breaths too. What that means is that you are not taking in as much oxygen as you could, or as you should. And over time that can have a profound impact on your physical and emotional health.

Every breath you take

One of the most important elements in yoga, perhaps the most important, is the breath, noticing the breath, focusing on it, trying to make it long and deep and smooth. Why? Because numerous studies have shown that deep, controlled breathing can:

• Ease muscle tension
• Help you feel more relaxed
• Lower heart rate and blood pressure
• Increase lung capacity
• Help people with respiratory diseases like asthma and emphysema breathe more easily and reduce need for medication
• Ease anxiety

Not bad for something we all do every day eh! The problem is most of us don’t really breathe in a way that can help us maximize the health benefits of it. So here is one way to do just that.

Learning to breathe

1) Start by observing the way you normally breathe. You should notice that as you breathe in your abdomen rises and then falls when you breathe out. Watch this for a few moments to really get a sense of the rhythm and flow of your breathing.

2) Begin to deepen your breathing and extend that movement. So, as you breathe in do so more slowly and longer than normal. Let your abdomen rise as much as is comfortable, then as you breathe out slowly let it fall.

3) Don’t try to use or expand your lungs and chest while you are doing this, use only your abdomen.

4) Do this for 20 breaths.

That’s it.

Simple, but amazingly effective.

There's a book for everything - even breathing

A fresh breath of air

So try it a few times a day at first, see how it feels. Try it particularly after a stressful event, focusing on the sound and feel of your breath, and see how quickly it helps you calm down.

Then, as you get used to it, try it more and more often. Try it standing in line at Starbucks, or waiting for the bus, or in line at the grocery store. The more you do it the better you’ll get at it and the more benefits you’ll get from it.  It could prolong your life!

Sometimes it feels as if you can’t turn around without bumping into another study that tells you how wonderful exercise is. Most of it is stuff you probably already know – at least it is if you read Health and Simple regularly – but once in a while you come across some fun new benefit that makes you think “cool”.

We’ll get to that in a minute.

But first.. Just Being Fat Increases a Kids Risk of Heart Disease
Now, we all know that more and more children are becoming overweight or even obese. Not just here in the U.S. but throughout Europe and other developed and affluent nations. Now a new study says the consequences of that may be far graver than we thought.

The study, in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, found that as early as age 7, being obese may raise a child’s risk of future heart disease and stroke, even if they don’t have any other risk factors for cardiovascular problems such as high blood pressure.

That’s a wake-up call to parents, schools and pediatricians that they need to be more aggressive in working with kids with weight problems, to tackle them early and often so that those kids don’t grow up overweight or obese. The longer the problems persist, the greater the risk of future health problems.

Now, the news that fat kids start showing signs of heart disease early on is not new. But this adds an extra wrinkle. This shows that even if the kids are otherwise healthy and show no other indications of heart problems, just being fat shows they are heading for a world of health problems, unless we act quickly.

Move More Live Longer, and Healthier
OK, stop me if you heard this before. Exercise or physical activity is linked to a friggin’ host of wonderful things such as reduced risk of:

• arthritis
• falls
• fractures
• heart disease
• lung disease
• cancer
• diabetes
• obesity
• watching the Kardashians (OK, the evidence isn’t all in on this one but hopefully if you workout regularly you won’t have time to watch this dreadful, awful, scripted “reality” show) (note from Shirl:  I kinda like it…love the make-up!)

But now a bunch of new studies in the Archives of Internal Medicine show that exercise can have benefits in all sorts of fun, new ways

• Among women who are 70 or older, those who exercise regularly during middle age are healthier in many areas of health from less risk of chronic disease to lower risk of heart problems or dementia
• Exercise programs are associated with denser bones in older women. Why is that good? Because stronger bones mean less likely of fracture or other serious problems if you fall – either fall in love or fall in the shower
• Here’s my favorite. Resistance training can improve some cognitive skills in older women. This is such a cool study. The researchers found that doing resistance training just once or twice a week can not only improve attention and concentration skills among older women, but it can also improve conflict resolution skills. Amazing eh. Better conflict resolution skills. But then I figured that no one wants to argue with an old woman who’s built like Arnold Schwarzenneger so maybe that explains it. But what a cool granny eh!

One of the few things in life that I have ever really regretted is getting a full-body tattoo depicting scenes from the Battle of Gettysburg. Ah, the things you do at 17 after a night on the town with a crew from a visiting Portuguese warship.

To be honest, there are several parts of the battle I’ve never seen, though my closest friends tell me that Picket’s Charge – which snakes up my left hamstring and ends in, well, disaster – is particularly wonderful.

Anyway, I was reading this fascinating new study the other day that says many people are now getting medical tattoos and that doctors need to get up to speed on it.

The study, presented at the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists meeting, says many people are getting tattoos that alert people to their medical condition. It can be anything from a warning that you have diabetes to tell paramedics that you have a severe allergy, say to peanuts, that can render you unconscious quickly.

Anyway, the survey says many doctors don’t know anything about this and suggests they need to become better informed so that if one of their patients comes in and asks about it, they can have an informed discussion and decide on the best course of action.

If you have seasonal allergies, it might not be necessary. But if you have a deadly reaction to penicillin then you might want to consider it. Maybe on a background of a skull and crossbones.

That way you can look cool and be safe at the same time.

Fat Fish & Men’s Hearts

This study is important for many reasons. First, it proves men do have a heart, and secondly it says that chaps who eat salmon or other fatty fish just once a week can reduce their risk of heart failure.

You might have missed the study because you allowed your subscription to the European Heart Journal to slip. That’s understandable. Ever since they got rid of that centerfold shot of Surgeon of the Month it hasn’t been quite so much fun, but this study is worth reading.

The researchers followed 39,367 Swedish men between the ages of 45 and 79 from 1998 to 2004 (perhaps those boys from Abba were among the study group?) They found that men who ate fatty fish – such as salmon, mackerel, herring, whitefish and char – were 12 percent less likely than men who didn’t eat the fish to develop heart failure.

Perhaps our fast food friends will take note and create a heart healthy Big Mackerel burger. We can dream can’t we!

More on why wine is good for you

What better to wash that fish down with than a lovely glass of wine. Well, actually beer would be just as good.. but I digress.

So, normally when you are writing about dry stuff like medical research you tend to have to jump into the findings pretty quickly otherwise you risk losing our audience, but when the headline screams that wine is good for you you can take your sweet time about saying what they found.

But obviously not too long or you’ll jump to some cheap celebrity news site. So here you go.

A study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research found that people who drank wine before they were diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma had a reduced risk of death or relapse compared to people didn’t drink wine before they were diagnosed with the disease.

Now, you may never be diagnosed with non-Hodgkings lymphoma but can you really take that risk? So, stop reading this and open a bottle of wine and protect yourself.

It’s March. It’s cold out there. Or wet. Or snowy. Or all three. All I know is that by now the number of people who are still holding on to their New Year’s Resolution to be more active and go to the gym is declining as relentlessly as the Dow Jones.

But if you need a few helpful prompts to get back on the wagon, our ever-obliging chums in the world of obesity research have some fun stuff just for you.

First, being obese can really have an impact on the quality of your sex life. Now, that’s not just from the practical aspects of trying to be intimate when your partner fears for their very life in case you lie on top of them.

No, a study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM) says being obese can lower your sperm count and be linked to infertility in men. It can also lead to lower testosterone levels, lower sexual desire which equals reduced sexual pleasure.

The good news is that is not inevitable if you either

• avoid being obese in the first place or

• are obese but undergo gastric bypass surgery

The researchers followed 64 men over two years after they underwent a gastric bypass procedure called a Roux-en-Y, where they basically turn your stomach into a tiny pouch and bypass several feet of your digestive tract so you don’t absorb as much of the nutrients in the food.

It’s not an easy procedure to undergo, you have to be really disciplined in your diet and intake of supplements after the procedure to maintain the initial success of the operation. But if an improved sex life doesn’t serve as motivation I have no idea what will.

Obese Women May Endanger Ability to Have Babies

It’s not just men who are at risk of sexual problems if they are obese. Another study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism says women are too.

The researchers say women who are obese and trying to get pregnant take longer to get pregnant compared to non-obese women, even if they are young and have a regular menstrual cycle.

The researchers say being obese seems to cause changes in a woman’s ovaries which may be responsible for an egg’s inability to turn into an embryo.

Now Don’t Get Mad – That Won’t Help

We’ve known for a long time that being negative and not dealing well with stress can increase a person’s risk of sudden heart attacks. Now there’s even more bad news for folks prone to temper tantrums.

A study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that being angry could also be a risk factor for a heart attack.

Those clever people at Yale studied some 62 patients who had had heart attacks and now had implantable devices to help regulate their heart rhythms.

They found that people who had the highest levels of anger were up to 10 times more likely to have experienced an arrhythmia in their heart. Fortunately they had the implantable devices to help restore the rhythm.

But it is a reminder to hold your temper if you want to hold on to your heart.