Eat Less Processed Red Meat To Live Longer

Picture I took at our local NTUC

Wanna live a couple of years longer? Than you need to stop eating processed meat as it decreases your lifespan by about 2 years.

Processed red meat includes sausages (or your favourite hot dog), luncheon meat (a popular local favourite), cold cuts, ham and liver pate to name a few.

How do I know this? Well I didn't make this up, I read a paper in which 75,000 people were studied from 1998 to 2012. They were asked about the frequency and types of red meat in the diet. Researchers measured total red meat consumption (fresh pork, beef and veal) and processed red meat consumption listed above as a subset.

More than 22 % of the participants died during the study period. Those who didn't eat much meat products (less than 100 grams or about 3.5 ounces per day) had similar survival rates as vegetarians. Those who ate more than 100 grams per day had a lower life expectancy as the quantity of red meat grew larger.

Those eating processed red meat had the highest mortality rates. The researchers concluded that eating non processed red meat alone was not associated with shorter survival rates though.

References

Bellavia A, Larsson SC et al (2014). Differences In Survival Associated With Processed And With NonProcesssed Red Meat Consumption. Am J C Nutrition. DOI: 10.3945/ajcn.114.086249.

Used to eat this often when I was a kid (Picture from Flickr)

Can Running Help Stop You From Eating Junk Food?

My personal favorite

Any of you having a craving for junk food? I do, all the time. In fact as I'm writing this, I am having a huge craving for potato chips.

How do I not succumb to this urge? Well, it seems that people whose brains have a strong dorsal-lateral prefontal cortex (DLPFC) section may have greater self control when it comes to eating behaviour.

What the heck is that?

Well, the DLPFC is near the front portion of your head in case you were wondering. Researchers zapped that area (with a coil placed near the subjects scalps near the hairline) to temporarily decrease brain activity in the DLPFC of the subjects in their study.

Guess what? When the participants were zapped in that area, they had more food cravings and also ate more junk food compared to subsequent tests when they received a sham zap.

With that zap, the participants were almost totally interested in high calorie snacks (Pringles potato chips and milk chocolate in the study).

In fact they mostly ignored the more healthy food options that were also available.

The researchers suggest that improving your DLPFC function can improve dietary self control, prevent obesity and may even help manage Type II diabetes.

How to you make your DLPFC function better? Studies have shown that running and other aerobic exercises are known to enhance DLPFC function. Getting adequate sleep and avoiding alcohol have also been shown to help.

Hmmm, this is strange. When I used to train a lot previously, I would often eat all chips, chocolate, drink lots of Coke etc. I thought all that training was supposed to help strengthen my DLPFC??

Now that I'm not racing and training much I would not dare to eat as much for fear of putting on too much weight. I guess after my accident, I've changed my eating habits as well.

Reference

Lowe CJ, Hall PA et al (2014). The Effects Of Continous Theta Burst Stimulation To The Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex On Executive Function, Food Cravings And Snack Consumption. Psych Med. Sep 76(7): 503-511. DOI: 1097/PSY.0000000000000090.

Introduction To Kinesio Taping 130914

Due to many requests by some of our readers and patients, Sports Solutions hosted the Introduction to Kinesio Taping today at our clinic. Some couldn't come though, they went to watch our National Netball team in action as the girls were playing the semi finals against rivals Malaysia today.

Today's  session was taught differently compared to previous introduction courses. Specific regions of the body were addressed with specific techniques taught, a fair bit being KT 2 concepts.

Here are some pictures from this afternoon.

All ready to begin

getting ready to choke Priscilla

Jolyn taking over teaching duties

Helping Jolyn out

All the participants left very happy with specific techniques they can use from the course. Email us at admin@sportssolutions.com.sg if you're keen to learn more.

An Amazing Photo

Picture by Arnold Gold of the New Haven Register

Near the 10 km mark, a spectator at the New Haven 20 km road race was so inspired by what she saw as the lead men ran by that she joined lead pack of eight runners, probably surprising them more than a little.

The spectator ran along in her flip flops, perhaps trying to feel how the race pace of 5:00 a mile felt like and to see how long she could hang with the boys.

Hopefully she got inspired enough to start running regularly.

How about you?