The Star Online: Lifestyle: Health
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Health |
- Jocks beat scholars in brain test
- Marriage is good for the heart: study
- Loading up your day’s essentials with goodness from nature
| Jocks beat scholars in brain test Posted: 31 Jan 2013 10:13 PM PST Professional athletes learn quicker than university students to unravel complex visual data, said a study Thursday that challenges the age-old brains-vs-brawn cliche. Jocks are brainy too -- in fact they are smarter in some dynamic contexts, concludes the paper in the journal Nature Scientific Reports. "They appear to be able to hyper-focus for short periods of time resulting in extraordinary learning functions," wrote study author Jocelyn Faubert from the University of Montreal School of Optometry. "Professional athletes as a group have extraordinary skills for rapidly learning unpredictable, complex dynamic visual scenes." For the study, Faubert put 102 professional sportsmen, 173 amateur athletes, and 33 non-sporty university students through a 3-D visual test. The subjects were about 23 years old on average. The athletes included 51 English Premier League footballers, 21 National Hockey League ice hockey players and 30 French Top 14 rugby stars. Test participants had to track multiple moving objects on a screen with their eyes. They were not required to employ any motor skills. The test was repeated 15 times over a minimum of five days. The top athletes performed best from the word go, and had by far the steepest learning curve as the experiment progressed, wrote Faubert. The amateurs started with similar results to the students in the first test, but then drew ahead in terms of learning speed. "This demonstrates that a distinguishing factor explaining the capacities of professional athletes is their ability to learn how to process complex dynamic visual scenes," said the paper. "This gives us an insight as to what is so special about the elite athletes' mental abilities, which allows them to express great prowess in action." Faubert said she had been "very" surprised by the findings because previous attempts to explain athletes' superior abilities through standard cognitive tests had failed. The test had also unexpectedly shown that the athletes' quick-learning ability was not limited to their particular expertise, she added. The test was subject-neutral and had no sports context so that athletes would not have the benefit of familiarity. "The pros are much superior than scholars in our highly complex mental task. In other words, they are smarter (at) learning how to interpret the real world in action," said Faubert. The skills tested would also be used in dynamic, multi-tasking scenarios like driving or crossing the street -- things at which another recent study showed athletes to be better. "It is clear from these results that such mental processing and learning skills should be acknowledged as one of the critical elements for performance outcomes in sport...," said the paper. The study could not say whether the superior learning ability was innate or acquired through practice, nor whether it was unique to athletes. Previous studies had shown that parts of an athlete's brain thicken the more they train, while another found a change in a brain region that regulates motion perception. -- Relaxnews |
| Marriage is good for the heart: study Posted: 31 Jan 2013 08:44 PM PST Married people are less prone to heart attacks than singletons and more likely to recover if stricken, according to a Finnish study published Thursday. Researchers collected data on 15,330 people in Finland between the ages of 35 and 99 who suffered "acute coronary events" between 1993 and 2002. Just over half of the patients died within 28 days of the attacks. The team found that unmarried men in all age groups were 58-66 per cent more likely to suffer a heart attack than married ones. For women the nuptial benefit was even greater -- single women were 60 to 65 per cent more likely to suffer acute coronary events, the Finnish researchers wrote in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. For both genders, wedlock also considerably lowered heart attack mortality. Unmarried men were 60-168 per cent and unmarried women 71-175 per cent more likely to die of a heart attack within 28 days, compared to their unhitched counterparts. "Single living and/or being unmarried increases the risk of having a heart attack and worsens its prognosis both in men and women regardless of age," the team wrote. "Most of the excess mortality appears already before the hospital admission and seems not to relate to differences in treatment." Speculating on the reasons, the team said married people may have a higher, combined income, healthier habits and a bigger support network. "It may be assumed that resuscitation or calling for help was initiated faster and more often among those married or cohabiting," said the authors. They could also not discount the psychological effects of marital bliss. "Unmarried people have been found to be more likely depressed and according to previous studies depression seems to have an adverse effect on cardiovascular mortality rates," lead author Aino Lammintausta from the Turku University Hospital told AFP. Previous studies on the health benefits of matrimony often had sketchy data on women and older people, the researchers said. The new study showed that marriage protected women even more than men from out-of-hospital heart attack death. The study included people from different race groups and social backgrounds and the findings "can roughly be thought to be applicable in other western countries," said Lammintausta. Relying on data from population records, the team could not directly measure the effects for unmarried, cohabiting couples. - Relaxnews |
| Loading up your day’s essentials with goodness from nature Posted: 31 Jan 2013 03:31 PM PST Protein is found in every single cell in the body. An important building block for bones, muscles, cartilage, skin and blood, high quality protein provides all of the essential amino acids needed by healthy adults and growing children. People who don't get enough of this important macronutrient will lack energy, and they will see their muscles and immune systems weaken. To help people meet their daily protein needs, leading direct selling company Amway is introducing NUTRILITE™ All Plant Protein Powder which helps to load up your day's essentials by unlocking more goodness from nature. The unique tri-blend of soy, wheat and pea provides the right combination of proteins and amino acids to keep you feeling healthy and energetic, without animal products or dairy side effects. "As one of the macronutrient foundations of a balanced diet, protein needs to be consumed each day to maintain health," says Gene Maly, Senior NUTRILITE Research Scientist. "Most people have difficulty consuming the recommended amount of protein in their diet, which is why adding a high quality protein source, like NUTRILITE All Plant Protein Powder, helps people give their bodies the fuel to power their cells, provide energy to their bodies, and with the recommended amount of 25 grams of soy protein per day, also helps to reduce cholesterol." But most people associate protein with meat, poultry, eggs and dairy. In today's world, that isn't always what people want to hear. Many people want to incorporate as many plant-based options as they can into their diets. A simple observation Many of the essential amino acids found in NUTRILITE's previous version of Protein Powder came from dairy, essentially from cows. In the history of NUTRILITE, observing the diet of cows signified an "ah-ha" moment for its founder, Carl Rehnborg. After a return from China in the early nineteen hundreds he made a simple observation that the healthiest cows ate a diet of alfalfa and water -- they had shinier coats, they produced the most milk, and they gained the most weight. He realized that for cows to thrive, they needed the essential nutrients found in plants like alfalfa. Today, NUTRILITE scientists have taken Carl Rehnborg's observation one step further by going back to the natural source, creating a plant-based protein powder that provides all of the essential amino acids people need in their diets to maintain cellular health throughout their body. This simple idea has resulted in NUTRILITE All Plant Protein Powder. Protein keeps us feeling healthy by acting as a cell repair nutrient, it provides energy by producing hemoglobin – the red blood cells that carry oxygen throughout our bodies, it builds lean muscle, and it supports the immune system by manufacturing antibodies, the substances that fight off illness. - This article is brought to you by Amway |
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