LiveLongAgeWell

Yes.

Last post I presented evidence that the act of chewing gum can temporarily improve short-term memory and test-taking performance (click to read).

These brain benefits are based on relatively new research, including functional MRI scans, but other well established research has demonstrated that chewing gum can improve your oral health; the condition of your teeth and gums. If you have healthy gums and good oral health, you are less likely to get sick.

People with poor dental nutrition, meaning untreated cavities and inflamed gums, are more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease. The current thinking is that some heart and blood vessel disease, including atherosclerosis, is an inflammatory process, and if your gums and teeth are not in top condition—meaning they are chronically infected—your oral tissues will be slowly leaking toxic, infectious products into your bloodstream. These toxins then are slowly irritating, inflaming the walls of your blood vessels and leading to more vessel damage and making you more prone to heart attacks and strokes.

As an otolaryngologist, I saw tens of thousands of mouths over 25 years, and usually I got a fantastic clue as to how healthy someone was just by looking at their teeth and gums. Not always, but usually, if the gums were in good shape, so was the person, and if the person had bad oral hygiene, their body was not in such great shape either.

Saliva is a good thing; in general the more the better. One of the causes of chronic gum infection and inflammation is dry mouth. Typically the more saliva you make, the healthier your mouth, and one reason chewing gum is healthy is because it stimulates saliva production. Saliva dilutes the acidic environment in your mouth that follows a meal—it washes away and neutralizes the acid and food particles that lead to chronic infection and dental plaque. The calcium and phosphate in saliva can strengthen your dental enamel. Further, low-grade gum irritation makes you more prone to diabetes, and if you already have diabetes, gum infection will make your blood sugar more difficult to control. Finally, a dry mouth makes bad breath more likely.

Even the normally conservative American Dental Association has endorsed certain chewing gums, and you can see which those are by clicking here. They typically contain tooth-friendly sugars like xylitol or sorbitol. The recommended “dose” is that you chew for up to 20 minutes after a meal. It’s particularly a good idea after you eat out—for example after lunch at work—and don’t brush until hours later.

Look for a gum with “Whitening” on the label. They cost more than regular gums, but are worth it. The only side effect I can think of is the act of chewing gum can in some people strain the TMJs (temporo-mandibular joints), so watch for any pain in front of your ears, and discuss any concerns with your dentist. Otherwise, give gum a try. It’s cheaper than most all medications, and a lot safer. It potentially can improve your oral health, your general health, your mental health, and your social life…as we get older, breath becomes more of an issue, and whatever we can do to combat bad breath and allow people to come physically closer, the better.

Last Friday’s post was somewhat directed towards dense research (aging theory, anti-inflammatories, vitamin D, avoiding diabetes) so today, let’s go lighter, simpler, and to a topic that probably is more important than the heavy science issues, at least concerning your mind and memory.

I have a theory that much unnecessary (I might say, premature) aging occurs just because you think you should age in a certain way, at a certain rate. Maybe you observed such aging changes in your parents or contemporaneous friends, and now you feel this is how it should be for you too. But it doesn’t have to be. In many areas, if you really believe that you can maintain your abilities as you get older, you can. I’ve seen it many times. Certainly not in all aspects of aging, but it’s true in many: your mindset is most important. It’s not so complicated.

And this recent simple research from North Carolina State University, published in Experimental Aging Research, is directed towards that theory. Basically, two groups of older individuals were given memory tests to see how well their minds were functioning. Before and during the tests, half of them were essentially told (or in subtle ways reminded): “you are old”, and the other half were not biased with that rubbish at all…they just were allowed to do the memory tests.

The study found that those older people who were subtly told: “we are young researchers doing memory tests on you old people” did much worse on the tests than the older people who just took the test without any such biased and unnecessary comments. So as you, and we, all get older, we will be subjected to such biases and comments (be ready so you can reject them), and if you just believe in yourself, you’ll do much better…

I could only find a short abstract of the study (I couldn’t get access to the full report), so I suggest you read the following press release from North Carolina State University, which sums up the details of the study very nicely:

Thinking your memory will get worse as you get older may actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that senior citizens who think older people should perform poorly on tests of memory actually score much worse than seniors who do not buy in to negative stereotypes about aging and memory loss.

In a study published earlier this month, psychology professor Dr. Tom Hess and a team of researchers from NC State show that older adults’ ability to remember suffers when negative stereotypes are “activated” in a given situation. “For example, older adults will perform more poorly on a memory test if they are told that older folks do poorly on that particular type of memory test,” Hess says. Memory also suffers if senior citizens believe they are being “stigmatized,” meaning that others are looking down on them because of their age.

“Such situations may be a part of older adults’ everyday experience,” Hess says, “such as being concerned about what others think of them at work having a negative effect on their performance – and thus potentially reinforcing the negative stereotypes.” However, Hess adds, “The positive flip side of this is that those who do not feel stigmatized, or those in situations where more positive views of aging are activated, exhibit significantly higher levels of memory performance.” In other words, if you are confident that aging will not ravage your memory, you are more likely to perform well on memory-related tasks.

The study also found a couple of factors that influenced the extent to which negative stereotypes influence older adults. For example, the researchers found that adults between the ages of 60 and 70 suffered more when these negative stereotypes were activated than seniors who were between the ages of 71 and 82. However, the 71-82 age group performed worse when they felt stigmatized.

Finally, the study found that negative effects were strongest for those older adults with the highest levels of education. “We interpret this as being consistent with the idea that those who value their ability to remember things most are the most likely to be sensitive to the negative implications of stereotypes, and thus are most likely to exhibit the problems associated with the stereotype.”

Move over marijuana. Bye-bye cocaine. See you later anabolic steroids…The world is entering a new drug war, and the first big shot was not fired in the streets of border town Mexico, but in the prominent medical journal Nature, and this report, like a bomb, has produced a flurry of counterattacks from both sides.

Although the biggest causes of death worldwide are cardiovascular, infectious, and cancer-related, the push for new pharmaceuticals from many companies will not be cures for those top three killers, but will focus on three other areas: appetite/weight control, sleep, and memory. Some experts believe that in ten years, we will be able to, with the right drugs (if we can afford), fine-tune our weight, exact sleep duration, and memory functions as easily as we now tune-out commercials on our digital video Tivos.

In the drug underground—somewhere in that murky space between the legal and the actionable—a quiet revolution has been brewing in the use of so-called “smart drugs”. In the past few decades doctors have used amphetamine derivatives, like the ever-more popular Ritalin, to treat the ever-more established diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). But Ritalin was just one of the first to tinker with attention and wakefulness, and in 1998, the first good drug treatment for narcolepsy (the uncontrollable desire to fall asleep at most any time) was released.

Modafinil (commercially known as Provigil) proved to be a wonderful advance for narcoleptics, and, as often happens with new drugs with brain effects, it was tested illegally in the underground of clubs and college campuses, and found to be very effective in keeping even normal people awake and functioning seemingly at a high level for long periods of time. The American military, which long relied on amphetamine-type drugs, soon adopted modafinil as the drug of choice for special op soldiers who needed to stay awake for days at a time. Many college students found modafinil as an especially effective study aid, and one survey estimated that on some U.S. campuses, 25% of students have used modafinil or similar.

But the use of this drug in many cases has been, at best, “off-label”; that is, used for problems not FDA approved, or illegal, especially by students who obtain pills diverted from friends with legitimate prescriptions. And a growing controversy: should these drugs, especially Provigil, be released for general use, to be taken by anyone who wants an extra edge? Advocates claim it’s safe, non-addicting, and that wider release would be good for society.

This call for liberalization of mind-enhancing drugs such as Provigil has been a minority opinion, considered highly questionable by the majority of experts who fear wider release would result in abuse, brain damage, addiction, or injustice (the argument is only the well-off could afford regular use, and the rich already enjoy many advantages). So imagine the uproar when seven high power scientists from Harvard, Stanford, and the Universities of Oxford, California, and Pennsylvania published this recent report in Nature saying, basically, free these drugs for wider use…it’s our right, and will be good, even advance, mankind. The article is very readable; you may or not agree with it, but I suggest it to you. Next week, more on mind drugs.

Last Sunday I thoroughly enjoyed a dinner of the national dish of Brazil, feijoada (fehz-waada), so I was happy to see that this week the New York Times featured black beans (the principal component of feijoada), as the topic for its Recipes for Health series.

You probably know that legumes—which includes black beans as well as the color spectrum of others such as navy, red, pinto, and white—are healthy, but my guess is you don’t know how great they really are, and that the black variety is the healthiest of the lot. Some of the benefits of black beans:

1.    They are full of fiber, which naturally lowers your cholesterol absorption and production. High fiber diets have been linked with lower heart attack and stroke risk.
2.    Beans are also loaded with the best type of carbohydrates, the complex type, which are slowly absorbed and provide your body with long-lasting energy without the spikes in blood sugar seen with many carbs.  Beans are especially good for those with sugar control issues, and recently, blood sugar spikes have been implicated in long-term memory decline.
3.    Surprisingly, beans and particularly black beans are full of the same antioxidants, anthocyanins, that are found in grapes. Recent research has shown the darker the bean, the higher the antioxidant content. Black beans actually contain about the same anthocyanin content, weight-for-weight, as grapes and cranberries.
4.    They are low in calories and almost completely fat-free.
5.    Especially for a fruit/vegetable, they are full of protein…one cup provides about a third of your daily protein needs.
6.    Beans have high iron content, and are full of the wonderful trace element molybdenum, as well as heart-healthy folate (a B vitamin) and magnesium.
7.    Black beans likely have anti-cancer properties.
8.    They store well for long periods of time, and are cheap.

The downsides to beans are that they take some time to prepare and cook…the healthiest way is to cook them yourself rather than using canned beans (interestingly, in Brazil, you cannot even find or buy canned beans), and beans tend to cause gas (despite that they are considered beneficial for most people’s gastrointestinal tracts). Pre-soaking the raw hard beans in water for at least six hours makes them easier to cook and also decreases the gas problem. Then simmering beans can take an hour or two, but if cooked in a pressure cooker, it goes down to 30 minutes.

The Times mini-series details several black bean recipes, including basic simmered beans, black bean soup with spinach, and a healthy alternative to traditional fat-filled refried beans.

Real Brazilian feijoada is another matter entirely, and what’s in it depends on the region you live. The one I had last week had black beans mixed with various types of pork and sausages, potatoes, cabbage, squash, and collard greens. Here is one recipe from foodbuzz if you want to experiment. You can even find feijoada made only with chicken, or without meat, although those would not be considered true feijoadas by most (carnivorous) Brazilians.

But if you don’t want to spend the time making feijoada, try at least basic black beans from scratch. It will be worth the effort in taste and nutrition, and the more you can divorce yourself from canned food, the better! (But if you really don’t have the time or inclination to make from scratch, canned low-sodium black beans are an OK substitute.)

All in all, I would wager that black beans are the least expensive super-food we have, and these days, that is something to consider.

Based on last week’s survey results, rather than every week sending out two email updates to subscribers, I will send out one to two weekly based on the content. And as always,  three fresh posts will magically appear on the LLAW website itself every week.