Good news! Coffee and wine may promote a healthy gut

The food you eat and the medicines you take can alter your gut bacteria in ways that either help or harm your digestive health, two new studies suggest.

Diversity is beneficial

Foods like fruits, vegetables, coffee, tea, wine, yogurt and buttermilk can increase the diversity of bacteria in a person’s intestines. And that diversity can help ward off illness, said Dr Jingyuan Fu, senior author of one of the studies.

“It is believed that higher diversity and richness [in gut bacteria] is beneficial,” explained Fu. She is an associate professor of genetics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Read: Gut bacteria suffer when hit with infection

On the other hand, foods containing loads of simple carbohydrates appear to reduce bacterial diversity in the gut, Fu and colleagues found. These include high-fat whole milk and sugar-sweetened soda.

In addition, medications can also play a part in the makeup of your gut bacteria. Antibiotics, the diabetes drug metformin and antacids can cut down on gut bacterial diversity, the researchers found. Smoking and heart attacks also can have a negative effect, the team said.

Each person’s intestines contain trillions of microorganisms, which doctors refer to as the “gut microbiome”, said Dr David Johnson. He is chief of gastroenterology at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia, and a past president of the American College of Gastroenterology.

A dramatic and prominent role

The gut microbiome plays an essential but little-understood role in human health, said Johnson, who was not involved with the new studies.

Read: Gut bacteria may be key to gastric bypass’ effects: study

“It’s the largest immune system in the body,” Johnson explained. “These bacteria have a very dramatic and prominent role in determining health and disease.”

To study the effect of lifestyle on the gut microbiome, Fu and her colleagues collected stool samples from more than 1,100 people living in the northern Netherlands.

The samples were used to analyse the DNA of the bacteria and other organisms that live in the gut. In addition to stools, the study collected information on the participants’ diets, medicine use and health.

In the second study, researchers with the Flemish Gut Flora Project performed a similar analysis on stool samples taken from 5,000 volunteers in Belgium.

Both studies concluded that diet has a profound effect on the diversity of gut bacteria, although, Fu said, the “underlying theories of these dietary factors remain largely unknown”.

Read: Gas and diet

Johnson added that medicines can have the same effect, and antibiotics actually can kill off some important strains of gut bacteria. “One dose of an antibiotic may disrupt your gut bacteria for a year,” he said.

Both sets of researchers emphasised that their studies only help explain a fraction of gut bacteria variation – roughly 18 percent for the Netherlands study, and about 7 percent for the Flemish study.

High fibre and low carbs

However, the findings from the two groups overlapped about 80 percent of the time, indicating that they are on the right track, the researchers said.

The Belgian researchers estimated that over 40,000 human samples will be needed to capture a complete picture of gut bacteria diversity.

Read: Gut bacteria affect health and obesity

Johnson noted that other research has shown that poor sleep, obesity, diabetes and the use of artificial sweeteners also can interfere with gut bacteria.

“The general rule is a balanced diet with high fibre and low carbs tends to drive a better gut health overall,” he said.

According to Fu, once researchers have a clearer understanding of the gut microbiome and its effects on health, doctors could be able to help prevent or heal illness by reading or influencing the bacteria within people’s bodies.

“The personalized microbiome may assist in personalised nutrition, personalised medicine, disease risk stratification and treatment decision-making,” she said.

Both studies were published in the journal Science.

Read more:

Symptoms of digestive disorders

Diagnosing digestive disorders

Preventing digestive disorders

Copyright © 2015 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Good news! Coffee and wine may promote a healthy gut

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Sugar Crush: How to Reduce Inflammation, Reverse Nerve Damage, and Reclaim Good Health

What Grain Brain did for wheat, this book by a leading peripheral nerve surgeon now does for sugar, revealing how it causes crippling nerve damage throughout the body—in our feet, organs, and brain—why sugar and carbohydrates are harmful to the body’s nerves, and how eliminating them can mitigate and even reverse the damage.

Sugar Crush exposes the shocking truth about how a diet high in sugar, processed carbohydrates, and wheat compresses and damages the peripheral nerves of the body, leading to pain, numbness, and tingling in the hands and feet, along with a host of related conditions, including migraines, gall bladder disease, and diabetes. If you suffer from ailments your doctors can’t seem to diagnose or help—mysterious rashes, unpredictable digestive problems, debilitating headaches, mood and energy swings, constant tiredness—nerve compression is the likely cause.

Over the years, Dr. Richard Jacoby has treated thousands of patients with peripheral neuropathy. Now, he shares his insights as well as the story of how he connected the dots to determine how sugar is the common denominator of many chronic diseases. In Sugar Crush, he offers a unique holistic approach to understanding the exacting toll sugar and carbs take on the body. Based on his clinical work, he breaks down his highly effective methods, showing how dietary changes reducing sugar and wheat, coinciding with an increase of good fats, can dramatically help regenerate nerves and rehabilitate their normal function.

Sugar Crush includes a quiz to assess your nerve damage, practical dietary advice, and the latest thinking on ways to prevent and reverse neuropathy. If you have diabetes, this essential guide will help you understand the dangers and give you the tools you need to make a difference beyond your doctor’s prescriptions. If you have the metabolic syndrome or prediabetes, or are just concerned about your health, it will help you reverse and prevent nerve damage.

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Sugar Crush: How to Reduce Inflammation, Reverse Nerve Damage, and Reclaim Good Health

Here's why leafy green vegetables are key for good digestion

For the first time, scientists have figured out how an unusual type of sugar found in green, leafy vegetables feeds the ‘good’ bacteria living in our guts to aid digestion, while blocking off the ‘bad’ bacteria that can make us sick.

Known as sulfoquinovose (SQ for short), it’s the the only known sugar molecule to contain sulphur, and that’s important – sulphur is the third most abundant mineral in the body, and is one of the vital amino acids used to create proteins for cells and tissues, plus many crucial hormones, enzymes, and antibodies.

“Sulphur is critical for building proteins, the essential components of all living organisms,” said one of the researchers, Spencer Williams from the University of Melbourne in Australia. “SQ is the only sugar molecule which contains sulphur, and ‘digestion’ of the molecule by bacteria releases sulphur into the environment, where it re-enters the global ‘sulphur cycle’ to be reused by other organisms.”

SQ is produced by all green plants to facilitate photosynthesis, and the greener the plant, the more it contains. According to Rae Johnston over at Gizmodo, each year, leafy green vegetables around the world produce the sugar on a scale comparable to the world’s total annual iron ore production.

The only problem? Humans can’t digest it. “No one had any idea where it went or what happened to it when the plant died,” lead researcher, Ethan Goddard-Borger from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, told The Sydney Morning Herald. “But it is actually being used by bugs that live in the gut to promote their growth, which is a good thing for you.”

While scientists have known about SQ’s presence in leafy greens, such as spinach, broccoli, kale, and parsley, for many years, for the past five decades, no one’s been able to figure out how bacteria in our gut extract it from the vegetables to use as an energy source.

Now the Australian team has identified a previously unknown enzyme called YihQ that bacteria use to isolate, absorb, and metabolise these sulphur-containing sugars..

“Bacteria in the gut, such as crucial protective strains of E. coli, use SQ as a source of energy. E. coli provides a protective barrier that prevents growth and colonisation by bad bacteria, because the good bugs are taking up all the habitable real estate,” Goddard-Borger explains in a press release.

“E. coli is a key bacterial coloniser needed by our gut. We speculate that consumption of this specific molecule within leafy greens will prove to be an important factor in improving and maintaining healthy gut bacteria and good digestive health.”

Not only does the discovery, published in Nature Chemical Biology, solve a 50-year-old mystery about how one of the most abundant sugar molecules in the world gets recycled from plant to plant, it opens up the possibility of an entirely new class of antibiotics. 

Because harmful bacteria – such as food-poisoning culprit, Salmonella – also metabolise this sugar, the team suggests that SQ-based antibiotics could be developed that specifically attract certain types of pathogens and kill them from the inside-out. And if there’s one thing we need right now, it’s new kinds of antibiotics. 

Read these next:

Here"s why leafy green vegetables are key for good digestion

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Four foods that are good for digestion

A healthy digestive system is the guarantee to a healthy life. Condition of your gut marks the condition of your overall health. So, your gut area requires proper attention.

Here are a few foods that are good for digestion.

Ginger

Often known as the ‘universal medicine’ in India, it stimulates the digestive systems, helping us to relieve of any uncomfortable gas and bloating.

Lentils and Beans

Legumes, especially black beans and lentils, are excellent sources of soluble fiber. Once it passes through your system, soluble fiber soaks up water, which bulks up your stool. The healthy bacteria in the gut ferment the fiber into short-chain fatty acids which have considerable health benefits, like serving as an energy source for cells that line the intestinal tract.

Pineapple

Pineapple is super soothing to our stomachs since it contains a special digestive enzyme called bromelain, which helps us break down proteins, making it easy to digest and absorb nutrients. Bromelain also has anti-inflammatory properties which are helpful in easing stomach aches and discomfort.

Yogurt

Yogurt selections labeled with live or active cultures contain strains of bacteria which can enhance your bowel movements and help you maintain a healthy digestive system. Use it in your regular meals, add fresh fruits for variety and avoid buying those which have sugar added to it.

Four foods that are good for digestion

For women's emotional health, living together is as good as marriage

Studies have shown that marriage significantly increases lifetime happiness. But new research indicates that even people who opt to live together rather than make their union more official can see such benefits.

A recent study by researchers from Ohio State University, published in the Journal of Family Psychology found that, for women, moving in with a romantic partner for the first time creates a similar decline in emotional distress to getting married for the first time.

Men, on the other hand, only have a significant increase in emotional health when they marry for the first time. And both genders become even happier if they’re living together and then take the step of getting married.

When it comes to second relationships after a first significant one ended, both men and women have similar boosts in emotional health when they move in together or get married.

Claire Kamp Dush, co-author of the study and associate professor of human sciences at Ohio State, said the results could reflect the declining social stigma in living together before marriage.

“At one time marriage may have been seen as the only way for young couples to get the social support and companionship that is important for emotional health,” Kamp Dush said in a statement. “It’s not that way anymore. We’re finding that marriage isn’t necessary to reap the benefits of living together, at least when it comes to emotional health.”

The study is based on a nationally representative survey of 8,700 people in the US born between 1980 and 1984 who were interviewed every other year between 2000 to 2010. Participants were asked about their relationship status and answered questions designed to test their emotional health, such as how often in the past month they’d felt “calm and peaceful,” “downhearted and blue,” or “so down in the dumps that nothing could cheer you up.”

There are some limits to the study, as the participants were not asked about the relationship quality of their union, and their emotional health was only tested biannually over 10 years. It could well be that cohabitation and marriage lead to different emotional effects over the longer term. But for those who’ve decided to put off marriage and live with their partner, this study suggests that they’re still benefitting from a happiness boost.

For women"s emotional health, living together is as good as marriage

The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health

The groundbreaking science behind the surprising source of good health

Stanford University’s Justin and Erica Sonnenburg are pioneers in the most exciting and potentially transformative field in the entire realm of human health and wellness, the study of the relationship between our bodies and the trillions of organisms representing thousands of species to which our bodies play host, the microbes that we collectively call the microbiota. The microbiota interacts with our bodies in a number of powerful ways; the Sonnenburgs argue that it determines in no small part whether we’re sick or healthy, fit or obese, sunny or moody. The microbiota has always been with us, and in fact has coevolved with humans, entwining its functions with ours so deeply, the Sonnenburgs show us, humans are really composite organisms having both microbial and human parts. But now, they argue, because of changes to diet, antibiotic over-use, and over-sterilization, our gut microbiota is facing a “mass extinction event,” which is causing our bodies to go haywire, and may be behind the mysterious spike in some of our most troubling modern afflictions, from food allergies to autism, cancer to depression. It doesn’t have to be this way.

The Good Gut offers a new plan for health that focuses on how to nourish your microbiota, including recipes and a menu plan. In this groundbreaking work, the Sonnenburgs show how we can keep our microbiota off the endangered species list and how we can strengthen the community that inhabits our gut and thereby improve our own health. The answer is unique for each of us, and it changes as you age.

In this important and timely investigation, the Sonnenburgs look at safe alternatives to antibiotics; dietary and lifestyle choices to encourage microbial health; the management of the aging microbiota; and the nourishment of your own individual microbiome.

Caring for our gut microbes may be the most important health choice we can make.

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Fast the Ayurveda Way for Good Health

Sabudana khichdi, arbi masala, aloo paneer kofta, kaddu ki sabzi, rajgira ki poori, aloo tamatar sabzi, sabudana pakora, banana chips, potato finger chips, sabudana bhel, sabudana laddoo, papaya halwa, sweet potato halwa, lauki ka halwa, apple halwa, dry fruits laddoo, sweet lassi, dry fruits milkshake, banana milkshake, and the list goes on. I don’t know if you guessed it, but the above is a list of foods that can be eaten during the Navaratri fast. Yes, you got that right; it is fasting food. No wonder that many people love to go on a ‘fast’.

In Ayurveda, the concept of a fast is a little different. A fast means that you go without any food during a specified period of time. You are allowed to sip hot water. Ayurveda states that if your digestion seems a little disturbed or if your bowel movements are not smooth, then going on a fast—that is, skipping your next two meals—may be a good idea to restore the digestive process to normal.

The vrat or fast was perhaps formulated with this in mind: to give your entire digestive system a periodic rest. But the vrat of modern times seems to be a time to indulge in more and newer exotic dishes. It was fascinating to see the number of recipes posted on the Internet for the Navaratri fast. There was an incredible range of recipes on the Internet starting from main courses to side dishes to snacks (in case the main dishes were insufficient) and desserts to top it all. These were further classified into North Indian and South Indian recipes to suit regional palates.

Periodic fasts have been prescribed in all religions to perhaps test your ‘willpower’ and to give your digestive system a rest. Ayurvedic texts state that digestion is critical and central to good health. So a lot of thought has gone into this aspect of our daily lives. One’s digestion or digestive fire must be just right. The fire should not burn too violently or in too subdued a way. It should be a moderate steady flame. So if you have a digestive fire which is dull in which you are unable to digest what you have eaten, always feeling full, not really feeling hungry etc., what you can do first is fast. And this is a real fast, not the Navaratri type of fast but fasting completely from food for perhaps one or two meals. Fasting increases agni. Fasting from food is called khust. Fasting from water or limiting fluid intake called trit can also be done to increase agni. A word of caution: this should be done by normally healthy people who feel that their digestion has become sluggish. Definitely not for diabetics who are on medication.

Drinking plain hot water increases agni. So if you have consumed a heavy marriage feast, you can sip some hot water to improve digestion or use herbs such as fennel, calamus, dry ginger, plumbago, turmeric, cumin or asafoetida. The famous ayurvedic preparation Trikatu containing dry ginger, pippali and black pepper can also be taken. Agni, or digestive fire, is increased by these heating herbs, that is, these herbs have a hot virya. If there is ama, detoxification can be done by using herbs such as guduchi, cilantro leaves, coriander, fenugreek, turmeric and calamus. Agni is improved by exposure to sun, heat wind and fresh air. So take a walk early in the mild morning sun or at sunset and let the fresh air improve your digestive fire.

Many of these prescriptions may be well known to us, but in the grind of daily living we forget them. This Navaratri, try a real fast and an invigorating walk and see your digestion improve.

The writer is retired Additional Chief Secretary, Tamil Nadu. She can be reached at sheelarani.arogyamantra@gmail. com / arogyamantra.blogspot.com

Fast the Ayurveda Way for Good Health

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Men called to set good health example

Some of the men who attended this morning’s leadership seminar. (Picture by Reco Moore.)

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UNLESS TARGETED programmes are instituted, men in Barbados will continue to ignore their health.

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Social psychologist Anderson Langdon said there were no hard and fast solutions but it was up to male leaders to stand up and lead by example.

“Leaders are made, whether by self or circumstance and these leaders realise the most important tools are the mind, body and soul so therefore what is clear is that these leaders take care of their health,” he said.

Langdon, a research officer with the Barbados Family Planning Association, said non-communicable diseases remained the top causes of death among men. He was speaking today at a two day men’s health workshop at the Dayrells Road, St Michael offices of the Pan American Health Organisation and World Health Organisation.

The workshop was entitled Building Men for Successful Leadership Roles in Barbados and Langdon said it was timely in light of the need of targeted programmes.

PAHO/WHO representative Dr Godfrey Xuereb also called for older men to set an example.

“We have to try and be promoters of physical activity and set examples for our male children because we see boys as being active up to age six then as soon as they get to the eleven plus it drops to nothing as we parents push them into academics,” he said. (CA)

Men called to set good health example

Diabetes Drug To Help Obese Patients Achieve Weight Loss; The Good Side Effect Of 'Liraglutide'

A drug originally made to treat patients suffering from type-2 diabetes can also cause significant weight loss in obese individuals, a new study finds.

(Photo : A Sweet Life) Diebetes drug injectable to help obese patients reduce weight

A study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, has shown a drug, which was originally intended for diabetes patients, to also help obese patients achieve weight loss and improve metabolic control.

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Liraglutide, an injectable diabetes drug recently launched as ‘Saxenda’ by a Danish pharmaceutical company, was found to help individuals lose significant weight over a yearlong study.

“It is a very effective drug. It seems to be as good as any of the others on the market, so it adds another possibility for doctors to treat patients who are having trouble either losing weight or maintaining weight loss once they get the weight off,” said Dr. Xavier Pi-Sunyer, principal author of the study and a professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center in New York as quoted by Live Science.

In their methods, they conducted a 56-week, double blind trials at 191 sites in 27 countries in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Africa and Australia subjecting to treatment 3731 volunteers who had a body-mass index (BMI) of at least 30 or a BMI of at least 27 if diagnosed with high cholesterol or high blood pressure.

They then randomly assigned subjects in a 2:1 ratio: 2487 patients to receive once-daily injections of the diabetes drug ‘liraglutide’ at a dose of 3.0 mg and 1244 other patients to receive placebo for control. Both groups were also given counseling on lifestyle modification which included proper diet and exercise.

After following the proper treatments, the researchers found a total of 63.2 percent of the all the ‘liraglutide’ patients as compared with 27.1 percent in the placebo group who achieved at least 5 percent body weight loss, while 33.1 percent and 10.6 percent, respectively, had more than 10% body weight loss.

However, the researchers also noted adverse effects of the treatments – which went from mild to moderate nausea and diarrhea – affecting 6.2 percent of ‘liraglutide’ patients and 5.0 percent in the placebo group.

With these results, the researchers conclude that the diabetes drug liraglutide, in conjunction to proper diet and exercise, could help obese people significantly reduce their body weight and improve metabolic control to burn more fats.

As quoted in Manila Bulletin, “This is another approach in tackling the obesity epidemic in our country,” said Elias Siraj, director of the Diabetes Program at Temple University Hospital who remarked an accompanying editorial in the journal. “Fortunately, even modest weight loss of five percent to 10 percent makes nearly all medical issues more manageable.”

The research was funded by Novo Nordisk, the global healthcare company which created the drug.

 

 

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Diabetes Drug To Help Obese Patients Achieve Weight Loss; The Good Side Effect Of "Liraglutide"

Making good choices about anesthesia, from the June 2015 Harvard Women's Health Watch

There are many types of anesthetic available, and the type chosen can affect recovery. Learn your options.

Boston, MA (PRWEB) June 17, 2015

From stitching up a cut to bypassing a coronary artery, most operations aren’t possible without anesthesia. It is designed to keep a patient comfortable during a procedure that otherwise might be hard to tolerate physically, emotionally, or both. There are many types of anesthetic available, and the type chosen can affect your recovery. While doctors make some of the decisions about which type of anesthetic to use, patients often have a say, too, according to the June 2015 Harvard Women’s Health Watch.

“Anesthesiologists have four goals: to see that you have no pain, that you’re drowsy or unconscious, that your body is still so that the surgeon can work on it, and that you aren’t left with bad memories of the procedure,” says Dr. Kristin Schreiber, an anesthesiologist at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

There are four main types of anesthesia:

•     Local anesthesia. Anesthetic medication is injected near the area to be treated. Its effect is limited to a fairly small area.


•     Regional anesthesia. Anesthetic medication is injected near clusters of nerves to numb a larger area, or region, of the body.


•     Neuraxial anesthesia. Anesthetic medication is injected near the spinal roots, numbing an even larger part of the body than regional anesthesia. Epidural and spinal anesthesia are included in this category.


•     General anesthesia. A combination of intravenous and inhaled drugs brings on unconsciousness and the inability to feel pain.

Regional and neuraxial anesthesia can also induce different levels of sedation. Minimal sedation means being relaxed but aware of what’s going on. Moderate sedation causes a “twilight sleep” — drifting in and out of consciousness, but able to easily be aroused. Deep sedation is similar to the effects of general anesthesia — being fast asleep and unlikely to remember anything.

Read the full-length article: “What you should know about anesthesia“

Also in the June 2015 Harvard Women’s Health Watch:

•     7 lessons from the proposed nutritional guidelines


•     When is a fainting spell worrisome?


•     What to do for shoulder pain


•     Keeping one step ahead of toenail fungus

Harvard Women’s Health Watch is available from Harvard Health Publications, the consumer publishing division of Harvard Medical School, for $20 per year. Subscribe at w ww.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/womens or by calling 877-649-9457 (toll-free).

XXX

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/05/prweb12747507.htm

Making good choices about anesthesia, from the June 2015 Harvard Women"s Health Watch

Judith Woods: Who gets married for the good of their health?

Photo: Alamy

There are occasions – a Verdi requiem, the terraces at Anfield, the X Factor final – when just one voice, however melodious or heartfelt or lip-synched, is simply not enough.

So in response to the news than men get a health boost from marriage while women do not, I offer a random selection of comments from my inner circle of girlfriends.

“In that case, you’d think my husband would be a lot nicer to me.”

“No wonder he demands round-the-clock nursing when he gets man flu. He’s afraid that if I leave, he’ll snuff it.”

“When my mother used to scrub the kitchen table like a martyr, muttering ‘I’m not doing all this for the good of my health’, I had no idea she literally meant HER health.”

Let me hasten to state for the record that we’re not militant martinets or angry feminazis. Far from it.

^{Tim Hunt: forced to resign (Photo: AP)}

In general, we enjoy the company of men, and not just because we find that each other’s solicitous spouses are invariably more charming to us than our own.

In particular, we feel genuinely sorry for poor Nobel laureate Tim Hunt, forced to resign over a couple of lame remarks about women in laboratories, hounded by a load of humourless, thin-skinned harpies.

We don’t hate our husbands; reader, we married them. But there is something undeniably irksome about the fact that grooms enjoy added health benefits when they tie the knot, but brides don’t.

•I knew I was marrying the wrong person

•Charity hunts pensioner who left handwritten note in 1950s wedding dress

Trickle-down wealth does not, it seems, equate with trickle-down health. According to research by University College London, the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (who must surely make for unbearably bumptious bedfellows), men who wed are markedly healthier than their single counterparts.

While both parties remain, once married, as likely to develop metabolic syndrome – an unhappy combination of diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity known to the rest of us as irritable-wine-and-crisps-disorder – an act of marital union confers no health advantages the woman. None. Poor, batty Miss Havisham would have gone mad either way.

I can’t help thinking that if we’d known this factoid earlier last week, we would have been spared the prickly debate surrounding the new book of the summer, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, by the irresistibly-named Kate Bolick (sadly not a plural), in which she espouses the superiority of the single life.

Interestingly, when I asked assorted men if marriage was better than single life they all agreed it was – in theory.

In practice, however, there wasn’t nearly as much sex as they’d been given to believe. Oh, and nobody flagged up the nagging. The health dividend, however, went unremarked upon.

“If a child’s ingratitude is sharper than a serpent’s tooth, a husband’s ingratitude is a stake through the heart, dipped in anthrax,” says a separated friend of mine, who is battling her ex in the divorce courts. She claims that if he’d been a lot more appreciative out of bed and a little more awake in it, she could have kept the marriage going, at least until the children had left school.

For his part, he belongs to the “she nagged too much” camp, and also bemoans the lack of congress, which makes you wonder what on earth was stopping them.

^{Women crave a grown-up gap year (Photo: SCPhotos / Alamy)}

What’s stopping them now, of course, is the prospect of a decree absolute.

Women are the main instigators of divorce, with 66 per cent of marriages ending – after 11 and a half years, on average – following wifely intervention. But then men have a tendency to dig in and wait for the woman to lose patience and sort things out herself.

Yet, significantly, among those silver splitters aged 60-pluswho get divorced after 30 years or more, men are every bit as likely to start proceedings as women.

And men are inclined to ricochet, unimaginatively if healthily, straight into marriage with a younger partner. Women who cut loose tend to crave new experiences, fresh challenges and a grown-up gap year, but without the illegal stripping at sacred sites.

Divorce is a drastic option by any measure. The virtues of marriage extend far beyond body mass index and blood pressure.

There could be a marriage benefit for employers, too. Rather than offering health cover, relationship counselling might be more economical. The wealth of a nation resides in the health of a nation, so instead of that exorbitantly expensive annual medical, why not a marital MOT? For male staff, at any rate.

As for female executives? No need. Travel vouchers or a weekend spa break would be just fine, thanks.

Judith Woods: Who gets married for the good of their health?

Edinburgh Community Food on why fibre really is good for you!

By Nicola Murray (Student-on-Placement at ECF, Abertay University)

So, what is the big deal about dietary fibre? Is it just to keep us regular? In a word, no – it does so much more!

Fibre is an important part of a healthy balanced diet and has many benefits for our overall health. It can improve not only our digestive health – think constipation, bowel cancer or diverticular disease – but can help reduce the risk of heart disease, strokes, diabetes and some others cancers too. High fibre foods keep us feeling fuller for longer by slowing down digestion. This can help us maintain a healthy weight as we are less likely to reach for a high sugar mid-morning snack.

In the UK, the average person consumes around 14g of fibre per day which is much lower than the recommend 18g. Fibre is a complex carbohydrate found only in plant foods. Foods such as meat, fish, and dairy don’t contain any at all. Simple carbohydrates (like sugars) are broken down to provide fuel but dietary fibre has other important roles in the body. While we gain few nutrients or energy from fibre its passage through our digestive system helps remove potentially harmful waste from the body. Moreover, some types of fibre are actually fermented in the lower intestine, producing some important nutrients like vitamin K (which helps our blood clot), B12 (for processing energy) and fatty acids (which are great for our hearts).

There are two different type of fibre: soluble and insoluble. Soluble fibre – found in fruits, vegetables, grains, beans and pulses – can be digested by our bodies as it is dissolved in water and forms a gel in the gut. It is then passed through the GI tract, absorbing water and slowing down our digestion. What this does is help keep stool soft – making it easier to pass – which can prevent or treat constipation.

Insoluble fibre – found in whole grains, vegetables, high fibre cereals, nuts and seeds – cannot be digested by the body. It passes through our gut without being broken down and helps other foods move through our digestive system more easily. This keeps our bowels healthy and helps prevent digestive problems. If suffering from diarrhoea we should limit the amount of soluble fibre we are consuming and increase the insoluble fibres. On the other hand, if suffering from constipation we should increase soluble fibre (e.g. fruit and veg) and reduce the insoluble type.

Box-out – health benefits of fibre
• Keeps us regular
• Helps reduce cholesterol
• Lowers risk of heart disease, strokes and diabetes
• Assists in removing waste from the body
• May help lower blood pressure
• Keeps us fuller for longer, helping us to maintain a healthy weight
• Produces vitamins K and B12, plus healthy fatty acids in the colon
• Provides food for healthy gut bacteria
• Helps relieve diarrhoea, constipation and haemorrhoids

To increase the amount of fibre in our diets try to incorporate fibre into every meal – aim for 2 portions.

Top tips for increasing your fibre
• Swap white bread, rice and pasta for tastier wholemeal alternatives
• Eat more oat-based foods such as no-added-sugar porridge, muesli or oatcakes
• Try to incorporate fibre into every meal – aim for 2 portions per meal
• Go for whole fruit rather than fruit juice
• Go for more highly nutritious and high fibre lentils, beans and other pulses
• Try going ‘veggie’ a few days a week
• Increase your fibre intake fibre slowly to reduce the risk of bloating and stomach cramps
• Drink plenty of water to help the passage of the fibre in the gut

Submitted by Nicola Murray (Abertay University)

Edinburgh Community Food on why fibre really is good for you!

Adequate Fluid, Fiber Intake Offers Good Health for Digestive System

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The digestive system is one of the most active systems in our body and absorbs large amounts of water on a daily basis. Many healthy looking patients …

Adequate Fluid, Fiber Intake Offers Good Health for Digestive System