WHO supports people quitting tobacco to reduce their risk of severe COVID-19

Smokers face a 40 – 50% higher risk of developing severe disease and death from COVID-19.

The World Health Organization (WHO) therefore partners with  Viber, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, WeChat and AI company Soul Machines to reach billions with free digital quitting tobacco aids.

“Smokers have up to a 50% higher risk of developing severe disease and death from COVID-19, so quitting is best thing smokers can do to lower their risk from this coronavirus, as well as the risk of developing cancers, heart disease and respiratory illnesses,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.

“To help tobacco users to commit to be quitters and winners, we are using digital aids to release the WHO Quit Challenge chatbot and Artificial Intelligence digital health worker Florence, and making advocacy material available in 30 languages,” added Dr Rüdiger Krech, Director Health Promotion, WHO.

Globally, roughly 39% of men and 9% of women use tobacco.  The highest smoking rates are currently found in Europe at 26%, with projections only showing a 2% decrease by 2025 if urgent government action is not taken.

What to Eat to lower Alzheimer's Risk

People who tried the new scientist-designed MIND diet lowered their risk of Alzheimer's by 53%. Eat this many weekly servings of the following 9 foods:

Source: Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of The Alzheimer’s Association; Martha Clare Morris, ScD, Rush University.

The importance of keeping our legs strong

Among the signs of longevity, as summarized by the US Magazine Prevention, strong leg muscles are listed on the top, as the most important and essential one.

As a matter of fact, the legs together have 50% of the nerves of the human body, 50% of the blood vessels and 50% of the blood flowing through them. It is the large circulatory network that connects the body.Only when the feet are healthy, the convention current of blood flows smoothly. So people who have strong leg muscles will have a strong heart.

Moreover, a new study from the journal Gerontology says meaty, muscular legs are linked to a similarly powerful mind—even later in life. 

The study focused on 324 British twins, ages 43 to 73. The twins, all female, took two neuropsychological tests 10 years apart. They also took a test to measure leg explosive power at the beginning of the 10-year period. 

The results showed that more leg power at the beginning of the study resulted in less cognitive change 10 years later (the more muscular twin actually performed 18% better on memory and cognitive tests than her less-fit sister). Brain imaging also showed differences between the fit and unfit twins, with the buffer sister having significantly more brain volume than the other.

Though researchers did not know why stronger legs result in quicker minds, they believe physical activity's effect on the brain comes from hormones released by working muscles.

However, as a person gets older, the accuracy and speed of transmission of instructions between the brain and the legs decreases. Thus we have to keep exercising the legs. If you do not move your legs for two weeks, your leg strength will decrease. A study from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark found that both old and young, during the two weeks of inactivity, the legs muscle strength got weakened by a third, which is equivalent to 20-30 years of ageing. As our leg muscles weaken, it will take a long time to recover, even if we do rehabilitation exercises later. Therefore, regular exercise like walking, is very important.

In addition, the so-called “Bone Fertilizer Calcium” will sooner or later be lost with the passage of time, making the elderly more prone to bone fractures. And fractures in the elderly easily triggers series of complications, especially fatal diseases such as brain thrombosis. And 15% of elderly patients will die within a year of a thigh-bone fracture.

Exercising the legs, is never too late, even after the age of 60 years. Only by strengthening the legs, we can prevent further aging. Thus we need to walk for at least 30-40 minutes daily to ensure that our legs receive sufficient exercise and to ensure the leg muscles remain healthy.

More about Caffeine

Many of us start our days with a cup of coffee or tea. Caffeine does truly pick you up a little bit and make you even more alert. So particularly for people with routine tasks, it can be beneficial. For example, if you must drive a lot at nighttime, or if you are in the military and you are on duty to monitor, but nothing is really happening for hours on end.

How much caffeine we drink?

In fact, not everybody will need it. If you may have enough energy or get good enough sleep that you can go through the day without any caffeine.

Moreover, different people react very differently to caffeine.

If you are getting tremors, feeling suddenly nervous, or your heart rate is changing, it could well be that you are drinking too much caffeine. And it can interfere with a good night's sleep.

Your lifestyle also makes a difference. For example, if you are a smoker,  you metabolize caffeine in the liver about twice as fast, and so likely you can drink caffeine up to a later time and still be okay in terms of sleeping.

But there are other factors, like if you use oral contraceptives as a woman, it takes twice as long to metabolize caffeine and you may see that you cannot sleep well.

Genetics also plays a role, since some people have variants in their genetic code that affects enzymes in the liver that metabolize and get rid of the caffeine. This can make you metabolize it slower or faster, too.

In general, it is recommended by associations like the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to keep caffeine at 400 milligrams per day or less. If you look at a normal 8-ounce cup of coffee, that has about 100 milligrams of caffeine, so that would be up to four cups of coffee per day.

Another recommendation is to keep it to no more than 200 milligrams per sitting.

Cholesterol

 

Many people worry about cholesterol. More than a third of Americans have high cholesterol, putting them at greater risk of stroke and heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. It is reasonable to think that eating cholesterol-laden foods will raise your cholesterol levels. But the connection is not quite that simple. 

The amount of cholesterol in your food does not necessarily translate to the amount of cholesterol in your blood vessels.

"Eating foods rich in cholesterol does increase blood cholesterol, usually by a small, but still significant amount," explained Dr. Stephen Devries, a preventive cardiologist and executive director of the educational nonprofit Gaples Institute in Deerfield, Illinois. But the effect of eating foods that contain a lot of cholesterol "may not be as high as one might expect, because most of the cholesterol in blood actually comes from the body's own production." When you consume a bunch of cholesterol, your body will usually make less to compensate.

Of greater concern is what usually gets served up alongside cholesterol: saturated fat. Eating lots of foods high in saturated fat increases the body's production of low-density lipoproteins, or LDL ("bad") cholesterol, which can build up inside the arteries, restricting blood flow to the heart and brain, heightening the chance of heart attack or stroke.

"Saturated fat is a bigger culprit for raising blood cholesterol in general than dietary cholesterol," Devries said.

A lot of the controversy around the health effects of saturated fats, for instance, has come from studying what happens when people cut down on them without taking into account what they are eating instead.

"If saturated fat is replaced with refined carbs, like sugar or white bread, then there's been shown to be no net health benefit. If saturated fat is replaced with other healthier fats, then there's a clear health benefit with a lower rate of heart disease," Devries said.

Seafood — most notably shrimp — can be relatively high in cholesterol. But shellfish and fish are great sources of lean protein for people who eat animal products, and provide essential omega-3 fatty acids that the body cannot make on its own. That makes them good substitutes for red meat and poultry.

As for the age-old egg question, Devries recommends sticking to no more than four full eggs a week — that is, including the yolk, where almost all the cholesterol is, along with about half the protein. One large egg contains 1.6 grams of saturated fat and a whopping 187 milligrams of cholesterol. In fact, eggs account for a quarter of the cholesterol in the American diet.

There are some people who should be more careful about their intake of eggs and other foods high in cholesterol. That includes people who have borderline high cholesterol (over 200 milligrams/deciliter) or other risk factors for cardiovascular disease, such as family history, or those who are hypersensitive to dietary cholesterol, meaning that even regular amounts raise their blood cholesterol levels significantly. People with type 2 diabetes should also watch the cholesterol in their foods.

For most people, fretting over the cholesterol in particular foods is less meaningful to heart health than trading out the usual suspects — like red meat, full-fat dairy, packaged foods and sugary drinks — for more vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains and beans. The 2019 American Heart Association meta-analysis recommends shifting to healthy eating patterns that emphasize these unprocessed ingredients, such as the Mediterranean diet.