Study Suggests Folic Acid Improves Thinking Skills

This news item from the New York times says that a recent study in the Netherlands found that folic acid supplements improves thinking in older people.

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By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Folic acid dietary supplements significantly improve thinking skills that tend to decline with normal aging, a Dutch study has found.

Researchers randomly assigned 818 men and women ages 50 to 70 to take a daily oral dose of 800 micrograms of folic acid or a placebo. All the subjects, who were otherwise healthy, had elevated blood levels of homocysteine, which has in previous studies been associated with poor cognitive performance.

All the subjects took five tests of mental functioning. At the beginning of the study, there was no significant difference in the scores between the groups. But at the end, after controlling for cholesterol, blood pressure, body mass, smoking status and other variables, the folic acid group performed significantly better on three of the five mental tests, and their average for all tests was significantly higher.

Although the lead author, Jane Durga, affirmed that the study was carefully randomized and controlled, she said, “Based on this paper alone, I wouldn’t be waving it around” to urge people to supplement their diets.

“Although this is a high-quality study,” she continued, “it needs to be repeated in other populations like in the U.S., where there is already folic acid fortification.”

By law, flour in the United States is fortified with folic acid to help prevent neural tube defects in newborns.

“This is only the first study that shows this effect,” Dr. Durga said. “There need to be studies that look at lower doses or increasing natural folates, which may lead to similar or even greater effects.”

At the time of the study, published on Jan. 20 in The Lancet, Dr. Durga was a nutritional epidemiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

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Canadian University Team Create Trans Fat Alternative

This looks like a healthy alternative to trans fat. Hope it lives up to its promise.
I got this from CTV news.
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An international research team headed by a University of Guelph professor has developed a new heart healthy alternative to artery-clogging trans fats.


Recent research has shown that hydrogenated oils are heavy in trans fat, which may be even more hazardous to our health. They've been shown to raise our bad cholesterol levels while lowering our good cholesterol and putting us at risk for heart disease.

A federal task force last summer recommended limiting the use of these fats in processed foods, and many food manufacturers have been scrambling to change their recipes to eliminate or reduce the trans fats in their products.

Now, a team led by Alejandro Marangoni, a professor at the Univeristy of Guelph's Department of Food Science, has found an alternative way of turning heart-healthy oils into a solid that doesn't create trans fat.

Marangoni's research group devised a method to mix vegetable oil, water, monoglycerides and fatty acids to form a gel that has the same structural and functional properties as trans and saturated fats.

"So this is no different than your olive oil, your soybean oil, your canola oil but it's now in a solid form," Marangoni explained to Canada AM. "And it has been done without having to add any trans fats or any saturated fats to the product.

"It's a completely different kind of chemistry."

As an added bonus, the new oil formula has been found to release fats in a more controlled way.

By regulating the amount of insulin produced by the body after a meal, controlled release of lipids in the blood may help lower the risk of obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

The research, which included human trials, will be published in the next issue of Soft Matter, a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Hydrogenated fats were welcomed by the food industry when they were invented early in the 20th century because they didn't require refrigeration like butter did, they extended the shelf-life of foods and keep baked products moist.

Marangoni says his new fat has all the same benefits. He hopes the product will be available for use for industrial food manufacturers later this year.

"Because this is a recently patented technology that has just become public, we can actually see this in our products this year."

"So really, the bakery applications, the sort of food service sector, that's where this is targeted to," he says. "That's where we get most of our fat. So that's where we hope to see it this year."

Milton Drepaul

Green Tea Improves Your Health

About 20 years ago when I was living in Kingston , Jamaica ,my landlady An Yueng told me one day that that the secret to her good health was Tai Chi and drinking green tea.
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She did her Tai Chi every morning. I would watch her go through the graceful routine and she would say," Good for you. Make you peaceful and you make more children." Whenever I visited her she would offer me a cup of green tea. She must have noticed my wrinkled smile at the pale green tasteless (to me) brew. "It makes you live longer, Chinee people not like Westerners. We respect elders. They say green tea good for you."

With the advent of the internet I began to read up about green tea in 1994 after I noticed a small news item on the news. It said that drinking green tea daily is one of the best health habits you can have.
Later I found out that several studies have shown that regular use of green tea can improve the ratio between “good” and “bad” cholesterol, ease mild depression, help prevent diabetes and more.

A recent study, published in the September 13, 2006 Journal of the American Medical Association, found that among 40,530 Japanese adults followed for 11 years, there was a 16 percent lower risk of death from all causes among those who drank more than 5 cups of green tea a day compared to those who drank less than one cup daily.

Even though the health food stores are full of Green-tea extracts I prefer drinking the tea. That's right, I've finally learned to love the pale green brew. Sometimes I add it to regular black tea.
I think An Yeung was right and now the scientific studies seem to back her view that the greater benefit comes from simply drinking green tea.
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High IQ link to being vegetarian-

Intelligent children are more likely to become vegetarians later in life, a study says.
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A Southampton University team found those who were vegetarian by 30 had recorded five IQ points more on average at the age of 10.

Researchers said it could explain why people with higher IQ were healthier as a vegetarian diet was linked to lower heart disease and obesity rates.

The study of 8,179 was reported in the British Medical Journal.

Twenty years after the IQ tests were carried out in 1970, 366 of the participants said they were vegetarian - although more than 100 reported eating either fish or chicken.

Men who were vegetarian had an IQ score of 106, compared with 101 for non-vegetarians; while female vegetarians averaged 104, compared with 99 for non-vegetarians.

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