Healthy Advice from Newmark's Door

Yesterday, Craig Newmark had two interesting items that were health-related.

1. Sleep is important. From a very detailed, informative piece in The Harvard Magazine (it is well worth reading the entire article),

Sleeping well helps keep you alive longer. Among humans, death from all causes is lowest among adults who get seven to eight hours of sleep nightly, and significantly higher among those who sleep less than seven or more than nine hours. (“Those who sleep more than nine hours have something wrong with them that may be causing the heavy sleep, and leads to their demise,” White notes. “It is not the sleep itself that is harmful.”)

Sleep is essential to normal biological function. “The immune system doesn’t work well if we don’t sleep,” says White.

... The moral of much sleep research is startlingly simple. Your mother was right: You’ll get sick, become fat, and won’t work as well if you don’t get a good night’s sleep. So make time for rest and recovery.

2. Slow the physical depreciation of the body with green tea and red wine; also avoid sugar. From SFgate.com,

An experiment with her tiny worms is responsible, [Cynthia Kenyon] says; that experiment proved that sugar switches on a genetic sequence that increases the amount of insulin produced by an organism, which in turn causes the body to demand more sugar. This not only adds flab to the waistline, if worms had a waistline, but also increases damage to cells in the body, speeding up the slow degradation of cells that contributes to aging.

"It was a revelation," Kenyon says. She also drinks red wine and green tea, which her lab and others have shown help repair cells and contribute to an increased life span. [note from EclEco: do you think aspartame has the same effect?]

digression: JJ sent me this, which says "bright fruits and vegetables help fight arthritis."

Cynthia Kenyon also has a good sense of humour:

"...people have mistaken me for 30, even 25."
"How old are you, really?" asked Newman.
"I'm 150."