WIL Weekly #50
Being outside protects your eyes, positive experiences boost your mitochondria and more...
This is my free weekly newsletter covering 5 interesting points from the week. Subscribe (if you haven’t already) if you’d like to get it in your inbox each week!
1. Forget about cholesterol, worry about insulin resistance
This is a great illustration that puts into perspective what I was saying about statins earlier. Statins are supposed to reduce your risk of heart disease by lowering your cholesterol. Yet, studies are suggesting that statins increase insulin resistance and therefore risk for diabetes. Biomarkers of insulin resistance are far far worse of a risk factor for heart disease than LDL “bad” cholesterol.
The image comes from a 2021 paper on the deception regarding low-fat diets titled: Hiding unhealthy heart outcomes in a low-fat diet trial: the Women’s Health Initiative Randomized Controlled Dietary Modification Trial finds that postmenopausal women with established coronary heart disease were at increased risk of an adverse outcome if they consumed a low-fat ‘heart-healthy’ diet
2. Positive experiences are good for your mitochondria
On Dr. Christopher Palmer’s website, he breaks down a June 2024 study titled Psychosocial experiences are associated with human brain mitochondrial biology. The study found that people who have more positive experiences, such as having a larger social network had higher levels of a certain mitochondrial protein in their brains. On the other hand, those with more negative experiences like social isolation and depression and had less of these proteins. This suggests that positive experiences are associated with improved mitochondrial function.
Specifically, Palmer says:
Positive and negative psychosocial factors explained 18 to 25% of the variance in the abundance of OxPhos complex I proteins, a crucial component of the mitochondrial energy production machinery.
3. Diabetic limb amputations are 4x as frequent as fatal car crashes in the United States
Great article by Neil Barsky on how surprisingly common diabetic limb amputations are. The whole article is worth reading, so I’ll just share some interesting snippets:
About 38 million Americans have diabetes, and each year a staggering 154,000 Americans will suffer amputations, roughly 80% of which will be the result of complications from diabetes. Their life expectancy following this procedure is five years; the probability of a second amputation is up to 35%. By comparison, a total of 1,700 American soldiers had limbs removed since 2002 due to injuries sustained during combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To further put that in perspective, the number of people dying from car crashes in the U.S. is 1/4th that of diabetic limb amputations.
That month, she met Dr Ravi Kamepalli, one of the few infectious disease and obesity physicians in the country who include a low-carbohydrate diet in their treatments of diabetic wounds. He sent her to a colleague for vascular work that increased blood supply in the foot. He cleaned out the foot of gangrene. And he explained to her how her high-carbohydrate diet spiked her blood sugars, which not only were the original source of her problem, but also made it more difficult for her wounds to heal.
She stripped sugar and carbohydrates from her diet and almost immediately saw results. As her blood sugar numbers began to drop, she had better blood circulation. “I didn’t understand you could change things around if you eat the right foods,” she said. “I needed to help myself.”
So we know that low-carbohydrate diets work for diabetics. Why does the American Diabetes Association push insulin injections instead?
The lack of public urgency surrounding this public health catastrophe is in some measure the result of the nation’s most powerful diabetes advocacy group, the American Diabetes Association (ADA), which works hand in glove with its big food, pharmaceutical and medical technology donors, all of whom feed off the $400bn Americans spend annually on diabetes-related hospital stays, doctor visits, insulin injections, glucose-lowering drugs, insulin pumps, glucose monitors and other diabetes-related paraphernalia.
4. Kids need to get outside to protect their eyes
Recent epidemiological evidence suggests that children who spend more time outdoors are less likely to be, or to become myopic, irrespective of how much near work they do, or whether their parents are myopic. It is currently uncertain if time outdoors also blocks progression of myopia. It has been suggested that the mechanism of the protective effect of time outdoors involves light-stimulated release of dopamine from the retina, since increased dopamine release appears to inhibit increased axial elongation, which is the structural basis of myopia.
A September 2013 paper titled Time outdoors and the prevention of myopia discusses the theory that bright sunlight enhances dopamine production and prevents your eye from lengthening (which is thought to be the cause of myopia). They note that better eyesight is associated with time spent outdoors in general rather than time spent on a specific activity like sports.
5. Loneliness increases risk of stroke
June 2024 study: Chronic loneliness and the risk of incident stroke in middle and late adulthood: a longitudinal cohort study of U.S. older adults
Chronic loneliness was associated with higher stroke risk independent of depressive symptoms or social isolation. Addressing loneliness may have an important role in stroke prevention, and repeated assessments of loneliness over time may help identify those particularly at risk.
This study out of the journal eClinicalMedicine suggests that loneliness increases the risk of stroke by 56%. They had adults aged 50 and older rank their loneliness and then they tracked who got strokes over 10-12 years. They found that every one-point increase in the loneliness score increased the likelihood of stroke by 5%. Those who stayed at a high loneliness score were 56% more likely to experience stroke than their counterparts who ranked low on loneliness.
At this point, I'm convinced that the health organizations across America are more concerned with keeping diabetics and their circulation. They are about actually fixing diabetes.
In the large food industry that keeps you on your high glucose roller coasters lobby to help ensure you continue eating their product, even if it is determental to the health of all their customers.
4.
Well, outside you have actual variation in colours, distances, shades of light, textures, etc.
So even if your eyes get physically deformed, due to one reason or the other, the preprocessing neural nets behind the eyes could potentially adapt to retain the ability to discern distance and shape.
The experienced "lower prevalence of myopia" could therefore simply be a case of undiscovered cases of myopia.
"""
In children, there is also an almost universal pattern of increasing myopia prevalence with years of schooling, and increased myopia with children with higher examination results
"""
As if the worth of the educational systems weren't lacking enough already.
5.
"They had adults aged 50 and older rank their loneliness and then they tracked who got strokes over 10-12 years"
Elderly being isolated are known to experience mental degradation due to a lack of both mental, and physical activity.
Even worse when they end up stuck in front of the hose of hate that is TV and the rest of old media.
Come to think of it, it's very much reminiscent of how the rat utopia developed.
Anyhow, they didn't check for hobbies, or the like, from what I can see. But it's note-worthy that those who had "vigorous physical activity" more than once a week had a high prevalence of "consistently low loneliness". Would've been interesting to see the incident rate for each of those groups.
Additionally, drinking seems to have no effect on loneliness.
--
Consistently high loneliness: 9.76% stroke incident rate
Recently succumbed to loneliness: 9.07%
Recently gotten out of loneliness: 8.48%
Consistently low loneliness: 6.31%
--
84.8% of the cohort were in the "consistently low loneliness" group.