Quotes About Health

For a short time, one or two hours, stress does wonderful things for the brain," Sapolsky told the conference. "More oxygen and glucose are delivered to the brain. The hippocampus, which is involved in memory, works better when you are stressed for a little while. Your brain releases more dopamine, which plays a role in the experience of pleasure, early on during stress; it feels wonderful, and your brain works better.

A notable experiment in 2007 showed that cognitive flexibility improves after just one thirty-five-minute treadmill session at either 60 percent or 70 percent of maximum heart rate.

physical activity sparks biological changes that encourage brain cells to bind to one another.

If you come away from this book with one rule and one rule only, it is this: don't drink sugar water. In any form. Not a Big Gulp Coke. Not a Knudsen's 100 percent natural and organic fruit juice.

Dietary cholesterol, for instance, has an insignificant effect on blood cholesterol. It might elevate cholesterol levels in a small percentage of highly sensitive individuals, but for most of us, it's clinically meaningless." At the same time, a diet high in carbohydrates is strongly associated with high triglycerides, low HDL, and the damaging particles of LDL, which is the killer profile.

Those substitutes had in common a type of fat that is manufactured and has no precedent in evolutionary history: what we call "trans fats," which is a truncation of their technical chemical name, trans-isomer fatty acids. These are also labeled "unsaturated fats," but the better way to think of them is as not existing in nature. These are the fats that harm you, and together with sugar they are the foundation of the industrial foods system.

study shows that exercise—or at least the resulting fitness levels—can have a powerful impact on that fundamental skill.

A newer model, "allostasis," proposes that efficient regulation requires anticipating needs and preparing to satisfy them before they arise.

The Zen Buddhists have another way of saying pretty much the same thing: meditation is not something you think about; meditation is something you do. Same with well-being. No matter what ails you, you are not going to think your way out of it or read your way out of it. Living well is something you do. So then it's not something we

Frank Forencich, who lives in Portland, Oregon, and writes and thinks about the role of movement and play in people's lives;

Go Wild reveals the depth of our current evolutionary discordance, awakening us to how our lifestyle choices foster maladaptive gene expression and thus pave the way for disease.

Edward M. Hallowell, MD, author of Shine

Hormesis is a biological response to low doses of a stressor, such as a toxin, that improves the ability of the body to handle that toxin. It can be applied to exercise. Unlike homeostasis, hormesis does not return the body to a normal state. It returns it to a better-than-normal state. When a bodybuilder lifts weights, he is placing

Sedentary behavior causes brain impairment, and we know how: by depriving your brain of the flood of neurochemistry that evolution developed in order to grow brains and keep them healthy.

One of Bob's aphorisms," says Stickgold, "is that for every two hours your brain spends taking in information during the day, it needs an hour of sleep to figure out what it means. If you don't get that hour, you don't figure it out. The difference between smart and wise is two hours more sleep a night." This idea takes on a new dimension

What the adventuring doctors noticed on virtually every one of those frontiers was that the so-called primitive people were in many ways healthier and more robust than Europeans. Cancer was absent in many populations around the world.

Further, researchers began compiling a list of diseases absent in indigenous populations, no matter where they lived on the planet, including and especially cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, psoriasis, dental cavities, and acne. Note that this list includes some of the very diseases that constitute our worst problems today.

Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease that results from eating sugar and refined carbohydrates. It appeared among the earliest recorded diseases of civilization, coincident with sugar and flour appearing in people's diets in places as distinct as Africa and Arizona, and has been with us for more than a century. But this is not a static story.

Dense packages of storable starch allowed sedentary lives. That is, we no longer needed to range far and

The result is that any girl who starts early and has a lifetime of menstrual regularity with few pregnancies (lean, athletic girls and women often do not menstruate regularly) has approximately twice as many periods and so twice as many bouts of hormone cycling as hunter-gatherer girls.

Evolution has hard-wired health to happiness

The evolution of our unique brains was locked into the evolution of our wide range of movement. Mental and physical agility run on the same track.

Public health recommendations, from the Centers for Disease Control to the American College of Sports Medicine, suggest doing some form of moderate aerobic exercise for thirty minutes at least five days a week.

The body was designed to be pushed, and in pushing our bodies we push our brains too. Learning and memory evolved in concert with the motor functions that allowed our ancestors to track down food, so as far as our brains are concerned, if we're not moving, there's no real need to learn anything.