Archives for March 2020

Katy Weinberg was 25 in 2006, a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia teaching HIV awareness and prevention, when she stumbled upon what would become the backbone of her current project: recruiting and training artists, especially musicians, to get vital public health messages out to the public.

In Zambia at the time, HIV/AIDS was – and still is – the number 1 cause of death. Getting people with limited education accurate information on how the virus was spread was crucial to saving lives. To that end, she invited a young pop singer named Ephraim “Son of Africa” Mutalange to be the emcee at a community HIV education meeting. Thousands came to hear him and the public health message Weinberg’s group was promoting. That event would linger like an advertising jingle in the back of her mind.

Fast forward a few years, during which Weinberg earned an MBA from Boston University and a Master’s in Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The idea of using musicians to promulgate public health messages still echoed in her mind. She eventually got a job managing the Global Health Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, where she won a grant from the band, Aerosmith, to keep up her AIDS prevention efforts.

Still channeling her Zambian friend, Ephraim, Weinberg went back to Zambia in 2016. She worked with Ephraim on a song to teach young Zambians, especially girls, how to resist “Sugar Daddies” and others who promised money and favors in return for sex. The song, called “Worth More,” touted the lyrics “You’re worth more than material things.”

In 2019, Weinberg and Ephraim worked together again, this time convening a small group of other artists, public health experts from Children’s and the Zambian Ministry of Health, among others, and came up a new song – in two tribal languages, Nyanja and Bemba, as well as English. The song, about HIV, took social media by storm, garnering more than half a million views, Weinberg says.

Today, Weinberg and her Zambian friends are at it again, this time because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to the public health training they’ve already received, she says, a team of Zambian musicians is poised to release new songs to help stop the spread of this disease.

To be sure, artists have immense power to influence behavior for evil as well as good.

German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, for instance, used her talents to make highly effective Nazi propaganda movies in the 1930s for Adolph Hitler, a clear example of an artist’s power to harm.

Somewhat less malevolently, prominent American artists and celebrities have used their power recently to promote such dubious health tips as bird poop facials, drinking one’s own urine, placenta smoothies, and perineum sunning, a technique that actor Josh Brolin tried, which resulted, predictably, in a painful burn on his anus.

Even dumber? A social media “challenge” urging teens to lick substances including toilets and grocery stores items that might contain COVID-19.

But it’s the positive use of artists for public health message that most interests Weinberg, and no time more so than the present.

Recently, for instance, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, speaking on “Good  Morning America,” urged American media personality Kylie Jenner to convince her young followers that COVID-19 is dangerous to them as well as older people. She got the idea, and quickly posted a social distancing message to her 166 million Instagram followers.

Other artists are using their influence, too. American rapper Logic (born Sir Robert Bryson Hall II) took the national suicide hotline number “1-800-273-8255” as the title of a moving video to help prevent suicide. It has reportedly garnered hundreds of millions of views on YouTube.

Bon Jovi recently urged his Instagram followers to help create a new song about dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic called “Do What You Can.” Weinberg was delighted, noting that Bon Jovi uses himself as a role model and the song to reinforce the social distancing message health care professionals are trying to get across.

It’s not just Americans who are using their musical talents to push hand-washing and social distancing.

In Italy, hardy souls have been belting out arias from their porches, becoming a worldwide TV sensation. In Vietnam, musicians came up with a COVID-19 song that features animated creatures with face masks bouncing around touting the virtues of hand washing.

In Zambia, thanks to the training Weinberg’s team had already put in place,  Zambian musicians were already psyched when the pandemic struck and have created new songs to help stop the spread of the disease.

In Uganda, a group of musicians led by Bobi Wine get the message across engagingly in 3 minutes and 36 seconds minutes of upbeat, catchy singing.

I strongly recommend listening to the Ugandans. Whether or not you end up singing along with them, as I did, I guarantee you’ll get the message.

And in the process, you’ll hear the immense power of music to spread the word.

(Originally posted on Pyschology Today)

Okay, fess up. Are you sitting around just waiting for COVID-19 to go away? Chances are we all are losing fitness by the day, and that we are all sitting even more than we usually do, which is bad enough, as I discuss in my new book Exercise is Medicine.

So, here’s some motivation to get you off – and at least walking circles around — the couch.

In the latest (April) issue of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, British researchers reported on their observational study called “Walking Away From Type2Diabetes.”

They set out to see if people could learn to substitute some light physical activity for sedentary time. They collected data from 647 participants at high risk for diabetes, including people over age 65 and those who were obese. A third of the group were women. The participants wore accelerometers –those little devices that track physical movement – except while they slept.

Sure enough, the researchers found after one year that reallocating time from sitting to light physical activity paid off. Every 30 minutes that a person substituted movement for sitting around was correlated with smaller waistlines, lowered blood sugar, lowered triglycerides and overall reduced cardiometabolic risk. And the more intense the physical activity, the bigger the improvements.

That finding fits with the research I talk about in my book. Not to put too fine a point on it, sitting too much – all by itself – can raise the risk of disease and premature mortality, even if you dutifully exercise. In fact, many well-educated people do exercise, but they’re also more likely to have desk jobs.

One large 2012 study of 240, 819 healthy American adults, for instance, showed that more time spent sitting was linked to premature death from heart disease and cancer. In fact, even among people who exercised more than seven hours a week, watching TV for more than seven hours a day was linked to a 50 percent greater risk of all-cause mortality and a two-fold greater risk of cardiovascular mortality.

Sobering, isn’t it? Especially since the average American sits for 13 hours a day – way too much.

But take heart. Replacing just two minutes of sitting every hour with a bit of moving around helps mitigate the risks of sitting. Even better, don’t sit for more than 30 minutes at a stretch. Set your watch or a timer to ping you every so often, then get up, get a drink of water, sort the laundry, go to the bathroom, anything that makes you stand up and move.

Why, you may be wondering, is something as natural as sitting so bad. Lots of reasons, actually. But a major one is that sitting increases visceral fat. Visceral fat is not an inert blob of tissue, as once thought, but an active organ that pumps out chemicals called cytokines (adipokines) that lead to chronic, systemic inflammation. Chronic inflammation, in turn, leads to insulin resistance (a precursor of diabetes), atherosclerosis and neurological degeneration, among other things.

It gets worse. A sedentary lifestyle is also linked to high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome, gallstones, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, some cancers, cognitive dysfunction, dementia, osteoarthritis, low back pain, frailty, decreased functional independence, constipation, muscle weakness, depression…need I go on?

Indeed, physical inactivity (a broader category than just sitting) is so lethal – and so common – that it now accounts for an estimated 5.3 million deaths worldwide, according to a landmark 2012 study. That’s 9 percent of all premature mortality (death before a person’s statistical life expectancy).

On the plus side, even just standing – not exercising, but simply not sitting – would reduce premature deaths from all causes, according to a study of 16,585 Canadian adults.

The take-home lesson is clear: Yes, we’re under house arrest at the moment, and for the foreseeable future. But we don’t have to take this pandemic sitting down.

(Originally posted on Pyschology Today)

A couple of weeks ago, before we got seriously distracted by COVID-19, I wrote in this blog about new research that scientists in Europe, the United States, and beyond have done to pin down the exact mechanisms associated with aging.

As I describe in Exercise Is Medicine, that there are nine major “hallmarks” of aging, that is, nine specific genetic and molecular events that comprise the process of aging. The good news is that exercise can affect all nine of these in a positive direction. The bad news is that eating too much and exercising too little has the opposite effect.

One of the most intriguing of these hallmarks is the epigenetic clock. This is a kind of biological metronome that “is literally an age estimate for any cell type, tissue type or organ,” says Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics and biostatistics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Epigenetics, in case you’ve forgotten, consists of the changes to DNA that influence which genes are active but don’t change the DNA itself. (Changes to the DNA itself are called mutations.) The epigenetic clock is actually just one of a number of biological clocks that help the body keep track of time. When should we get hungry? When should we sleep? When should we conceive babies? The most familiar of these clocks is the circadian clock, which keeps track of day and night.

But the epigenetic clock stands out because of its surprisingly strong relationship with chronological age. As Horvath puts it, it’s like counting the rings on a tree to estimate its age.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting. One of the chief epigenetic changes is a process called DNA methylation. That sounds intimidating, but it’s really not. DNA methylation is the process that happens when a chemical structure called a methyl group latches on to certain stretches of DNA. Depending on where the methyl group lands, it can control the expression of particular genes. As we age some sites on DNA gain methyl groups and others lose them.

The coolest study I came across while researching is this one: In 2014, Swedish researchers asked a group of healthy young men and women to subject themselves to muscle biopsy tests in both legs, then asked them to ride bikes in the lab using only one leg four times a week for 45 minutes for three months. Then the muscle biopsies were repeated.

The scientists found that more than 5,000 sites on the genome of muscle cells had new methylation patterns, with some sites showing more methylation and some, less. The fascinating thing was that these changes only showed up in the exercised leg, not the control leg. It was a perfect experiment, same person, same diet, same sleep patterns, everything. Except that one leg got exercise and the other didn’t. Bottom line? The exercised leg appeared to show a slowing of the epigenetic clock.

Scientists who study the epigenetics of aging have made some other intriguing discoveries, too. As anybody can tell at a high school or college reunion, we don’t all age at the same rate. Despite having the same chronological age, in other words, we vary widely in the rate at which we age at the basic molecular level.

Indeed, some ethnic groups seem to age faster than others, according to epigenetic research. Men age faster than women. Even different tissues in the same body age at different rates. The heart, for instance, can be 50 years old, according to the epigenetic clock, and the lungs, 30.

DNA methylation can actually predict all-cause mortality, regardless of chronological age. In one 2016 study of 13,000 people, for instance, Horvath’s team showed that the epigenetic clock was able to predict the life spans of Caucasians, Hispanics and African-Americans “even after adjusting for traditional risk factors such as chronological age, gender, smoking, body-mass index, disease history, and blood cell counts.”

Some data even suggest that there is a 35 percent increase in the risk of death for each five-year increase in DNA methylation age.

Pretty sobering stuff, isn’t it? Makes you want to jump on one of those exercise bikes and pump away. With both legs, of course.

(Originally posted on Pyschology Today)

Okay, folks. It’s exercise-and-coronavirus time

To be honest, I was going to write about something totally different today.

But since we’re all cooped up for the foreseeable future and since our bodies (and minds) still need exercise, herewith some thoughts on how to get at least the minimum (30 minutes a day, five days a week) to keep from falling apart during this difficult time.

First, as you know if you’ve read my new book, Exercise Is Medicine, exercise has huge benefits for the immune system. Obviously, we need our immune systems more than ever these days.

You may have  heard over the years that exercise causes immune suppression. Well, banish that thought. Old studies of marathon runners seemed to suggest that intense exercise created an “open window” during which the immune system temporarily crashed and pathogens swooped in.

That’s a myth. True, the runners often did self-report sore throats. But that is wrong. When subjected to real, medical diagnoses, the intense exercisers who reported sore throats after exercise did not have infections at all, just irritated throats. No need to worry on that score.

The truth, which has been emerging steadily in recent years, even a single workout, far from making us more vulnerable to infection, can actually boost our immune systems. Indeed, the title of an important 2018 study from British researchers says it all: “Debunking the Myth of Exercise-Induced Immune Suppression…”

Writing in the journal Frontiers in Immunology, the authors say that, “to this day, research practice, academic teaching and even physical activity promotion and prescription continues to consider a prevailing myth that exercise can temporarily suppress immune function.” Dead wrong, they say. They conclude ‘that regular physical activity and frequent exercise are beneficial, or at the very least, are not detrimental to immunological health.”

Okay.

How do you do work out if you’re stuck in quarantine and your gym is closed. Well, one thing is obvious. Go outside. If you’re physically able to get outdoors and if you stay six feet away from other people on the street or in the park, by all means, do it. Walk. Run. Skip. Whatever. Breathe fresh air. Catch a few rays. Wave to the others from that respectful distance.

And if, for whatever reason you can’t go outside? Bounce around inside. Try to get your heart rate up enough so that you can talk but not sing. If you’re watching TV, stand up to watch. Pick up your cell and pace around while you’re chatting. If you live in an apartment building, walk or jog in the hallways provided you keep away from other hall-walkers. If you have no hallways, put on some music and dance. Channel those prisoners who keep sane by pacing around their cells. If nothing else, practice balancing on one foot while you wash the dishes.

Keep going. Do yoga on the floor. Swing your arms. Do sit ups. Use books or jugs of water as weights to pump iron.

Above all, don’t stay glued to the computer or TV all day. As I put it in my book, “Sitting kills.” Sure, it’s tempting to blob around since you’re home anyway, but don’t. If you are using this home-bound time to write that novel or do your taxes, that’s terrific. But get up at least once an hour and walk around.

Obviously, if you do catch the coronavirus and especially if you have a fever, take it easy. But otherwise, get up and move. Your body will thank you. So will your mind.

(Originally posted on Pyschology Today)

Here’s something to ponder: From an evolutionary biology point of view, is aging just one big accident?

The answer, surprisingly for those of us who assume that falling apart over time is the natural order of things, is Yes. Evolution didn’t “plan” for us to deteriorate in later life for the simple reason that evolution doesn’t “plan” anything. Rather, as bio-demographer S. Jay Olshansky at the University of Illinois puts it, aging “is an accidental byproduct of surviving beyond our biological warranty period, beyond fixed genetic programs that exist for growth, development, and reproduction.”

So what, then, does boost our chances for longer, healthier life? The main thing that is under our control, as I argue in my new book, Exercise is Medicine, is, of course, exercise. But other things help determine longer life, too, chiefly our genes and our environment. Let’s pause a moment to consider that. If you are born into an environment full of hazards, your chances for long-term survival are obviously poor, no matter how good your genes. If you’re born into a safe environment, your chances for long life improve.

And this feeds into the genetics. Over generations, if you grow up in a safe environment, you can afford to postpone the age at which you reproduce. This is key, because delayed age of reproduction helps select for genes that indirectly allow for or encourage longer life. In other words, if you’re healthy and safe enough to think about having babies – whether you’re a human or an opossum – in later life, you’ve probably already got good genes.

Think about what’s been going on with humans for decades now. All over the comparatively safe developed world, women are having children later. In the United States, the average age for the birth of a first child is now 26.3, up from 24.9 just a few years ago. Women whose biological clocks are ticking slowly enough that they are still capable of having a baby beyond age 33 are twice as likely to reach very old age as women who have their last baby at 29.

Worldwide, life expectancy has been steadily rising. Life expectancy at birth is now 68.6 around the world and is projected to rise to 76.2 by 2050. In the United States, life expectancy at birth for women in 2016 was 81.1, and for men, 76.1.

In other words, most of the increase in human longevity in recent times has to do with the fact that, in the developed world at least, we have made our environment safer, not that the process of aging itself has changed.

So what is that process of aging?

Not long ago, it wouldn’t have been possible to give a satisfying answer to that question. But in 2013, European scientists boiled down the most important changes to nine “hallmarks” of aging. This gets into some serious cell biology, but don’t panic. In future posts, we’ll make it accessible. For now, the take-home message is this: At least in the view of some researchers, the beneficial effects of aging affect all nine hallmarks of aging, in a positive direction.

Contrarily, our Westernized lifestyle – too much food and too little exercise – accelerates things in the wrong direction.

(Originally posted on Pyschology Today)