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HOW YOUR FRIENDS

By Tim Olds & Carol Maher

Think about your five closest friends. What do they care about? Do they love the gym? Long walks on the beach? Maybe they smoke or are overweight. You should choose your friends wisely because they can have a big influence on your health.

Growing evidence suggests disease spreads through social networks. According to a U.S. study that followed 12,000 people for 32 years, if you have a close friend who becomes obese, your chances of becoming obese increase by 171 percent. And your risk of attempting sui-cide is four times higher if you have a friend who has attempted suicide.

So if social networks can make you sick, can they also make you healthier? It seems they can, but in one of life’s annoying asymmetries, the health effect doesn’t seem to be as strong as the illness effect.

Recent studies have shown that quitting smoking spreads through social networks. If your significant other quits, you have a 67 per-cent decreased chance of smoking.

And research confirms what we have always suspected—happiness is contagious. Your chances of becoming happier increase if you are surrounded by happy people.

The strength of the contagion depends on how close you live and your relationship with the happy person. The strongest effect occurs if you have a happy friend who lives within one mile of you (25 percent increased chance of becoming happy).

Happy siblings or spouses can also help, but less so, increasing your chances of becoming happy by 14 percent and 8 percent respectively. Happy co-workers have no effect at all, so it’s

OK to be grumpy at work.

Is Health Really Contagious?But couldn’t all this be due to like people attracting like? Scientists have tested this. It seems the effect really is due to the behaviors spreading over time, from key central “nodes” to their social connections. The spread can be seen up to three degrees of separation, so you can actually influence the friends of your friends’ friends.

The “direction” of the connection is also important. The study examining obesity’s spread through social networks found that if you consider someone your friend and he or she becomes obese, your chances of becom-ing obese increase modestly (57 percent increased risk).

Yet if the person considers you a friend, but the feeling isn’t mutual, your risk of obesity is unaffected. Worst of all, if you consider each other as friends and your friend becomes obese, your chances of becoming obese nearly tre-bles (171 percent increased risk). But we’re not suggesting that you unfriend your overweight

friends as a preventative measure.As this contagion effect of health has become

recognized, researchers have tried to exploit it to improve health. In a 2015 study, public health scientists delivered a multivitamin sup-plement program in rural villages in Honduras.

The program was spread using word of mouth, starting with 5 percent of village residents. In some villages they randomly selected the ini-tial targets, and in other villages they randomly selected individuals, asked them to name a friend, and then these nominated friends became the initial targets.

Uptake of the multivitamins was significantly higher in the villages where the initial targets were the nominated friends. This exploits the “friendship paradox,” that on average, your friends have more friends than you do.

What About Online Social Networks?Online social networks also present a ripe opportunity to deliver health programs. Our recent review identified burgeoning scientific interest in this idea, with promising results. Our study of a gamified Facebook app that helps

users team up with online friends to compete in a 50-day physical activity challenge led to a two-hours-per-week increase in physical activity.

Other programs have targeted a wide range of health behaviors, including weight loss, exercise, quitting smoking, and sexual practices.

Using online social networks to improve your health isn’t for everyone. Sharing health infor-mation online can be confronting. But on the upside, social networks provide public account-ability, opportunities for social support, and friendly rivalry—all powerful motivational tools.

If you are interested in trying an online social networking exercise intervention, join our new study and recommend a friend.

Carol Maher is a National Heart Foundation senior research fellow in physical activity, sed-entary behavior, and sleep at the University of South Australia. Tim Olds is a professor of health sciences at the University of South Aus-tralia. This article was originally published on The Conversation.

AFFECT YOUR HEALTH

How do you want to affect your circle of friends?

JACOB AMMENTORP LUND/ISTOCK

Global reach—over 100 million.Local reach 680,000 Chinese viewers in the San Francisco Bay Area.Three million unique online visitors to ntdtv.com each month.Online, mobile (iNTD on iPad, iPhone, and Android), and Roku smart TV - live streaming, accessible ANYWHERE, ANYTIME.DTV Channel 38.5—Largest 24/7 Chinese television with rich localized lifestyle content.

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Health & Fitness February 11–17, 2016B3

Does Fructose Lead to Larger, Sicker Hearts?Fructose drives a molecular mechanism that can lead to cardiac enlargement and heart failure, researchers report.

“Walk through any supermarket and take a look at the labels on food products, and you’ll see that many of them contain fruc-tose, often in the form of sucrose (table sugar),” says Wilhelm Krek, professor for cell biology at ETH Zurich’s Institute for Molecular Health Sciences.

Prepared foods and soft drinks, as well as pur-portedly healthy fruit juices, contain fructose as an artificial additive—often in high quantities.

In recent decades, fructose spread throughout the food market due to a reputation as being less harmful than glucose. In contrast to glucose, fructose barely increases blood glucose levels and insulin secretion. This avoids frequently recurring insulin spikes after any glucose con-sumption, which are deemed harmful. In addi-tion, fructose tastes sweeter.

But there’s a downside: The liver converts fruc-tose very efficiently into fat. People who con-sume too much high-fructose food can in time become overweight and develop high blood pressure, dyslipidaemia with fatty liver, and insulin resistance—symptoms that doctors group together under the name metabolic syndrome.

Heart MuscleIn a paper published last June in the jour-nal Nature, Krek and team member Peter Mirtschink describe a more troubling side effect of fructose.

They discovered a previously unknown molecular mechanism that points to fructose as a key driver of uncontrolled growth of the heart muscle, a condition that can lead to fatal heart failure.

When a person has high blood pressure, the heart has to grow, as it is harder to pump the blood through the circulatory system. These growing heart-muscle cells require a consid-erable amount of oxygen.

However, since not enough oxygen is availa-ble to adequately supply the increased growth, the cells switch to an alternative energy sup-ply. Instead of drawing energy from fatty acids, they rely more on an anaerobic process called glycolysis—literally, the “splitting of sugars.” If the heart-muscle cells can access fructose in addition to glucose, this can set off a fatal chain reaction.

Fruit Is Still FineLarge volumes of fructose are added to many foods, but especially to sweet beverages and soft drinks. This practice drove up per capita consumption of high fructose corn syrup in the United States between 1970 and 1997, from 230 grams (about half a pound) per year to over 28 kilograms (nearly 62 pounds).

But Mirtschink provides reassurance that eating a normal amount of fruit daily is safe and healthy. “Besides fructose, fruit contains plenty of important trace elements, vitamins, and fiber,” he says.

People should, however, avoid overly sweet soft drinks and fruit juices—these often have sugar added—as well as ready-made meals and other foods to which large amounts of fructose are added as a flavor carrier.

“Just this surplus of fructose can help trigger the mechanism we have described if one of the stress factors is present, such as cardiac valve disease or high blood pressure,” Mirtschink emphasizes.

To read the entire article, see ept.ms/FructoseHeart

This article was originally published by ETH Zurich. Republished via Futurity.org under Cre-ative Commons License 4.0.

Americans eat a lot of fructose in the form of high fructose corn syrup, found in many processed foods.

Intense Beet Juice Ups Strength After Heart FailureDrinking concentrated beet juice, which is high in nitrates, increases muscle power in patients with heart failure, a study shows.

“It’s a small study, but we see robust changes in muscle power about two hours after patients drink the beet juice,” says senior author Linda R. Peterson, associate professor of medicine at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

“A lot of the activities of daily living are power-based—getting out of a chair, lifting groceries, climbing stairs. And they have a major impact on quality of life. We want to help make people more powerful because power is such an impor-tant predictor of how well people do, whether they have heart failure, cancer, or other con-ditions.

“In general, physically more powerful peo-ple live longer.”

13 Percent More PowerBased on research in elite athletes, especially cyclists who use beet juice to boost perfor-mance, the study’s corresponding author, Andrew R. Coggan, assistant professor of radi-ology, suggested trying the same strategy in patients with heart failure.

In the journal Circulation: Heart Failure, the scientists report data from nine patients with heart failure. Two hours after the treatment, patients demonstrated a 13 percent increase in power in muscles that extend the knee.

The researchers observed the most substantial benefit when the muscles moved at the high-

est velocities. The increase in muscle perfor-mance was significant in quick, power-based actions, but researchers saw no improvements in performance during longer tests that meas-ure muscle fatigue.

A Whole-Body ProblemHeart failure can have various triggers, from heart-valve problems to viral infections, but the result is the heart’s gradual loss of pump-ing capacity.

“The heart can’t pump enough in these patients, but that’s just where the problems start,” says Peterson, a cardiologist and direc-tor of Cardiac Rehabilitation at Washington Uni-versity and Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

“Heart failure becomes a whole-body problem because of the metabolic changes that happen, increasing the risk of conditions such as insu-lin resistance and diabetes and generally lead-ing to weaker muscles overall.”

The nitrates in beet juice, spinach, and other leafy green vegetables such as arugula and cel-ery are processed by the body into nitric oxide, which is known to relax blood vessels and have other beneficial effects on metabolism.

To read the entire article, see ept.ms/BeetJuiceHeart

This article was originally published by Washington University in St. Louis. Republished via Futurity.org under Creative Commons License 4.0.

ZELENO/ISTOCK

DRAGHICICH/ISTOCK

By Conan Milner Epoch Times Staff

Hawthorn has served as both a food and medicine for thousands of years. It’s one of the longest-used medicinal plants in Euro-pean herbalism. Up until the 19th cen-tury, it was widely associated with fairies and magic.

Today hawthorn ranks among the three most often used “heart herbs” in the West (along with garlic and cayenne pepper) and is prescribed by doctors and herbalists alike. It’s used to treat

all manner of cardiovascular problems: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, arrhyth-mia, angina, enlarged heart, hardening of the arteries—you name it.People take hawthorn both for prevention

and advanced heart disease. A 2010 meta-anal-ysis of hawthorn research and clini-

cal practice concluded that the herb holds “significant potential as a useful remedy in the treatment of cardiovascular disease.”

Hard and SharpRanging in size from shrub to tree, haw-thorn is a handsome plant year round. It’s a

rustic cousin of the rose, and every spring it erupts in clusters of small blossoms (pink, red, or white depending on the variety).In the fall, hawthorn produces small,

hard, apple-like berries called “haws” (a name that comes from an old Saxon word

meaning “hedge”). When its shiny leaves have fallen, the tree reveals thorns the size of sewing needles. The botanical name, crataegus, comes from Greek words meaning hard and sharp.

A full-grown hawthorn tree is small, but trees often enjoy a ripe old age (some are over 700 years old). In Germany and Britain, haw-thorn hedges were used for centuries to mark property boundaries.

One old name for hawthorn is “bread and cheese tree” because the berries, blossoms, and leaves are all safe to eat and have provided sus-tenance in times of famine. Even in times of plenty, the berries are used to make jam, syrup, or wine.

Plant PartsThe hawthorn berry is the part most often used

for food. But when it comes to a heart medicine, studies overwhelming favor the leaf and flower. That doesn’t mean the berry has no cardiovas-cular benefit. Research points to the plant’s rich antioxidant content for its healing ability, and each plant part has a different mix of favora-ble compounds.

When selecting a supplement, the recom-mended standardization of compounds to look for is at least 1.8 percent vitexin and 10 percent procyanidins. These standardization recom-mendations give the consumer something com-parable to products found effective in research and clinical practice.

To get a feel for how hawthorn works, con-sider something called ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme). This enzyme constricts blood vessels, thereby raising blood pressure. Similar to ACE-inhibitor drugs, hawthorn extract works to regulate ACE activity, relax-ing the blood vessels so pressure drops and circulation improves.

Further research has shown that hawthorn may also regulate the heartbeat, increase blood flow to the heart, and serve as a mild sedative.

Chinese HawthornThe funny thing about herbal history is that you often find different cultures using the same plants in very different ways.

While heart issues are the main indication for hawthorn in the West, in traditional Chinese medicine, it’s mostly used for digestive prob-

lems, such as diarrhea and bloating, especially after an overindulgent, greasy meal. The fruit is also available as a candy, jelly, or powder for a sweet-and-sour tea to sip after dinner.

Given the success of hawthorn as a heart med-icine in the West (and the rise in heart disease around the world), Chinese doctors are now using it this way too.

Safety ConcernsHawthorn is a very safe herb, and European doctors often combine hawthorn with conven-tional drug treatment. Even so, patients taking heart medicine are advised to talk to their doc-tor before adding hawthorn.

Hawthorn extracts are available in a variety of forms: powder, tincture, capsules, and more. Dosages range from 160 milligrams a day up to 900 milligrams a day. Consult a qualified health practitioner for an appropriate dosage for your condition.

The berries, leaves, and flowers of the hawthorn are safe to eat.

European doctors often combine hawthorn with conventional drug treatment.

TOMPET80/ISTO

CK

PUBLIC

DOMAIN

Research has shown that hawthorn may regulate the heartbeat, increase blood flow to the heart, and serve as a mild sedative.

Hawthorn illustration from

“Wild Fruits of the Countryside,” by

F. Edward Hulme, 1902.

Healing the Heart with HAWTHORN

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