Category Biology/Biotechnology

Finding time to commit to exercise can be a real challenge, forcing many of us to squeeze in a quick run or gym session whenever there’s a spare moment. But research suggests if you really want to make the most of your exercise, you should do it at the same time each day. It’s a schedule your body will thank you for.

A 2019 study lead by researchers from Brown Alpert Medical School in the US showed it really doesn’t matter if you’re a dawn jogger or a twilight cyclist; it’s the consistency that’s key if it’s weight-loss you’re after.

The US Department of Health and Human Services suggests two and a half hours of moderate physical activity each week is the least we should be doing to keep healthy.

And not just a minute here or there, but at least 10 minutes of heart-pounding e...

Study also looks at effect of leaky gut on concentration. Fatty food may feel like a friend during these troubled times, but new research suggests that eating just one meal high in saturated fat can hinder our ability to concentrate – not great news for people whose diets have gone south while they’re working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study compared how 51 women performed on a test of their attention after they ate either a meal high in saturated fat or the same meal made with sunflower oil, which is high in unsaturated fat.

Their performance on the test was worse after eating the high-saturated-fat meal than after they ate the meal containing a heal...

This discovery may have clinical importance in management of heart failure. Oxidative stress can be pathological. Now researchers report that the other end of the redox spectrum, reductive stress, is also pathological. Reductive stress causes pathological heart enlargement and diastolic dysfunction in a mouse model.

Many heart diseases are linked to oxidative stress, an overabundance of reactive oxygen species. The body reacts to reduce oxidative stress — where the redox teeter-totter has gone too far up — through production of endogenous antioxidants that reduce the reactive oxygen species. This balancing act is called redox homeostasis.

But what happens if the redox teeter-totter goes too far down, crea...

Cappuccino, latte or short black, coffee is one of the most commonly consumed drinks in the world. But whether it’s good or bad for your health can be clarified by genetics, as a world-first study from the University of South Australia’s Australian Centre for Precision Health shows that excess coffee consumption can cause poor health.

Using data from over 300,000 participants in the UK Biobank, researchers examined connections between genetically instrumented habitual coffee consumption and a full ra...