Snack Life: Junk Food Craving Sweet Tooth Nation

Revving up a process that slows down as we age may protect against atherosclerosis, a major cause of heart attacks and strokes. In findings published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine led by Ana Maria Cuervo, M.D., Ph.D., successfully minimized artery-narrowing plaque in mice that would otherwise develop those lesions. The researchers did so by boosting chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA), a cellular housekeeping process that Dr. Cuervo discovered in 1993 and named in 2000.

A new analysis suggests that most U.S. dog owners are unaware of—and do not follow—guidelines on safe pet food and dish handling from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but that better education and implementation of the guidelines could reduce contamination. Dr. Emily Luisana of North Carolina State University in Raleigh and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on April 6, 2022.

Despite the well-known research, over half of Americans are not taking very good care of themselves. According to a recent survey, 53% report that they do not consider their lifestyle as being healthy for the mind or body, and alarmingly the same amount of respondents report that they don’t feel that they are capable of improving their health. 

Image: Physically fit primary school pupils can concentrate better, as confirmed by a major study conducted by a team at the TU Munich Department of Sport and Health Sciences together with schools in Bavaria's Berchtesgadener Land region.

Image Credit: LRA BGL Verwendung frei für die Berichterstattung über die TUM bei Nennung des Copyrights / Free for use in reporting on TUM, with the copyright noted 

Physically fit primary school pupils feel better and can concentrate better. They are more likely to make it to higher-level secondary grammar schools than children with less sporting abilities. This has been confirmed for the first time in a study by the Department of Sport and Health Sciences at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).