Silvie+Maryl | Upgrading Minds, Transforming Lives

Music: No need for drugs – get your “feel good” dopamine from music. Scientists have found that the pleasurable experience of listening to music releases this neurotransmitter in the brain, a chemical important for more tangible pleasures associated with “rewards” such as food, drugs and sex. The study revealed that even the anticipation of pleasurable music induces dopamine release. The research was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Read More…

Love: When it comes to love, go with your gut – literally. A new study says our choice of mate may be influenced by our intestinal bacteria driving our pheromones to tell us who to be attracted to. The research compared two groups of flies, one that had been fed a diet of starches and one that had been fed a diet of malt sugar, and found that each subgroup preferred partners with similar nutritional background. But when antibiotics were administered, killing gut bacteria, the preferential mating pattern disappeared.  The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that intestinal flora plays a direct role in pheromone levels, driving mate selection. Yet another reason to take your probiotics. Read More…

As an internationally known surgeon, researcher and clinician at the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, M.D., made the case for a plant-based as a cure to cardiac trouble, a feat he explains in his book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. Yes, you read right – prevent AND reverse. But you don’t have heart disease (yet), you say? Read on. In this revealing interview, Dr. Esselstyn, who will soon be talking plant-based heart health on the big screen in the groundbreaking film Forks Over Knives, speaks about the surprising young age we start to develop heart disease, how grave the situation is, and how we can completely avoid it. Read More…

November is American Diabetes Month, an observance created to generate awareness about a disease shared by nearly 24 million children and adults in the Unites States. That is not counting the 57 million Americans that have pre-diabetes and are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, and the other 5.7 million who don’t know they have it. The American Heart Association estimates that 59.7 million Americans 20 years and older have pre-diabetes, a condition that more than doubles the risk of death due to heart attack. The worse part is that the death rates due to diabetes continue to increase since 1987. Here is the good news: Type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes can be reversed with NO DRUGS by getting informed and adopting a plant-based diet. Read More…

We often hear that an alkaline body is a healthy body and an acidic body is a disease-promoting environment. But do you know what this means? Being aware of the delicate pH balance of our bodies is an important part of a healthy lifestyle. This is directly affected by the foods we eat. Let’s explore how.

When it comes to the body and nutrition, it’s really all about the cell. The cell has to do a job, which is to keep us alive by providing us with energy to do what we need to do. The thing is, in this energy-generating process, the cell also creates waste byproducts. This is where pH comes in. The natural pH of blood is 7.365, but cellular byproducts are lower than that, what we would call acidic. Refreshing our memories from chem lab in school: The pH scale goes from 1-14, with 1 being the most acidic and 14 the most alkaline or “basic”.  A pH of 7 is considered neutral. At 7.365, the healthy pH of our blood is slightly alkaline, while cellular byproducts are the opposite. Here is where our role in helping balance this out comes in – and the importance of food in this process. Read More…

Parenting: Time to make some changes, minority mommies. Efforts to prevent childhood obesity should begin far earlier than currently thought – perhaps even before birth for some populations, according to a study. Research that tracked 1,826 women from pregnancy through their children’s first five years of life found that this was a key period for childhood obesity prevention, especially for minority children. “Almost every single risk factor in that period before age 2, including the prenatal period, was disproportionately higher among children,” said Elsie Taveras, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School. Looking at risk factors, researchers found that African-American and Hispanic infants were more likely than their Caucasian counterparts to be born small, gain excess weight after birth, begin eating solid foods before 4 months of age and sleep less. The good news: most of these can be modified by getting updated information, not just “wisdom” handed down through generations. The study was published in the online edition of the journal Pediatrics. Read More…