The Rundown

Diet & Deep Sleep. Previous work on the relationship between sleep and nutrition has looked at how what we eat affects our sleep. Less examined is how different diets directly affect sleep quality so researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden decided to investigate the impact.

For the study, the team recruited 15 healthy male participants and randomly gave them a diet that was either high-fat, high-sugar or low-fat, low-sugar. The men continued their usual sleeping habits (seven to nine hours a night) and kept a daily sleep diary.

At the end of each dietary intervention, the participants’ sleep was monitored in a laboratory where the researchers examined slow-wave activity or deep sleep, which consists of stage 3 non-rapid eye movement sleep, typically lasts between 70 and 90 minutes and happens during the first hours of the night. Deep sleep is thought to play an important part in restoring the brain and the consolidation of memories.

The team found that deep sleep exhibited less slow-wave activity when the participants had eaten junk food, compared to those that ate healthier food. Basically, the unhealthy diet resulted in shallower deep sleep.

Further research is needed to investigate how long-lasting the effects of eating an unhealthier diet are and exactly what substances in the diet worsened the depth of deep sleep.

Movement Motivation. Aging and cognitive decline often go hand-in-hand. The hippocampus and adjacent cortices, areas essential for learning and memory, are typically among the first brain structures to be affected as we age. The good news is there’s increasing evidence that physical activity can delay or prevent these structural reductions in older adults.

According to a new study out of Florida Atlantic University and CINVESTAV, Mexico City, Mexico, one key to preventing memory decline is to keep moving throughout your lifetime, particularly during middle age.

The research focused on the effects of long-term running on a network of new hippocampal neurons that were created in adult mice, at middle age. The “mice on the run” showed that running throughout middle age keeps old adult-born neurons wired, which may prevent or delay aging related memory loss.

Carmen Vivar, corresponding author of the study, says that long-term running “may enhance pattern separation ability, our ability to distinguish between highly similar events and stimuli…which is among the first to display deficits indicative of age-related memory decline.”

The takeaway is that chronic exercise, starting in young adulthood and continuing throughout middle age, helps maintain memory function as we grow old—a solid motivation to stay moving.

Extra Point

Watch

The Game Changers. This 2018 documentary follows ex-mixed martial arts competitor James Wilks as he explores plant-based eating. Wilks talks to a group of athletes who follow a vegan diet, as well as scientists, professors and physicians. The Game Changers is on Netflix.

Listen

The Big Silence. Host Karena Dawn introduced this podcast in early 2022 with a goal to normalize conversations around mental health and to empower individuals to share their stories. Episodes talk about reframing food language and diet lifestyle, growing from trauma, mastering your stress and how to have more happy days.

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Finding Your Optimum Zone to Perform to Your Potential. In this piece for The Growth Equation, Steve Magness explores the Yerkes-Dodson Law, a “simple and intuitive” curve that explains the relationship between stress and performance. How do you get to the best place to perform? The answer, he writes, is to find the “Goldilocks” of stress: Too little and you aren’t excited enough. Too much and your performance drops.