In today’s alarming and alarmist health news headlines, I bring you these two gems.
1. Lack of sleep kills your brain cells permanently!
“Sleep loss may be more serious than previously thought, causing a permanent loss of brain cells, research suggests.
In mice, prolonged lack of sleep led to 25% of certain brain cells dying, according to a study in The Journal of Neuroscience.
If the same is true in humans, it may be futile to try to catch up on missed sleep, say US scientists.
They think it may one day be possible to develop a drug to protect the brain from the side-effects of lost sleep.
The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, looked at lab mice that were kept awake to replicate the kind of sleep loss common in modern life, through night shifts or long hours in the office.”
Read more here.
2. And if that weren’t bad enough, now sitting won’t just kill you, it will also give you a fat butt.
See “Sitting too much causes fat cells of the buttocks to expand and stiffen, promoting obesity, study finds,”
“You are what you eat? Turns out, rather, it may be more about how much you sit, if the results of a new Israel study are any indication.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University have found that fat cells that are exposed to chronic pressure, which is what happens to the buttocks when you’re sitting, experienced faster growth of fat mass. The research waspublished this week in the Biophysical Journal.
Professor Amit Gefen of Tel Aviv University in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the research team wanted to investigate why a sedentary lifestyle results in obesity.
“We found that fat cells exposed to sustained, chronic pressure — such as what happens to the buttocks when you’re sitting down — experienced accelerated growth of lipid droplets, which are fat depots,” said Gefen.”
I’m going to sit on my butt for a long flight but with any luck I’ll get enough sleep.
I should be a drooling vegetable with a huge butt by now. I’m a lifelong insomniac with a sedentary job. But, somehow, I’m still forming complete sentences and wearing size 4 pants, so maybe I got lucky in the genetic lottery.
🙂