Newsletter #036: Exercise vs. Medication: Which is More Effective for Lowering High Blood Pressure? 🩸
Hello Friends!
Happy weekend friends, and welcome to the latest edition of the humanOS newsletter! Here, we’ll share our work, plus some of the cool studies and media that we reviewed this week and that found their way onto our social media channels. 🤓
This Week’s Research Highlights
🌡 Performing sedentary office work in a comfortably warm environment substantially reduces caloric intake and may also enhance productivity.
Subjects were randomized in a crossover design to perform seated office work for 7 hours in either a thermoneutral condition (control, 19°C‐20°C) or a warmer condition (26°C‐27°C). Participants ate, on average, 357 more calories in the cooler condition than in the warm condition, after controlling for BMI and peripheral temperature at midday. 96% of participants in the warm room reported being comfortable, in contrast to only 32% of those in the control condition, and participants also reported greater productivity in the warm condition.
☕️ Dark roast coffee reduces DNA damage.
Subjects were randomized to drink either freshly brewed dark roast coffee or water for a period of four weeks. Blood was drawn and analyzed to assess the level of DNA damage. By the end of the intervention period, the level of DNA strand breaks in the coffee group decreased significantly, in comparison to controls. Mean change from baseline was ~23%. Dark roast specifically may be potent for maintaining DNA integrity due to its concentration of N-methyl pyridinium - a compound generated during the roasting process - which has strong Nrf2-inducing effects.
💪🏻 Exercise may be as effective as prescription drugs for lowering high blood pressure.
Researchers pooled data from 194 clinical trials examining the impact of drugs on lowering systolic blood pressure and 197 trials testing the effect of exercise interventions. When the analyses were restricted to participants with hypertension (above 140 mmHG), endurance training and dynamic resistance exercise had an impact on blood pressure similar to that of ACE-I, ARB, β-blocker, and diuretic medications.
🧠 Seeing pictures of food with calorie information changes the way your brain responds to the food.
Researchers showed participants 180 food images without calorie information, followed by images accompanied by calorie data. The subjects were asked to rate their desire to eat the food while in an fMRI. When food images with calorie content appeared, subjects were not only less likely to want to eat the food, but their brains exhibited reduced activation in regions associated with the reward system and higher activation of the control system.
Podcasts We Loved This Week
- Claudia Hammond: Neuromyths. Via All in the Mind.
- Rudy Leibel: Finding the obesity gene and discovering leptin. Via The Drive with Peter Attia.
- Robert Whitaker: The drug-based paradigm of psychiatric care in the U.S. Via STEM-Talk.
New humanOS Content
- humanOS Radio: How to Perform Better at Work. Podcast with James Hewitt.
This week on humanOS Radio, Greg spoke with James Hewitt. James Hewitt is a performance scientist at Loughborough University, where he is researching how workers’ lifestyle and work patterns influence their well-being and performance. James is specifically interested in how knowledge workers can achieve sustainable high performance without compromising health.
In this interview, Greg and James discuss what traits differentiate successful individuals, physical activity for work, how to start the day on the right foot, and much more. If you want to perform better at work (and be happier & healthier in the process of doing so), this interview has plenty of useful information!
The humanOS Bookshelf
Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Ginny says: Around this time, many of us make resolutions to change some aspect of ourselves. Yet most will abandon our objectives within mere weeks. Why is that? It is because having goals is not enough. We need systems for long-term behavior change.
Weight loss (which is perhaps the most popular New Year’s resolution) is an illustrative example. To actually lose weight, you need to make multiple relatively small changes to your lifestyle. So, you might skip drinking sugary soda and do 20 minutes of HIIT today. But you obviously won’t notice an impact on the scale right away from doing that (or even after you’ve done it for a week). It’s only after your efforts have compounded over time that we start to see the benefits - which of course is why so many people despair and give up. That means we need to find a way to build good habits and stick to them long term. In Atomic Habits, James explains how to build a system for getting 1% better every day - the idea being that easy atomic changes can deliver big results over time. If you wanna know more, check out our interview with James from last autumn (one of my favorites!), or go ahead and pick up the book.