Conscious Choice: Make Over Your Mind

May 2008 | Healthy Living :: Body Talk

Make Over Your Mind

Meditation can change your brain for the better, according to recent research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Looking at brain scans of 16 Tibetan monks and 16 volunteers with no previous meditation training, scientists discovered that certain emotion-related brain regions were dramatically altered in those who practiced compassion meditation. Those regions included the insula (an area engaged in detecting bodily responses to emotion) and the temporal parietal junction (a region regarded as important in processing empathy).

It’s possible that meditation training may help people to develop skills that cultivate compassion and happiness, suggests study director Richard Davidson. In fact, he states, the study findings indicate people can learn compassion the same way they might learn to play a musical instrument. “People are not just stuck at their respective set points,” Davidson notes. “We can take advantage of our brain’s plasticity and train it to enhance these qualities.” Since the process involves regulating your thoughts and emotions, such training may be particularly valuable to people prone to depression, adds Davidson.

Tummy Trouble
Just a few weeks of slacking off on your exercise routine could lead to a bigger belly, a new report from the Journal of the American Medical Association finds. For two weeks, 10 healthy young men cut their physical activity back to just 1,500 steps per day (about 4,500 to 8,500 fewer steps than the men usually walked daily). Even though participants didn’t appear to put on any weight, their belly fat increased by 7 percent in those two weeks. Linked to increased inflammation levels in previous studies, excess belly fat may raise your risk of chronic conditions such as heart disease.

In another experiment, the same researchers had eight healthy young men stay sedentary for three weeks. By the end of the study period, the participants showed signs of impaired insulin sensitivity, a known risk factor for diabetes.

Get Your Three Squares a Day
Skipping breakfast, going light on lunch and piling on the grub at dinnertime might not be your most health-smart meal strategy. In a study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers found that sticking with a solid three-meal-a-day diet may be more effective for keeping your cholesterol and blood pressure in check.

For the study, a small group of volunteers took in all their calories in either one meal a day or in three meals a day. After eight weeks, the study groups switched, so that the “one-mealers” became “three-mealers” (and vice versa). Despite experiencing slight drops in weight and body fat compared to their counterparts, the volunteers had greater increases in total cholesterol, LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, and blood pressure when they were one-mealers. What’s more, according to further analysis published in the journal Metabolism, the one-mealers had more sustained elevations in blood-sugar concentrations and other diabetes risk factors.

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