Evolution carved out a special place for anxiety, an often helpful emotion which triggers cortisol release in fight-or-flight responses. Anxiety can save your life. But these days anxiety from uniquely modern stressors—health screenings, computer meltdowns, traffic jams, noise pollution and hundreds of other adverse events —lingers long after its usefulness. Chronic anxiety can kill you. This […]
Travel Changes You, and Your Microbes Too
Travel can be rewarding, financially if it’s for work and emotionally when it’s for play or to visit loved ones. The downsides too are well-known: flight delays, uncomfortable seats, annoying seatmates and jet lag. Another to consider is how our microbes fare when flown across vast time zones to lands where even food and water […]
As Asthma Rates Rise, So Does Interest in Microbes
Progress is not always pretty. Polluted air, water and soil are part of the price tag on fast cars, potent drugs and cheap beef. Health can suffer. Faced with environmental toxins, our bodies secrete cytokines which induce multiple responses played out in the lungs, airways and immune system. This specific type of allergy named asthma is […]
Fat-fighting microbes? Prove it with a robust study design.
By Josh Baisley, B.Sc., Director of Clinical Trials, Nutrasource Obesity, defined as a body mass index (BMI) ≥30kg/m2, continues to be an important health issue globally, as it is a major risk factor for several diseases, including hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, gall bladder disease, osteoarthritis and some cancers, among others.1,2 Rates of […]
Holiday Cheers for Probiotics
It’s so easy to throw a ribbon on a box of candy or bottle of booze and call it your very merry holiday offering. Resist the ordinary. This year, invest your resources in gifts that will actually improve the health of those you care about (even though your annoying co-worker still merits ribbon candy.) Ideas with […]
Can Microbes Lower Blood Pressure?
Shake the salt habit, get off the couch and don’t forget your meds. Long the trifecta for managing high blood pressure, those rules demand revision as more of the planet (as many as one-third of adults) struggle with numbers that can lead to early death. One novel approach may lie with the gut-brain axis. In […]