Froodee

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Wanna be happy? Grow old

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You probably thought that babies are the happiest people on Earth because they’re innocent and have no sense yet of the many problems inherent in life.

I thought so, too. Ah, those innocent angelic faces of babies. They must be the happiest people alive.

It turns that this isn’t so. According to the latest research on the subject, the oldest people in society are the happiest of them all.

Surprised? You thought that with all their wrinkles, arthritis and all other body pains they’re suffering from, the oldies will sulk their way to their own grave?

“The good news is that with age comes happiness,” said study author Yang Yang, a University of Chicago sociologist. “Life gets better in one’s perception as one ages.”

Yang said that although a certain amount of physical and emotional pain in old age is inevitable — including body aches and the deaths of loved ones and friends — older people generally have learned to be more content with what they have than younger adults.

The main reason is that older people have learned to lower their expectations and accept their achievements, said Duke University aging expert Linda George. An older person may realize “it’s fine that I was a schoolteacher and not a Nobel prize winner,” she said.

George, who was not involved in the new study, believes the research is important because people tend to think that “late life is far from the best stage of life, and they don’t look forward to it.”

Yang’s findings are based on periodic face-to-face interviews with a nationally representative sample of Americans from 1972 to 2004. About 28,000 people ages 18 to 88 took part.

There were ups and downs in overall happiness levels during the study, generally corresponding with good and bad economic times. But at every stage, older Americans were the happiest.

In general, the odds of being happy increased 5 percent with every 10 years of age.

Overall, about 33 percent of the respondents reported being very happy at age 88, versus about 24 percent of those age 18 to their early 20s.

The study appears in April’s American Sociological Review.

This is really good news for all. Now, we don’t need to fear getting old. The real fun only begins when you’re 88!

We can’t have our cake and eat it, too

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The headline above has proven to be true in the case of biofuels which only recently were hailed as the solution to global warming and the key to the planet’s survival.

Now, the mad rush to produce biofuels is being blamed for the worldwide food crisis.

Various nations have already spent billions of dollars in their bid to develop sugar- and grain-based ethanol and biodiesel to replace carbon-belching fossil fuels, the overwhelming source of man-made global warming.

But in their effort to mass-produce such biofuels, the nations of the world have taken away food crops from the hungry mouths of the world’s burgeoning poor to serve the rich by providing clean fuel to the vehicles of the well-to-do.

This has prompted prices of rice and other food to soar to astronomical heights and threaten the world with mass starvation.

On Friday, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said biofuels “posed a real moral problem” and called for a moratorium on using food crops to power cars, trucks and buses. The vital problem of global warming “has to be balanced with the fact that there are people who are going to starve to death,” said Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

“Producing biofuels is a crime against humanity,” the UN’s special rapporteur for the right to food, Jean Ziegler of Switzerland, said earlier.

But some are casting doubts on the link between biofuels and the world food crisis, saying this “is highly exaggerated.”

Defenders of biofuels say food shortages have multiple causes, including a growing appetite for meat among the burgeoning middle class in China and India.

I think instead of exchanging recriminations and engaging in endless debates on whether biofuels have something to do with the world food crisis, all concerned groups and individuals should zip up their big mouths and rack their brains instead on finding an alternative solution to global warming without endangering the world’s food supplies.

If the brainiacs of our world could come up with such miracles as the Internet and the microchips that power such modern-day wonders as cell phones, iPods and portable game consoles, it should not be that difficult to look for ways to produce wonder crops to feed millions of hungry people and wonder fuels that would not harm the environment.

But it seems the irony of our planet’s history is that the bigger the problems that afflict mankind, the more greedy Big Business becomes.

Such narrow-minded greediness could be the bane of mankind.

Photo caption:
A campaigner protests over biofuel legislation in London last April 15. (AFP/Ben Stansall)

Thousands of scientists flying high on drugs

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It turns out that many of the world’s scientists, particularly those in the United States, are flying high on drugs.

According to a recent survey in Nature, Britain’s top science journal, 20 percent of scientists have admitted to using performance-enhancing prescription drugs for non-medical reasons.

A huge majority of these pill-popping Einsteins said they take drugs to “improve concentration,” and that they did so on a daily or weekly basis.

Now I may start to doubt scientists who could see things we ordinary mortals could not even imagine. For all we know, with all the drugs they’re taking, they could just be hallucinating.

Oh, but then some of their findings could prove to be significant and contribute to scientific advancement for the betterment of mankind.

Ok then, pop more Ritalin, Mr. Modern-Day Einsteins.

The survey was conducted on 1,427 scientists, mostly those residing in the United States, reports said.

It focused on three drugs widely available by prescription or via the Internet – Ritalin, Modafinil, which is also called Provigil, and beta blockers.

Ritalin, a trade name for methylphenidate, is a stimulant normally used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, especially in children. Modafinil – sold as Provigil — is prescribed to treat sleep disorders, but is also effective against general fatigue and jet lag.

Both medications are commonly used by students as “study aids” to sharpen performance and wakefulness.

“It doesn’t seem to be causing too much trouble since most [students] use the drugs not to get high but to function better,” said Brian Doyle, a clinical pyschiatrist at Georgetown University Medical Centre. “When exams are over, they go back to normal and stop abusing the drugs.”

Other experts expressed more concern about what the survey revealed. “It alerted us to the fact that scientists, like others, are looking for short cuts,” said Wilson Compton, director of epidemiology and prevention research at the US National Institute for Drug Abuse.

Ritalin, he said, can become addictive, even if it has proven safe and effective when taken as prescribed.

The third class of drugs included in the survey was beta blockers, prescribed for cardiac arrhythmia and popular among performers due to its anti-anxiety effect.

Of the 288 scientists who said they had taken one or more of these drugs outside of a medical context, three-fifths had used Ritalin, and nearly half Provigil. Only 15 percent were taking beta blockers.

Aside from enhancing their mental performance, the surveyed scientists said the pills enabled them to focus their mind to a specific task. Others said they simply want to get rid of jet lag.

Almost 70 percent of 1,258 of the scientists said they would be willing to risk mild side effects in order to boost their brain power by taking cognitive-enhancing drugs.

Half of the respondents reported such effects, including headaches, jitteriness, anxiety and sleeplessness.

In the survey, 80 percent of all the scientists — even those who did not use these drugs — defended the right of “healthy humans” to take them as work boosters, and more than half said their use should not be restricted, even for university entrance exams.

More than 57 percent of the respondents were 35 years old or younger.

I don’t exactly know what to make of this. All I know is that prohibited drugs, such as those being used by these science brainiacs, are considered prohibited because they are harmful to one’s health. And this is scientific fact which they themselves established.

If they say that prohibited drugs are dangerous, why are they taking them? Have they all gone mad or suicidal? Or are they keeping something from ordinary Earthlings like us?

This riddle is giving me a headache. I better pop in a pill – no, not Ritalin, just Paracetamol.

The pee secrets revealed

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Next time you go to the toilet to pee, consider that you’re leaving behind a specimen that would show how you would live and die.

That’s how valuable urine is. No wonder, some people trapped for weeks in collapsed buildings managed to survive by drinking their own fluids, no matter how yucky that might taste. But that’s another story.

In a recent study made in London, researchers found out that the urine samples they collected from 4,000 volunteers from across the world show that people from different nations often have spectacularly different metabolisms.

The findings are explained in this month’s issue of “Nature” journal.

Chemicals left in the urine can reveal a lot about peoples’ bodies and lifestyles, the scientists said.

“For instance, Chinese and Japanese people are almost identical genetically, which isn’t surprising, since they diverged culturally only a few thousand years ago – but they are very different metabolically,” said researcher Jeremy Nicholson, a biological chemist at Imperial College London.

“We know there’s a huge difference in the diseases that different nations risk – broadly speaking, the Japanese tend to die of strokes, the Chinese of heart attacks – and we see those differences reflected in their urine,” he said.

“Of course they’re different in terms of lifestyle – the Japanese tend to eat more fish than the Chinese as a whole do – but their gut bacteria are also very distinct as well.”

Gut microbes help people get energy from our food.

“In your guts, you have about 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) of 1,000 different species of bacteria,” Nicholson explained. “If you include all the genes from bacteria along with your own, only about 1 to 2 percent of the genes in your body are human, with the rest from the gut microbes. And what bacteria you have can be quite different from person to person.”

Within a country, there can be big differences metabolically among people from different regions, the researchers said.

“You can even pick out different cities – you can see the differences between Chicago and Corpus Christi,” Nicholson said.

The study not only looked at chemicals known to be linked with certain disorders, but also discovered previously unknown links between certain molecules and diseases.

For example, no one had known that a compound known as formate was connected with any disease, “and formate turned out to be strongly linked with blood pressure,” Nicholson said. “So this approach might lead to ways to predict or prevent high blood pressure based off formate.”

In the future, urine might help shed light on diabetes, atherosclerosis, obesity and even cancer, he added.

I wouldn’t blame you if this thought cross your mind as you discard your bodily fluids is: “That’s the cure for cancer going down the drain.”

Who’s more forgetful? Who?

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If you’re a guy and you can’t remember where you place your wallet, don’t worry, you’re just having a bout of anxiety perhaps or maybe getting older – no big deal.

But if you’re a guy and you can’t remember your wife’s birthday, either you have a serious problem with your wife or with your own mind. So, you could either go to a marriage counselor or a doctor, as the case maybe.

A new study showed that men are more likely than women to have problems with memory and other thinking skills, symptoms considered to be an early stage of dementia.

The new study sheds light on the cognitive differences among men and women on the subject of memory for the first time.

Forgetfulness linked with aging, or just a frenzied day, is normal, the researchers said.

But when you start forgetting things you normally remember, and on a routine basis, such as your wife’s birthday or your wife’s face, these maybe signs of so-called mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which can lead to dementia, the experts said.

People with mild cognitive impairment are three to four times more likely than others to develop Alzheimer’s disease, according to the Mayo Clinic. Considered the most common form of dementia, Alzheimer’s is a neurological disorder that affects your ability to think, speak, reason, remember and move.

The recent findings come from a study of nearly 2,000 residents in the US state of Minnesota who ranged in age from 70 to 89. Dr. Rosebud Roberts of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and her colleagues followed the participants beginning in the fall of 2004, collecting new data every 12 to 15 months.

Overall, 74 percent of the participants had normal mental function; about 16 percent had MCI; and 10 percent had full-on dementia.

Men were one-and-a-half times more likely to have mild cognitive impairment than women. The prevalence in men increased from 12 percent in men ages 70 to 74 up to 40 percent in the oldest age group, ages 85 to 89.

The finding remained the same regardless of a man’s education or marital status.

“These findings are in contrast to studies which have found more women than men, or an equal proportion, have dementia, and suggest there’s a delayed progression to dementia in men,” Roberts said. “Alternately, women may develop dementia at a faster rate than men.”

Memory sometimes plays tricks on our mind. One time you remember such exquisite little details as the shape, color, texture and even the taste of a woman’s lips. And other times, you can’t remember anything of that – even when she’s right there infront of you.

I guess, memory is closely tied to emotions. The more intense the feeling, the more it is hard to forget – even when you’re already a hundred years old, perhaps.