Definition: "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance "
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10.06.2016 |
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Want to live longer? Eat lots of beans, nuts and fish, and avoid soft drinks
Study
The researchers used questionnaires to find out about the participants' eating habits and also measured the length of their telomeres in the DNA of their blood cells. Telomeres are a bit like a biological clock. Each time cells divide they get shorter. The longer they are, the longer you still have to live. And a healthy lifestyle delays the reduction in telomere length.
Results
The researchers did discover, by the way, that a high caloric intake is not healthy. The more calories the participants consumed, the more TNF-alpha was circulating in their body. TNF-alpha is an inflammatory factor, and studies have shown that it plays a role in nearly all processes that lead to a deterioration in health.
Grains, dairy, vegetables, fruit, potatoes and meat had no influence on telomere length. One might expect vegetables at least to have a positive influence on telomere length, but that might have been because the participants in this study ate few vegetables.
On the other hand, the consumption of soft drinks did have a pronounced negative effect on telomere length. The researchers made no distinction between soft drinks sweetened with sugars and those sweetened with artificial sweeteners such as aspartame.
What did emerge from the study was that a diet containing large amounts of beans, nuts, fish and seaweed had a positive effect on telomere length.
In conclusion, diabetes had a strongly negative effect on telomere length. The less the body's sensitivity to insulin, the shorter the telomeres were.
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