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The Olive Oil Hunter News #79

Posted on by The Olive Oil Hunter

Grilled Tuna Steaks with Salmoriglio Recipe, Spotlight on Parsley, How Accurate is Your Calorie-Counting App and Are You Wired for Shorter Sleep? ?

Got your grill primed and ready for the warmer months? Then I’ve got a zesty tuna recipe to start the season with a bang. My tuna primer will cue you into the differences in tuna varieties so you know what to keep an eye out for at the fish counter. If you like to track your meals on an app, you’ll be surprised at the results of a study on their accuracy. Plus, I’m sharing the latest research on how genes influence sleep patterns.

Grilled Tuna Steaks with Salmoriglio

  • Grilled Tuna Steaks with Salmoriglio Grilled Tuna Steaks with Salmoriglio

    With origins in Sicily, this simple yet zesty sauce is also excellent with grilled salmon, beef, poultry, or vegetables. 

    Ingredients

    • 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, plus more for the fish
    • Juice from 1 lemon
    • 2 tablespoons hot water
    • 2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced 
    • 3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
    • 1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh oregano or 1 teaspoon dried oregano 
    • 1 tablespoon brined capers, drained (optional)
    • 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes or more to taste
    • Salt and freshly ground black pepper
    • 4 tuna steaks, each 6 to 8 ounces and 1-inch thick 

    Directions

    Step 1

    Make the salmoriglio: Put the 1/2 cup olive oil in a small saucepan and warm over low heat. Whisk in the lemon juice and hot water. Stir in the garlic, parsley, oregano, capers if using, red pepper flakes, and salt and pepper to taste (go easy on the salt if you’re using capers). Keep warm. 

    Step 2

    Set up your grill for direct grilling and preheat to medium-high (450ºF). Lightly brush the fish with olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Arrange on the grill grate, and grill until the fish is opaque and easily flakes when pressed with a fork—about 12 minutes, turning once with a spatula. (If you prefer your tuna on the rare side, cook the steaks for less time.) 

    Step 3

    Transfer the tuna to a platter or plates, and drizzle with the salmoriglio. Serve the remaining sauce on the side. 

    Yields 4 servings

Healthy Ingredient Spotlight: Tuna

Healthy Ingredient Spotlight

Reeling in the right tuna

According to the National Fisheries Institute, of all the varieties of tuna in the oceans, you’ll most likely find only five at fish stores and on menus:

  • Albacore is the tuna you know best packaged in cans or pouches. It has a mild flavor and white to light pink flesh.
  • Bigeye (ahi in Hawaii) is the favorite for sashimi and is also mild in flavor.
  • Bluefin, used almost exclusively for sushi, is the darkest, fattiest, and arguably the most expensive variety, with a taste that gets more pronounced as the fish reaches adulthood. Overfishing has made it a priority for conservation efforts.
  • Skipjack is the tuna type you’re now most likely to see in cans and pouches. Considered “light tuna,” it’s high in nutrients, including omega-3 fatty acids.
  • Yellowfin, sometimes sold as ahi, has pale pink flesh and is slightly more flavorful than albacore.
Healthy Kitchen Nugget: Flat or Curly parsley

Healthy Kitchen Nugget

Flat or curly: picking parsley

Fresh parsley is a lot more than a plate garnish, especially when you choose flat-leaf, or Italian, parsley over its curly cousin. Flat-leaf parsley has a more herbal taste compared to the crunchy and bland grassy taste of the curly variety, due to different proportions of some of parsley’s natural compounds. Chopped or minced, flat-leaf parsley adds bright color as well as flavor to a dish—people who aren’t fans of cilantro can use it instead. 

For Your Best Health: How accurate is your calorie counting app?

For Your Best Health

How accurate is your calorie-counting app?

That’s the question researchers from Northwestern and Benedictine Universities set out to answer. They compared nutrient data on the 50 most frequently eaten unprocessed or minimally processed foods from four commercial nutrition apps against a leading research-based food database, Nutrition Data System for Research (NDSR). They looked at calorie counts, macronutrients, total sugars, fiber, saturated fat, cholesterol, calcium, sodium, and more. Here’s what they found: “CalorieKing and Lose It! had mostly excellent agreement with NDSR for all investigated nutrients. Fitbit showed the widest variability in agreement with NDSR for most nutrients, which may reflect how well the app can accurately capture diet.” The study also found some flaws with MyFitnessPal, such as fiber accuracy and poor agreement with NDSR on calories in particular. The findings were published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Fitness Flash: Are you wired for shorter sleep?

Fitness Flash

Are you wired for shorter sleep?

According to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), some people have genes that allow them to thrive on just four to six hours of restorative sleep each night. What’s more, these elite sleepers also have psychological resilience and resistance to neurodegenerative conditions. Of course, not everyone is wired this way, but uncovering what enables some people to stay healthy despite getting little sleep can provide answers for those who need more and can’t seem to get it.

“There’s a dogma in the field that everyone needs eight hours of sleep, but our work to date confirms that the amount of sleep people need differs based on genetics,” says neurologist Louis Ptacek, MD, one of the senior authors of a study published iniScience on March 15, 2022. “Think of it as analogous to height; there’s no perfect amount of height, each person is different. We’ve shown that the case is similar for sleep.”

For more than a decade, Dr. Ptacek and Ying-Hui Fu, PhD, both of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, have studied people with Familial Natural Short Sleep (FNSS), the ability to function fully on four to six hours of sleep a night, which runs in families. To date, they’ve identified five of the genes that play a role in FNSS. These genes may help in the development of future drugs to ward off sleep disorders, protect against brain disorders, or slow down their progression. 

“Sleep problems are common in all diseases of the brain,” says Dr. Fu. “This makes sense because sleep is a complex activity. Many parts of your brain have to work together for you to fall asleep and to wake up. When these parts of the brain are damaged, it makes it harder to sleep or get quality sleep.”

Their latest work tested Dr. Fu’s hypothesis that, for people with FNSS, elite sleep can be a shield against neurodegenerative disease rather than speed up its development as it seems to do in people who need closer to seven to nine hours and fail to get it. They bred mice that had both short-sleep genes and genes that predisposed them to Alzheimer’s and found that their brains developed much less of the hallmark signs linked to dementia.

Identifying more special sleep genes will take time, and the researchers liken their work to solving a jigsaw puzzle. “Every mutation we find is another piece,” says Dr. Ptacek. “Right now, we’re working on the edges and the corners, to get to that place where it’s easier to put the pieces together and where the picture really starts to emerge.”

“This work opens the door to a new understanding of how to delay and possibly prevent a lot of diseases,” says Dr. Fu. “Our goal really is to help everyone live healthier and longer through getting optimum sleep.”

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The Olive Oil Hunter News #78

Posted on by The Olive Oil Hunter

Roast Chicken with Pumpkin Seed Pesto Recipe and Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO) and Cancer Prevention

We know from a wealth of studies that the Mediterranean diet can help prevent various types of cancer, notably colon cancer, thanks to the abundant fiber in many of its foods. Equally exciting research now highlights the benefits of olive oil in particular in helping with cancer prevention, and it’s thanks to a very specific nutrient, oleocanthal. 

Fitness Flash: Gut Health and Olive Oil

Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO) and Cancer Prevention

The Research: “Olive oil intake and cancer risk: A systematic review and meta-analysis,” PLoS One (2021).

“(-)-Oleocanthal and (-)-oleocanthal-rich olive oils induce lysosomal membrane permeabilization in cancer cells,” PLoS One (2019).

“(-)-Oleocanthal rapidly and selectively induces cancer cell death via lysosomal membrane permeabilization,” Molecular and Cellular Oncology (2015).

For the PLoS One review, done at the University of Athens in Greece, scientists analyzed 45 studies and found that the “highest olive oil consumption was associated with 31 percent lower likelihood of any cancer, breast, gastrointestinal, upper aerodigestive, and urinary tract cancer. Significant overall effects spanned both Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean participants.” They concluded:  

“Olive oil consumption seems to exert beneficial actions in terms of cancer prevention.”

Studies done at Hunter College in collaboration with scientists from other New York area institutions help explain what might give extra virgin olive oil or EVOO, known for its anti-inflammatory properties, this cancer-fighting ability. For the Molecular and Cellular Oncology study, Hunter professor David A. Foster, PhD, and his coauthors, identified the role of oleocanthal (OC), a phenolic compound in EVOO, already credited for the health benefits linked to diets rich in EVOO. The team “investigated the effect of OC on human cancer cell lines in culture and found that OC induced cell death in all cancer cells examined as rapidly as 30 minutes.” 

It turns out that oleocanthal damages cancer cells’ lysosomes, cell components that contain enzymes used to break down larger molecules like proteins. As explained in a news report from Hunter College, “The oleocanthal degrades the integrity of the lysosomal membrane, releasing the enzymes into the cells’ cytoplasm, which leads to cell death. Cancer cells often have larger and more numerous lysosomes, making them more vulnerable to oleocanthal than other cells.” 

According to the scientists, different olive oils have different oleocanthal concentrations due to their origin, harvest time, and processing methods. For the 2019 PLoS One study, the researchers, including scientists from Weill Cornell Medicine, Rutgers University, and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, along with Hunter, tested a variety of olive oils to determine their respective concentrations of oleocanthal, ranging from very low to very high. The olive oils with high oleocanthal content completely killed cancer cells in a manner similar to purified oleocanthal. The olive oils with average oleocanthal content reduced their viability, but to a lesser extent. Those with no oleocanthal had no effect.

The researchers also tested oleocanthal’s effects by injecting it into mice engineered to develop pancreatic tumors. The oleocanthal injections extended the lives of the mice by an average of four weeks. If it were to have the same effect in humans, which is as yet unknown, that could translate to over 10 years. 

“Whether oleocanthal can be used as a magic bullet to target cancer cells is not clear,” says Dr. Foster. “However, the data provided in this article validate studies indicating that extra virgin olive oils can prevent cancer.”

“Today, there are no brands of olive oil sold at grocery stores in the United States that mention ‘oleocanthal’ or other polyphenols on their label, and this might change as producers of olive oil catch up with the scientific research, and consumers become more savvy,” says Limor Goren, PhD, research associate at Hunter College and lead author of the 2019 study. She adds that consumers can also do their own taste test for oleocanthal: “Taste a small amount of an extra virgin olive oil; if there is a signature stinging sensation felt at the back of the throat, that is an indication of oleocanthal. It should feel peppery.”

Roast Chicken with Pumpkin Seed Pesto

  • Pumpkin Seed Pesto Roast Chicken with Pumpkin Seed Pesto

    This South American-inspired olive oil-rich pesto elevates simple roasted chicken and packs an herby punch. 

    Ingredients

    • 1 3-1/2- to 4-pound chicken 
    • 2 tablespoons, separated, plus 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil 
    • Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper 
    • 1/2 cup hulled green pumpkin seeds (pepitas), unsalted 
    • 1/2 cup packed fresh cilantro leaves, rinsed and patted dry
    • 1/2 cup packed fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves, rinsed and patted dry
    • 2 large garlic cloves, peeled and coarsely chopped 
    • 2 tablespoons water, more as needed
    • 1 tablespoon fresh lime, more to taste
    • 1 teaspoon ground cumin 

    Directions

    Step 1

    Preheat your oven to 400°F. Place the chicken on a rack in a shallow roasting pan or rimmed baking sheet. Rub the chicken with 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Season the inside and outside generously with salt and pepper. Roast for 60 to 70 minutes or until the internal temperature in the thickest part of a thigh is 165°F. Let rest for 10 minutes before carving.  

    Step 2

    While the chicken is roasting, prepare the pesto. Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil to a medium-hot skillet, and add the pumpkin seeds. Sauté until the seeds begin to pop, about 2 minutes, but don’t let them burn. Cool, and then transfer the seeds to the bowl of a food processor. Add the cilantro, parsley, garlic, water, lime juice, and cumin, and pulse several times. With the machine running, slowly add 1/3 cup olive oil until you get a purée. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and add more lime juice if needed. (If it’s too thick, add additional water, one tablespoon at a time.) Serve with the chicken. Refrigerate any leftover pesto to use as a dip. 

    Yields 2-3 servings

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The Olive Oil Hunter News #77

Posted on by The Olive Oil Hunter

Citrus Pork Rib Roast with Roasted Fennel Recipe, Spotlight on Fennel, How to Marinate Safely, Diversify Proteins for Better Health and Resistance Training for Better Sleep

Springtime celebrations demand a dramatic dish, and a pork rib roast fits the bill. This recipe is a great introduction to fennel for those who have been shying away from this versatile veg. You’ll also read about two pieces of interesting health research, important to anyone who wants to fend off high blood pressure (a top heart health risk) and sleep better (not getting enough is a risk to the heart, brain, and overall well-being).

Citrus Pork Rib Roast with Roasted Fennel

  • Fennel Citrus Pork Rib Roast with Roasted Fennel

    This recipe serves a large crowd. For smaller gatherings, cook just one rib roast and cut all the other ingredients in half. If you can’t get bone-in pork rib roasts locally, substitute pork loin roast or even thick pork chops—adjust the cooking times accordingly. The citrus marinade is also excellent with chicken. 

    Ingredients

    • Two 5-bone pork rib roasts, each about 4 pounds 
    • 3 lemons, sliced into eighths and seeded
    • 3 navel oranges, sliced into eighths
    • 1/2 grapefruit, sliced into quarters and seeded 
    • 1/2 sweet onion, peeled and quartered
    • 6 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
    • 3 small sprigs fresh oregano
    • 2 tablespoons fennel seeds 
    • 3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, divided use
    • 10 whole cloves
    • 10 fresh or 5 dried bay leaves
    • 8 juniper berries, crushed, or 1/4 cup gin
    • Sea salt and coarsely ground fresh black pepper 
    • 3 large fennel bulbs 
    • 15 kumquats
    • Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, for serving

    Directions

    Step 1

    Put the pork roasts in one or two jumbo-sized resealable plastic bags, a large glass bowl, or baking dish. In the bowl of a food processor, combine the lemons, oranges, grapefruit, onion, garlic, oregano, fennel seeds, and 1/4 cup of olive oil and pulse until the mixture is roughly chopped and juicy. Take the bowl off the processor base, remove the blade, and stir in the cloves, bay leaves, and juniper berries or gin. Pour the marinade over the pork roasts. Seal the bags and place them in a roasting pan to contain any leaks or, if marinating in a large container, cover well with plastic wrap. Refrigerate overnight or up to 24 hours, turning periodically to redistribute the marinade. 

    Step 2

    When ready to cook, preheat your oven to 350°F. Prepare a very large roasting pan by lining it with foil (for an easy cleanup) and placing a roasting rack in it; set aside. Scrape the marinade off the roasts and pat dry with paper towels. Generously season on all sides with salt and pepper. In a large skillet, heat 1/4 cup olive oil over medium heat. Sear one roast until caramelized, turning as needed with tongs, and then transfer it to the roasting pan. Repeat with the other roast. Place the pan in the upper two-thirds of the oven (you’ll need a second oven rack placed in the bottom third for the fennel and kumquats). Set a timer for 40 minutes. 

    Step 3

    While the pork is roasting, prepare the fennel. Cut off the fronds, the feathery green tops of the fennel stalks, chop a few and set aside. Refrigerate the rest of the fronds for other uses. Trim the bottoms of the bulbs and cut off the stalks; reserve the stalks for another dish or the next time you make stock. Cut each bulb vertically through the core into 4 sections. Drizzle the bottom of a rimmed baking sheet with some of the remaining olive oil and arrange the fennel pieces on top. Drizzle more olive oil over the fennel. Season with salt and pepper. Arrange the kumquats among the fennel. Place the baking sheet on the lower rack of your oven when the timer goes off. Roast, turning once, until the fennel is tender and golden brown, about 40 minutes. Transfer the fennel and kumquats to a platter. Dust with the grated cheese and garnish with the reserved fennel fronds. 

    Step 4

    Remove the pork roasts from the oven when the internal temperature in the thickest part is 140°F, about 1 hour and 20 minutes total (this should coincide with the fennel/kumquat cooking time). Let rest for 10 minutes before slicing into chops. Serve with the roasted fennel and kumquats. 

    Yields 10 servings 

Healthy Ingredient Spotlight: Fennel

Healthy Ingredient Spotlight

Get familiar with fennel

For the uninitiated, fennel can look intimidating, but its licorice scent and taste add a lot of appeal to dishes, from soups to seafood—you’ll be pleasantly surprised even if you’re not a fan of black licorice candy.

This member of the carrot family hails from the Mediterranean region but is used, both raw and cooked, in cuisines far and wide. Raw fennel adds crunch to salads, much like celery, when the bulb is quartered and thinly sliced or chopped, depending on the recipe. The feathery fronds at the top of the vegetable can be chopped much like dill and used in many of the same ways, from a garnish to a flavoring. Some people find that the stalks are too fibrous to eat raw, but they soften when cooked—cooking also makes fennel’s licorice flavor milder.  

Healthy Kitchen Nugget: How to Marinate Safely

Healthy Kitchen Nugget

Marinating safely

Marinating food, especially overnight, is a great way to infuse it with flavor. But think “safety first,” according to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. When possible, marinate in glass, covering the container fully with plastic wrap, or use disposable food-safe sealable plastic bags. Don’t use a metal container because the acid in a marinade can interact with metal. Refrigerate the marinating food on the bottom shelf of your fridge. If a recipe calls for the marinade liquid to be used as a baste,you mustboil it first to kill bacteria. Even better is to reserve some of the marinade separately or to make a small additional batch for this purpose.

For Your Best Health: Diversify Proteins

For Your Best Health

Pick a variety of proteins

Eating a balanced diet and including protein from a variety of sources may help lower the risk of high blood pressure, according to research published in Hypertension, a journal of the American Heart Association (AHA).

In its 2021 dietary guidance to improve heart health, the AHA recommended eating one to two servings, or 5.5 ounces, of protein daily from healthy sources—plants, seafood, low-fat or fat-free dairy products, and, if desired, lean cuts and unprocessed forms of meat or poultry. The new research looked at the link between specific proteins and new cases of high blood pressure among 12,000 participants whose diet records were analyzed over a six-year period. 

Participants were given scores based on the number of different sources of protein they ate: whole grains, refined grains, processed red meat, unprocessed red meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and legumes. One point was given for each protein source, with a top score of 8. The researchers then compared new cases of hypertension to the scores. In contrast to participants with the lowest score (less than 2), those with a score of 4 or higher had a 66 percent lower risk of developing high blood pressure.

But there can also be too much of a good thing, especially when it comes to processed meat. When the researchers divided the total quantity of protein eaten into five levels (or quintiles) from least to most intake, people who ate the least amount of total protein and those who ate the most protein had the greatest high blood pressure risk.

“The heart health message is that consuming a balanced diet with proteins from various different sources, rather than focusing on a single source of dietary protein, may help to prevent the development of high blood pressure,” says study author Xianhui Qin, MD.

Fitness Flash: Resistance training for better sleep

Fitness Flash

Resistance training for better sleep

Having sleep trouble? Strength training to the rescue! Research done at Iowa State University found that study participants who did 60 minutes of resistance exercise three times a week for a year slept longer and fell asleep faster than participants who did aerobic-only workouts or a combination of aerobic and resistance exercises for 30 minutes each. The resistance exercise regimen consisted of three sets of 12 exercises that targeted all the major muscle groups and included bicep curls, crunches, leg extensions, and triceps dips.

Among participants who were not getting at least seven hours of sleep at the start of the study, sleep duration increased by an average of 40 minutes in the resistance exercise-only group compared to an average increase of 18 minutes in the other groups. People in the resistance exercise-only group also reported falling asleep an average of three minutes faster at the end of the 12 months; there wasn’t any notable change in this regard in the other groups.

“While there’s no definitive answer as to why humans sleep, one theory is that sleep provides the body an opportunity to restore different systems,” says lead author Angelique Brellenthin, PhD, assistant professor of kinesiology at Iowa State. “Because resistance exercise is a powerful stimulus that causes stress to the muscle tissue, that stimulus may send a stronger signal to the brain that this person needs to sleep and to sleep deeply to repair, restore, and adapt the muscle tissue for the next time they need it. Our study shows resistance exercise goes above and beyond the benefits you would see from other types of exercise in terms of sleep quality. If people are concerned about their sleep and have a limited amount of time to exercise, they may want to consider prioritizing resistance workouts.”

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The Olive Oil Hunter News #76

Posted on by The Olive Oil Hunter

Vegetables Primavera Recipe, Spotlight on Asparagus, Importance of Preheating the Pan and Indoor-Gardens, plus Exercise for Stroke Prevention

There’s nothing quite like the taste of spring’s first vegetables after a long winter of frozen or imported choices, and the recipe I’m sharing lets them shine without a fussy preparation or heavy sauce. If your thoughts turn to gardening this time of year, you’ll appreciate the benefits of bringing some of that greenery inside. Plus, you’ll see why getting out and walking in the nicer weather has an important health benefit.

Vegetables Primavera

  • Vegetables Primavera Vegetables Primavera

    This dish gets its name from “pasta primavera,” which, as legend has it, originated not in Italy (where primavera means spring) but in the US some 40 years ago when Sirio Maccioni, owner of the famed New York restaurant Le Cirque, had the idea to throw together seasonal vegetables with pasta because he didn’t have any tomatoes at hand.

    While many people have tried to improve on the original recipe, I like the freshness of my simple preparation—no butter or cream is added to the vegetables. And while you can serve it over any pasta or whole grain, it’s delicious on its own or as the side to your favorite protein. Feel free to switch up the veggies based on what’s available in your area, but always add the firmest ones to the pan first to give them the extra cooking time they need.

    Ingredients

    • 4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, more for drizzling
    • 8 ounces broccoli
    • 8 ounces asparagus spears, trimmed and cut in half
    • 8 ounces sugar snap peas or shelled peas
    • 1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
    • ½ teaspoon coarse salt
    • 4 ounces arugula or baby spinach

    Directions

    Step 1

    Cut off the ends of the broccoli stems and slice the stems into coin shapes; cut the heads into small florets. Heat a 12″ skillet over high heat until very hot. Add the 4 tablespoons of olive oil and the broccoli to the skillet. Cook for two minutes, rotating the pieces so that all sides get a slight char, and then add the asparagus. Toss every 30 seconds. 

    Step 2

    After two minutes, add the peas and turn down the heat to medium. Sprinkle the veggies with the salt and pepper and keep cooking them until tender. Add the arugula or spinach and cook until the greens wilt and their liquid has evaporated. Remove from the heat and drizzle with olive oil before serving.

    Yields 2 servings as a main dish or 4 servings as a side or over a starch

Healthy Ingredient Spotlight: Asparagus

Healthy Ingredient Spotlight

Asparagus 101

Nothing says spring like fresh, local asparagus. Some people swear by the thinnest stalks, while others like the mouthfeel of those with a larger-than-pencil width—it’s really a matter of personal preference. The key to asparagus is to trim the ends simply by snapping them off where you find no resistance—that will leave you with tender stalks. Three ounces of these low-calorie antioxidant powerhouses supply 2 grams each of fiber and protein, plus good amounts of folic acid and vitamin K, iron and potassium, and many other minerals.

Growing your own asparagus is a true test of patience because it takes three years from planting to harvesting. During the first two seasons you’ll see some shoots, but you can’t eat them—just let them turn to fern-like vegetation. Once the shoots yield true spears, you should have a nice crop for up to 15 years. 

Healthy Kitchen Nugget: Preheating your Pan

Healthy Kitchen Nugget

Get your pan hot first

When sautéing or searing, always heat your pan for two or three minutes before adding your olive oil. This prevents “cooking” the oil as the pan climbs to its optimal temperature. Then let the oil come to a shimmer before adding the food for a tasty sear.

For Your Best Health: Indoor Gardens and Air Quality

For Your Best Health

Get into the indoor-garden groove

Besides looking pretty, plants can significantly cut indoor air pollution at home and at the office, according to new research led by the UK’s University of Birmingham in partnership with the Royal Horticultural Society.

Researchers exposed three common houseplants—peace lily (Spathiphyllum wallisii), corn plant (Dracaena fragrans), and fern arum (Zamioculcas zamiifolia), all of which are readily available in the US—to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a common pollutant. Their experiments showed that the plants could lower NO2 by as much as 20 percent, whether they were in light or darkness or whether the soil was wet or dry.

“The plants we chose were all very different from each other, yet they all showed strikingly similar abilities to remove NO2 from the atmosphere. This is very different from the way indoor plants take up CO2 in our earlier work, which is strongly dependent on environmental factors such as night time or daytime, or soil water content,” says lead researcher Dr. Christian Pfrang.

Plants can be especially beneficial in offices with poor ventilation and near areas with high levels of air pollution, though the bigger the space, the more plants will be needed.  

Just how they take up NO2 is still a mystery. As Dr. Pfrang explains, “We don’t think the plants are using the same process as they do for CO2 uptake, in which the gas is absorbed through stomata—tiny holes—in the leaves. There was no indication, even during longer experiments, that our plants released the NO2 back into the atmosphere, so there is likely a biological process taking place also involving the soil the plant grows in, but we don’t yet know what that is.”

Fitness Flash: Stroke Prevention

Fitness Flash

Exercise offers protection from stroke

Experts say that preventing a stroke is far better than having to treat one, and one of the best steps you can take is getting physical activity. Among its other benefits, exercise helps lower blood pressure, and we know that high blood pressure is a significant stroke risk factor. The problem is, as we’re spending more and more leisure time on social media and in front of our devices, we’re exercising less and less. In fact, sleep is the only thing we spend more time doing than using electronics. Without an increase in exercise, doctors say we’re going to see an increase in stroke rates. 

New research, published in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, analyzed specific data from nearly 20 years of records from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and found that different kinds of physical activity done with different frequencies can make a big difference. With choices to fit any lifestyle, you don’t have to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. 

Here are the most impactful findings:

Moderate-intensity aerobic activities can reduce the likelihood of stroke by 20 percent, and this can go as high as 60% with 30 to 60 minutes of daily activity, such as walking or bicycling. Home chores and yard work count, too, especially when done for an hour or two at a time, five to 13 times a month. You’ll see some stroke prevention benefits with as few as 10 minutes of activity every day, but the level of prevention grows as you reach those hour marks. 

Muscle-strengthening (resistance training) for three to five days per week, or 14 to 20 days per month, can reduce risk by up to 50 percent. One caution: In this study, muscle-training for more than 20 hours per week had the opposite effect, possibly “due to the high cortisol levels that the body releases in a state of constant stress”—a serious warning for bodybuilders.

Having a job that involves moderate to vigorous activities on a regular basis, such as carrying heavy loads, can lower stroke risk between 36 percent and 43 percent, and even more when the activity is daily and vigorous (admittedly, this is hard to do later in life). 

The key word with any of these activities is regular. As the study concludes, “Daily or every other day activities are more important in reducing the stroke risk than reducing sedentary behavior duration.”

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