A diet higher in fatty fish helped frequent migraine sufferers reduce their monthly number of headaches and intensity of pain compared to participants on a diet higher in vegetable-based fats and oils, according to a new study. The findings by a team of researchers from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), parts of the National Institutes of Health; and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, were published in the July 3 issue of The BMJ.

This study of 182 adults with frequent migraines expanded on the team’s previous work on the impact of linoleic acid and chronic pain. Linoleic acid is a polyunsaturated fatty acid commonly...

Wine grapes are particularly finicky when it comes to their environment. For instance, heatwaves and droughts lead to earlier berry ripening and lackluster wine. And these types of episodes are expected to intensify as Earth’s climate changes. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have tweaked growing conditions for Cabernet Sauvignon grapes to slow down their ripening, which increased the levels of compounds associated with wine’s characteristic floral and fruity notes...

For a long time, scientists who studied the biological properties of sugars faced a bitter struggle. A type of carbohydrate, along with starch and cellulose, sugars are vital to our health and involved in a vast array of processes in our bodies. Complex sugars known as glycans are involved in everything from the creation of new cells to the immune system’s response to viral infections. But glycans are also notoriously difficult to study and, as a result, their precise...

Researchers have found that eating disorder behaviors, such as binge-eating, alter the brain’s reward response process and food intake control circuitry, which can reinforce these behaviors. Understanding how eating disorder behaviors and neurobiology interact can shed light on why these disorders often become chronic and could aid in the future development of treatments. The study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, was supported by...

Eating milk chocolate every day may sound like a recipe for weight gain, but a new study of postmenopausal women has found that eating a concentrated amount of chocolate during a narrow window of time in the morning may help the body burn fat and decrease blood sugar levels. To find out about the effects of eating milk chocolate at different times of day, researchers from the Brigham collaborated with investigators at the University of Murcia in Spain. Together, they conducted a randomized, controlled, cross-over trial of 19 postmenopausal women who consumed either 100g of chocolate in the morning (within one hour after waking...

Nitrate supplements can improve vascular and muscle function. Whether higher habitual dietary nitrate is associated with better muscle function remains underexplored. The aim was to examine whether habitual dietary nitrate intake is associated with better muscle function in a prospective cohort of men and women, and whether the relation was dependent on levels of physical activity...

Although the human genome adapts on slow time scales, there is mounting evidence that industrialized lifestyles have rapidly changed the human gut microbiome (1, 2). Conceptions of health-diminishing biological incompatibility (“mismatch”) arising from the disruption of human-microbe relationships negotiated over evolutionary time have led to proposals that the altered microbiota contributes to high rates of noncommunicable disease (3–6) and...

The link between vitamin D and a reduction in the risk of older adults suffering from a fall is the focus of IADSA’s latest ‘Mind the Gap’ resource. Available to view on the website, the resource explains that falling is a risk factor for bone fractures among men and women aged 60 years and older. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there are 37.3 million falls every year – more than 100,000 a day – that are serious enough to require attention. Multiple factors can increase the risk of fall, including a lack of vitamin D. Scientists believe vitamin D improves muscle function, strength and body balance, which helps to reduce the risk of falling. WHO and the US National Institute on Aging both...