The overlooked power of diet for improving your mental health - New Scientist

Brown fat (shown here in a light-microscopy image) burns calories to generate heat. Credit: Ziad M. El-Zaatari/Science Photo LibraryWhen people think of fat, they typically picture the jiggly tissue around the belly that stores extra calories. That’s white fat. But there’s another type, called brown fat, that does the opposite. Typically found around the neck, armpits and in the chest, brown fat burns calories to generate heat and has been linked to health benefits. Fat cells have a ‘memory’ of obesity — hinting at why it’s hard to keep weight offA study of more than 100,000 people — the largest of its kind — is now expanding that list of benefits. It revealed that people with ‘active’ brown fat are less affected by a number of health issues, including type 2 diabetes, depression and anxiety, than are those without it. Researchers used an artificial-intelligence model to quantify, from scans, the participants’ active brown fat, which is fat that is ‘turned on’ and burning calories. They concluded that the more active brown fat people have, the greater the protection they have from disorders and diseases. The findings were published today in Nature1.

For decades, researchers have invested billions of dollars in Alzheimer's treatments designed to target amyloid beta, a peptide that forms harmful deposits in the brain. But a biochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, believes scientists may have overlooked another potential contributor to the disease: a smaller, closely related peptide that was long considered harmless. In a new commentary published in ChemBioChem, UC Santa Cruz professor Jevgenij Raskatov highlights research suggesting that this lesser-known peptide, called P3, can form microscopic clumps and threadlike structures known as fibrils. Evidence also suggests that P3 may interact with amyloid beta (Aβ), potentially influencing how it accumulates in the brain and how toxic it becomes. These findings raise the possibility that P3 contributes to the nerve cell damage associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Among cancer patients, the high financial cost of cancer care is a prevalent problem. This financial burden is also associated with potentially harmful behavioral strategies that patients might use to cope with costs, such as delaying or forgoing treatment and skipping medications. Collectively, researchers refer to this impact as financial toxicity.

Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) could transform diabetes management for millions of Americans with type 2 diabetes who don't take insulin, according to findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The clinical trial found that adults using CGMs spent approximately five additional hours each day within their target blood sugar range compared with those receiving routine care. Nearly twice as many CGM users also achieved an A1c level below 7%, a common treatment goal for people with diabetes.