Gout may protect against Alzheimer's disease, or not

Articles like Gout May Protect Against Alzheimer's Disease have been around for quite some time. Indeed there's plenty of evidence for the protective effect of gout, or rather, uric acid, on Alzheimer's disease. I just want to point out that there does exist conflicting evidence from other researches, such as this 2-page report, No association between gout and Alzheimer's disease: results of a case–control study in older people in Taiwan(Int J Geriatr Psychiatry 2013; 28: 1205-1206). In case you can't read it, here's one passage (emphasis added):

Both studies [in Italy and Portugal] have conveyed the message that high level of uric acid may increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease. In this present study, we found that no association is detected between gout and Alzheimer's disease in both gender, whether gouty patients had ever used urate-lowering drugs or not. Because conflicting results exist, further studies are required to confirm the association between gout and Alzheimer's disease.

Tooth brushing

Some tips:

1. You're supposed to brush your teeth for at least 2 minutes. But if you really don't have the patience, try brushing more on the trouble spots and less on the good teeth. Usually the molars need more of your attention. So repeatedly brush those, in both left-and-right, and back-and-forth directions, inside and outside. Given the same total brushing time, you've made best use of your time.

2. Tongue cleaning is healthful because it clears out germs and eliminates or reduces bad breath, but it's not commonly practiced. Instead of using special tools, why not just use your tooth brushes on the surface of your tongue, or even below it? A few seconds of doing it doesn't take long and brings great benefit.

3. Not really tooth brushing. But I find that the easiest way to remove stains on teeth, such as those left by coffee or tea, is, surprisingly, rubbing with a white rubber eraser! Try it. It works. No need to research for side effects, because there is none. The only problem is that it only works on the teeth in the front, incisors and maybe canines, and not even the inner side of them, and the effect is obviously not as dramatic as the real solution, which may shock your friends and coworkers by suddenly showing ghastly white teeth. Isn't it more pleasing to have just slightly whiter teeth than before? And you only show the front teeth to people you're facing anyway.

What and how much benefit is gained by what exercise

In my very old notebook, I hand-copied part of an article published in the Chinese newspaper， China Youth Daily (中国青年报), issue 3689, of March 22, 1981. The article is titled "Which exercises have more value" （哪些运动项目锻炼价值高）. The part I copied is a table of 10 exercises with scores assigned to each on 9 criteria about health.

	jog- ging	cycling	swim- ming	skating	hand- ball	basket- ball	tennis	gym- nastics	walking	soft- ball
Cardio- pulmonary endurance	21	19	21	18	19	19	16	10	13	6
Muscular endurance	20	18	20	17	18	17	16	13	14	8
Muscular strength	17	16	14	15	15	15	14	16	11	7
Flexibility	9	9	16	13	16	13	14	19	7	9
Balance	17	18	12	20	17	16	16	15	8	7
Weight control	21	20	15	17	19	19	16	12	13	7
Muscle buildup	14	15	14	17	11	13	13	18	11	5
Digestion	13	12	13	11	13	10	12	11	11	8
Sleep	16	15	16	15	12	12	11	12	14	7
Sum	148	142	140	140	140	134	128	126	102	64

Unfortunately, either the article did not cite references or I didn't copy them. So the source is unknown. But the data seem to be interesting and make sense. A Google search reveals a message in Chinese posted in 2001 and one message in Swedish probably posted a few years later. Other articles or online postings are probably copies from the first message.

Minor differences exist between my 1981 notes and the above two sources. My table lists 10 exercises while these two messages list 8, missing skating, basketball and gymnastics, but with golf which is missing in my table. The scores assigned to softball slightly differ between my table and the two messages. However, the sum, or overall rating, of each exercise is the same (or almost the same for softball) and so the order of the exercises from the most to the least beneficial remains the same.

[Update 3/4/2014]
Found it! James F. Fixx The Complete Book of Running, 1977, p.39

Not long ago seven exercise experts were asked by the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports to rank popular forms of exercise on the basis of how much they help cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular endurance, muscular strength, flexibility, balance and general well-being. Each panelist was permitted to award a given activity anything from no votes (signifying no benefit) to three (maximum benefit). Thus twenty-one is a perfect score.

James Fixx's table lists 8 physical activities, everything exactly the same as in the two sources (Chinese and Swedish) I mentioned above. Since I translated, or rather back-translated, from Chinese in my notes to English posted here, some words are different, cardio-pulmonary instead of cardio-respiratory, muscle buildup instead of muscle definition, jogging instead of running, etc. Also, my note has softball while James Fixx's has bowling, definitely a different sport, which explains why I see slight difference there.

President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, now President's Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition, has a web site. I ran a few keyword searches on the site but failed to locate this table of 7 exercise experts' rating. In the Bibliography of Mr. Fixx's book, there's President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and the Administration on Aging, The Fitness Challenge... in the Later Years. If that book is this, published in 1968, I didn't find anything in it that looks like this panelists' rating with a few keyword searches.

Fast relaxation techniques

I'd like to talk about the techniques I've developed for fast relaxation. They are very personl, in the sense that the most critical part is also the most difficult to explain or communicate to others.[note1]

Most modern societies don't encourage a siesta or nap after lunch, which is conducive to good health. Fortunately I happen to be working in a place where a short 10 to 30 minute break after lunch can be made use of for such a quick nap. To maximize the relaxation in this 20-minute (on average) nap break, I follow the following steps, not in strict order after the preparation:

(0) Preparation: Find a comfortable and relatively quiet place; lie down as comfortably as you feel; close eyes, preferably covered with a blindfold (I personally like to leave it on my eyes without tying, and so I have to lie down in supine position to keep it from falling off).

(1) Relax facial muscles to absolutely no facial expression. I'm sure you've seen pictures in advertisement featuring a pretty face of a person that seems to be enjoying a sweet sleep. But that's fake, because a person in deep sleep cannot have a pretty face; the complete loss of facial expressions is quite ugly by any culture's standard. During this phase, if you're truly relaxing your facial muscles, you'll feel a slight protruding and lowering movement of the muscles around your mouth (orbicularis oris), among other actions. There's also eye muscle relaxation, but I'll defer that to point (3).

(2) Relax your soft palate and uvula. The effect of this is obvious: you breathe more heavily. We all know people falling asleep at a meeting or in a classroom make breathing sound (not related to snoring). That's the sound you need to consciously mimic. But do not snore.

(3) This is the most critical step. For lack of a better phrase, I have to just call it "Relax your brain". Maybe the easiest way to come to this stage is to constantly "say", not actually speaking with your mouth but more like an incantation, to yourself, "I don't care", "Doesn't matter", "Not my business", "So much for today", "Finally, home sweet home" (as if you just came back from an exhausting trip and plunged yourself to bed) whenever the brain wants to drift toward any of the zillions of random thoughts. The "incantations" you repeat to yourselve serve as psychological suggestions to your brain not to bother with anything. If you practice that correctly, there's a very subtle effect you may be able to feel: the whole brain seems to be under slightly higher pressure, and it feels "heavier". There may be some benefit in thinking of something (ancient Chinese might have called it qi) going from the back of the brain (not head) toward the front, in a manner of internal massage.

Associated with this feeling, you'll have eyeballs' spontaneous upward movement toward the upper rims of the eye sockets (not vertically toward the sky), further increasing the brain pressure. Make sure you move your eyes up spontaneously, not voluntarily or intentionally, or rather, let them float up by themselves. (Have you ever forced open a sleeping person's eyes? You would see mostly the white of the eye (sclera), exactly because of this complete eye muscle relaxation, probably because the superior rectus muscle of the eye orbit natually contracts more than the inferior counterpart. Also see my earlier blog, "Heavy eyelids when tired, and upward eyeball movement".) Earlier I said I don't like to tie the blindfold. That's because it would interfere with this very slight eye movement. If you must sleep on the side, I suggest you tie the blindfold with one string even if it has two, or use a dark color lightweight towel instead.

To increase the effect of this brain relaxation, a prolonged exhalation relative to inhalation in a breathing cycle is needed. Actually, it's an added breath holding period after exhalation, not exhalation per se. Suppose you inhale with two beats of your heart, and exhale with two beats, you then can hold breath for another two or more beats, with a ratio of an apparent exhale-to-inhale duration 2:1 or higher. But the ratio itself is not  important, as long as you can comfortably tolerate the long exhalation phase. I surmise that this prolonged exhalation has a hypoxic "poisoning" effect on the brain, to more or less incapacitate it from engaging in any wandering thought. It's in this exhalation phase, the breath holding period in particular, that you relax the brain the most.

These brain relaxation techniques are as much as I can describe. I'm a strong opponent of any form of mysticism, and yet in explaining point (3), I have reached the limit of my language skills. But I have sucessfully used these techniques to maximize the short nap time and refresh myself before the long hours of afternoon work. I'm sure with practice, you'll be able to do the same too. These techniques can also be used to help initiate sleep at night (the only difference is no need for a blindfold).

Now a few comments on other similar techniques. In hypnosis or mesmerization, "hypnotic subjects are fully awake and are focusing attention" (from Wikipedia for "Hypnosis"). I don't think my techniques promote focused attention. Although during the process, you're still awake, the goal is to get to sleep, or at least a sleep-like state, not attention to anything. Similarly, meditation is "a practice in which an individual trains the mind or induces a mode of consciousness, either to realize some benefit or as an end in itself" (from Wikipedia for "Meditation"). Again, some mode of consciousness is the goal, as opposed to my techniques which strive for the opposite, unconsciousness, although the process is inevitably passed through consciousness. Another important difference is in physical postures. Lying down, either in supine or prone position or on the side, as if to sleep, is preferred with my techniques, while most people practice meditation in an upright position. I can't think of any possibility that a sit-up position could relax your brain and body as much as you could while lying down.
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[note1] This article has a Chinese version 快速放松的技巧.

Comment on "Drinking three litres of water a day took TEN YEARS off my face"

British newspaper Daily Mail recently posted an online article Drinking three litres of water a day took TEN YEARS off my face, featuring a 40-some-year-old lady who made significant improvement on her facial skin just by drinking plenty of water for 4 weeks. There's suspicion that the second image of the woman, allegedly taken at the end of her "water treatment", was smoothed by Photoshop. Although it's hard to confirm manual editing, I have pretty good confidence to say that the image was apparently last saved from Photoshop 3.0, an old version probably made free now, by British photographer Warren Smith.


Suspicion aside, drinking plenty of water is definitely healthful, as most people drink less, rather than more, than recommended. What's the recommended amount of water we should drink? According to Mayo Clinic, a male adult should drink 3 litres per day while a female 2.2 litres, more in special cases, such as in hot weather. The concern of water poisoning is irrelevant in this case, as it would require a far greater amount of water taken in a short period of time. Whether drinking enough water will remove signs of facial skin aging obviously needs scientific studies. But for now, remember that thirst is one of the weakest human senses, especially when we age, hence this old saying, "it's too late to dig a well when you're thirsty".