More variety needed – plus more Health and Beauty snippets

More variety needed SO much diet advice is currently based on restrictions, said Kirsten Jackson, who is also known as the IBS Dietitian.

She pointed out that too often guidance focuses on restricting calories and fat. Instead, Jackson recommends adding to your diet – and plants above all – for optimum gut health.

“We should aim to eat at least 30 different plants a week,” she said.

Even coffee would count as one, she explained, and a spice as another. “Grains too, so don’t stick to wheat-based bread and pasta but add barley, rice and quinoa. Add herbs to dishes and snack on nuts and you’ll soon reach 30.”

Happy talk COVID-19 took 6.7 million lives but has not affected humankind’s general happiness, the latest World Happiness Report found.

Interviews with more than 100,000 people in 137 countries found “significantly” higher levels of benevolence in all global regions than before the pandemic.

Evaluating their lives on a scale of one to 10, people usually gave scores as high during the Covid years as in 2017-19.

The report also found attitudes were “slightly” more pessimistic in western countries but rather better in the rest of the world.

Good and bad THE good news is that coffee boosts the calories which people burn each day.

The bad news is that they sleep less, according to a study published in the New England Journal of  Medicine.

University of California cardiologist, Dr Gregory Marcus, tracked 100 adults for two weeks, monitoring their movements and sleep patterns on the days when they did or did not drink coffee.

Results suggested people who drink coffee regularly walk 1,000 more steps than non-drinkers each day, but they lose out on around 30 minutes of sleep at night.

“The reality is that coffee is not all good or all bad but has different effects,” Dr Marcus said.

Well-done, please

UNDERCOOKED meat could be responsible for hundreds of thousands of urinary tract infections (UTIs) every year, scientists have warned.

In Britain, UTIs are responsible for an annual seven million GP consultations and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has pinpointed E coli as the most common cause.

Meanwhile, US researchers spent a year matching UTI-causing E coli with the E coli found in meat and found that approximately 8 per cent were derived from the E Coli strains lurking in raw meat like chicken, turkey and pork.

Fresh air needed  PEKING UNIVERSITY (Beijing) analysed the records of 389,000 people living in the UK over a 10-year period, estimating their exposure to air pollution.

This included PM2.5 – particles so small they can pass through the lungs into the bloodstream – and nitrogen dioxide emitted by vehicles.

Over this period 13,131 people were diagnosed with depression and 15,835 with anxiety.  Those exposed to most air pollution were 16 per cent more likely to develop clinical depression and 11 per cent more likely to develop anxiety, the researchers found.

At one’s fingertips USE the fingertip unit method (FTU) when applying an ointment or cream prescribed by the doctor.

An FTU is the amount of any semi-solid that can be squeezed from the tip of an adult’s index finger as far as the crease of the first joint.

One FTU is enough to treat an area of skin twice the size of the flat of an adult’s hand with the fingers together or, in other words, “a handprint.”

Pull your socks up WHILE nights are still chilly, wearing socks could help you to sleep well.

According to clinical psychologist Dr Michael Breus, research suggests that wearing socks to bed not only helps people to fall asleep faster, but they sleep longer and wake up fewer times throughout the night.

More investigation into bed socks was needed, he said, although the “unique” relationship between body temperature and sleep was established decades ago.

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