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Healthy Heart in the Amazon

    How to maintain a healthy heart is a surprisingly contentious question. Diet and exercise are crucial, everyone agrees – but the ideal specifics and the relationships among them remain mysterious. Some experts recommend avoiding dietary fats; others endorse fat and low carbohydrates. The impact of high levels of inflammation on heart disease is disputed. And almost no one can agree about how much (or what type of) exercise is optimal.

    Nevertheless, a study published last month in The Lancet points the way to resolving some of these issues by focusing on the Tsimane, a group of subsistence farmers and hunters living in Bolivia along a tributary of the Amazon River. Anthropologists have learned a lot about the lives of the Tsimane since they began studying them 15 years ago. The men typically spend seven hours or so of every day hunting, fishing or poling their canoes to towns to sell and procure food. The women devote almost as much time to gathering nuts and farming rice, corn and plantains. Men and women cover roughly eight miles each, or 17,000 steps, each day. Their diet is heavy on carbs: 72 percent of their daily calories derive from unprocessed starches, 14 percent from saturated and unsaturated fats and 14 percent from protein. Many Tsimane experience frequent infections and show chronically elevated levels of inflammation.

    For the Lancet study, anthropologists teamed with cardiologists who drew blood from 705 Tsimane men and women between the ages of 40 and 94. The researchers also conducted cardiac scans, enabling them to score the presence of atherosclerosis, a disease characterized by plaque buildup inside a person’s cardiac arteries. A score of 0 meant essentially no detectable disease; 1 to 99, low levels; and 400 or greater would be high. Eighty-five percent of the volunteers scored 0; only 3 percent exceeded 99. Even among those older than 75, only 8 percent exceeded 99. A single person scored higher than 399. As a group, the Tsimane had scores less than one-fifth those of people in the United States or Europe. They exhibited even less atherosclerosis than Japanese women, previously thought to have the world’s healthiest arteries. In general, the Tsimane developed the first signs of atherosclerosis almost 25 years later than their counterparts in the industrialized West.

    The implications of these findings are complex, says Hillard Kaplan, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the study’s co-author. They raise questions about the effect of fats and carbohydrates on the heart and also about the cardiac impacts of inflammation, which does not contribute noticeably to atherosclerosis among the Tsimane. But Kaplan says the study indicates how essential it is to be very active physically – the Tsimane were in almost constant motion every day.

(Gretchen Reynolds. www.nytimes.com, 06.04.2017. Adaptado.)

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Healthy Heart in the Amazon

    How to maintain a healthy heart is a surprisingly contentious question. Diet and exercise are crucial, everyone agrees – but the ideal specifics and the relationships among them remain mysterious. Some experts recommend avoiding dietary fats; others endorse fat and low carbohydrates. The impact of high levels of inflammation on heart disease is disputed. And almost no one can agree about how much (or what type of) exercise is optimal.

    Nevertheless, a study published last month in The Lancet points the way to resolving some of these issues by focusing on the Tsimane, a group of subsistence farmers and hunters living in Bolivia along a tributary of the Amazon River. Anthropologists have learned a lot about the lives of the Tsimane since they began studying them 15 years ago. The men typically spend seven hours or so of every day hunting, fishing or poling their canoes to towns to sell and procure food. The women devote almost as much time to gathering nuts and farming rice, corn and plantains. Men and women cover roughly eight miles each, or 17,000 steps, each day. Their diet is heavy on carbs: 72 percent of their daily calories derive from unprocessed starches, 14 percent from saturated and unsaturated fats and 14 percent from protein. Many Tsimane experience frequent infections and show chronically elevated levels of inflammation.

    For the Lancet study, anthropologists teamed with cardiologists who drew blood from 705 Tsimane men and women between the ages of 40 and 94. The researchers also conducted cardiac scans, enabling them to score the presence of atherosclerosis, a disease characterized by plaque buildup inside a person’s cardiac arteries. A score of 0 meant essentially no detectable disease; 1 to 99, low levels; and 400 or greater would be high. Eighty-five percent of the volunteers scored 0; only 3 percent exceeded 99. Even among those older than 75, only 8 percent exceeded 99. A single person scored higher than 399. As a group, the Tsimane had scores less than one-fifth those of people in the United States or Europe. They exhibited even less atherosclerosis than Japanese women, previously thought to have the world’s healthiest arteries. In general, the Tsimane developed the first signs of atherosclerosis almost 25 years later than their counterparts in the industrialized West.

    The implications of these findings are complex, says Hillard Kaplan, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the study’s co-author. They raise questions about the effect of fats and carbohydrates on the heart and also about the cardiac impacts of inflammation, which does not contribute noticeably to atherosclerosis among the Tsimane. But Kaplan says the study indicates how essential it is to be very active physically – the Tsimane were in almost constant motion every day.

(Gretchen Reynolds. www.nytimes.com, 06.04.2017. Adaptado.)

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

Healthy Heart in the Amazon

    How to maintain a healthy heart is a surprisingly contentious question. Diet and exercise are crucial, everyone agrees – but the ideal specifics and the relationships among them remain mysterious. Some experts recommend avoiding dietary fats; others endorse fat and low carbohydrates. The impact of high levels of inflammation on heart disease is disputed. And almost no one can agree about how much (or what type of) exercise is optimal.

    Nevertheless, a study published last month in The Lancet points the way to resolving some of these issues by focusing on the Tsimane, a group of subsistence farmers and hunters living in Bolivia along a tributary of the Amazon River. Anthropologists have learned a lot about the lives of the Tsimane since they began studying them 15 years ago. The men typically spend seven hours or so of every day hunting, fishing or poling their canoes to towns to sell and procure food. The women devote almost as much time to gathering nuts and farming rice, corn and plantains. Men and women cover roughly eight miles each, or 17,000 steps, each day. Their diet is heavy on carbs: 72 percent of their daily calories derive from unprocessed starches, 14 percent from saturated and unsaturated fats and 14 percent from protein. Many Tsimane experience frequent infections and show chronically elevated levels of inflammation.

    For the Lancet study, anthropologists teamed with cardiologists who drew blood from 705 Tsimane men and women between the ages of 40 and 94. The researchers also conducted cardiac scans, enabling them to score the presence of atherosclerosis, a disease characterized by plaque buildup inside a person’s cardiac arteries. A score of 0 meant essentially no detectable disease; 1 to 99, low levels; and 400 or greater would be high. Eighty-five percent of the volunteers scored 0; only 3 percent exceeded 99. Even among those older than 75, only 8 percent exceeded 99. A single person scored higher than 399. As a group, the Tsimane had scores less than one-fifth those of people in the United States or Europe. They exhibited even less atherosclerosis than Japanese women, previously thought to have the world’s healthiest arteries. In general, the Tsimane developed the first signs of atherosclerosis almost 25 years later than their counterparts in the industrialized West.

    The implications of these findings are complex, says Hillard Kaplan, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the study’s co-author. They raise questions about the effect of fats and carbohydrates on the heart and also about the cardiac impacts of inflammation, which does not contribute noticeably to atherosclerosis among the Tsimane. But Kaplan says the study indicates how essential it is to be very active physically – the Tsimane were in almost constant motion every day.

(Gretchen Reynolds. www.nytimes.com, 06.04.2017. Adaptado.)

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

Healthy Heart in the Amazon

    How to maintain a healthy heart is a surprisingly contentious question. Diet and exercise are crucial, everyone agrees – but the ideal specifics and the relationships among them remain mysterious. Some experts recommend avoiding dietary fats; others endorse fat and low carbohydrates. The impact of high levels of inflammation on heart disease is disputed. And almost no one can agree about how much (or what type of) exercise is optimal.

    Nevertheless, a study published last month in The Lancet points the way to resolving some of these issues by focusing on the Tsimane, a group of subsistence farmers and hunters living in Bolivia along a tributary of the Amazon River. Anthropologists have learned a lot about the lives of the Tsimane since they began studying them 15 years ago. The men typically spend seven hours or so of every day hunting, fishing or poling their canoes to towns to sell and procure food. The women devote almost as much time to gathering nuts and farming rice, corn and plantains. Men and women cover roughly eight miles each, or 17,000 steps, each day. Their diet is heavy on carbs: 72 percent of their daily calories derive from unprocessed starches, 14 percent from saturated and unsaturated fats and 14 percent from protein. Many Tsimane experience frequent infections and show chronically elevated levels of inflammation.

    For the Lancet study, anthropologists teamed with cardiologists who drew blood from 705 Tsimane men and women between the ages of 40 and 94. The researchers also conducted cardiac scans, enabling them to score the presence of atherosclerosis, a disease characterized by plaque buildup inside a person’s cardiac arteries. A score of 0 meant essentially no detectable disease; 1 to 99, low levels; and 400 or greater would be high. Eighty-five percent of the volunteers scored 0; only 3 percent exceeded 99. Even among those older than 75, only 8 percent exceeded 99. A single person scored higher than 399. As a group, the Tsimane had scores less than one-fifth those of people in the United States or Europe. They exhibited even less atherosclerosis than Japanese women, previously thought to have the world’s healthiest arteries. In general, the Tsimane developed the first signs of atherosclerosis almost 25 years later than their counterparts in the industrialized West.

    The implications of these findings are complex, says Hillard Kaplan, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the study’s co-author. They raise questions about the effect of fats and carbohydrates on the heart and also about the cardiac impacts of inflammation, which does not contribute noticeably to atherosclerosis among the Tsimane. But Kaplan says the study indicates how essential it is to be very active physically – the Tsimane were in almost constant motion every day.

(Gretchen Reynolds. www.nytimes.com, 06.04.2017. Adaptado.)

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Does a lipstick threaten the future of one of our closest living relatives?

    Pizza, biscuits, and beauty treatments are some of the thousands of products that contain palm oil, which threaten iconic species through deforestation. And a new study says that planting alternative oils could pose an even bigger danger to living things.
    Palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil on the planet and is believed to be in about 50% of products found in supermarkets and shops. It is important for lipstick for example because it holds colour well, has no taste and doesn’t melt at high temperatures. It’s found in shampoos, soaps, ice cream and instant noodles amongst thousands of others.
    Over the past 20 years, growing demand has seen thousands of hectares of old, tropical forests chopped down to make way for the oily palm tree plantations. But these forests are home to some of the most threatened species in the world, including the orangutan. “Orangutans are a lowland species on Bornean Sumatra and that’s where palm oil is grown. The two often clash, palm oil displaces orangutans, they are pushed into gardens where they generate conflicts with locals and that’s where you get the killings. They are incredibly versatile, but what an orangutan can’t deal with is killing. Because they are such slow breeding species, the killing has a really big impact”, the report’s lead author Erik Meijaard, told BBC News.
    Palm makes up 35% of the world’s vegetable oil supply but only takes up 10% of the world’s land allocated to producing the greasy stuff. To replace it with rapeseed, soy or sunflower seed oil would take far larger amounts of land, in fact up to nine times the amount needed for palm. It’s likely that such a move would see a displacement of diversity loss, with many more species in different places under threat. “If palm oil didn’t exist you would still have the same global demand for vegetable oil,” said Erik Meijaard.

(Matt McGrath. www.bbc.com, 26.06.2018. Adaptado.)

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Does a lipstick threaten the future of one of our closest living relatives?

    Pizza, biscuits, and beauty treatments are some of the thousands of products that contain palm oil, which threaten iconic species through deforestation. And a new study says that planting alternative oils could pose an even bigger danger to living things.
    Palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil on the planet and is believed to be in about 50% of products found in supermarkets and shops. It is important for lipstick for example because it holds colour well, has no taste and doesn’t melt at high temperatures. It’s found in shampoos, soaps, ice cream and instant noodles amongst thousands of others.
    Over the past 20 years, growing demand has seen thousands of hectares of old, tropical forests chopped down to make way for the oily palm tree plantations. But these forests are home to some of the most threatened species in the world, including the orangutan. “Orangutans are a lowland species on Bornean Sumatra and that’s where palm oil is grown. The two often clash, palm oil displaces orangutans, they are pushed into gardens where they generate conflicts with locals and that’s where you get the killings. They are incredibly versatile, but what an orangutan can’t deal with is killing. Because they are such slow breeding species, the killing has a really big impact”, the report’s lead author Erik Meijaard, told BBC News.
    Palm makes up 35% of the world’s vegetable oil supply but only takes up 10% of the world’s land allocated to producing the greasy stuff. To replace it with rapeseed, soy or sunflower seed oil would take far larger amounts of land, in fact up to nine times the amount needed for palm. It’s likely that such a move would see a displacement of diversity loss, with many more species in different places under threat. “If palm oil didn’t exist you would still have the same global demand for vegetable oil,” said Erik Meijaard.

(Matt McGrath. www.bbc.com, 26.06.2018. Adaptado.)