By age 60, you’re not over the hill, but you may have trouble climbing one.

In a study of 2,211 climbers who attempted to summit Mt. Everest during spring from 1990 through 2005, researchers found that nearly 31% reached the top. The percentage dropped to 13% among climbers 60 and older.

Not exactly a shocker, we’ll grant, but the research team (led by a University of Washington biology professor) had wondered if the presumed extra experience of older climbers might actually help them reach the summit and survive. Not so. In fact, the chance of dying on the mountain was 1.5% overall — but 5% for climbers 60 and older, according to a University of Washington news release.

On Everest, youth and vigor trump age and experience,” note the authors in the paper (published online Aug. 15 in the journal Biology Letters).

The analysis also found that women who attempted to climb Mt. Everest were as likely as men to reach the summit or die trying.

Here’s some Mt. Everest facts:

• Height: about 29,030 feet.
• First to summit Mt. Everest: 1953, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, relative whipper-snappers at 39 and 33, respectively.
• First ascent by a woman: 1975, Junko Tabei of Japan.
• First solo assent: 1980, Reinhold Messner of Italy.
• First couple to get married on the summit: 2005, Nepalese Moni Mulepati and Pemba Dorjee. (No one did the chicken dance afterward, we hear.)
• First true ski descent: 2000, Davo Karnicar, who has since skied six other puny summits.
• First to snowboard from the summit: 2001, Stefan Gatt. (And, yes, he’s still alive and talking about it, over and over, as a motivational speaker.)
• Oldest person to reach the summit: Katsusuke Yanagisawa, 71 years and 61 days at that time, May 22, 2007.
• First person to ride a bicycle from his home in Sweden to the mountain, scale it alone without the use of oxygen tanks and bicycle all the way back: 1996, Goran Kropp. He survived that feat but died in 2002 while climbing in Washington state.

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Article courtesy from LA Times / Health
Image courtesy from WorldsUltimate.net

There are plenty of places to find beautifully photographed food on the Internet — on Web pages for restaurants, recipes or candy companies. But food photography can be more than just gustatory Glamour Shots. Here’s a collection of some of the most creative, informative photos of food we’ve found online.

Oklahoma State University hosts a set of extensive food galleries aimed at educating the public about how to recognize portion sizes. The site has separate galleries for vegetables, dairy, meats and oils — and a dazzling array of breads, biscuits and rolls.

Glamour magazine’s slideshow demonstrates all the extra sides you can eat with your entree — for the same number of calories — should you merely switch to a low fat version of a food. Someone at Glamour must really like raspberries and beer — they show up multiple times as these bonuses.

And there’s more! Ever wonder what your fast food looks like up close — really close? Probably not, but you can find out at a website run by Michael Davidson of Florida State University. The university’s Molecular Expressions site catalogs thousands of pictures taken with high-powered optical microscopes, including a gallery of burger ingredients. (No information on how many calories are in one cubic nanometer of a French fry.)

Everyone, it seems, is trying to figure out why people are getting so fat these days — and some aren’t buying the notion that it’s about eating too much and sitting on one’s duff all day. They suggest we’re getting fat because of an obesity-causing virus — or due to stress, lack of sleep, or some special, fat-promoting property of corn syrup. Now comes theory No. 300: We eat too much ice!

This interesting thesis is the brainchild of AJ Djo, a chemical thermal engineer and author of “The Hot Diet: The Real Reason You’re Gaining Weight and How to Lose It Fast and Forever.”

Djo’s theory, according to a press release, is the product of “five years of intensive research into America’s weight problem.” He maintains that ice affects the metabolism in ways that make us pork up, and that the solution is to follow his “Five Hot Principles,” which will “lengthen your lifespan, decrease obesity related diseases and give you more energy.”

We’ll admit that ice-as-the-scourge-of-America is a new one on us. (And thank heavens for global warming if that’s the case.) But isn’t the converse true? “I thought it made you burn calories,” protested a friend when informed of the Djo book. After all, doesn’t drinking cold water cool the body and force the expenditure of energy to warm it up again?

Indeed, this may be correct. You can read all about it at health.howstuffworks.com/question447.htm, wherein it is calculated that drinking eight glasses of ice-cold water will burn 70 honking additional calories daily. Coming soon: “The Cold Diet”?
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Article by Rosie Mestel
Image courtesy from: Insulite Labs

This genetically engineered zebrafish (top) is fatter and bigger than its brothers and sisters. (Lab of Roger Cone / Oregon Health & Science University)

Maybe it’s not as impressive as a 25-foot giant squid, but a new “morbidly obese” fish developed by Oregon scientists will likely make a splash in the field of obesity research.

An article published in the July issue of the FASEB Journal describes how graduate student Youngsup Song, working in the lab of Roger D. Cone, genetically engineered a small tropical fish — Danio rerio, or the zebrafish — to be longer and fatter than normal. At 6 months of age, the obese fish were 20% to 100% heavier than the non-engineered fish with whom they shared a tank.

The point of creating such fish is — no, not to make us all feel less self-conscious in these days of expanding waistlines — to show that zebrafish, like humans and mice, can be made obese simply through the increased activity of one of their genes, says Cone, director of the center for the study of weight regulation and associated disorders at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.

It’s easier to study a fish than a person — so fat fish may shed light on human obesity and help devise ways to treat it, Cone says.

The behemoth fish were engineered to produce extra amounts of a protein, AgRP, which is also naturally present in humans. In people (and mice) extra amounts of AgRP have been shown to increase appetite and slow metabolism.

A small percentage of people who are obese are that way because they have a single mutant gene, like these fish. But, Cone adds, “80 to 95% of severe obesity remains unexplained.” Trawling through the zebrafish genome for genes that make fish obese may help identify some of these unknown genes in people, he says.

Cone stresses that there’s a difference between the severe type of obesity created here and the increasingly prevalent type we hear about in the headlines. The latter is controlled by many genes and is influenced by factors such as a poor diet or sedentary lifestyle. Still, he adds, because common obesity is so much more complex, studying single genes with big effects is a good place to start. Enough of all this chatter: Go check out the picture of the fish.

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Article by Chelsea Martinez
Image courtesy from LA Times / Health

They’re hitting the treadmill to find out…

If your day doesn’t start until you’ve brewed a fresh pot of coffee or tea, then your brain is one lucky mass of gray matter.

A recent study revealed that folks who drink at least half a cup or more of either beverage each day may be far less likely to develop a glioma — an aggressive, hard-to-treat, and dangerous type of brain tumor. So put the pot on!

Brain-Protective Brews
In fact, regularly drinking either brew could cut the risk of a glioma by up to 34 percent. Researchers suspect that antioxidant compounds in the two drinks probably get the credit for the benefit. These compounds stimulate activity of a protein that can repair cancer-causing damage to brain-cell DNA. Pretty powerful stuff! 

Caffeine Counts
But there may be more at work. Researchers also think that the caffeine in coffee and tea might have something to do with the brews’ power to deflect cancer. In fact, petri dish research has shown that caffeine delays the growth of glioma tumor cells. But it’s no reason to start mainlining java if it’s not your thing. And more research is needed to confirm all of the recent findings anyway. But for java or tea lovers, it is good to know that you can probably add another checkmark to the “pros” column

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Article from RealAge
Image courtesy of FleetOwner