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Celebrate gluten-free day – eat outside
Being gluten intolerant like me is fine if you’re trying to cut down on carbs – unless you live opposite the amazing Soulshine Cafe!
But food allergy is really serious for millions of people, leading to severe reactions and even death – GLOBAL PREVALENCE OF PEDIATRIC AND ADULT IGE-MEDIATED FOOD ALLERGIES: Results: FROM THE ASSESS FA STUDY.
So what’s that got to do with light?
It turns out there’s a link between latitude and the prevalence of food allergies – the further North you go, the greater your risk – Regional differences in EpiPen prescriptions in the United States: the potential role of vitamin D. Autumn and winter babies may be more likely to struggle with intolerance because they didn’t get as much sunlight in those critical formative weeks – Sun exposure inversely related to food sensitization during infancy.
Medics have used UV light to treat babies with jandice for over a century.
New research is giving some tempting clues about some of mechanisms involved – including the role of the ‘sunshine’ vitamin D3 in keeping your gut microbiome in good shape so it can keep those inflammatory antibodies in check – Cellular and molecular mechanisms of vitamin D in food allergy.
But what if you just can’t get outside?
Could artificial lighting help?
One team from Japan, working with mice, found that daily exposure to bright white full-spectrum light for 12 hours per day over 9 weeks significantly reduced the reaction compared to the controls – Daily full spectrum light exposure prevents food allergy-like allergic diarrhea by modulating vitamin D3 and microbiota composition.
Its really not clear what’s involved – the light source used didn’t include any extra UV, but does seem to have quite a lot of Infrared.
I’m looking forward to learning more from the team who led that work – in the meantime, I’m eating my cake outside!
ChronoCoffee
You may have spotted the headlines last week about how timing your coffee could save your life – well reduce your risk of heart disease by over 30% and reduce your risk of all-cause mortality by 16% compared to those who keep drinking coffee all day – Coffee drinking timing and mortality in US adults.
One reason all-day sippers may struggle more is sleep.
Caffeine is a powerful psychoactive drug that shakes up a cocktail of hormones, including adenosine and melatonin linked to the natural feeling of being tired at the end of the day – Caffeine: cognitive and physical performance enhancer or psychoactive drug?
But caffeine has a ‘half-life’ in your bloodstream between four to six hours, which is why drinking it in the afternoon can make it harder for you to get a refreshing night’s sleep.
Shift workers who resort to coffee to stay awake tend to sleep badly during their recovery time, with less time in deep sleep and longer periods awake – Caffeine Intake Alters Recovery Sleep after Sleep Deprivation. People who sleep badly tend to drink more coffee, compounding the issue – Caffeine Consumption and Sleep Quality in Australian Adults.
Astronauts on the space station have the same problem.
Over 90% of them are regular coffee drinkers before setting off into space – they know it improves mood, alertness and performance. But when they rely on constant cups of coffee to cope with life on the space station, they struggle to switch off and sustain mental and physical health over time.
Plus, as this study points out, NASA needs to have a Plan B in case they run out of coffee up there… – Effectiveness of caffeine and blue-enriched light on cognitive performance and electroencephalography correlates of alertness in a spaceflight robotics simulation.
So coffee isn’t the silver bullet.
That’s where light comes in.
We know blue light helps healthy students feel more awake and perform a range of tasks in a lab-based test – as good as a coffee but best when taken together – A Comparison of Blue Light and Caffeine Effects on Cognitive Function and Alertness in Humans.
But does broad-band white light have a similar effect in a real life setting for older adults too?
NASA experimented with a combination of regular low-dose shots of caffeine plus exposure to relatively low level cool light (~90 lux/88 MelEDI at 6500k) in a multi-night trial with participants ranging from 25 to 55 years old carrying out a range of tasks. Although they consider future experiments should use higher light levels, even this baseline delivered the best of both worlds- improved performance and refreshing sleep.
Another recent study with young sleep-impaired drivers suggests this combined approach can work down here on earth, improving subjective alertness and the number of potentially fatal lane drifts too – Bright light alone or combined with caffeine improves sleepiness in chronically sleep-restricted young drivers.
Coffee and light together- the perfect blend!
Sweet expectations – buba-kiki cafe
You will expect the cafe painted red and lighter colours to serve a sweeter and mellower brew, while a green cafe, especially dark or forest green will prime your tastebuds for something a little bitter and sharp.
This may be due to a classic crossmodal effect informally known as ‘buba-kiki’, where we make predictions about one quality of an object based on another.
For example, you are more likely to believe a rounded object will feel warm and soft and have a more ‘rounded’ name – like buba.
In contrast, a spiky object is more likely to be associated with cooler, smooth or even rough textures and sound more staccato and spiky – Kiki…
These predictions or priors are useful time-saving shortcuts – you don’t waste your time and money in a cafe that isn’t going to give you the kind of coffee you like.
But they can be dangerous because you may walk past the best new idea – or friend – on the block because it didn’t look the part – yet.
The gift of sleep (tracking…)
According to GQ’s Gadgets for Men Gift Guide, the Oura Ring topped the most-wanted list in 2024 – 55 Tech Gifts for Gadget Freaks and Non-Geeks Alike.
At over £300 for the basic model, was it really worth the extra cash? (although the smile when they opened it was priceless of course!)
But would the Apple Watch or Fitbit have been just as good?
A team of scientists put these sleep trackers through their paces in a study that, unusually, included older adults (well, up to 50) and people of different ethnicities – a critical factor when it comes to these technologies that read your vital signs through your skin – Accuracy of Three Commercial Wearable Devices for Sleep Tracking in Healthy Adults, Racial and Ethnic Discrepancy in Pulse Oximetry and Delayed Identification of Treatment Eligibility Among Patients With COVID-19.
All three are pretty accurate when it comes to measuring how long you’ve been asleep.
But if you’re going to get geeky about It (and at that price, you really should), the Oura does seem to come close to the wearable headbands known as PSG or polysomongraphy devices, considered the gold standard for tracking the detailed dynamics of sleep in scientific research.
It’s worth noting that one of the authors does work for Oura, but the ring came out top on every measure, with over 75% sensitivity to changes in sleep stages, the FitBit coming in second (61 to 78%) and the Apple ranging from just over 50% to 86%.
The Fitbit tended to overestimate light sleep and underestimate deep sleep (18/15 minutes respectively), while the Apple Watch was broadly the opposite, overestimating deep sleep and underestimating light sleep by a bigger margin (43 and 45 minutes).