If you’ve been on Facebook lately, you might have noticed a large number of celebrities as well as regular people posting videos of them dumping a bucket of ice water on themselves. And if you’re like any other normal person, you might wonder why. Well, the #IceBucketChallenge is actually a social media campaign to raise awareness for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a neurodegenerative disease that impacts the brain and spinal cord, causing progressive paralysis. The rules are simple. You have to dump a bucket of ice water on yourself, record it and post it online. After you do your video, you have to recommend other people, and if they don’t do the ice bucket challenge within 24 hours, they have to donate money to ALS research. Seems simple enough right? Well, the social media campaign is actually taking off in a big way with donations coming in 10 times more often in a day than ever before. Guess people don’t like ice water dumped on them. Who knew? So how about it? Will you guys do the #IceBucketChallenge? Send us links of your videos or videos of your friends and we might be inspired to take the challenge ourselves.
High-Fat Diets Could Reduce the Brain’s Ability to Regulate Food Intake
Thursday, January 26, 2023
When high-fat and high-calorie foods are consumed regularly, our brain’s ability to regulate hunger cues, and calorie intake gets reduced. A new study has shown evidence of how continuously eating a fatty diet seems to disrupt the neurological pathway between the brain and the gut.
The cells in charge of signaling the brain when we’ve had enough food are called astrocytes. According to new research published in The Journal of Physiology, calorie intake is regulated in the short term by astrocytes (large star-shaped cells in the brain that regulate many different functions of neurons in the brain). Astrocytes also control the signaling pathway between the brain and the gut, a path that can get interrupted by high calorie diets.
