brain health

A new study just released in the Journal of Human Brain Mapping showed that obese individuals have eight percent less brain tissue than normal-weight individuals and their brains look 16 years older than the brains of individuals who are at normal weights. In addition, the brains of overweight individuals looked eight years older than those of leaner individuals.

Lead researchers of the study call this “severe brain degeneration” a great risk for degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, in addition to other diseases that affect the brain.

Not all health solutions are about what you eat and how you physically exercise. Some exercise is mental and it purposely involves no physical activity. Meditation isn’t just relaxing, it can expand your intellect as well. While you build bigger muscles with weights, you build a bigger brain with the relaxation methods of meditation.

“In meditation, effort must be applied in a direction opposite to what we are used to. Our effort must be to relax ever more deeply,” says John Novak, author of Lessons in Meditation.

There’s physical evidence of these brain-expanding benefits. The researchers from the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging used a high-resolution, three-dimensional form of MRI and two different approaches to measure differences in brain structure.