There’s a recent article in Syntagma that takes a look at an unusual feature of the waning elderly mind. Here’s a short extract:

“When we are new to this world, we often use our parents’ minds to make sense of what is happening around us. We don’t know we are doing it because we have no experience of anything else, but we absorb attitudes and opinions that we couldn’t possibly attain for ourselves. What, then, is more natural than the reverse process occurring in later life?”

Link to article: Syntagma

Depression, like dyslexia and “Yuppie flu”, is one of those fashionable diseases that have no symptoms except what the sufferer feels.

Now Professor Jerome Wakefield of New York University has said that sadness and depression are essential tools of evolution that prompt “sufferers” to become high achievers in life. He cites Winston Churchill, Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln and Isaac Newton as depressives who made good.

Wakefield says: “When you find something this deeply in us biologically, you presume it was selected because it had some advantage, otherwise we wouldn’t have been burdened with it. We’re fooling around with part of our biological makeup.”

He further believes that medical diagnoses of depression and its treatment with powerful drugs, like Prozac, is an unnecessary and dangerous fad. His book, The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder states that sadness helps us learn from our mistakes. “I think one of the functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning — to make us focus on something else for a while.”

So, if you are feeling down, consider that a deep part of yourself may be attempting to convey something to you.

At least try to find out what it is before heading for the medic’s surgery.

Dr Fredric Brandt — of Botox fame — says that just by eliminating sugar from your diet, you can look ten years younger in ten days.

And it isn’t just by losing weight : “In a nutshell, sugar hastens the degradation of elastin and collagen, both key skin proteins. In other words, it actively ages you,” he claims.

In a new book, 10 Minutes/Ten Years: Your Definitive Guide to a Better and Youthful Appearance, Brandt says he saw a remarkable change in his own skin when he dropped sugar from his diet. He lost 20lb in weight, but also gained a new “glow, radiance and elasticity” in his face. Within a year, his body had changed as well.

“I’m really lean and have the body of a teenager, although I’m in my 40s. … Believe me, it’s cheaper than a facelift.”

He continues, “The sugar triggers a process in the body called glycation. This is where the sugar molecules bind to your protein fibres — those wonderfully springy and resilient collagen and elastin fibres — which are the building blocks of skin.”

However, just by overheating starchy foods or grilling them, the sugar content mutates producing Advanced Glycation End products, AGEs, which do immense harm to the skin.

This is quite a complex book, so if you’re really interested in its message, we suggest you read it in detail.

It has long been known that tomatoes possess many health benefits. Whether you eat them raw in salads and sandwiches, or cooked and processed into soups, purees, pastes and sauces, the good news just keeps on coming.

We’ve heard about their effect in preventing various types of cancer, of prostate and the skin, and the humble fruit’s use against heart disease and stroke. Now it’s a great cosmetic too.

The benefits are credited to lycopene, the pigment behind the distinctive red skin and a powerful antioxidant.

Professor Birch-Machin, of Newcastle University believes tomatoes are a cheap and simple way of improving health and looking good.

After a joint study by Manchester and Newcastle universities, he said, “I went into the study as a sceptic, but I was quite surprised with the significance of the findings.”

The British Society for Investigative Dermatology’s annual conference was told that tests using ultra-violet lamps showed that tomato-eaters were a third better protected against sunburn at the end of the study than at the start. Other tests suggested a tomato-based diet boosted production of collagen, the protein that keeps skin supple.

Tomatoes also protect the mitochondria, the parts of cells that turn food we eat into energy. “Being kind to our mitochondria is likely to contribute to improved skin health, which in turn may have an anti-ageing effect,” Professor Birch-Machin said.

The researchers now recommend two tomato-based meals a day for optimum health.