【推荐2】There is no such thing as a "safe" level of drinking, with increased consumption of alcohol associated with poorer brain health, according to a new study.

In an observational study, researchers from the University of Oxford studied the relationship between the self-reported alcohol intake（摄入量）of some 25,000 people in the UK, and their brain scans. The researchers noted that drinking had an effect on the brain's gray matter—regions in the brain that make up "important bits where information is processed," according to lead author Anya Topiwala, a senior clinical researcher at Oxford.

"The more people drank, the less the volume of their gray matter," Topiwala said via email. "Brain volume（容量）reduces with age and more severely with dementia（痴呆）. Smaller brain volume also predicts worse performance on memory testing," she explained. "While alcohol only made a small contribution to this（0.8%）, it was a greater contribution than other 'changeable' risk factors," she said, explaining that changeable risk factors are "ones you can do something about, in contrast to aging."

The team also investigated whether certain drinking patterns, beverage（饮料）types and other health conditions made a difference to the impact of alcohol on brain health. They found that there was no "safe" level of drinking—meaning that consuming any amount of alcohol was worse than not drinking it. They also found no evidence that the type of drink—such as wine, spirits or beer—affected the harm done to the brain.

However, certain characteristics, such as high blood pressure, obesity or binge -drinking（酗酒）, could put people at higher risk, researchers added.

【推荐1】Sleep repairs the body and the mind and helps prevent disease by strengthening the immune system. However, many adults do not get eight hours of sleep each night. The average adult today gets only 6.4 hours of sleep. Only in recent years have health professionals begun to realize the seriousness of sleep deprivation in the working population. A significant number of people work at night, work long hours, or suffer from sleeplessness or jet lag.

Studies show that the brain is negatively affected by sleep deprivation because certain patterns of electrical and chemical activity that occur during sleep are interrupted and the brain cannot function normally. In one study, thirteen healthy adult subjects(实验对象) who usually had normal sleep patterns were kept awake and carefully monitored in a lab during a period of 35 hours. During the experiment, the subjects were asked to perform several tasks, such as mathematics and word problems, while undergoing scans of their brain activity. The researchers found that the temporal lobe (颞叶) of the brain, the region involved in language processing, was active during speech tasks in rested subjects but not in subjects who lacked enough sleep. After several hours without sleep, there was no activity within this region.

Several studies show that getting fewer than six hours of sleep can damage short-term memory and reaction time—thus causing a serious risk of accident. In one study of drivers, researchers reported that sleep deprivation had the same effects as being drunk. They found that people who drove after being awake for 17 hours performed worse than those with a blood alcohol level of 0.5 percent, the legal limit for drunk driving in most western European countries. The researchers concluded that countries with drunk driving laws should consider similar restrictions against sleep-deprived driving.

【推荐2】Most of us lead unhealthy lives; we spend far too much sitting down. If in addition we are careless about our diets, our bodies soon become loose and fatty and our systems slow moving. There are some aspects (方面) of our unhealthy lives that we cannot avoid. I am thinking of such features of modern city life as pollution, noise, rushed meals and stress. But keeping fit is a way to reduce the effects of these evils. The usual suggestion to a person who is looking for a way to keep fit is to take up some sport or other. While it is true that every weekend you will find people playing football and hockey in the local park, they are outnumbered a hundred to one by the people who are simply watching them.

For those who do not particularly enjoy competitive sports—and it is especially difficult to do so if you are not good at them—there are such separate activities as cycling, walking, jogging and swimming. What often happens though is that you do them in such a leisurely way, so slowly, that it is doubtful if you are doing yourself much good, except for the fact that you have at least managed to get up out of your armchair.

Even after you have found a way for keeping in shape, through sport or gymnastics, you are still only half way to good health, because, according to the experts, you must also master the art of complete mental and physical relaxation. It has to do with deep breathing, emptying your mind of all thoughts, meditation, and so on. Yoga, as practiced in the West, is the most widely known and popular of the systems for achieving the necessary state of relaxation. It seems ironical (讽刺性的), though, that as our lives have improved in a material sense we have found it increasingly necessary to go back to forms of activity—physical effort on the one hand and relaxation on the other—which were the natural way of life of our forefathers.