Meditation isn’t just for mental health

Paul Mccartney once said, “Meditation is a lifelong gift. It’s something you can call on at any time.” Ringo says: “At the end of the day, I can end up just totally wacky, because I’ve made mountains out of molehills. With meditation, I can keep them as molehills.” And George Harrison’s point of view rounds it out: “So yoga, all these [meditative] methods, are really … just to stop further pollution of your system and consciousness and to cleanse the system.”

When it comes to meditation and your system, George may have been right on. If you regularly do deep meditation for several years, it may alter your gastrointestinal system — and your gut biome in particular. That’s the finding of a small study in the journal General Psychiatry.

When researchers looked at the gut microbes in 37 Tibetan Buddhist monks from three temples, they found they differed substantially from those of their nearby neighbors and the microbes that were more plentiful in the monks than in “civilians” are linked to a lower risk of anxiety, depression and cardiovascular disease. The differences were seen in the prevalence of vacteroidetes (they made up 29 percent of the monks’ stool samples and just 4 percent of their neighbors) and prevotella (42 percent vs 6 percent).

Not too late to screen

The long list of screenings we are told to get, from our teeth to our bones and reproductive organs, can seem a bit much, but they’re often life-saving. Take screening for cervical cancer.

A lot of women would benefit from being more conscientious about being screened in the decade before they turn 65 — and by being screened after age 65. That’s the message delivered by a study that looked at the ages of over 12,000 women in California who were diagnosed with cervical cancer between 2009 and 2018 and found that 17 percent of women were 65 or older — and 71 percent of them had advanced cancer and many died.

Most cervical cancer is caused by human papillomavirus, and 1 in 16 women age 57 to 85 is infected with high-risk HPV. So despite the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation that cervical cancer screening is unnecessary after 65 if several tests in a row during the past decade (including at least one in the past five years) didn’t find cancer, consider getting a Pap test if you’re 65-plus; and get the HPV vaccine at any age if you’re going to have new sexual partners.