Today, you can find protein supplements everywhere — they come in powders, drinks, pills and bars. With more than $12 billion in sales this year, the industry is booming.
As NPR's Patti Neighmond reports, protein helps build nails, hair, bones and muscles. It can also help you feel fuller longer than eating foods without protein. But do we need an extra dose? It depends.
Some particularly active lifestyles warrant extra protein, for example. But most of us tend to get enough without supplements. Angela Pipitone, a registered dietician, says it's better to forgo the supplements which can contain sugar and other additives.
To get protein, “whole foods are always the best option,” she says.
In his late 50s, Gene DiRado, became more withdrawn, more forgetful. So his son, Stephen DiRado, processed his growing concern by doing what he'd done since the age of 12: taking photographs. He started in the 1980s and continued for decades, using it as a way to stay close to his Dad.
It was years before Stephen realized his father was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.
"I would see it in his face — and that's when I would get that sinking feeling," Stephen says of those early years. "I started to look for me in those photos. What's my role?"
Stephen's black-and-white portraits of Gene turned into a documentary project called With Dad. The two continued the project until Gene's death in 2009.
New research from Denmark adds fuel to an intriguing theory: Could the inflammation from infection be a cause of mental illness?
As NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee reports, researchers studied medical records of 1.1 million Danish children, and found a link between a wide variety of infections, including common ones like bronchitis, and a higher risk of many mental illnesses.
The risk for getting a mental disorder was the highest within the first three months following an infection.
The link has been found in other research too but the mechanism underlying it is still not fully understood. One theory is that infections contribute to mental illness by activating the body's own inflammatory response.
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