Stress Reduced.
Next time you feel your blood pressure rising, try staring at an aquarium. It may be helpful in reducing stress, according to a preliminary study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ecologist Alan Beck and psychiatrist Aaron Katcher monitored the blood pressure of 20 university students and staffers who alternated between a two-minute period of reading academic textbooks aloud (a standard method of inducing moderate stress), a 20-minute period of looking at a wall, and a two-minute to 20-minute period of looking at a fish tank that contained either fish and plants or just plants.
Blood-pressure levels rose during the readings. They fell when people stared at the wall and fell even further when they watched the bubbling tanks. At first there were only slight differences in the effects produced by the tanks with fish and plants and the tanks with only plants. However, people watching tanks without fish tended to lose interest sooner than the others, and their blood pressure would then begin to rise again. For the few subjects who suffered from high blood pressure before the experiment began, fish watching proved even more effective than for the others.
"It turns out that when you look at fish, you relax," says Beck. He is not sure what effect all the attention has on the fish. -Berkely Rice.
Beck and Katcher are associated with the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
Alzheimer's Mitigated.
It can be hard for people with Alzheimer's disease to eat well because they often can't concentrate long enough to finish their food. Many tend to wander and pace too much even to sit down and start a meal. But Purdue University nursing professor Nancy Edwards, PhD, may have found a solution: aquariums. When she put fish tanks in three Indiana nursing homes, she found that after several weeks, those patients with Alzheimer's who looked at them while dining ate, on average, 17 percent more food than they did before the aquariums were brought in. The brightly colored specimens gliding peacefully through the tanks appeared to have the effect of calming the patients and getting them to focus at mealtime. Dr. Edwards hopes that placing fish tanks in nursing homes can help cut health-care costs by reducing the need for various supplements -- and medications administered to calm disruptive patients. In addition, she thinks patients could end up better nourished since when you eat foods as opposed to supplements, you get the full complement of foods' nutrition benefits.
From the Tufts University Health & Nutrition Letter September 1999
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