Science Of Staying Young: 1st Step To Stay Young At Any Age

• Improve the heart-healthiness of your diet. Both French fare and a Mediterranean diet offer distinct health benefits. Particularly, the latter diet with its high content of olive oil, fish,and red wine is heart healthy.
• Eat fish at least four times per week. An increased intake of essential omega-3 fats may reduce your risk of heart disease, memory loss, and other health problems. Good types of omega-3-rich fish include salmon, mackerel, sardines, and herring. (If you can’t or won’t eat fish, consider using fish oil supplements.)
• Drink alcohol in moderation. One to two alcoholic drinks per day appear to be more beneficial than none, but don’t drink in excess of this amount. Consult doctor/physician for Alcohol Treatment
• Eat at least three to five vegetables and two to three fruits a day. Choose colorful fresh or frozen produce, and eat whole fruits rather than drinking juices that lack fiber.
• Increase fiber-rich foods in your diet. Fiber lowers blood sugar levels and cholesterol. Good sources include berries, dried beans, prunes, whole wheat bread, brown rice, bran, fruit, vegetables, and nuts.
• Drink plenty of liquids. Try to drink at least four to six glasses of liquid each day, and eat foods with higher water content, like melons and vegetables.
• Spice up your foods. Onions, turmeric, black pepper, cinnamon, ginger, thyme, cumin, oregano, basil, sage, curry, and garlic all have positive effects on health.
• Eat more yogurt. The probiotic effect of yogurt with live cultures may improve your health by preventing illness and limiting inflammation.
• Consider using select herbal or other remedies. A limited number of herbal preparations may be effective in treating specific problems, such as ginger for vertigo and alpha-lipoic acid for diabetic neuropathy and possibly memory loss.

Exercise More, Think Better

Exercise has payoffs for the mind, too, as it can improve feelings of overall well-being, along with reducing stress and depression.

Many people who feel lethargic or drained all the time are generally just out of shape. Exercising makes you feel tired while you’re doing it, but its longer-lasting effect is the reverse: it enhances your overall energy levels. Likewise, movement lowers your mental stress. Just getting up from your desk and work when you’re stressed out and going for a short walk can clear your mind, improve your mood, and enhance your productivity when you return to the task at hand. Studies have also shown that exercise is an effective remedy for mild to moderate depression and possibly major depressive disorder as long as the activity is continued over time.

What’s more, it appears to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia that have recently begun appearing at earlier ages in many adults, even well before retirement age. For older individuals, exercise clearly improves brain function. For example, in a study of 1,740 adults over sixty-five years of age who were followed for more than six years, individuals who exercised three times a week were a third less likely to develop dementia. However, even in younger individuals, regular exercise is associated with less brain atrophy, or shrinkage, and even as little as six months of regular aerobic training can reduce your rate of brain loss.

Any activity increases blood fl ow and oxygen delivery to your brain and results in a reduced cell loss in the part of your brain called the hippocampus, which is the region associated with memory and spatial navigation. Not only can activity delay or prevent dementia, it may be able to restore some of what you’ve lost mentally. Thus you need to exercise to keep from losing your brain, but also if you’ve already lost some of it.

Importance Of Vitamin D for Staying Younger?

Although the majority of vitamin D is made in your skin through exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun (normally supplying about 90 percent of your daily needs), the level of this vitamin in the body becomes lower with each passing decade, even in very healthy people living an outdoor lifestyle. It has even been found to be low in many individuals taking small doses of vitamin D as part of a multivitamin pill.

Vitamin D’s importance for staying younger for longer can’t be overstated. The only vitamin that acts as a hormone, vitamin D’s most important effect is its ability to work with calcium to enhance bone mineral deposits that strengthen bones and prevent hip and other fractures, making it a key hormone for maintenance of bone integrity. As recommended earliar, women older than fi fty and men older than sixty should consume at least 800 international units (IU) of this vitamin daily, together with a total calcium intake of at least 1,000 mg (preferably 1,500 for postmenopausal women) every day. Even when taking 800 IU of vitamin D a day, some older individuals fail to have adequate levels of it in their bloodstream. A normal blood level of 25-hydroxy vitamin D (the precursor to the active form) is 30 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL). Get your level measured to make sure it is at least that high, as lower levels can result in muscular weakness and increased risk of falling.

Vitamin D replacement can strengthen your bones, muscles, and body. In addition, it can improve your immune system, thus protecting you from infections, cancer, and even diabetes. Onset of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes has been linked to a defi ciency of this vitamin, at least for some individuals. But avoid taking an excess of vitamin D, as doing so can lead to elevated calcium levels and result in high blood pressure, cognitive problems, and weakness. Up to about 10,000 IU may be safe for most individuals, which is impossible to get through food intake and sunlight exposure alone and hard to reach even with normal levels of supplementation.

“Vitamin D is likely the most important hormone you have in your body. Take in adequate amounts in supplement form (800 IU), along with calcium (1,000 to 1,500 mg), to maintain bone health, immune function, a healthy heart, and more.”

Stay Active For Sharper Mind

Whether you’re still creative or not, you’re likely to experience a decrease in your ability to learn and remember things as you age. For instance, a study of Harvard physicians found that between forty and seventy years of age, most of them experienced an approximate 18 percent decrease in this ability. While the extent of changes in learning ability varies widely from person to person, everyone shows some degree of decline over time, along with reductions in skills like riding a bike or judging distances accurately.

The most common causes of normal memory loss are stress and anxiety, followed by depression, all of which are considered reversible. Only after these emotional states are eliminated would other medical conditions be considered as potential causes, and Alzheimer’s disease would actually be far down the list. Most older adults who complain about memory loss do not have Alzheimer’s disease; rather, many are either experiencing normal forgetfulness or suffering from mild mental impairment, depression, stress, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sufficient sleep, or other medical issues (such as a prior head trauma resulting in unconsciousness) that are impacting their short-term memory.

“Everyone experiences a decreased ability to learn and memorize things over time, but while some degree of forgetfulness is normal, memory loss is not usual. For instance, it would not be concerning to forget the name of a movie you saw last weekend, but you shouldn’t forget that you saw a movie at all.”

Maintain A Stable Weight

Too fat, too thin, just right—how do you know where your body weight falls? We are continually bombarded with messages about how fat Americans have become and how bad this weight gain is for our nation’s health. Interestingly, while the United States became the fattest nation in the world during the twentieth century, our average life span still increased by twenty-seven years. This conundrum makes us realize that nothing is ever quite what it appears or is as simple as we would like it to be. In some cases, weight loss can be good (if it’s fat weight alone), but it can also be bad if what you’re losing is your muscle mass instead. In fact, sarcopenia, the medical term for muscle wasting, can vastly decrease your quality of life and make you feel older than you actually are.

This important step lets you know how to tell if your body weight is appropriate. It additionally gives practical suggestions to help you maintain a healthy and stable weight, primarily through increased physical activity and early medical interventions, the goal of which is to make you look and feel as good as possible at any age.

Good and Bad News About Your Weight

The good news is that as you get older, being slightly overweight may actually improve how long and well you live. However, we’re certainly not advising you to allow yourself to sit around and gain weight, since the bad news is that for adults in their middle years,expanding waistlines are associated with type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. Excess body fat has become the “wicked witch” of modern medicine. We contend, however, that body fat has gotten a bad rap that it likely does not fully deserve. In fact, after sixty years of age, significant weight loss is actually bad for most people and usually not recommended.

Body fat is a powerfully active metabolic tissue in the body that produces a variety of hormones, such as leptin and adiponectin, as well as cytokines that can be both good and bad (more on these later). Although excess fat is often directly blamed for type 2 diabetes onset, a minor loss of weight (only 5 to 7 percent of your total weight, equivalent to about ten or so pounds for a two-hundred-pound person) can vastly improve blood glucose levels and overall diabetes control, as long as what you lose is body fat and not muscle. What’s more, people without much subcutaneous fat (located right below the skin’s surface) often develop a condition known as lipoatrophic diabetes, a type of diabetes caused by having too little fat.

In addition to having important metabolic activity, fat plays an important role in protecting your vital organs. Likewise, a fatty cushion around your hips helps protect them from being fractured if you fall. It also acts as insulation, keeping you warm in colder environments.

Perhaps most important, fat acts as a storage organ, just as the camel’s hump allows it to travel long distances without eating or drinking, which can be vitally important if you suffer through a prolonged illness or long stay in the hospital at any point in your life.

SO TO SUMMARIZE ….

Putting It All Together

Whether robotics or other technological advances are in your health-related future or not, congratulations are in order! So, you now have the knowledge to help you live your life to the max, all while enjoying a more youthful body and improved health. Immortality, if you should find a way to achieve it, is irrelevant if you don’t have your health. Unfortunately, you still have to put the easy steps suggested here into practice to live well, and changing lifelong habits can be a bit challenging. In anticipation of your need for a refresher from time to time, we have summarized the main points of our basic prescription for a long and happy life, as follows:

• Eat fish at least four times a week, and if you have elevated cholesterol or heart disease, also consider taking fish oil supplements daily.

• Drink no more than one to two glasses of red wine or other alcoholic beverages each day. In case of complications due to excessive drinking go for Alcohol Treatment and consult doctor/physician

• Eat adequate amounts of protein and calories, along with plenty of tea, fiber, and antioxidant-rich foods such as whole grains, leafy vegetables, legumes, spices, and dark chocolate.

• Exercise for thirty minutes daily, making sure that you do all five kinds of exercise (endurance, resistance, balance, flexibility, and posture) each week.

• Take 1,000 to 1,200 milligrams of calcium and 800 international units of vitamin D from age fifty onward if female, age sixty-fIve onward if male, and have your bone mineral density and vitamin D levels measured regularly.

• For women having hot flashes, take low-dose estradiol (estrogen supplement) and a natural progestin for five years, and if you have your ovaries removed, take just the estrogen until you reach age fifty-five.

• For men, check your ADAM score, and if it’s positive, get screened for depression, have your bioavailable testosterone level measured, and consider taking testosterone supplements if it’s low.

• If you’re having memory problems, consider taking 600 milligrams of alpha-lipoic acid daily, but also do frequent memory exercises to sharpen your mind.

• Keep active and happy, maintain a positive spiritual life, and if you enjoy organized religion, go to church regularly— rather than watching televangelists from home.

• Aim to keep your weight stable, since neither large amounts of weight gain nor of weight loss is good for you as you age.

• Make sure your physician measures your good-bad cholesterol (large, fluffy LDL), and if this component explains why your total cholesterol level is high, don’t have it lowered

too much with medications. If your cholesterol is elevated from sd LDL, the bad-bad kind, however, then medications will help protect your vessels.

• If you’re at high risk for certain types of cancer or other health problems and screening tests are available, get screened regularly to detect problems early.

• Enhance your exercise time with spontaneous physical activity (SPA) to prevent falls and frailty.

Most of all, remember that your ultimate goal is to maintain optimal health, a younger biological age, and a high quality of life for as long as you live, which shouldn’t be a problem now that you have at your fingertips the most up-to-date information possible on how to do so. Question your doctor’s opinion, continue to educate yourself, be your own advocate, enjoy life, and smile your way to the century mark and beyond!

Watch out for PART2 of this article (coming soon….) …..