High leverage ways to live longer, part 3....

Today's Post: Friday, 12-9-2011

There are many ways to live longer but some give you a larger return than others.

I thought an interesting post would be to list the ones that give you the most leverage.

Some are easy, some are easy for some people but hard for others, and some take a lot of work for anyone who does them.

The overall strategy is to watch for these strategies and begin to use them yourself when you find them.

Or, if it’s something you used to do, when you see it again, resume doing it!

On Tuesday, 12-6-2011, we posted 8 of these strategies.

Yesterday, Thursday, 12-8-2011 we posted 3 strategies.

Those were 9, 10, & 11 which have to do with stress. (Those were effective ways to avoid stress, effective ways to escape or lessen stress, and how to keep the stress left over from harming you.)

The one in today’s post, #12, is different but can be very health protective as well. And one kind of it has been tested to somewhat reverse aging.

Doing the first 11 is dramatically effective. Just by doing those you can slow aging, live longer, and have many more health years.

One man who did them all lived to be 96 and was in good health until about the last month or so of his life. His healthy years were over about 30 years more than was average for men born the year he was.

So, he lived as an adult in good health almost TWICE as many years as the average man. And he did live double the number of healthy years of the men who messed up on just a few of the more important of these strategies.

So if you do all of these, the postive effect on your life can be huge.

At this writing though, there is one MORE way to live longer and have more years of healthy life in addition to the first 11.

There are 3 categories.

a) For almost every kind of chronic disease, there are additional supplements you can take that make that disease less likely for you. Some of these can even help reverse these diseases in their early stages. Even better, many supplements have multiple health benefits.

Many of our posts on preventing specific diseases include the supplements that help prevent that disease.

Taking many of these supplements can prevent you from dying or becoming disabled by preventing these diseases. That both helps you live longer and have more healthy years of life too.

b) There are also some supplements that help you maintain youthful abilities even though you have aged.

(Of the first 8 ways, regular exercise, well done has exactly this effect. In fact, exercised muscles almost don’t age at all on the cellular level research found.)

c) There is one supplement that actually can partially halt or reverse aging -- and has even been tested to partially reverse aging -- by making your telomeres longer.

(Since it IS expensive, that’s why it’s nice you can achieve much of the same effect in slowing aging by using the stress protective methods we covered yesterday.)


a) Here’s more on the first one:

For almost every kind of chronic disease, there are additional supplements you can take that make that disease less likely for you. Some of these can even help reverse these diseases in their early stages. Even better, many supplements have multiple health benefits.

Many of our posts on preventing specific diseases include the supplements that help prevent that disease.

Taking many of these supplements can prevent you from dying or becoming disabled by preventing these diseases. That both helps you live longer and have more healthy years of life too.

Three supplements are like the superfoods of supplements.

(And, it also helps that there are superfoods that contain them. Getting them in supplement form helps ensure that you have them every day and get enough of them to protect you. They can also be more convenient as supplements and make room for even more kinds of super foods in what you eat because they are more concentrated.)

1. Taking somewhere between about 4,000 & 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases. (Taking 2,000 to 4,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 is the lowest amount likely to have this effect.) It also dramatically increases your immune system’s ability to kill off viruses and harmful bacteria. This effect in turn helps your body to remove cells on their way to becoming cancers and helps prevent many kinds of cancer.

2. Taking omega 3 oils from algae or purified fish oil lowers chronic inflammation which strongly helps prevent heart disease and helps prevent cancers. It also helps lower triglycerides and any excessive tendencies for your blood to clot too easily. So taking them is strongly protective and will help you avoid heart disease and heart attacks.

(All these effects are much greater if you also & at the same time avoid eating any high omega 6 oils such as corn and soy oil and minimize eating fats from animals fed grain since grains are high in omega 6 oils.)

Taking omega 3 oils is also strongly protective of your brain and your mental abilities. This is particularly true for the omega 3 oil DHA.

If you have high blood pressure taking omega 3 oils may lower it somewhat.

And, you tend to not get depressed and are considerably less irritable if you take omega 3 oils.

(An unusually high intake of omega 3 or taking them with a blood thinning drug can overdo their blood thinning effect. So don’t take six capsules a day instead of one or two. And NEVER take a blood thinning drug without talking to your doctor first if you take omega 3!)

3. The combination of the supplement curcumin and black pepper or the spice turmeric (from which curcumin is derived) and black pepper is strongly protective against Alzheimer’s disease. The new research show it both prevents the causes of the disease and tends to remove them even after there is some damage.

But there’s more! Taking curcumin or eating the curried foods spice with turmeric also is strongly preventive against heart disease and many cancers!

It is one of the safe and natural ways to lower LDL cholesterol AND it lowers inflammation. So doing this is also strongly heart protective and will help you prevent cancers.

Here are some of the other supplements helpful for preventing particular diseases.

For heart disease, niacin and inositol hexaniacinate is far more heart attack preventive for most people than taking statin drugs. (The best cardiologists give patients a $150 genetic test to see if they are in the minority that statins actually help and then still only use statins for people with serious problems too acute to wait for other methods to work.) It not only lowers LDL cholesterol. In addition to niacin and turmeric, taking or eating ginger and taking sterol supplements lowers LDL. (Avoiding refined grains, soft drinks, and more than occasional real sugar also lower triglycerides besides taking omega 3. And drinking moderate amounts of red wine and regular vigorous exercise increase your protective HDL.) Taking 1,000 to 2,000 mg a day of vitamin C and one a day of deodorized garlic one study found to reduce plaque in your blood vessels. So that supplement combination is also protective. Note that like omega 3 oils garlic and garlic supplements have a blood thinning effect.

These supplements and actions are so effective that even many people for whom statins would be protective can avoid the risk of their side effects if they do these other things soon enough.

For cancers there is some evidence that 200 iu real, natural vitamin E, particularly the gamma tocopherol form and 200 mcg a day of the mineral selenium but NOT more selenium than that can help prevent cancers. (Do NOT however take the cheap man made inaccurate copy of vitamin E. It was recently found to increase prostate cancer. And, the carotene lycopene which is best gotten in tomato based past sauce with extra virgin olive oil is thought to prevent prostate cancer. And you can also take lycopene supplements. One researcher found 30 mg a day to be effective for prostate cancer. And it made the cover of TIME magazine when the news broke.

For preventing Alzheimer’s and mental decline the top 3: vitamin D3, omega 3 oils, and curcumin/turmeric plus black pepper are protective. (Regular exercise and each and every effective way to prevent heart disease also help. Using only extra virgin olive oil also helps. Not only does this help the omega 3 to omega 6 ratio and lower inflammation but there is a phyto nutrient in extra virgin olive oil that is directly preventive. Avoiding all tobacco smoke, using the well organized life style we posted on yesterday, socializing well and often, and continuously learning new things also help.)

Once again we are out of time. So the other parts of this #12 method on supplements will be next week in the fourth part of this series.

We’ll cover supplements to help prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes and to prevent osteoporosis.

Then we’ll cover the supplements that can reverse some the effects of aging and those thought to directly slow or reverse aging.