High leverage ways to live longer....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-6-2011

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!

1. The easiest action to do to live longer now, taking vitamin D3, may be taken off the market by the FDA, but let’s hope it is not. (Since there is no justification whatever for their proposed plan to eliminate all supplements, this IS being vigorously opposed.)

It’s new information. A few years ago, vitamin D was thought of as the minor vitamin in multivitamins that prevented rickets. And, it was believed that the form of vitamin D in the cheaper supplements, vitamin D2, was almost as effective as the vitamin D3 your body makes when you get sunlight on your skin. The amount most daily multi vitamins had was 400 iu.

Since then research has found that taking an optimum amount of vitamin D3 cuts your risk of death from all causes by 6%.

(Vitamin D2 which would remain if the FDA pulls vitamin D3 has some value. Taking it cuts your risk of death from all causes by 2%. That’s a third as effective. And, since you’d have to get a prescription and pay drug prices at the pharmacy for it, it would cost more than vitamin D3 supplements now available that do three times as much for you!)

Specifically, you are then less likely to get many cancers, heart attacks and other heart diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, and autoimmune diseases.

Avoiding these expensive to treat and very nasty diseases is worth doing for its own sake! In fact, if you do so by taking vitamin D3, in your case, you may live 20 years longer and live 15 or 20 more HEALTHY years. So your longevity and worthwhile life may well go up far more than 6%.

It’s also been found that the optimum dose per day of vitamin D3 is at least 2,000 to 4,000 iu a day. And many researchers doing vitamin D research now take 4,000 to 10,000 iu a day. One researcher stated that the most effective dose to prevent cancers and autoimmune diseases is 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3.

(Your body uses at least 3,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 if it’s available. And, the amount your body makes on a summer day when you are outside in the sun can easily top 20,000 iu a day. So despite the large sounding numbers, taking 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 is well within the range your body deals with easily.)

2. Avoid all tobacco products and tobacco smoke to the very best of your ability.

Tobacco products and tobacco smoke cause at least 30% of ALL cancers and a full 25% of heavy smokers get lung cancer. Tobacco today is radioactive. It has enough radioactivity from the fertilizer used on tobacco that if you get it or its smoke in your blood stream, you are at greater risk for all cancers. In addition, most smokers use lighters today to light cigars, pipes, and cigarettes. The hot flame in lighters produces several short lived but very dangerous carcinogens. One researcher found that the plot of the curve for the increased incidence of lung cancer was almost identical to the curve for the increased use of cigarette lighters.

And, that’s far from all. As horrible as it can be cancer is the LITTLE problem with tobacco smoke! Some smokers either don’t get it or die before they do. So most of them think they will be one of the lucky ones who don’t get cancer and keep smoking.

Smoking also speeds aging up. This happens to all smokers and people exposed to second hand smoke. That can cut your life by many years by itself.

But the BIG problem with smoking and exposure to tobacco smoke is that EVERY exposure begins to cause heart disease and other diseases of circulation. And, it begins to impair your ability to breathe. The plaque that tobacco smoke builds up in your blood vessels also gradually causes high blood pressure. And, the drugs for high blood pressure often harm your quality of life. Very, very few smokers know all this.

It means that absolutely no smokers and no people exposed to much second hand smoke escape harm! The smokers who continue to smoke thinking they may escape cancer may be right about that. But unfortunately for them NONE of those smokers escapes harm

This includes brand new teen aged smokers. And, it includes people who think they are safe because they smoke so few cigarettes each day. (One study of teen smokers found they had the breathing capacity of middle aged people from lung damage caused by smoking for example.)

And once again, that’s not all! We now know that in addition to causing the underlying heart disease and plaque build up in your blood vessels, tobacco smoke triggers heart attacks in people who would have escaped them otherwise! (Communities that banned smoking in most of their community found the rate of heart attacks and admissions to their Emergency Rooms with heart problems dropped dramatically as soon as the bans went into effect!)

It’s completely proved. If you avoid tobacco products and tobacco smoke, you will suffer less, have much lower health care costs, live more healthy years, and live more years.

Using this strategy is a very high leverage way to live longer and live more healthy years.

Being a nonsmoker who avoids second hand smoke and other tobacco products is one of the highest leverage things you can do to live longer.

3. The third way to live longer and have more healthy years IS harder to do and can be risky if done badly or in dangerous places.

But it can be done safely and in safe places.

And, once you establish the regular habit, it simply becomes a normal part of your life.

It dramatically slows aging and even grows new brain cells. It prevents heart disease and does so more each year you do it and the better you get at doing it. It also tends to prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes.

It also makes it easier to lose fat if you gain too much and dramatically easier to keep that fat off.

People who do it tend to live 10 to more than 20 years than people who do none of it at all. They also tend to gain that many healthy years.

This is doing a few sessions of vigorous exercise every week. Some people do an hour three days a week. Some people do as I do and do a few minutes to half an hour most days a week. But the key is that some of the exercises be quite vigorous but not done for too long at that intensity and to do it EVERY week you can and keep doing it.

People who get this kind of exercise keep their ability to do things far more and far longer than people who don’t. Their useable and enjoyable years of life go up dramatically. They are far less likely to get any kind of mental decline and their brains stay full sized while sedentary people have shrinking brains instead.

College professors tend to live longer lives. But in a study at Stanford with people otherwise matched, the sedentary ones died ten or more years sooner and had more heart disease and other health problems before they died than the those who kept getting some kind of vigorous exercise each week.

And, there’s more! If you set out to be less fat, it may take a while to do. But researchers found and keep finding that fit fat people are MUCH healthier than skinny sedentary ones. So, you can very quickly be much healthier if you begin to do vigorous regular exercise even if you still have fat to lose.

There’s also an extra bonus. In both men and women, if you have a sex life at all, it will be much better if you are an exerciser!

4. Always wear your seat belt. Make a very strong effort to avoid driving drunk. And, NEVER text while driving or your car is in motion or has its brakes off.

People do things like drive to the store and for errands and to and from work every day. If you do these things and never do the reverse, if there is an emergency, you are three times less likely to die or be hurt. If you are hurt it will only be a third as bad. And most of the time, you will avoid the accident completely or walk away from it with only the car damaged.

Do the reverse and you can lose 40 years of healthy life in some cases. You can wind up in jail a long time for manslaughter from negligence or driving under the influence.

This is a under-rated way to live longer and stay in good health. But doing it works. It’s not horribly hard. And the problems it prevents can be horrific. The reason it’s so high leverage is the incredible multiplier factor of having it operate day after day every day for every year you life.

Be sure to use this one!

5. Learn to brush your teeth in a way that brushes your gumline and gums. Learn to floss well. Do each one every day at least once. And see your dentist for cleaning and a check up every 6 months if you can. You’ll keep your teeth. You’ll look and smell better. And you dramatically cut your risk of heart disease and cut your risk of cancer a bit!

This one is completely under-rated. And that doing it prevents heart disease is a new discovery.

But if you do it, your health will be better, you’ll live longer, and you’ll look younger.

6. Avoid harmful foods and drinks as close to completely as you can. And, focus on eating foods and drinking drinks that benefit your health.

This one is complex to learn and for many people will mean no longer having things they have liked or having them dramatically less often.

But doing it well helps prevent heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and all kinds of mental decline including Alzheimer’s disease.

And, once you learn it and get used to doing it, you CAN keep doing it and many of the foods you eat will be dishes you enjoy eating.

Many of our posts since I began writing them over 5 years ago have been on this subject.

To save time this list will leave out the reasons why but just will list things to delete, avoid, or have very rarely. And we’ll list foods that benefit your health to eat most of the time each week.

a) Virtually eliminate drinking all soft drinks very definitely including diet soft drinks.

Drink water, water with just carbonation, tea, green tea, and coffee instead. Drink some real juices but with no sweetening added and stick to just one a day.

b) Eat no foods and drink no drinks that contain high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners. (Eat some treats with real sugar, honey, or molasses but not very often. Definitely avoid eating them more than a few times a week!)

Completely eliminate shortening that isn’t lard, margarine, and ANY food that contains trans fats or any hydrogenated oil! (By itself, that eliminates many foods with refined grains and most packaged desserts, packaged snacks, and commercial baked goods.)

c) Get rid of virtually all breads and other foods made with refined grains. Completely drop packaged desserts and snacks and commercial baked goods or cut eating them to a few times a YEAR! Avoid eating any white rice and only eat brown rice in small servings on occasion instead of every day.

Eat beans and lentils and nonstarchy vegetables and some 100 % whole grain foods instead.

d) Stop using any soy or corn or safflower oil or buying foods that contain them. Minimize eating or using canola oil.

Instead use extra virgin olive oil almost exclusively. (Some extra virgin olive oil is mild to almost unflavored. Some extra virgin olive oil has flavors you may like in salads or on occasion but for most uses the mild to unflavored is more adaptable.

Use some real butter occasionally, ideally from cows fed only grass and coconut oil but not often and avoid high heat when you use them.

Eat raw nuts and avocados if you aren’t allergic to them

e) Eat wild caught fish, seafood from sustainable and unpolluted sources, meat from animals fed only grass, if you can get it -- eat poultry raised on pasture foods from lands that aren’t polluted, and raw, unsalted nuts if you aren’t allergic to them. Eat some whole eggs and lowfat dairy foods.

If you eat grain fed meat and poultry do it far less often and eat the trimmest most fat removed versions and dishes only. Add back a mild extra virgin olive oil if you need more fat in a dish you have made with super lean double fat trimmed meat.

7. Eat a lot of kinds and amounts of nonstarchy vegetables each week -- particularly the cruciferous vegetables and be sure to eat some of those raw.

This is so good for your health and longevity and avoiding gaining excess fat, it deserves a separate listing.

There are many healthful cuisines that test as being protective from the Mediterranean diet to the DASH II diet and all the health supporting ethnic cuisines. ALL of them have this one factor in common.

8. If you aren’t allergic to them, eat raw nuts almost every day.

Most people wouldn’t dream this is so. But one study found that for those who aren’t allergic to them, eating nuts in this way added to their health and longevity as much as smoking reduces it.

That’s a HUGE effect and not well known.

The five reasons seem to be that people who eat nuts have their protective HDL go up and their harmful LDL go down AND they tend to eat less fatty, grain fed meat. So their heart disease is dramatically less.

They also get many key minerals needed for good health that even people who take supplements often don’t get enough of.

They also eat nuts as a snack instead of the junky treats that cause disease -- most of the time.

(The hidden benefit of eating nuts is that they are so filling that people who eat them eat less of other things and despite nuts having fat, the people who eat nuts do NOT gain weight!)

There are some more powerful ways to live longer that will be in part II next time.