10 key ways to Live Long and Prosper….

Today's post: Wednesday, 4-15-2015

Leonard Nimoy’s phrase, Live Long and Prosper, more than lives up to Spock, the Star Trek character he created it for!

It’s another way of saying. “May you have a worthwhile and healthy life and may it last long.”

Here are 10 key ways to do that:

1.  Have a worthwhile purpose you make a focused effort to achieve or contribute to.

(This can be career oriented or a big personal mission or it can be a hobby or volunteer effort you care about or several of these!

Make sure to have at least one!

Most people want to stay healthy.  But to feel as if you are a valuable and competent person and have an incentive to make an extra effort to stay healthy and stay able and live long, having a purpose really helps!

In fact, one of the most effective ways to stop depression is to begin to focus on building a worthwhile life.)

2.  Be kind to people – and when you can do it and it will help be supportive to them.

(Learn to do this well and interact and socialize with people regularly.  Doing so both makes your life worth living AND is a force multiplier – plus doing so helps prevent mental decline!)

3.  Be consistently prudent and follow effective safety policies in the things you do.

(Why have your life end suddenly and far too soon?  Why become badly disabled when it could have easily been avoided? 

Always wear your seat belt.  Don’t take your eyes off the road while you are driving and the car is moving.  Jump into water you can’t see into feet first instead of head first.

You must take risks.  But avoid those that could kill you or disable you when you can avoid it.)

4.  As a personal policy know what foods and drinks and ingredients are harmful and STOP ingesting them and always avoid them.

(Our last post lists most of them and why avoid them:

   Why always read labels…. Thursday, 4-9-2015)

5.  Eat (or drink in a Vitamix drink) 6 or more servings of organic vegetables each day. 

(Greens and cruciferous vegetables and onions and yellow and orange vegetables are all great!)

(Those who do this -- or do it with the help of the new Vitamix 750 -- slash their risk of heart disease, cancer, and everything else.  Even 3 to 5 real vegetables other than some kind of potatoes a day is far better for you than less. 

AND if you do it, you will find it easy or even done for you to lose excess fat and easy to keep it off!)

6.  Eat one or two pieces of organic whole fresh fruit each day. 

(This too cuts your risk of heart disease. Fruit tastes good. And despite being easy to do, dramatically cuts your risk of both kinds of strokes!)

7.  Avoid all tobacco smoke, tobacco products, nicotine, and eCigarettes.

(The list of things you help avoid by doing this is astonishingly large. 

And for many of them ALL smokers get them even if they don’t get cancer. 

Alzheimer’s disease, emphysema and other forms of COPD, insulin resistance, osteoporosis, heart attacks, strokes, ED, PAD, and even foot amputations are ALL on this list!)

8.  Vigorous exercise: Get some carefully built up to but vigorous exercise in sessions of 10 to 25 minutes each most days of every week.  That’s essential. 

(Vigorous exercise slows aging and keeps you mobile and protects you from almost everything from Alzheimer’s disease to heart disease to osteoporosis – even some cancers. 

It helps people keep off excess fat they lose and if well done can help them lose it in the first place.)

(If you can fit in much less challenging exercises like walking and gardening and even doing chores where you stand AND cutting back on your TV watching and sitting time also can help a lot!)

9.  If you can manage it, get a regular doctor who is competent, caring, well informed,

AND who is actually comfortable with YOU managing your health with your doctor as a consultant – NOT the boss where your health is concerned. 

And, get the major preventive tests at least once a year from fasting glucose and HBA1C to the lipid panel with total cholesterol, HDL, LDL, and triglycerides.

(YOU decide what to do if the readings are bad.  But doing without these tests is like driving the car of your health with a blindfold on.  If you can’t see trouble ahead, you may not take action in time to avoid it when you easily could have done so!)

10.  There are vitamins and minerals and herbs and spices and plant extracts and other food concentrates and other natural compounds with real and documented health benefits.

If you learn them well or follow the work of someone who does and buy from reputable companies, you can sometimes more than double the protection of doing everything else right for health issues that are relevant to you.  And, in some cases, you get the protection far faster and sooner.

If you do all these, the chances are excellent that you will:

Live Long and Prosper  

Ways to live long and in good health....

Today's Post: Friday, 1-27-2012

Recently there was an article on ways to live to be 100. I messed up & didn’t save where I saw it. (It made some good points, so I wish I had and could refer you to it directly.)

But I’ve used it as a starting point rather than just listing the ideas in it.

1. It’s helpful if your parents and grandparents lived long lives. Part of living long does look to be inherited.

But the genes for long life are complex and there are many. Not just one or two.

And, some of the apparent heredity is from doing as you saw your long lived relatives do or they taught you to do and what you saw them not doing!

The best news though, is that we now know that these genes are NOT rigid designs. Instead they are available built-in capacities. AND both the helpful ones and the harmful ones can be turned on and off, “expressed” or not depending on what YOU do.

The kinds of exercise to do and foods to eat and foods and drinks to NOT eat we often post about quite often are your control levers to turn your longevity genes on and not off!

Doing the reverse – eating and drinking junk, not exercising, and smoking or getting a lot of exposure to tobacco smoke tend to turn them off!

So, to maximize your genes for long life, read our posts and similar information:

Find ways to customize to you the health supporting lifestyle we write about and that work for you.

Do the best you can. The people who do tend to live into their 90’s and stay healthy almost all of their lives.

2. The article I saw said, “Don’t retire.”

That’s one way to do it. For people who make a contribution at their work and still can do so, who are good at their work, and who like it, that works.

Similarly, some people do well with partial retirement. Some cut back to part time. Some become consultants in their area of expertise.

The real message, though, is stay engaged and active in your life.

For many people not fully retiring from work does the job well.

But other ways work for some people.

Some people who can afford to retire from work and already spend time with their extended families or their church or nonprofit work or even their hobbies.
If these people then do these full time or close to it and almost as energetically and as solidly engaged as they did when they were working, that also does the job.

It’s the active engagement with live, staying active, and staying connected to other people that does the job.

I’m likely to keep working myself. But both my parents retired and used the second method.

They both work. Use one of them or both of them. But stay engaged and active.

This both improves your health and makes it worth continuing to live.

3. Use healthy life management strategies.

a) Be prudent. Avoid harm when you can. Always wear your seat belt. Be “proactively paranoid” as business author, Jim Collins recently put it. Find out about risks and how to avoid them and do it.

b) Be purposeful and well organized.

Develop systems and even day to do routines that you almost always use. Take actions you know work to achieve your goals. Find out things that might work and check for the facts and try them.

Have goals and purposes that are important to you. People who have a main personal mission or life work live longer than people who don’t. (This relates to the stay active strategy.) But it doesn’t have to be that grand. Having several things you want to do take action to do also works.

c) Be scientific, careful, and analytical when things go wrong. Things that go wrong do so for specific reasons and can be better if more useful causes are put into place. That’s the truth. People who assume they will stay bad are simply less accurate and less careful thinkers. Worse, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and excuse to do nothing to improve things. Learn NOT to shoot yourself in the foot that way!

But in working on goals or when things go well notice the good things and how they help you and how they keep appearing. Have hope and be optimistic. Remember things you got done and assume you can make these goals happen or you’ll find a way. Then take action.

Martin Seligman, PhD studied these two factors. People who are high in both have better lives in every way. They have better health and live longer. They usually make and have more money. They have more friends. They often succeed in achieving their goals big and small.

d) Be conscientious. Be kind. Be dependable.

You’ll feel better about yourself.

But even more important, you’ll stay connected to people and they will treat you better.

Both benefits help you live longer and enjoy it more.

e) Whether you or not take supplements too, be sure to know which foods have multiple health benefits and eat many of them every week.

Foods have the vitamins and minerals you can get in supplements. But they often do far more.

For mixed carotenes and calcium getting them in food is more effective and safer than taking them as supplements.

Many nutrients have health benefits in their natural form that are NOT in the synthetic partial copies in some supplements.

But the really important 3 reasons for eating lots of these superfoods are these:

Many nutrients such as vitamin E in foods, are complexes or families of related nutrients. The common supplement for vitamin E, alpha tocopherol in its natural form, does have benefits. But gamma tocopherol gives far more protection from prostate cancer. Walnuts have both kinds. Extra virgin olive oil has more kinds than just alpha tocopherol.

In some cases the supplement has a valuable ingredient even by itself. But the foods that ingredient is in also have co-factors that can multiply that value as much as 20 times.

Third, we don’t know all the values of all the nutrients in foods. But scientists are already discovering there are dozens in almost every kind of natural food.

Many of the supplements ARE valuable by themselves or add the value of eating those nutrients in foods. But the best health always comes to people who eat the most nutritious foods.

Blueberries and other berries. Raw nuts walnuts and others for people who aren’t allergic. Extra virgin olive oil. Broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables. Broccoli and other dark green, yellow, or orange vegetables high in carotenes. And, avocados -- are all super foods.

People who eat abundantly from these foods have dramatically better health and live longer than people who don’t.

For example, broccoli and other dark green, yellow, or orange vegetables high in carotenes contain alpha carotenes. People who eat them look healthier because they get a warmer skin color. But a high blood level of alpha carotene also goes with good health and living a long life recent studies found.

f) Get at least 6 hours a day of sleep. If you also exercise and sleep that core 6 hours at the same time each day or very close to it doing this works even better. Avoid sleeping more than 8 and a half or 9 hours most days.

g) Do vigorous and moderate exercise most days of every week.

It keeps your brain working and dramatically slows aging.

h) Learn to brush and floss right and do so every day. (The focus on that is stimulating your gums and cleaning your gumline thoroughly.) Get your teeth cleaned and checked every 6 months. This prevents gum diease which causes health harm in your whole body. It allows you to keep your teeth which helps you look and feel younger.

i) Stay connected with people and socialize with them regularly. Learn to do it well and find and stay connected with people you like and enjoy.

Be SURE to include many people younger than yourself and keep meeting new ones! That way if you outlive many of your friends from your earlier life you still are connected.

This does 3 things each of which helps you live longer.

You enjoy life more and find it worth staying alive.

You gain a support network than can give you essential help at times.

And, you get brain exercise from socializing that is hard to believe brain scans found. Just because you are skilled and have done it all your life, it feels easy. But the scans show it requires and activates enormous resources in your brain.

That means that socializing, just like physical exercise,keeps your brain working well as you get older.

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.

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.

Proven long life strategies...

Today's post: Friday, 5-23-2008

A few days ago, I read that there is a new book out in which the author lists the factors he found in common in four parts of the world where a large number of the people live into their 90’s & to be over 100 AND where they tend to stay in good health in their later years.

So, when Early to Rise did a review yesterday including some of the strategies he found, I decided to post it here & add some of my own comments.

(As some of you know, we did a post on Friday, 3-14-2008 called 21 ways to live to be 100. And, as you’ll see many of those overlap this article & suggest similar strategies.)

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

“Anti-Aging Strategies From the Longest-Lived People in the World

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS

Recently, I interviewed Dan Buettner, whose latest book, The Blue Zones, is a veritable treasure trove of tips for living longer. Buettner is an explorer whose work for National Geographic led to the book. He investigated four parts of the world where there are more healthy centenarians than anywhere else - Sardinia, Italy; Loma Linda, CA; Okinawa, Japan; and Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula. Here's what we can learn from the folks who've done "anti-aging" better than anyone else on the planet.

1. Move. Longevity all-stars engage in regular, low-intensity physical activity, whether it be hiking, shepherding, gardening, walking, yoga, or something else. The data suggest that moderate, even easy, activity done on a daily basis will extend your life.

2. "Hara hachi bu." This Okinawan saying means "Stop eating when your stomach is 80 percent full." Clear enough? Cutting calories by a mere 20 percent will extend your life.

3. Go heavy on the plants. While readers of ETR know that higher-protein diets can be really healthy, that doesn't rule out a diet that's also loaded with vegetables. All of the long-lived peoples investigated by Buettner ate a plant-based diet with almost no processed foods.
4. Drink some alcohol. In Sardinia, it's wine. In Okinawa, it's sake. Whatever you prefer, alcohol in moderation seems to reduce both stress and inflammation. But remember that women who drink need to be getting plenty of folic acid in their diets. (Even moderate drinking raises the risk of breast cancer - but only for women who are folic acid deficient.)

5. See the big picture. Okinawans call it ikigai. Nicoyans call it plan de vida. In both cultures, the phrase translates to "why I wake up in the morning." Develop a strong sense of purpose, connection to others, and community. It's the best anti-aging "medicine" you can find.

[Ed. Note: Dr. Jonny Bowden, a nationally known expert on weight loss, nutrition, and health, is the author of the new book The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth. For more information, go to www.jonnybowden.com.....]”

X * X* X* X* X* X* X*

1. We’ve done many posts on how regular exercise improves your health & slows aging. It seems it is even more critical to slow the aging of your brain than even our posts on the subject suggested. Our next post will be about that.

2. I haven’t read the book for the complete story on the other 3 cultures on purposely stopping eating a bit before you are completely full. Significant calorie restriction does seem to prolong life but can take some of the fun out it.
Fortunately, getting a lot of exercise, eating a lot of vegetables, & NOT eating processed or junk foods also help prevent you from being too fat. And, it looks like you can get the anti-aging effect of significant calorie restriction by taking Resveratrol.

And, it can be a LOT easier to eat moderately like this when you both are not under heavy stress & you have a good social support system. And, these four groups tended to have that going for them.

3. There are quite a good number of ways to eat that support & protect good health. The one thing they ALL have in common is stressing to eat a lot of vegetables both in amount & in variety. These groups seem to have that in common also.

In his recent book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan summarized his research in a way that summarizes the #2 & the #3 strategies this way: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”

(Most packaged food & snacks and some ice creams, bread & other foods that contain harmful or nonfood additions, do NOT make his list as food. He calls those food-like nonfoods.)

Another related point is that for people who are not allergic, eating nuts regularly boosts longevity by almost as much as NOT smoking – 5 to 10 years or more. And, while many of the Seventh Day Adventists do NOT drink alcohol, they do often eat nuts regularly as they are vegetarians. And they were one of the four groups he studied.

4. Drinking moderately, particularly if it’s combined with meals & socializing does seem to be protective.

The good social support & regular exercise the people he studied had does help avoid the excessive stress that drives drinking enough to overshoot moderate level of alcohol consumption.

5. Having religious faith or a personal guiding philosophy that live is worth living combined with strong family & community ties and social support not only sharply increases longevity, it makes it worth doing.

From the reviews I’ve read, this seems to be the most important take away from Dan Buettner’s book, The Blue Zones.

There are other sources for information the value of eating right and getting regular exercise. And, many people like the idea that moderate drinking has some health value. But this fifth point is significant & not stressed as often by so many different sources.

21 ways to live to be 100....

Today's post: Friday, 3-14-2008

(The first 8 were in the Sunday, 3-9-2008 Parade Magazine supplement in my Sunday newspaper. The first 8 things to do are theirs. The commentary on each is mine.)

1. Eat a heart healthy diet. They say that the Mediterranean diet is the best according to research. That contains a wide variety of vegetables, raw & cooked garlic, tomato sauces, extra virgin olive oil, wild caught fish, & some nuts, fresh & whole fruit, whole grains, & wine – mostly moderate intake of red wine.

Note that it does NOT contain ANY soft drinks or packaged snack foods. And the amounts of sugar & refined grains are very low if any. It has virtually no hamburger from grain fed cattle. And, although it has some poultry in some regions, it tends to be quite low in fatty cuts of meat & dairy fat.

2. Read the newspaper. Be actively interested in current events & read about them in print – in newspapers; online; & in books & magazines. Staying connected & mentally active ( & educated ) tends to predict longevity.

3. “Go forth & multiply.” Women who have children outlive those who do not (with the proviso that they survive childbirth.)

And, studies show that men who have children in their twenties are unusually long lived. (That could be because saner & richer men are more likely to do this than men who are poor & mentally unstable. Or it could be that enduring the extra work of little kids is better for you when you are young enough to have extra energy reserves than it is when you are older.)

4. Drink up! People who drink things that tend to promote good health live longer.

Tea, green tea, moderate consumption of coffee, & moderate alcohol intake “(up to 5 ounces a day for women, up to 10 ounces a day for men)” -- of wine. Beer can be a bit more & stronger drinks less. It works out to a bit less than one drink a day for women & two for men—with a few days with one or none each week.

Tea, green tea, & red wine drinkers get less cardiovascular disease, particularly heart disease. And that level of alcohol intake increases your HDL.

Coffee may help prevent Parkinson’s disease & liver cirrhosis.

And, the people who get 100 to 400 mg a day from tea or coffee tend to be more alert & think better than people who don’t.

5. Watch Your Waist. Being fat in the waist area is more health dangerous & more indicative of health risks than fat elsewhere. And, people who have fat tummies are much less sexually desirable than people who don’t – for BOTH men & women,

And, having a fat waist is indicative of eating fattening, unhealthy foods, not exercising, & excessive stress.

6. Get married. “Singles don’t live as long as married people.” It’s pretty simple, failure & loneliness harm your health. And, teams that work even marginally well together can succeed better than individuals. They’ve even found that married couples who don’t get along well are happier than single people. You can improve your own ability in ways that improve your marriage. And, happy married people tend to live a long time.

7. Have Faith. Clergymen & nuns & people who regularly attend religious meetings & have some kind, any kind, of religious belief do tend to live longer than people who don’t have any religion at all.

(Some of this is a positive outlook on life, a giving orientation, & regular social interaction. And, studies show that “open-minded” believers AND nonbelievers are mentally & often physically healthier than more closed minded people. As a result, people who are Unitarian-Universalists, Quakers, Reform Jews, & open-minded members other beliefs -- & who get regular social contact tend to live longest.)

8. Buy the farm. “Studies show living out in the country extends life compared with city dwelling.”

Some of the research this reflects is because people who are 100 & up in recent years were more likely to live on farms as young people than young people are today. But it may also reflect getting more exercise, & in those days being less exposed to pollution, & being less exposed to dangerous communicable disease – or to being outdoors more often than city dwellers & thus getting more sunshine & vitamin D.

Here are the rest of the 21 # 9 to 21.:

9. Eat raw cruciferous vegetables – every day-- such as broccoli, cabbage, horseradish, kale, & watercress. This has been found to prevent cancer, prevent the more dangerous forms of cancer, & prevent damage to your DNA, thereby SLOWING aging. It also has been proven to help you keep off excess body fat—including fat on your waist.

10. Eliminate or come very close to eliminating ANY amount of ingesting by eating or drinking any refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, transfats, fully hydrogenated vegetable oils, & both regular or diet soft drinks. And eliminate eating any foods or snack foods that contain them. This junk makes you fat & sick. Why spend money on it or harm yourself with it. You will live longer & there ARE other enjoyable foods, drinks, & good things in life without these horrible side-effects.

11. Develop personal interests. And keep learning new things that relate to them or are of interest to you or are useful. This is related to point #2 & others. People who enjoy life & are active mentally think better, keep their brains younger & their memories working much better than people who don’t. As a result they also live longer.

12 Spend time with your family. And do your best to be good to them, particularly in ways they like. Support them when they need it. People who manage to do this with all or part of their families are happier, have more social contact, & get more personal support than people who don’t. And they live longer usually.

13. Drink hot cocoa made from only from unsweetened cocoa -- & with no sugar or milk. This will help keep your blood vessels flexible, prevent or lower high blood pressure, increase blood flow & give you abundant antioxidants.
Eating dark chocolate with some sugar is almost as good if you only do it once or twice a week. But unsweetened cocoa works better & is far less likely to make you fat.

Adding milk tends to prevent most of these health effects.

14. Get regular exercise each week, including strength training. And be somewhat physically active at times each week also. This has been shown to both give you massive health benefits & help prevent many illnesses nonexercisers tend to reliably get. Doing this slows aging & even has been shown to grow new brain cells. And, if you do it safely, you WILL live longer AND be healthier each year you live.

15. Eat lots of vegetables each day – NOT including potatoes or French fries. Eating a variety of nonstarchy, cooked & raw vegetables from safe sources has multiple health benefits & is a secret to keeping off excess body fat. Eating vegetables such as sweet potatoes, squash, pumpkin, tomatoes, tomato sauces, broccoli, carrots, & many kinds of greens give you mixed carotenoids that tend to prevent cancer & have many other health benefits.

16. Get key health biomarkers, particularly those testable by blood tests, checked regularly. And, learn & use foods, supplements, & other lifestyle upgrades such as exercise that optimize any that are even somewhat too high or too low. Many of these other 20 methods have worked for thousand of years. This one is relatively new. But it’s extremely powerful. We’ve done many posts on it. Blood glucose, LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, & homocysteine levels that are too high will age you rapidly; cause cardiovascular disease, tend to make you senile, & /or kill you. So will having too low a level of HDL. If you know these measures, know what levels you should shoot for, & optimize them, you WILL live longer & be healthier every year you live.

17. Socialize. Phone friends & spend time with your friends & family. Meet new people. Network in your work & areas of interest. Research shows this will make you happier & more long lived. In fact, recent research shows it also is a remarkably effective way to exercise your brain.

18. Find some kind of mental puzzles you like & spend some time on them most weeks.

Some people combine this with socializing by playing cards. Some like crossword puzzles. I happen to like solving the chess problems in the newspaper. Regardless of which one you like, doing it has been shown to extend longevity & help prevent senility and memory loss.

19. Avoid poisons. This one sounds like a no-brainer. And, to some extent it is. But some things many people think are safe expose them to poisons. And, doing this can be a good bit harder to do than it should be. (See yesterday’s post on safe water to drink for example.)

This specifically includes NOT smoking or staying around second hand smoke.

And, it also means eating mostly organic produce & avoiding excess animal fat from grain fed meat animals, poultry, & from farmed fish. (Most of the pesticide & herbicide exposure for most people comes from such fat where it is bioconcentrated – NOT from produce.)

It also means keeping away from pesticides, herbicides, & “household products” like air fresheners.

20. Take key supplements. Virtually everyone should take a good multivitamin/mineral supplement, a good B complex supplement, some extra vitamin C, & 200 iu of natural vitamin E each day. Many people need the supplements that optimize their health biomarkers. And, supplements such as CoQ10, Ubiquinol, Resveratrol, & DHEA slow aging -- &/or partially reverse it in older people.

21. Be prudent, proactive, & optimistic and build a worthwhile life. This set of things has been proven to help you be happier, less depressed, have more friends, think better, have more money, achieve more – AND be healthier & live a longer life.