Slow or partly reverse aging by making your telomeres longer....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 5-27-2014                                                                         

I.  As you very well may know if you are a regular reader, regular and vigorous exercise most days of every week, has already been shown to produce several kinds of prevention of many diseases more common in older people.

A study found regular and vigorous exercise delivers powerful heart protection and increases your HDL and lowers LDL and triglycerides.  The great news in that study was that in the people in the exercise class they studied, all these improvements and protections kept getting better every year the people kept doing this!

This double confirms the separate research showing that exercise directly lowers the amount of the dangerous small particle LDL that is a key cause of heart disease.  (When exercise does this, you can see it in the higher HDL and lower triglycerides without going to the expense of getting the detailed exam of your blood particles used in that study.  Research at Harvard found the cheaper and more used lipid panel with HDL and triglycerides and the ratio between them tracks small particle LDL almost exactly. 

You want high HDL and quite low triglycerides.  Exercise helps deliver that!)

Another study at Stanford found such regular exercisers were far less impacted by diseases and had more years of healthy life AND lived significantly longer.  Moreover this was true when comparing them to other professional and economically advantaged peers who did NOT exercise!

Yet another study showed that in the muscles directly exercised the genetic messages and muscle fibers and capacity reverted to a youthful state even when the person was older.

As you may know, one of the biggest causes of aging if not the number one cause is when the telomeres at the end of your DNA strands that protect the insides get short enough the copies begin to have imperfections.  If you keep your telomeres longer, the copies are accurate and fully functional which avoids that.

In addition, people who have shorter telomeres at any age tend to get more heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and other diseases.

Given all this, it looks as if one of the ways to keep your telomeres long and enjoy all these health protections and more years of healthy life, is to exercise!

The news that sparked this post is that last month Dr Al Sears emailed me this:  "....recently a study of 2,401 twins found that physical activity was related to telomere length.

The researchers found that vigorous exercise that didn’t last too long or too short a time helps people have much longer telomeres than people who get no exercise or who exercise for too long.

The people in the study got to choose the kind of exercise they liked to do, like I do .... They did things like running, swimming, or tennis.

Those who exercised vigorously had telomeres that acted 9 years younger."

2.  Are there other things that you can do to keep your telomeres long or make them longer?

Yes.

a)Taking the supplements alpha lipoic acid or r-lipoic acid does this. 

So does taking NAC, n-acetyl-cysteine which causes glutathione release.  (Like vigorous exercise, lipoic acid lower insulin resistance and helps keep your nerves in good repair.  And, glutathione is a powerful antioxidant that enables you to exercise without oxidative damage.)

These are effective and easy to get at this time.

b) Avoiding or escaping from severe stress; effectively solving the problems that would otherwise cause it; having good relationships with people and frequent contacts; and using effective stress release techniques such as Massage, Yoga, and Tai Chi each help prevent short telomeres and even make them longer. 

Each of these is big topic and there are good books on each of them. 

My solution which I recommend to you is to exercise and take the supplements and do my best at the last set of things.

Even though my efforts at the last set of things fall short sometimes, I’ve done far better by making an effort to do each one than I did when I was younger at didn’t know to do that.

Make your telomeres longer to slow aging....

Today's Post:  Friday, 12-7-2012

Earlier this week, David Blyweiss, M.D., in his Advanced Natural Medicine Bulletin email had an important announcement.

There’s something you can do that not only slows aging but to some degree partially reverses it!

Regular readers will recall that on Thursday, 11-29, last week the post here was about the harm that people do themselves by unknowingly massively overdosing themselves with omega 6 oils that boost inflammation and NOT getting enough omega 3 oils that turn down excessive inflammation.

Here’s the news:  Researchers at Ohio State found that following the advice in that post or the advice that Dr Blyweiss gave in his email -- for just 4 months -- particularly adding more omega 3 oils from wild caught fatty fish -- they used an omega 3 supplement containing these oils – enabled the middle aged and older people studied to make their telomeres longer.

Yes you read that correctly.  To some extent doing this reversed the aging process in these people!

As many of you know, telomeres are the protective caps at the end of your strands of DNA.  If they become too short your body makes slightly defective copies of your DNA causing aging and research shows increasing your chances of getting cancer and other diseases because of these defective copies. 

This is a major factor if not THE causing factor in aging.

That means that if your telomeres become longer, the process of aging in you has been partly reversed.  You become less likely to get many diseases and your life will be longer.

Dr Blyweiss put it this way: 

““Shortened telomeres open you up to an increased risk of many health issues; including heart disease, cancer, dementia and chronic inflammation. They are also linked to a reduced lifespan.

Longer telomeres, on the other hand, are associated with robust health and a longer lifetime.

That's why I'm so excited about the Ohio State University study I mentioned earlier. It reveals groundbreaking evidence on how you can extend the length of your telomeres.”

“When the researchers dug a little deeper, they discovered the secret of how it works. It turns out the ratio of the participant's omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids was clearly associated with lengthened telomeres.”

He goes on to say as I did last week that most people today not only get too little omega 3 but get WAY too much omega 6 oils.

“Omega-6 oils account for the majority of polyunsaturated fatty acids in our food supply. They're found in vegetable oils, salad dressings, fried foods, margarines and many other foods. So we tend to really load up on them without even knowing it.

Worse, packaged foods that may have once been high in omega-3 fats are stripped of them in the manufacturing process. This extends the shelf-life of the products. So it's a big win for the manufacturer, but a bigger loss for you.

Given our diets, it probably won't surprise you to learn some analysts say the average American has an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of 20:1. Your ideal ratio should be around 3:1 or 4:1.”

I’ve heard that our ancestors ate in a way that resulted in a ratio of 2:1 to 1:1.  So that may actually be what our bodies are optimized for.

That suggest that stopping 90% of uour omega 6 intake and at least doubling your omega 3 intake if not adding even more omega 3 is a huge benefit to you and your health.

He then points out, as I did last week, that simply no longer eating such oils as corn oil and safflower oil and using olive oil instead to remove excessive omega 6 from your diet dramatically improves your omega 6 to omega 3 ratio -- in addition to adding omega 3 oils from omega 3 and DHA supplements and eating fatty, wild caught fish high in omega 3 oils.

He didn’t mention avoiding all soy oil which is a major contributor to most people taking in too much omega 6 because it’s so cheap it’s in so many foods.

(He did miss one with canola oil.  It does have the plant kind of omega 3.  But compared to the far more bioactive omega 3 oils from fish and from algae which is where the fish get it from, that kind of omega 3 is not as effective as it might be AND canola oil too is high in omega 6 oils and 97% of it is from GMO crops.)

He too recommends an upgraded version of the Mediterranean diet.

And, as I do he recommends completely removing packaged snacks an desserts and baked goods and fast foods.

Not only are they high in omega 6 but almost everything else they are made of is harmful to eat.

He put it this way:

“Cut back on processed foods. Foods like cookies, breads, cakes, chips, crackers and pastries are loaded with omega-6 oils as well as trans fats and gluten. In fact, you'll find omega 6's in almost all snack foods. There is very little, if any, nutritional value in processed foods. And they play havoc on your blood sugar and weight. So there are multiple reasons to stay away from these foods.”

Exactly right!

He also recommends that any meat you eat be from animals fed only grass:

“Buy grass-fed meats. Most of today's commercial livestock is grain-fed, which means you're getting more and more omega-6 fatty acids (a lot from corn fed cattle) from the meat you're eating. Meat from grass-fed livestock has a more favorable omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratio than grain-fed animals.”

Eating the fats from grain fed meat is a major source of excess omega 6 oils in the diet of most people today.

That’s why the DASH II diet that recommends foods with animal fat be the leanest most fat free versions gets good health results. 

That was done initially to cut saturated fat from the diet of people eating it and when most people only ate animal protein foods that had been fed grain.  But in addition to adding more vegetables and deleting “Foods like cookies, breads, cakes, chips, crackers and pastries” the fact that the DASH II diet gets good health results also is because it removes fats high in omega 6

To enjoy eating omega 6 oil free, eat the Mediterranean diet and use only extra virgin olive oil, eat wild caught fish, and only pasture fed poultry or “legumes” aka beans, lentils, and blackeyed peas.  And on rare occasions have meat from animals fed ONLY grass is better in many ways.  (New Zealand lamb and beef from cattle fed only grass are available online and in Whole Foods stores.)

But for cost reasons -- and for many people availability at their local stores, it’s good to know the DASH II method of eating very lowfat meats to remove the excess omega 6 oils in the grain fed meats and dairy foods in it.

Dr Blyweiss closed with this:

“Remember. Your telomeres are like a fuse. They get shorter and shorter as you age. But you can lengthen your telomeres – and avoid many of today's most devastating health issues – just by correcting your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio.”

Can you do anything else?

Yes!

There ARE other things that slow aging or speed it up suggesting strongly they may also lengthen or shorten telomeres.

Regular and vigorous exercise most days of every week -- as long as you avoid excessive long duration cardio such as running for more than half an hour at a time definitely slows aging.

Research done at Stanford University showed conclusively that regular vigorous exercise slows aging, prevents diseases of aging and dramatically increases your lifespan. 

Smoking and exposure to second hand smoke have the reverse effect and sharply speed up aging.  The diseases they cause often result in early death besides.

Taking 500 mg a day or more of vitamin C has been shown to help keep your telomeres from shortening.

Avoiding excessive and severe stress when you can and practicing meditation or better doing Tai Chi on a regular basis to turn off stress overreactions and give you a stress break also help you protect your telomeres.

Being good to the people around you and socializing with them often also helps relieve stress

--or sometimes will get you help when you need it -- and will help you protect your telomeres.

And, many other ways are beginning to be known.

But these are some of the big ones.

Now you know that slashing omega 6 intake and using extra virgin olive oil and adding to your omega 3 intake not only prevents your telomeres from getting shorter but has been shown to make them longer!

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.