Stop mental decline and slow aging and stop insulin resistance....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 10-15-2013

We’ve already posted many times on ways to prevent mental decline of all kinds and Alzheimer’s disease.

Recent research found that consistent higher blood sugar readings and sugar in your blood (96 to 119 fasting blood sugar readings) means that you are directly having this excess blood sugar beginning to cause early Alzheimer’s disease.

(Higher levels that are diagnosed as type 2 diabetes begin to add spikes of sugar to your LDL which begins to act like sand in an engine and destroy your blood vessel surfaces and many of your capillaries.  THAT begins to accelerate the formation of Alzheimer’s disease and cause vascular dementia from the drop off in blood circulation to your brain

These two levels of elevated blood sugar mean that you have enough excess intake of foods and drinks that spike your blood sugar -- or enough insulin resistance to have your insulin be a bit high since you need extra insulin to even keep your blood sugar that low.

That extra insulin means consistent fat gain; and the extra sugars get sent off to permanent fat storage.  Oops!

1.  Of course, you can slash your intake of the foods and drinks that cause this by 90 to 100 % less.

In my view, no one with any sense who knew what they did to your health, let alone how fattening they are, would eat or drink ANY of these!:

Soft drinks, diet soft drinks; refined grain foods – particularly those made with wheat; or white rice. Nor would they ever voluntarily eat or drink ANYTHING containing high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners

And, they would cut out 90 % or more of other whole grains and real sugars.  They'd eat or use far less each time and consume them fewer days a week or a month.

2.  The other way to help fix this is to turn off the insulin resistance.

It seems that insulin resistance is caused in part by dysfunction in your mitochondria.  They are the generators of energy in your cells.

Just stopping the overload of work just listed helps restore your health and fix insulin resistance because you can get away with lower capacity in your mitochondria and they may be harmed less by the excessive blood sugars and lower blood flow as well that you then have less of.

But there are four more ways to restore your mitochondria to health.

1. Doing regular vigorous exercise most days of every week particularly short bursts of high intensity cardio and slow motion strength training directly causes your mitochondria to be healthier to support that.  And, it can quite literally turn off insulin resistance and use the sugars to do the work of the exercises.

Many people with lower levels of high blood sugar find doing slow motion strength training a few days a week simply turns it off!

2.  Your body uses the substance ubiquinol to repair and energize your mitochondria.  But the conversion of CoQ10 to ubiquinol that happens in younger people who eat plenty of high quality protein foods stops happening in older people.  Taking CoQ10 helped but was not very effective.  However, taking the supplement ubiquinol directly is effective.  So that too is a way to slow aging by partially reversing a major cause of it and also turn down insulin resistance.

3.  Unfortunately, millions of people today take statin drugs that most of them get little benefit from. 

(Only a minority of them get strong benefits due to their genetics.  And, the vast majority of doctors do NOT give the $150 genetic test first to see if they are in that minority or not.) 

Then too, there are safer and far more effective ways to prevent heart disease than taking statins even for the group that they are more effective for.

(See our previous posts on that.)

Why is that such a big deal?  Because statin drugs deplete CoQ10 and ubiquinol in the body of people who take them. 

That’s really harmful!  It depletes the mitochondria in the hearts of people who take statins and weakens them.

But even worse than that, the mitochondrial dysfunction from taking statins directly causes insulin resistance.

So it should be no surprise at all that statin drugs cause more type 2 diabetes than they prevent heart attacks.

So the third way to slow aging and stop insulin resistance and the mental decline that causes is to use better heart protection methods than taking statin drugs.

4.  What would be almost better than these methods if we could find it?

What if we could cause your cells to grow brand new, healthy mitochondria too?

The exciting new discovery is that we DO have that now!

It’s called pyrroloquinoline-quinone, or PQQ.

It's a new vitamin and is in kiwi fruit and eggs from pasture fed hens and some other foods.

It DOES cause your cells to add new mitochondria.

So you can see taking PQQ helps actually reverse part of aging and that it helps turn down insulin resistance.

And, it is available as a supplement.  Jarrow supplies it.  The effective dose tests out to be about 20 mg a day and Jarrow supplies it in 10 mg and 20 mg sizes.

So you can see that taking PQQ would likely stop the creation of some causes of Alzheimer's disease.

Dr Al Sears has found research that shows exactly that.

This research shows that:

"When you take PQQ, it protects the proteins in your brain and reduces the formation of the plaques that lead to Alzheimer’s. PQQ also protects the brain from the toxic effects of any plaque that may already be there.1"

“PQQ reverses amyloid plaque toxicity and damage: In one of the first studies to look at PQQ, researchers found that when they pre-treated brain cells with PQQ they were protected from damage by amyloid plaque. In fact, brain cells “recovered” from death induced by the plaque, PQQ prevented healthy brain cells from dying, and made weakened and dying brain cells give off “healthy” signals again.3

PQQ protects against brain injury and improves memory: After suffering a brain injury, a group of animals were trained for five days to do a maze test. The animals given PQQ easily completed the maze, but none of the animals without PQQ could complete the maze. And the more PQQ the animals got, the faster they could do the maze.4

PQQ shields brain cells from toxicity: In another animal study, two groups of rats got a toxic level of glutamate (yes, the same stuff that’s in artificial sweeteners) in their brain. One group also got PQQ. The PQQ protected the animals’ brain cells from injury. It also acted as a powerful antioxidant, squelching free radicals so they didn’t cause damage.5"  

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!

How and why to boost growth hormone....

Today's Post:  Friday, 7-20-2012

Everything else being equal, people who have ample amounts of growth hormone are stronger, have less excess fat, and are in enough better repair they heal when injured and age more slowly.

In the email from Jillian Michaels on 7-17 earlier this week, “The Hormone You Always Want More Of” that sparked the idea to do this post, she also says that ample growth hormone helps protect your heart and keep your bones strong.

The ideal in life as Dr Jack Farquhar from Stanford said earlier this year is not a long life where the extra years are limited with poor health many but extra years of good health. 

Having an ample supply of growth hormone is a key to doing that.

Some people pay thousands of dollars a year to get shots of human growth hormone or HGH. 

But this is dreadfully expensive.  Some studies show some side effects likely due to overdose.  Some people with cancer or cancer they didn’t know about find this artificial way to get growth hormone boosts their cancer’s growth too.  

Another very important reason for not doing it this way is that the natural ways to boost growth hormone have OTHER health benefits that taking the shots do NOT give you.

 Last but far from least, if the people who do this have to stop for any reason, doing this may stunt their ability to make growth hormone on their own.

That said, what are some of the ways to boost growth hormone naturally?

The overall theme is that a lifestyle that helps you stay healthy and lean boosts growth hormone release too in almost every part of it.

1.  Vigorous exercises where you periodically exert extra effort done most days of every week release growth hormone. 

(Doing such exercises slows aging in other ways, also helps prevent insulin resistance and high blood sugar; protects your heart; promotes good circulation; releases BDNF, the kind of growth hormone that grows new brain cells; it releases testosterone which is both a growth hormone and helps you enjoy sex – in both men and women.  And, possibly unlike HGH shots, such exercise REDUCES your risk of cancer.)

Exercises you do fast and then stop and rest and then repeat are one example.  Interval cardio is specifically that kind of exercise.  Dr Al Sears in his PACE program teaches doing such exercise AND gradually building up to do more or do it faster as you progressively add just a little more than last time.

The other one is strength training.  You can be progressive by gradually using more weight up to a point.  The other ways to do it include doing a set until you get to enough repetitions you find you can’t quite do the last one even with extra effort.  You can also do the exercises with a weight just light enough you can do 5 repetitions where you move the weight up slowly over a few seconds and then lower it that slowly for each of the 5 repetitions.  I’ve found that doing this few seconds up and a few seconds down on the last repetition but doing the first repetitions fast also works.  I think that allows you to build speed and power and get some interval cardio all in one set.

2.  Eating abundant health OK protein foods and almost completely avoiding high glycemic foods also boosts growth hormone in addition to preventing diseases and helping you avoid or stop being fat. 

a) Protein foods like boiled eggs from pasture fed hens and nuts if you aren’t allergic and wild caught fish and beans and lentils and some meat from animals fed only grass and even some meat and poultry  or dairy foods from animals fed grains but where almost all the fat is removed work.  You tend not to get extra hungry or too quickly or get the famine response when you eat lightly if you eat enough of these protein foods.  The protein also gives your growth hormone the building blocks to use to build you or rebuild you.

b) This means drinking no soft drinks or ingesting any high fructose corn syrup and virtually eliminating refined grains and eating even 100% whole grains in moderation if at all.  It also means to cut back even on real sugar to a seventh or less of what many people eat today. 

Sugar loaded foods a few times a week in small servings can be OK for people who exercise and are in good health.  But eating them several times every day will make anyone who does so fat and sick if done long enough.  Jillian Michaels says eating these things also cuts growth hormone release.

3.  Doing a partial fast two or three days a week may also boost growth hormone besides studies showing it helps people lose more fat than cutting back on calories every day.  (I’ve been eating a vegetable only lunch two days a week for fat loss and was delighted to hear it may also help me release growth hormone.)

4.  Jillian Michaels also notes that you release growth hormone during sleep about 5 times a night.  That means that reliably getting good sleep most days each month helps you release adequate growth hormone.  (It also means that if you cut the amount of sleep too much you may cut this back to 3 or 4 times a night.  That will reliably reduce growth hormone.)

There are five solutions to this that I’ve learned.

a) On weekdays at least work towards getting up at the same exact time and going to bed at the same exact time every day.  The more you do this, the better your sleep will be, the more time efficient it will be, and likely your growth hormone release will be better.

b)  For most people it helps to get at least 6 hours of sleep each night and no more than about 8 and a half hours.  The ideal seems to be 7 to 7 and a half.

c)   Make your bedroom conducive to sleep.  Have curtains and blinds and use as little light as possible.  Avoid having any TV’s or video devices in your bedroom.  Keep it reasonably cool and warm enough to the extent you can do so.  Have it be quiet or wear ear plugs if necessary.

d)  Avoid foods and drugs that cause poor sleep.  Much more than 300 mg a day of caffeine causes you to not sleep as well at night so you need more the next day.  But about that or a bit less mostly before 3 PM avoids this effect.  If you drink alcoholic drinks, stick to one or two and to the extent you can drink them early in the evening.  Avoid binge drinking. Excess alcohol causes poor sleep quality and even can cause early wakening.  Use niacin and sterols and foods high in soluble fiber instead of statins unless you have tested to be one of the few people for which statins are effective and you recently had a heart attack.  Statins deplete your energy and Lipitor particularly apparently quite often causes severe insomnia.

e)   A recent study found that morning exercise causes the people who do it to go through more sleep cycles at night and do so more thoroughly.  That means you boost growth hormone twice with morning exercise – both by the exercise causing growth hormones to be released and by giving your body more chances a night to release them!

False headlines & the truth about vitamins and minerals, vitamin C....

Today's Post: Thursday, 4-12-2012

Most doctors know little about supplements including vitamins and minerals and are too busy to find out more unless they somehow get updated by their patients or other doctors who know more.

Some doctors have studied supplements and find they can get superior results with patients by using the indicated supplements. Since the supplements cost less than drugs and have virtually no side effects that harm quality of life, far more of their patients actually take the supplements than take many drugs.

The drug companies don’t like the competition from those supplements that do work but have none of the side effects most of their drugs do and the supplements cost less.

(Some drugs do important things and do them fast that supplements cannot do. And, for some things the drugs are the better choice. Then too some supplements may not be that effective.

But the drug companies appear to be deliberately misinforming doctors and the media and thus many of the rest of us about supplements that do work.)

So you may have seen headlines like “Vitamins are a waste of money or dangerous” AND “Vitamin E causes Prostate Cancer.”

But the truth is far different. Very different!

1. Most vitamins and minerals are beneficial and some are spectacularly beneficial.

There a few vitamins and minerals that do have side effects in doses that are too large. But if you know what level is safe on those few, those same vitamins and minerals can benefit you.

This makes the headline, “Vitamins are a waste of money or dangerous” false & I think deliberately misleading.

2. We know 4 things about vitamin E and prostate cancer. The headline as quoted, “Vitamin E causes Prostate Cancer" is completely false. And the other 3 things help prevent prostate cancer! (The study did not test real vitamin E but a poor artificial copy that was not real vitamin E!)

We covered vitamin E the first week in this series, on Tuesday, 3-13-2012.

We covered vitamin D3 last week, on Tuesday, 3-20-2012.

We covered vitamin B3, niacin, on Tuesday, 3-27-2012.

We covered the other B complex vitamins last week on Tuesday, 4-3-2012.

This week we cover vitamin C.

Except for making the symptoms slightly less for some people and sparing people who do a lot of vigorous exercise some colds, taking extra vitamin C doesn’t prevent colds or shorten them otherwise according to the research.

But taking larger doses does reduce allergies and, although this is less certainly proven, it does look to help prevent heart disease and other circulatory problems.

It tends to prevent or improve depression and may also slow aging.

People who eat little or no junk food and do eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and have one glass of real fruit or vegetable juice each day tend to get enough vitamin C to avoid scurvy.

Taking the 100 mg a day of vitamin C in most decent multivitamins also is enough to prevent scurvy.

The other benefits require taking 2,000 mg a day of vitamin C in divided doses.

Vitamin C’s main value is as an antioxidant.

Most plants and animals can make it themselves from glucose but people, other primates, and guinea pig rodents cannot.

Having enough glutathione helps vitamin C do more antioxidant work by resetting it to start over after it acts as an antioxidant.

Taking the amino acid NAC causes the body to release more glutathione so likely would help vitamin C do more.

Your body uses more vitamin C when stressed, sick particularly when fighting off bacterial infections, or when injured. Vitamin C also helps make and replace collagen and neurotransmitters.

100 mg a day which many people get from food is enough to prevent scurvy. People who eat only junk food and never take vitamins may not.

Taking more vitamin C than that as a supplement is thought to add significantly to your protection from heart attacks, obstructive or ischemic strokes, and other problems caused by reduced blood circulation.

Researcher Linus Pauling and Dr Matthias Rath also has said that due to its effect on collagen repair you will have far less damage to your endothelium, the inside surface of your blood vessels, by taking 500 to 2,000 mg a day of vitamin C.

Since the patches your body makes on such damage tend to build up plaque inside your blood vessels over time, they say this is a significant cause of heart disease you can prevent by taking that much vitamin C.

A strong argument for this case Dr Rath makes is that animals who make their own vitamin C make more than the equivalent of 2,000 mg a day of vitamin C AND never develop heart disease.

I read of a study that found people who took that much vitamin C and deodorized garlic at the same time even showed some reduction in plaque in their blood vessels.

I take 1600 mg of vitamin C at the beginning of my day and 500 mg a day after dinner because I find this persuasive.

I also eat berries, apple sauce with no sugar, bananas, and raw broccoli florets and drink 100 % cranberry juice once a day every week and eat other fruit and vegetables as I have the opportunity. These foods have vitamin C and other key nutrients and also may well have co-factors to make vitamin C more effective.

Completely avoiding tobacco smoke and getting enough exercise and avoiding foods that also cause plaque build up such as hydrogenated oils, too much sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and refined grains is also critical because doing the reverse has been shown to cause plaque build up. Eliminating those foods also helps you become and stay less fat.

Similarly getting enough omega 3 oils and limiting foods high in omega 6 reduces chronic inflammation and eating spices like ginger and turmeric that reduce inflammation both help to prevent the damage to the insides of your blood vessels that also cause plaque build up. Using only extra virgin olive oil is a good way to avoid the cheap and harmful oils high in omega 6. Eating super low fat versions of protein from grain fed animals or better yet eating wild caught fish and meat animals fed only grass instead helps avoid excess omega 6 oils. So does eating beans, lentils, and black-eyed peas instead of grain fed meat. Taking omega 3 supplements also helps. Not eating refined grains and only eating 100 % whole grains in careful moderation also help you avoid excess omega 6 oils.

Note that virtually eliminating eating any foods made from refined grains helps you prevent heart disease both ways! It will also help make you less fat and stay that way.

If you do the reverse of these things, extra vitamin C may limit the damage; but it may not do enough by itself.

But I believe that adding the extra vitamin C to doing these things adds to the protection they give you and that it can help repair some of the damage if you don't do it perfectly or did not know to do so in the past.

Then too studies have found that getting this extra vitamin C and other antioxidants allows you to do more vigorous exercise without getting sick.

There is also reason to believe that the extra vitamin C and the neurotransmitters it helps your body make prevents or lessens depression. In fact, I think I saw a study to that effect.

There also was a study that taking that much vitamin C helped prevent some of the shortening of your telomeres. That plus the antioxidant effect tends to slow aging.

Also, Wikipedia has information showing that taking 2,000 mg a day of vitamin C reduces virtually all allergic reactions by almost 40 % within a week of beginning. If you take that much all the time, it may do even better than that.

"Vitamin C is a natural antihistamine. It both prevents histamine release and increases the detoxification of histamine. A 1992 study found that taking 2 grams vitamin C daily lowered blood histamine levels 38 percent in healthy adults in just one week.[79] It has also been noted that low concentrations of serum vitamin C has been correlated with increased serum histamine levels.

Wikipedia also has this: " A balanced diet without supplementation usually contains enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy in an average healthy adult, while those who are pregnant, smoke tobacco, or are under stress require slightly more.[83] However, the amount of vitamin C necessary to prevent scurvy is less than the amount required for optimal health, as there are a number of other chronic diseases whose risk are increased by a low vitamin C intake, including cancer, heart disease, and cataracts."

They also note that taking more than 2,000 mg a day of vitamin C can cause diarrhea. If you get that, one way to stop it is to take part of your vitamin C at one time of day and the rest later in the day.

I do that. But I also do it to ensure my body has access to enough vitamin C all day since it is water soluble and I dislike using time release supplements or drugs when I can easily avoid it.

To be fair, many of the benefits of taking over 500 mg a day are less verified than I’d like.

I find the information suggesting 2,000 mg a day or at least 1,000 mg a day in divided doses of vitamin C daily persuasive.

It seems to work for me. My blood indicators for heart disease are almost all at the high optimal level. I look at least 10 to 15 year younger than my chronological age. And, despite having allergic hay fever and asthma as a child, I never have them now.

But at minimum, it’s clear you should take at least 100 mg a day of vitamin C. And eating enough fruit and nonstarchy vegetables each day not only will tend to give you that much vitamin C but dramatically improve your health in other ways.

Now you have a quick survey of vitamin C and the case for taking more this 100 mg a day minimum each day.

What you do with it is up to you!

Regular exercise, even walking, helps prevent mental decline....

Today's Post: Monday, 9-13-2010

Research has already been done showing that regular exercise slows aging, prevents many chronic diseases, and increases longevity. We know that the protective effects keep getting better the more years you have been exercising regularly. We know that exercise grows new brain cells and helps prevent your brain from shrinking.

But some even more interesting news was online earlier today.

Earlier today a section of Reuters news called, “Reuters Life!” published this story:

“Walking helps keep body and brain young.”

“Research shows that walking can actually boost the connectivity within brain circuits, which tends to diminish as….” people get older.

Dr. Arthur F. Kramer, who led the research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that,

"…we found as a function of aerobic fitness, the networks became more coherent."

Kramer's walking study, was published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. It tracked 70 adults from 60 to 80 years old over the course of a year. A toning, stretching, strengthening group served as a control against which to evaluate the previously sedentary walkers.

"Individuals in the walking group, the aerobics training group, got by far the largest benefits," he said, and not just physically.

Kramer and his group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at brain networks & tested a group of 20-to-30-year olds for comparison.

This quote is fascinating.:

“ "The aerobic group also improved in memory, attention and a variety of other cognitive processes," Kramer said. "As the older people in the walking group became more fit, the coherence among different regions in the networks increased and became similar to those of the 20-yr olds," Kramer explained.

But the results did not happen overnight. Effects in the walking group were observed only after they trained for 12 months. Six-month tests yielded no significant trends. “

In short, aerobic exercise sustained for a year or more not only grew new brain cells, it kept their brain’s functions working physically and the networks in their brains intact well enough to keep the mental performance of the exercisers high.

In fact, since this group had been sedentary before this experiment, the walking in this program may even have restored some lost function to their brains.

The only thing this report fails to show or that the research did not look at is whether it was the walking specifically or the aerobic fitness that produced these results.

As is hinted at in the Reuters story, walking is a repeating activity that requires a set of patterned responses.

Would interval cardio of shorter duration but to a higher level of fitness done as well or better than the walking?

I suspect the interval cardio would work the same or better and that if it did, the results would be measurably good within the first 3 months instead needing 12 months to achieve that.

However, as a public health measure for very large groups of people, I also suspect the number who would try and keep doing regular exercise by walking would be greater than the number of people willing to do some kind of interval cardio.

So in addition to slowing down aging, preventing some forms of damage to the brain physically including preventing brain shrinkage in part by growing new brain cells, regular exercise also maintains the networks of nerve connections that are the basis for effective mental performance too!

In addition, there also was another study, done by British researchers, and recently announced showing that people who did enough regular exercise to maintain their grip strength, the ability to walk fast, the ability to get up from a chair quickly, and the ability to balance decently on one leg, lived longer than people who did not.

This study was reported by Reuters Health last Friday and was titled, “Long life goes hand in hand with a firm grip.”

These many studies show that people who fail to get regular exercise simply don’t realize what NOT exercising does TO them and what regular exercise would do FOR them.

Stay healthy longer and live longer....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 5-25-2010

There are many, many ways to do this. The more of them you know and use and the sooner you begin, the better it works.

1. Regular moderate exercise works. Many people who live into their 90’s in good health have been walkers all their lives. Even three to five miles of walking, or 60 to 100 minutes total each week helps.

2. Regular, vigorous, exercise works extremely well. Strength training and interval cardio work well and can even be time efficient and done at home. Three alternating sessions of each for even 15 minutes each for a total of 6 sessions a week is doable and effective.

Such exercise has dramatic health benefits and protections. People who do such exercise look younger and live longer – as much as 20 years longer. They also avoid many diseases or get them only decades later if at all. So they have an even bigger edge in HEALTHY years lived.

3. Some supplements may help.

There is some evidence that taking 100 mg a day or more of resveratrol in its trans form may slow aging. And, it has been tested to help your heart stay healthier in particular.

Taking over 500 mg a day of vitamin C was shown in one study to result in longer telomeres. Since in large part, having your telomeres shorten CAUSES aging. That’s impressive.

Taking at least 2,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 and one capsule a day of curcumin or turmeric that it comes from in combination helps prevent most cancers and also protects your heart and tends to prevent Alzheimer’s disease! The D3 also helps keep your bones healthy, intact, and strong. They sharply increase your years of healthy life.

Lastly, taking the ubiquinol form of CoQ10 has been shown to be effective even in older people in increasing the health of your mitochondria. When your mitochondria begin to stop working, your cells have less and less internal energy. You feel less energetic and may begin to lose interest in life. And, your heart stops working as well. Taking 50 to 200 mg a day of ubiquinol helps to prevent or reverse this.

One animal study quoted by Dr Al Sears found that animals fed CoQ10 aged more slowly than those who did not get any. And, those fed ubiquinol aged so much more slowly, they did not seem to age at all.

4. Avoid tobacco smoke. If you smoke, quit. Your life, health, and freedom from future medical bills depend on it. You can’t quit too soon. But many have quit too late. Also avoid all second hand smoke. Even a few minutes exposure is bad for you. And we also now know that exposure to tobacco smoke not only causes heart disease, it triggers heart attacks in people who otherwise would have escaped them. Many smokers don’t know this. But every one they smoke causes some heart disease!

Smoking’s little problem is that it causes about 30 % of all cancers too.

Last but far from least, smoking speeds up aging and helps cause early wrinkling of your skin.

The bottom line is that smokers die 10 to 20 years younger, look older, and have 10 to 30 years fewer healthy years than nonsmokers.

They also pay for this out of pocket in cash every week. This is craziness. Don’t go there or stay there!

5. Don’t get fat or stay fat.

Being fat, eating and drinking the junk that causes it, and the NOT exercising that helps cause it, together cause type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, increased risk of heart disease and attacks, and acid reflux.

In addition to exercise, and NOT eating or drinking fattening junk, knowing how to cut back calories without reversing the process or creating excessive hunger can get this done.

The one thing most people need most today is to NOT eat snacks or treats made with sugar, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, salt, and refined grains and to drink NO soft drinks of any kind. The average American would be more than 30 pounds less fat from doing this one single thing!

6. Eat foods that are good for you that don’t fatten you instead.

Today NewsMax had a story on 8 of these it titled,

“8 Potent Foods for Healthy Aging”

They listed these 8. (I’ve added my comments. Some of these foods are even better for you than their info suggests!)

a) Berries.

Blueberries, raspberries, black berries, strawberries and related fruits such as cranberries and grapes contain phytochemicals known as flavonoids. Eating blueberries has been shown to improve brain function. Strawberries and I think raspberries contain ellagic acid, which slows tumor growth. They are also low in calories and high in good taste while containing natural vitamin C and massive amounts of antioxidants.

You can also take bilberry supplements that have fewer calories and added eye benefits.

b) Broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables.

Broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, including cabbage, kale, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts are all nonstarchy vegetables which fill you up and help turn off hunger with almost no calories. Newsmax also said that these cruciferous vegetables “…according to Dr. Russell Blaylock, author of The Blaylock Wellness Report, can help neutralize the cancer-causing effects of pesticides and herbicides.”

Eating them raw has been shown to help prevent cancer and may work even better at preventing the most dangerous and deadly kinds of it.

Dr Al Sears also states that eating these foods helps men to be sexier and have less prostate enlargement by removing excess estrogen and estrogen like chemicals and normalizing your body’s testosterone.

Last but far from least, broccoli also has carotenoids despite its green color. And those keep you healthy and may also fight some cancers.

Eating more vegetables also has been shown to turn down or prevent high blood pressure.

So eating cruciferous vegetables keeps you young, trim, and healthy all in one pass.

c) Fish.

Oily fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids that fight inflammation. Newsmax added: “People who eat fish regularly have lower rates of Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular disease. A recent study from the University of California, San Francisco, found that omega-3 fatty acids keep the DNA of heart patients from unraveling. The American Heart Association recommends two servings of fish each week.”

Water packed sardines are a very cheap way to do this. Wild caught salmon tastes better but costs more. Lastly, do NOT eat farmed fish. They have far less omega 3’s and DO have enough contaminants they should never be eaten!

Note that you can and likely should also take one or two capsules a day of omega 3 supplements from purified fish oil or algae.

Lastly, the reduction in inflammation and lowering of triglycerides from omega 3’s protects you from heart disease. And, getting enough omega 3’s makes you less irritable and reduces or prevents depression!

d) Garlic.

Newsmax had this: “A study found that women who ate a clove of garlic at least once a week lowered their risk of developing colon cancer by 50 percent, and a study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that people who eat garlic have half the risk of stomach cancer and two-thirds the risk of colorectal cancer when compared to people who avoid it.”

Raw, crushed garlic or deodorized garlic supplements can help thin your blood like aspirin but without harming your stomach lining or causing bleeding there.

Getting garlic this way also tends to make your blood vessels more responsive and may prevent or reverse plaque build up despite not lowering LDL cholesterol that much. In some people it lowers high blood pressure by doing this.

Lastly, garlic in soups, vegetable dishes, and salads along with extra virgin olive oil and other spices makes them taste good and has other health benefits.

e) Grapes.

Newsmax had this: “Rich in an antioxidant called resveratrol that is an anti-inflammatory and anti-coagulant, red grapes have been shown to extend the life span of test animals. Grapes also contain the bioflavanoid quercetin, which works with vitamin C (also found in grapes) to fight cancer, including cancers of the breast and colon.”

Drinking grape juice has been shown to make your blood vessels more responsive and to lower high blood pressure a bit.

Lastly, you can also take grape seed extract and drink red wine.

Just be moderate, restrained, and careful to avoid overdoing too much grape juice and red wine. If you do, you’ll add fat you could have avoided. And with red wine, more than 14 glasses a week begins to cause health and safety problems where half that much causes health benefits.

f) Nuts.

Unfortunately, some people are allergic to nuts.

But people who can and do eat nuts daily add as many years to their lives as smoking subtracts according to one source I read!

Newsmax had this: “Nuts contain high amounts of omega-3 fatty acids that lower inflammation and are great for your heart as well as your brain. They also contain B vitamins and minerals, including selenium and magnesium.”
The minerals help keep you healthy in many ways. And, eating nuts increases HDL cholesterol which is heart protective.

Nuts also make a great snack that is both good for you and tastes good. Even better, studies show they are not fattening! Apparently they turn off hunger so well, you automatically eat less of other foods.

Note that these great benefits come ONLY from raw or dry roasted nuts. Nuts that have been coated with salt or cooked in junky oils are NOT good for you, unfortunately.

g) Tomatoes.

Newsmax had this: “The generous amounts of the antioxidant lycopene in tomatoes help skin maintain its youthfulness, and may reduce the risk of developing heart disease, as well as several cancers, including breast, lung, and colon. The Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that men who ate 10 servings of tomato-based foods each week lowered their risk of developing prostate cancer by 45 percent.”

Note that cooked tomatoes when eaten with extra virgin olive oil deliver far more lycopene to your body than raw tomatoes.

However, raw cherry tomatoes and sliced tomatoes that are raw have another heart protecting compound and natural vitamin C. Plus they are a nonstarchy vegetable that helps keep you trim and taste good!

Lastly, you can take lycopene supplements.

h) Tea.

Newsmax had this: “Green and white teas contain large amounts of EGCG, a powerful antioxidant linked to a lower risk of heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, and numerous types of cancer. In addition, tissues in the eye absorb antioxidants from tea called catachins that may protect aging eyes from glaucoma.”

Even better, green tea and black teas have some caffeine but are milder and less sleep disruptive than coffee. And, when you drink them without milk, they increase your circulation.

Best of all, taking a couple capsules of green tea extract supplement on an empty stomach each morning can remove something like 5 pounds of excess fat by increasing your metabolism and also is a great way to get the other health protections from green tea.

To increase your odds for a long and healthy life, do as many of these methods as you can!

In this case, more IS better and ALL of the above is the best answer!

7 different ways to slow aging....

Today's Post: Friday, 12-4-2009

1. Keep the caps on your telomeres from unraveling or slow the process down.

Last Tuesday, 12-1, we posted on research that found vigorous exercise prevents the shortening of telomeres, the part of your DNA that protects the ends of your chromosomes from damage, similar to the caps on the ends of shoelaces.

This is now thought to be the main cause of aging; and when the telomeres become too short, the cell they are in dies.

We added some ideas on ways to get such exercise.

One of the ways this may work is that excessive and prolonged stress tends to unravel the telomeres.

And, recently it has been posted that people who are stressed AND get regular vigorous exercise tend NOT to feel severely stressed while sedentary people under the same level of stress DO feel severely stressed. So, it looks as if exercise may have its protective effect on telomeres in part by protecting you from some to much of the underlying processes by which excessive stress harms your body.

This also suggests that being lucky enough AND prudent and careful enough to avoid some kinds of severe stresses helps you escape the stress and avoid the aging that results. People who do things like always wearing their seat belts and always brushing their teeth and doing other prudent and preventive things, often escape severe stresses (& their increase of the rate of aging) that less prudent people do NOT escape.

Getting some kind of stress relief through massage, meditation, or Tai Chi – or watching a funny movie may also help.

Getting better at solving the problems that stress you &/or getting people to help you solve them will reduce the impact of stress on your telomeres and health. This can lift or remove the CAUSE of the stress.

Another method I’ve read about that was found to help keep your telomeres from unraveling was to take extra vitamin C. Based on its other health effects, taking 1500 mg a day or more of vitamin C may work best to do this.

I also once read that drinking green tea may have similar effects.

The other 5 ways I found in a recent Total Health Breakthroughs email in an article by their editor Jon Herring.

I list the cause of aging he did for each one & then list ways to combat them. (In this post, they are steps 2 through 6. Each of them is a state that increases aging and can be minimized or prevented.)

2. Inflammation.

People with high levels of chronic inflammation we now know are at greatly increased risk for heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases AND for getting virtually all cancers.

Our ancestors ate some plant foods with omega 6 oils; & they ate about that much omega 3 oils in the naturally fed game and wild caught fish and seafood they ate.

Unfortunately, today the majority of people still eat refined grain; use high omega 6 cooking oils such as soy oil, saffola oil, and corn oil -- & to some extent canola oil; & they tend to eat meat from animals fed grains that make their meat high in omega 6 oils and have very little if any omega 3 oils. (Farmed fish are often fed grain also with similar results. And, that’s in addition to the pollutants in farmed fish.)

The result of this massive overeating of omega 6 oils and so little intake of omega 3 oils reliably produces high levels of inflammation.

The solution is to only eat meat from animals fed only grass even if that means you eat far less of it; totally stop ingesting the oils on the list above; and use extra virgin olive oil that is almost all a neutral omega 9 oil instead; eat wild caught fish, and take purified fish oil supplements high in omega 3 oil.

The average American eats 22 teaspoons of sugar a day much of that from soft drinks and commercially baked snacks and desserts and other packaged foods. And, they get virtually no exercise or very little to help burn it off. They also eat very high glycemic refined grains and foods made from them.

This produces obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other diseases AND increase inflammation.

Simply NOT eating that stuff and eating organic vegetables, organic whole fruit, raw or dry roasted nuts, and some whole grains instead will sharply decrease inflammation and produces good health in multiple other ways.

And, no surprise, moderate exercise and short sessions of vigorous exercise that are not done to the point of overall exhaustion or injury also lower inflammation.

Lastly, taking a turmeric supplement daily and often using curry (which contains turmeric) and ginger as spices tends to lower inflammation.

(So does taking statin drugs. But if you do the other things on this list, you won’t need them to do the job.)

3. Glycation. This is related to oxidation but with the addition of tangling sugar molecules into the proteins that make up your body. It tends to make the walls of your cells too stiff and impervious to their environment to work properly and may also shorten the telomeres in those cells.

Repeat from above, “The average American eats 22 teaspoons of sugar a day much of that from soft drinks and commercially baked snacks and desserts and other packaged foods. And, they get virtually no exercise or very little to help burn it off. They also eat very high glycemic refined grains and foods made from them.

This produces obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other diseases AND increase inflammation.” AND it increases glycation.

“Simply NOT eating that stuff and eating organic vegetables, organic whole fruit, raw or dry roasted nuts, and some whole grains instead will sharply decrease” glycation as well as inflammation since it dramatically lowers the excessive sugars that eating as the average American does tends to have in their blood stream.

You can also take the inexpensive supplement DMAE which tends to prevent glycation AND increases your heart protective HDL.

You can also take the expensive supplement, carnosine that tends to prevent glycation and increases the growth and repair of your muscles when you exercise them.

Lastly, lightly browning foods you cook or eating foods raw or boiled instead of heavily browning them, burning them, or overcooking them sharply decreases the glycated proteins you ingest. That also reduces the glycation of your cells.

4. Toxification. Simply put, if you poison your cells, they will die or weaken and the more this happens the more aging you experience. Fewer of your cells will work right and support your life and health.

Avoid using herbicides and pesticides in your yard. Use little or no pesticide in your house. Do NOT use air fresheners of any kind that use chemicals – which is about 99.5% of all of them.

Don’t smoke or be around second hand smoke.

As much as you can, buy organic vegetables and fruit. That not only cuts your exposure to herbicides and pesticides a bit, it just about doubles the nutrition you get.

Even more importantly, either stop eating meat from grain fed animals or only eat the leanest most fat-trimmed meat from such animals -- & eat less of that. The pesticides and herbicides used on the grain get bioconcentrated in the fat of grain fed animals. (Doing this also helps you avoid excessive omega 6 oils and saturated fat.)

Eat cilantro often as a spice because I’ve read it helps rid your body of mercury.

Take an NAC, n-acetyl cysteine, supplement daily as I’ve read it or the glutathione it causes your body to release, tend to help your body remove pollutants.

Your kidneys remove many toxins from your body. So if you protect them from cardiovascular disease and high levels of sugar and avoid sky high blood pressure and get enough water (NOT soft drinks) to drink, they’ll work better and protect you better and remove toxins better.

Your liver does even more to detoxify you. Avoid drinking more than 2 drinks a day if you are a man and more than one drink a day if you are a woman. Also consider taking a milk thistle supplement and a lecithin supplement each day. Each of these things help to protect the health of your liver.

5. & 6. Oxidation and Depletion.

If your body has its cells damaged by excessive oxidation or starved for the nutrients it uses as building blocks, your cells will be damaged or unable to work well or both.

The solution is to get abundant antioxidants and key nutrients in your food and by taking supplements.

Buy and eat several servings of a variety of organic vegetables and some fresh and organic fruit each day. Be sure to eat foods high in carotenes and natural vitamin C.

Take a multivitamin & mineral supplement daily.

Also take 500 to 1500 mg a day of extra vitamin C; take 200 iu a day of natural vitamin E with mixed tocopherols (Solgar sells exactly that supplement); if you can find it and afford it, take mixed, natural tocotrienols (related compound to the tocopherols and vitamin E); take 200 mcg a day of selenium.

And, consider taking 200 mg a day of alpha lipoic acid. This not only is an antioxidant directly, it apparently helps vitamin C & vitamin E have greater antioxidant effects.

Take at least 2,000 iu a day of vitamin D3. Most people in the United States and in many other countries are badly deficient in this nutrient. And we no know that it is essential to almost every health supporting process in your body. It couldn’t be simpler. People who get less than that are almost all deficient. And, people who are deficient in vitamin D, get more cancers, more bacterial and viral illnesses, and more heart disease than people who are not AND they get more autoimmune disease. So it’s no surprise they tend to die younger than people who get enough vitamin D.

7. Take CoQ10 or even better take the ubiquinol directly that CoQ10 changes into in your body. CoQ10 is BOTH an antioxidant and keeps the mitochondria that are the power and energy source in your cells operating well.

Dr. Al Sears reports research in mice that found that since taking the ubiquinol directly keeps it at such high and lastingly high levels in your blood that both effects are so much better than taking nothing or even taking CoQ10 it almost stopped the aging in the mice entirely.

Way to massively reduce heart disease risk....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 9-29-2009

In the NewsMax Health Alerts email I get, one of the stories yesterday, Monday,
9-28, had the title: Green Tea Slashes Risk of Disease


Green tea was found to help prevent heart disease related deaths. Researchers at Japan’s Okayama University found that in the 12,000 Japanese men and women between the ages of 65 and 84 that they studied, those who drank large amounts of green tea reduced their risk of dying from heart disease by an average of 76 percent. In addition, their risk of dying from colorectal cancer was reduced by 31 percent.

The study lasted 6 years. By the end of the study, a bit over 1,200 had died, but researchers found that the more green tea they drank, the less likely they were to die.

Compared with those who drank less than a cup of green tea each day, those who drank 7 cups or more lowered their risk of dying from heart disease by an average of 76 %. Men cut their risk by 70 % & women cut their risk by 82 %

The researchers believe these effects were due to the polyphenols, which are antioxidants, in green tea.

Why was this effect found for green tea instead of black tea? The news story said that green tea has between 30 & 40 % polyphenols while black tea, the tea more commonly drunk until now, only has between 3 & 10 % polyphenols.

Since those drinking the higher amounts of green tea did it on their own, the researchers suggested the large reductions in death risks in their study were likely due to consuming green tea over a lifetime. (The people drinking a lot of green tea were likely doing it for many years before the study in other words.)

Many other studies that have shown green tea to be good for your health.

One recent study found that tea drinkers may have younger biological ages than non-tea drinkers enough so they will likely live about 5 years longer.

This recent Japanese study also found a reduction in the risk of developing colorectal cancer.
“To our knowledge, this is the first study that shows the inverse association between green tea and colorectal cancer mortality,” said the researchers.

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Since it is oxidized LDL that creates the most damage in your blood vessels and plaque build up that results in cardiovascular disease, this study suggests that green tea polyphenols or other ingredients in the green tea are antioxidants that tend to be unusually effective in protecting your LDL from becoming oxidized.

It’s less clear how the reduction in colon cancer and deaths from it was caused.

But it is clear that green tea does have some extra health benefits!

When I drank coffee, I often drank enough that the excess caffeine prevented me from getting as good a night’s sleep as I should have.

So, when my reflux caused me to not drink coffee, I’ve found that the same multiple cups of green tea, still help me wake up but without the sleep disruption or increase in anxiety the multiple cups of coffee were causing.

So, if you need maximum caffeine to wake up and for your workday, one way to do both would be to drink a cup of good quality, good tasting coffee when you first get up. But then switch to green tea after that. Another similar plan would be coffee when you first get up & coffee right after lunch and several cups of green tea otherwise.

I’ve not yet found the amount of guaranine or Guarana seed extract in Dr Sears choline punch. But his choline and guaranine “Choline Punch” apparently acts as a time release caffeine pill with built in recharger so that you get the optimum amount of sustained alertness boost. At least so he says. I’ve not yet tried it.

(See www.alsearsmd.com .)

Because the guaranine does have a sustained release over several hours, you do NOT want for safety or your mental status at work to overdo it. But since this product is a drink, it may be possible to start with a few ounces for a few days and gradually try more until you find the amount that works best for you.

So for waking up well while also drinking green tea, you could use this choline punch in a slightly reduced amount and drink several cups of green tea a day also.

The other possibility is that taking a green tea extract supplement may also work. That was NOT tested. But if the polyphenols in the green tea are causing the effect, the concentrated amount in the supplement might work very well indeed.

So there you have it. Green tea and very likely green tea extract supplements can add substantially to your heart protection and longevity.

They also apparently will add to any colon cancer protection you’ve gotten by taking vitamin D3 and turmeric and staying away from tobacco smoke and eating raw and cooked cruciferous vegetables.
Mix and match green tea with coffee or with careful experiments with Guarana seed extract to find what works best for you & you can be maximally alert and mentally quick when you want to be and have your health protected too.

Have a purpose in life to live longer….

Today's Post: Tuesday, 6-16-2009

Today’s HealthDay News that I found online under Yahoo health news reports a study that found that if you have a purpose in life –
whether it’s an ambitious mission in life, doing volunteer work that you feel makes a small positive difference, gradually getting your yard in shape, or reading all the 23 books your favorite author ever wrote, you'll live longer.

If you are working towards a goal that you care about reaching, it literally can be ambitious or quite modest.

But if you do you’ll live longer.

How powerful is this?

Even in people who were disabled or who had pre-existing medical problems, having this kind of purpose cut the death rate of the people who had one in half -- compared with people who had none!

When I saw this, I remembered seeing separate research showing that people who had a strong purpose in life had better heath & were dramatically more resilient in dealing with stress than people who didn’t.

But the neat thing that this study found is that even much more modest goals improved your health about as much.

The article noted that it might be that people who have goals had some kind of separate advantage that caused them to both have goals and to have better health.

I think that’s both true and false.

If you had parents or a mentor or teacher as a role model who was good at achieving goals or they taught you how to achieve goals successfully, you are more likely to have goals.

If you are proactive and have found you can achieve goals that you set on your own, you are more likely to usually have a goal or two in your life.

Or if you have read something that inspired you, you may have a goal as a result.

But the nature of working towards a goal and the way it engages your efforts and give a focus to some of your life are such that it turns on your brain to use more of its abilities. I believe that improves your health directly.

In addition to that, when you make choices that might harm you or improve your health, if you are working towards a goal, you are much more likely to make choices that avoid likely harm and that protect your health. THAT makes a very definite positive difference to your health.

Lastly, the process of achieving goals is such that doing so tends to teach you to be prudently optimistic. You look for solutions or causes and try again if something goes wrong. And, when you make progress successfully it tends to make you feel as if you can do the things you care about even if it looks hard to others.

Separate studies have found that people who think that way have better health in almost every category.

So, even if you didn’t have earlier experiences with achieving goals and you don’t have one now, I’m firmly convinced if you find one you care about and begin working towards it, you’ll get this effect.

And, health related goals can be twice as effective.

Say you don’t get any exercise now and cannot walk more than a few minutes without getting too tired. One way to have a goal is to decide to do a daily walk until you can not only walk for 20 minutes each day, you can walk briskly for sections of it without feeling it was too hard. Let’s say that walking for more than four minutes makes you feel really blasted. Start with daily two minute walks at an easy pace.
Then after a week do a 3 minute walk each day. By the week after that, you’ll find that you can easily do a 4 minute walk each day without feeling tired. Then just keep going; do a five minute walk the week after that; then go to six and so on until you walk for 20 minutes a day. Then once you are used to that, walk briskly for one or two short parts of it and keep adding more parts until you walk briskly for most of your walk.

Or you once you can walk for 5 minutes a day easily, do two walks each day. Walk for 5 minutes, then rest for 10 minutes and walk for five more. Then do two 6 minute walks but just rest for 8 minutes in between until you do two 9 minute walks with just 2 minutes in between. Then try just doing a 20 minute walk. Then once you are used to that, walk briskly for one or two short parts of it and keep adding more parts until you walk briskly for most of your walk.

That will help you live longer two ways. Not only you had a goal while you were doing it, you also beginning to do the exercise that also has been shown to slow aging and increase longevity.

Another way to live longer two ways is by volunteering. You can set goals for your volunteer efforts which helps you live longer. But in addition to that, every time you volunteer, no matter what for, you wind up meeting and talking to new people more or meeting and talking to people you already know more often. Then you have goals AND you have more social interaction too. And they both increase longevity.

Slow aging with exercise & more....

Today's Post, Tuesday, 6-2-2009

Yesterday’s post on fat loss had this on the best kind of exercise to help you lose fat.:

“2. The most effective kinds of exercise to lose bodyfat, lose internal fat, and turn off insulin resistance have a key similarity. They may not last huge amounts of time. But they are vigorous and can be safe once you build up to it gradually and keep the high intensity per time brief.

What exercises do that?

Interval cardio, progressive strength training, playing competitive sports, jumping rope, using a mini-trampoline, quite brisk execution of martial arts moves or routines such as Tae Bo or Karate or Kung Fu all work.

And, many of these are in fact on record as being effective at losing fat and belly fat.”

Now, here’s the surprise. These kinds of exercise also help dramatically slow aging.

These exercises cause your body to release growth hormone. That triggers repairs all throughout your body. And that works best for creating these repairs, muscle growth and fat loss when you also eat enough protein.

Meanwhile, guess what happens to people who don’t do these kinds of exercises every week? The repairs don’t happen or happen as much and those people begin to age faster due to undone maintenance repairs that gradually build up.

Then there’s the new brain cells and nerves that kind of exercise causes you to grow. That keeps you mentally sharp and mentally younger. In addition, this means that you maintain better control over your muscles and maintain your muscle speed better. Athletes talk about “losing a step” as they get older. But if you do these kinds of exercises, that happens much, much less.

And this also creates increased longevity. A recent study of runners found that they outlived non-exercisers by as much as 15 or 20 years.

In addition, today I read that exercise virtually halts or reverses one part of aging in today’s email issue of TotalHealthBreakthroughs.

Here’s the actual article so you can see for yourself.:

"This article appears courtesy of Early to Rise's Total Health Breakthroughs, offering alternative solutions for mind, body and soul. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com ."


"The Fountain of Youth? Hit the Weight Room!

By Missy Hawthorne, RN, CSCS

Are you a proud member of the “baby boom” generation? Well if so, congratulations! You and 78.2 million of your closest friends make up the bulk of this country's population, and the oldest of you turned 60 just a few short years ago! Turning 50, 60 or 70 for that matter is a wonderful milestone for which you should be proud. But as proud as you may be, aging brings some physical changes we may not be quite ready for, or ready to accept.

Have you noticed fine lines around the eyes, or your pants fitting a little tighter? Do your joints ache as you climb stairs, or do you find yourself bracing your back as you stoop to pick up the morning paper? And where did your strength go? Have your muscles vanished?

These realities and many more begin to haunt us at about age 40 and can continue to worsen with aging. Is there any way to slow things down? Ah, the fountain of youth! If only we could simply take a drink!

Studies and surveys I have come across of baby boomers' attitudes indicate that most of them are trying to be very proactive and slow their physical aging process as much as possible. One of the areas in which that's really important is muscle preservation.

As we age, we lose muscle mass and muscular strength leading to impairment in some activities of daily living. This natural age-related loss of muscle mass, strength and muscle function is called sarcopenia. The level of sarcopenia will greatly affect a person's ability to live and function independently as they grow older.

Research suggests the causes of sarcopenia are related not just to inactivity, but to oxidative stress (a condition in which antioxidant levels are lower than normal), inflammation, alterations in protein turnover, and dysfunction of mitochondria (the ATP energy factory in cells).1 And believe it or not, resistance training has been shown to not only reduce some of that oxidative stress, it reverses aging of the muscles on a genetic level.

One study compared 25 active older subjects (average age 68) to 26 younger subjects (average age 24). After a thorough medical evaluation including a graded exercise test, all subjects performed a supervised resistance training program on two non-consecutive days per week for 26 weeks.

All major muscle groups were included in the workout, beginning with single-set training which started out at more moderate levels and worked up to more intense levels. At the end of 26 weeks, the subjects underwent a muscle biopsy and RNA was extracted for analysis.

The biopsies revealed that resistance training not only slowed the process of aging, but actually reversed aging in something called the transcription RNA profile of the genes. The transcription profile looked like the RNA of a much younger person after the six months of resistance training, and the mitochondrial function of the cells was much improved. These changes translated into improved muscle strength. In fact, muscular strength in the older subjects improved by 50% in 26 weeks.2

For years personal trainers and fitness professionals have touted the benefits of resistance training. Now trainers can share with their clients that it may not be as easy as sipping from a fountain, but there is one sure way to reverse the aging process-- get into the weight room!

References

1. Kravitz, Len .2009. IDEA Fitness Journal. 21-23.
2. Melov, S. 2007. Resistance Exercise Reverses Aging In Human Skeletal Muscle. Plos ONE, 2 journal.pone.com .

[Ed. Note: Melissa Hawthorne, RN, BSN, CSCS is the owner of Priority Fitness Personal Training and Wellness. She is a Master Trainer for the Resist-a-ball Company, ISCA Personal Training, Kick-boxing, and Beamfit. Melissa serves as a fitness consultant for the LaValle Metabolic Institute. ....]"

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You can also help your body with antioxidants from supplements and food.

Fruit and vegetables – particularly organic and brightly colored ones such as sweet potatoes dark green, nonstarchy vegetables, and berries -- and vitamins A, C, E, the mineral selenium, and the supplement alpha lipoic acid all give you additional antioxidant protection. So does coffee, tea, cocoa, dark chocolate, and plant based spices such as basil and many other spices.
I’ve also read that vitamin C helps prevent aging directly by keeping your “telomeres” from unraveling & it helps prevent high inflammation and the diseases that causes, about which see our next post this Thursday.

In addition, you can improve the function of your mitochondria by taking CoQ10 100 mg twice a day in addition to the improvement you get from exercising.

And, though it may work best for your heart according to studies I’ve read of instead of all of you as once thought, you can also slow aging by taking resveratrol.

New way to turn off migraines....

Today's Post, Friday, 5-8-2009

The most encouraging thing I read about migraines before is that people who got them who did not exercise regularly, could cut the number of their migraines in half or more by beginning to exercise regularly and continuing to do so.

And, since exercise trains your blood vessels to expand and contract with the demands of exercise; & migraines are caused by atypical expansion and contraction of blood vessels in the brain, that made sense to me. (Our ancestors who we are all descended from virtually all got plenty of exercise over all the millions of years we evolved after all.)

So, even though this has been known for many years now, if you have migraines and want to have them less often and you don’t exercise, by all means begin to exercise every week soon & keep doing it each week.

Second, I read not long ago that people who get migraines were somewhat more likely to get heart attacks as they got older than people who didn’t. But even though this is consistent with the value of exercising regularly in preventing heart attacks, I wasn’t sure how knowing that might be useful.

But a few days ago, I was astounded to find out there is another connection. And, it’s one that can enable you to cut back the number of migraines you get even more.

A researcher found that giving people who got migraines a good B complex vitamin in addition to any more general multivitamin they were taking before got a lot fewer migraines. And, they then found out that it was the B6, B12, & folic acid in the B complex vitamins that did the job.

THAT is extremely good news AND helps explain the migraine and heart attack connection.

Those vitamins lower an animal protein breakdown product called homocysteine. If homocysteine is high it helps to cause heart disease and circulation problem related dementias – plus it speeds up aging. Perhaps the migraine connection is that by lowering it, you cut the amount of plaque build up in your blood vessels and improve the health of them and their inner layer called the endothelium. And that in turn allows your blood vessels to expand and contract more normally and with less pain when they do. (If your homocysteine is 9.0 or higher, and particularly if it’s well above 12.0, it is harmful & has these bad effects.)

Now, here’s why that’s such good news. While it’s true that taking 50 mg of B6, 1,000 micrograms of B12, and 800 to 1600 iu of folic acid a day will lower homocysteine, that’s just a start on what you can do to lower it to the 6.0 to 8.9 range that is much better for you. (You do have to be a bit careful of B6. Up to a total of 100 mg a day B6 is good for you. A bit above that may be. But 200 mg a day or more produces nerve damage in many people. So aim for a total of about 100 mg or bit less of B6.)

You can also take one or two tablets a day of 500 mg of TMG, Trimethylglycine, originally named betaine. (Jarrow makes an inexpensive TMG supplement that leaves out the HCL that gives some people heartburn and has no other active ingredients.) You can take one or two capsules a day of 500 mg of NAC, n-acetyl cysteine, in addition to the 3 B complex vitamins. Taking a multivitamin, a good B complex vitamin and the 3 B vitamins listed will lower homocysteine. Taking TMG will lower homocysteine. Taking NAC will lower homocysteine and increase a very powerful antioxidant called glutathione that has brain protective effects. If you do all three, you can lower homocysteine a lot.

But there is still more you can do to lower homocysteine. Cigarette smoke increases it by quite a bit. That’s one of the reasons tobacco smoke is do deadly by sharply increasing the amount of heart disease and stroke causing plaque to be built up in your blood vessels and speeding up aging. So, if you smoke and can quit that will help lower migraines as well. Similarly, getting skilled at avoiding all second hand smoke will help lower migraines.

And, there is still more you can do to lower homocysteine! Many people eat no green, unstarchy vegetables at all and not much fresh fruit. It’s long been known that people who eat several servings of green, unstarchy vegetables and some fresh fruit each day are in MUCH better health than people who don’t. (And we now know that organic vegetables are more effective in producing good health because they have more nutrients – NOT just because they have no pesticide residue.) Plus there is even more good news for using this method to lower homocysteine. People who eat several servings of green, unstarchy vegetables and some fresh fruit each day are significantly less fat than people who do not. (Regular soft drinks stuff you with calories that do NOT make you less hungry. Eating several servings of green, unstarchy vegetables and some fresh fruit each day makes you a LOT less hungry while providing close to zero net calories. That is a huge difference.)

Several servings of green, unstarchy vegetables and some fresh fruit each day don’t just provide a lot of folic acid, the most effective B vitamin to lower homocysteine, they provide the natural version your body actually uses directly. That means several servings of green, unstarchy vegetables and some fresh fruit each day is MORE effective in lowering homocysteine than taking folic acid supplements alone.

Lastly, if you begin to exercise regularly and do the things that lower homocysteine as well, having fewer migraines is just a small part of the health benefits you’ll get. In fact, fewer migraines may be only 4 or 5 % of the health improvements you’ll experience.

Since migraines mess up your quality of life so much, they do make a good motivator though.

Taking a B vitamin may help prevent Alzheimer’s....

Today's post: Friday, 11-7-2008

A few days ago in the report of a different kind of study about B vitamins, I saw the information that feeding mice that had a kind of Alzheimer’s disease the equivalent of a 2,000 mg a day dose in people reversed Alzheimer’s in them by essentially cleaning out the cellular damage or plaques that cause the disease. Doing this also prevented the mice from losing their memories as well.

Today, NPR had the story under this headline: “Vitamin B3 Reverses Alzheimer's In Mice”

The study was announced on Tuesday, 11-4-2008. It was done by researchers at the University of California, Irvine and was under the title, "Nicotinamide Restores Cognition in Alzheimer's Disease Transgenic Mice" which was published November 5th in The Journal of Neuroscience.

I’ve been taking the B-Complex vitamin B-Complex with C Stress Formula by Solgar for many years. It includes 100 mg a day of Niacinamide. This is a form of niacin, vitamin B3, that does NOT cause flushing; but also does not help optimize your HDL & LDL cholesterol as niacin does, which is why I also take 300 mg a day of niacin twice a day.

I looked it up and niacinamide IS another name for the nicotinamide that the researchers used on the mice. I’ve obviously not been taking anywhere near the 2,000 mg a day equivalent that the researchers used on a per pound or per kilogram basis in these mice. And, many findings in rats and mice wind up not happening in people.

But if the effect of niacinamide, aka nicotinamide, at the 100 mg a day dose in people has a mild preventive effect, it may well have totally prevented any Alzheimer's in me by simply removing, on a daily basis, any amyloid plaque that developed in my brain before it began to accumulate.

I’m also very glad that I take a daily curcumin capsule because this supplement, which is an active ingredient in the turmeric in curry, looks from population studies to prevent Alzheimer's. Since it also helps to prevent cancer, it’s thought that curcumin strengthens the immune system; & this has the effect of enabling the human immune system to remove amyloid plaque before it accumulates and causes damage.

By both taking curcumin AND niacinamide; and doing things that protect my heart which helps ensure good circulation to my brain; and doing regular exercise which grows new brain cells, I may have inadvertently done an excellent job of preventing Alzheimer’s and mental decline in me. (Taking the curcumin was a deliberate attempt to do so. But the other things I began doing & have been doing for other reasons.)

I had heard before that niacinamide had other health benefits than niacin including an antiaging effect.

But after I saw this research, I decided to look up the health benefits of niacinamide online.

I found this URL.:
http://www.biogenesis-antiaging.com/All-Products/c35/p279/Nicotinamide---Vitamin-B3-(Solal)/product_info.html /

It seems that taking 1,000 to 2,000 mg a day of niacinamide has been known to have many health benefits.

Taking 1,000 to 2,000 mg a day of niacinamide “….may help to retard the Aging Process (at a cellular level) and may function as a Life Extension agent.

“Niacinamide may be an effective adjunct therapy for the early treatment of Stroke.” (This effect may be connected to the effect the mice researchers found.)

For people with diabetes, these are important.: “Niacinamide may retard the development of Diabetic Nephropathy.” & “Niacinamide may help to prevent Retinopathy.” “Niacinamide may lower elevated Blood Sugar levels.” & “Niacinamide may alleviate Hypoglycemia.” And, since the formation of amyloid plaques in part may be caused by elevated blood sugar levels, this may mean that taking niacinamide may help prevent Alzheimer’s in at least two ways.

In fact they also list this, “Niacinamide may exert potent Antioxidant effects in the Brain.’ This would tend to prevent cellular damage in your brain and prevent Alzheimer’s a third way!

They also list this: “Niacinamide (2,000 mg per day) may help to prevent the onset of Diabetes Mellitus Type 1 (by protecting the Beta Cells of the Islets of Langerhans from destruction):….”

“Niacinamide may inhibit the ability of Alcohol (ethanol) to damage the Liver.”

Niacinamide…. “ ( taking 1,000 to 2,000 mg a day as 3.000 may be too much for some people) “….may be an effective treatment for Osteoarthritis. Niacinamide therapy may improve …. Joint flexibility, … reduce Inflammation and … permit Osteoarthritis patients to reduce their dosage of Anti-Inflammatory Drugs.
Niacinamide may be useful for the treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis.”

Then they add this:

“Niacinamide may inhibit the damage to the Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) content of Neurons that occurs during the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Niacinamide (1,000 6,000 mg per day) may alleviate Anxiety (by enhancing the ability of GABA to bind to the Benzodiazepine Receptors within the Brain).”

“Niacinamide (1,000 3,000 mg per day) may help to treat Autism.”

“Niacinamide may help to prevent Parkinson’s Disease (by inhibiting the ability of MPTP to damage the Substantia Nigra).”

“Niacinamide (500 800 mg per day) may reduce the symptoms of Phobias.
Niacinamide (200 1,000 mg administered at bedtime) may improve the quality of Sleep (by binding to the Benzodiazepine Receptors of the Brain). “

&

“Niacinamide may alleviate Asthma (it protects against Histamine-induced bronchoconstriction). “

&

“Niacinamide (applied topically) may help to prevent Skin Cancer caused by excessive exposure to Ultraviolet Radiation (UV-B form). “
“Niacinamide (gel containing 4% applied topically twice per day) may alleviate Acne.”
.“Niacinamide (applied topically) may alleviate Dry Skin (by increasing the production of Ceramides in the Stratum Corneum layer of the Skin). “
“Niacinamide may be useful for the treatment of Psoriasis.”

I’m not yet convinced I need more than the 100 mg of niacinamide I already take each day. But I may change my mind. But if I see my fasting blood sugar or HBA1C measures trend up towards undesirable levels or I begin to have “senior moments” that will likely change. Given what I already spend now on supplements, I also might wait until the antiaging effects of taking 1,000 or 2,000 mg a day of niacinamide are confirmed and I make more money.

However, I certainly think, based on this information, that anyone who has either kind of diabetes or has been diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s should consider taking 1,000 or 2,000 mg a day of niacinamide.