It is a reality I try to deny, but it is happening anyway - I am getting older.  Now the really brutal news is that you are too... we all are.  Not to be overly alarmist about this, but getting older has consequences.  I am reminded of a quote made by Jane Fonda after completing one of her many exercise videos - "It is possible to stay young, but it takes more work every year."  That is the message of this newsletter.

Is feeling youthful and alive important to me, or am I content to slowly slide into senility?  That may sound like a silly question, but it really hits a deep question about our motivation for being alive.  What am I here for?  What do I want and what do I need?  Is seeking happiness worth all the effort or is just getting by enough for me?  I believe health is one of the cornerstones of happiness - at least it is harder to be happy if you have no energy and feel sick all the time.

I have older patients that are active, busy, and having a ball with life, and I have patients whose entire weekly schedule is filled with nothing but doctor appointments.  Which group do I want to be in when I am 80 years old?  The lifestyle I live now will determine where I end up in 20 years. 

So what is getting older all about physically? What is the difference between the patients that look old and worn out at 50 and others that look young and vibrant at 80?  How can we be like the young and vibrant 80-year-old rather than the worn out 50-year-old?  In my observations and from what I have learned there are several keys to staying young looking and feeling.

The first key is about energy.  Lack of energy is the first and most common complaint received by doctors from patients as they age. People feeling old just don't have the energy to do what they like to do anymore.
   
Physically, energy is about the tiny power factories in our cells working well.  These factories are called mitochondria and their job is to convert either glucose (blood sugar) or fatty acids into energy for our cells.  Unfortunately this is a messy process which produces a lot of toxic waste like free radicals, urea, and hydrogen peroxide.  If this toxic waste is not efficiently removed, the energy factories gradually break down and stop producing the energy we need to do things.

While researchers are looking into gene therapies and other exotic remedies to solve these problems, in the mean time we will have to use what nature gave us to "clean up our act" so to speak.  This toxic waste is not a concern for us when we are young because it has not built up to levels that shut down our energy production ability.  We are young and invulnerable so we ignore the slow buildup of poisons happening in our bodies.  Ah, but we age and start to feel the impact of this gradual breakdown of our ability to produce energy - then it starts to matter to us.

The great hope several years ago was that we could use dietary antioxidants to reverse the effects of free radicals and hydrogen peroxide.  While these do have use in the blood stream, their effect is not showing itself to impact deep inside the cells at the level of the energy producing mitochondria.  We have to effect these toxins on a very deep level.  To date, I am aware of only three substances available to us commercially that impact deeply enough - Glutathione, Curcumin, and Resveratrol.  There are many things in the development pipeline that might have one or two studies indicating promise, but these three have thousands of studies showing their effectiveness.  The downside to all three of these substances is that they are hard to get into the body.  They are either poorly absorbed or easily destroyed.  The special preparations needed that make the effective forms of these substances are expensive.  The choice I make each morning is how much is it worth to me to support keeping my cells young and healthy?

The body is highly adaptive to the demands put upon it.  A second key to energy to ask ourselves is, do we demand energy production from the body?  I know we all want abundant energy, but that is not the same as actually acting in a way that promotes higher energy output.  Our bodies will always seek to produce and spend as little energy as possible.  Any tissue in your body that you don't actively use will slowly degenerate away.  So the more you use your body tissues the more your body will respond by generating energy for those tissues.  I am talking about bones, muscles, brain, heart, lungs, digestion, blood vessels, everything.  If you want to have well-functioning body tissues as you get older, you need to activate and use those tissues now and regularly.  There will never be a time where you get to just kick back and forget about caring for your body.  The instant you do, everything starts to degenerate.  You are either climbing up the mountain of health or you are sliding downhill - there are no rest points.  The days I "take off" from working on being healthy, are all days where my health takes a nosedive.  

That being the case, it means we have to make caring for ourselves a pleasurable activity.  If we hate caring for ourselves we will stop fairly quickly and end up stuck on the doctor visit merry-go-round.  It says something that the healthiest older folks I see as patients are all dancers.  They love dancing; they live to dance.  Dancing is fabulous at stimulating your body to ramp up energy production and it is self-motivating because folks love to do it.  For other folks it is working in their garden that drives their passion.  One fellow I know in his 80's loves racing cars.  He wins a lot too.  Another loves riding bicycles, and he just made a 70-kilometer ride to celebrate his 70th birthday.  Bottom line is we have to be active doing things we love to do.  Movement is critical to staying healthy.  Loving the movement you do is critical to doing enough of it to benefit you.

So we have what to do to promote more energy production and how to tame the toxic fire in the cells. What's next?  Next we need to cleanup the toxic waste in our blood stream.  That has two sides to it - stopping the influx of new poison into the system and gradually ridding the body of the old poisons.

I hate to say this, but on some level we all know it - the better something tastes, the more poisonous it is most of the time.  Fried foods and sugar-laden foods taste wonderful, and they are slow deadly poisons.  Packaged foods are full of health robbing industrial chemicals.  And for some of us even perfectly healthy foods are toxic to our particular bodies as allergic triggers.  Even fresh fruit in excess is toxic.  At one point I gave myself fatty liver disease from eating too much fresh fruit.  The effects of these foods build up year after year until our health is gone.  Do I eat them sparingly?  That depends. Do I want my health sparingly?

Once we stop actively poisoning ourselves, how do we get rid of the poisons already in our system?  Understand that these poisons have already done a lot of permanent damage.  Most aging damage is not reversible, but we can slow it down.  That is why health is best taught in childhood before all the damage has taken place, like ages 5 to 12.  We don't expect to be able to teach anything to 13 to 35 year-olds, as they are in their risk-taking phase of life and not prone to listen to wise counsel. 

Our liver is designed to do the cleanup for the body with the help of the kidneys, skin, and colon to dump the poison out.  To do its job the liver needs a number of essential nutrients found mostly in fresh vegetables and small amounts of meats.  For this reason this gives us a basic blueprint for a diet to detox the body - lots of fresh vegetables and small amounts of healthy meats.  The liver also desperately needs the time to do its detoxification work, which it can not do while it is processing our meals.  The easiest way to give the liver the time it needs detox is to restrict our eating to eight hours or less per day.  It takes the liver about eight hours after our last meal to finish up with food processing and switch into detoxification mode.  We want to give the liver at least another eight hours of time to do the detox work each day.  That leaves eight hours for food consumption each day.  Coffee, herb teas and certain green juices can be used during the detox time without stopping the process.

There are lots of other pieces to the puzzle of staying youthful, but the last really big piece is maintaining a youthful attitude.  Your body is an extension of your consciousness.  How you think and feel directly controls everything in your body.  Living your life filled with appreciation, joy, and wonder builds healthy cells in your body.  Being right, getting the job done, and winning do not build health even though they might build financial success.  But what value is there to financial success if you are too sick to appreciate it.  So what if you can afford the private room in the hospital instead of the semi-private room?

Choose health instead. 
 
Take care,
 
David