HEALTHY AT 100 (24 page)

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• Buy and eat organic food.
  

• If possible, grow organic food. Plant collards or kale in the late summer (or early summer where growing seasons are short) so that you have fresh greens all winter.
  

• Add your voice to the call for genetically engineered food to be labeled.
  

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• Pack your own lunch. If you make someone else’s lunch, write a love note and put it in with the food.
  

• Bake with your children. Involve them in making wholesome food.
  

• Bake delicious whole-grain muffins with blueberries, bananas, or other fruits they love.
  

• Serve a green leafy salad to your kids while they are waiting for dinner—you’ll be surprised by what they will eat when they are “starving.” In your salads, use romaine and other lettuces rather than iceberg (they have more vitamins and minerals). Also include chopped-up carrots and other vegetables.
  

• Buy or make healthful desserts and healthful comfort foods.
  

• Put wholesome snacks such as seeds, nuts, and vegetables with hummus in a conspicuous and accessible part of the fridge.
  

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• Eat many colors. Foods’ natural colors are not just treats for the eye but also signs of important nutrients such as antioxidants. When you crave something crunchy, try raw vegetables or nuts instead of salty chips.
  

• Every few days, grind organic flaxseeds in an electric coffee grinder reserved for this purpose. Keep the ground seeds in the refrigerator
  and sprinkle them daily on your meals. Try them on cereal and salads and in sandwiches and stews.
  

• Eat plenty of fresh vegetables every day. Make a big pot of vegetable soup, keep it in the fridge in a large container, and heat up small batches throughout the week.
  

• Eat whole grains, not refined grains. Eat baked potatoes with the skins, not French fries. Eat your own homemade vegetable soups, not the highly salted ones generally available in grocery stores. Look for brands that say “organic” and “low sodium.” Between meals, drink lots of pure water. Avoid soft drinks and diet sodas. Herbal teas can be comforting as well as healthful, particularly on cold days.
  

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• Use monounsaturated oils such as olive oil and canola oil as your primary cooking oils. Avoid heating oils to the smoking point. For the fat in your diet, eat walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, sunflower seeds, avocados, and other nuts and seeds.
  

• Avoid saturated fat by staying away from dairy products and fatty meats.
  

• Minimize consumption of oils that are high in omega-6 fatty acids, including corn, safflower, sunflower, soybean, and cottonseed oils. Shun trans-fatty acids. Stay away from margarine, vegetable shortening, commercial pastries, deep-fried food, and most prepared snacks and convenience foods.
  

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• Instead of eating out, invite friends over for dinner. And invite yourself over to a friend’s house for dinner, offering to bring a delicious and wholesome meal.
  

• Patronize only restaurants that serve healthful food or at least can accommodate your preferences.
  

• Instead of soft drinks, buy your kids fruit smoothies from Jamba Juice or similar stores.
  

• When you are interacting with people who don’t eat the same way as you do, never be ashamed of the steps you are taking toward greater health. Let your enthusiasm and love of life be contagious.
  

If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, keep moving.

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

W
hat if there was a pill that would keep you fit and lean as you aged, while protecting your heart and bones? What if it was as good for your brain as for your body, if it made you stronger, more confident, less susceptible to depression? What if it improved your sleep, mood, and memory and reduced your risk of cancer, all while adding life to your years and years to your life?

A great number of studies have found that exercise can provide all these benefits and more, even for people who begin late in life.
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We are learning that much of the physical decline that older people suffer stems not from age but from simple disuse. When we sit all day, year after year, our bones, muscles, and organ systems atrophy, and our self-confidence wanes. But the ability of exercise to revitalize and invigorate our lives is now a proven fact.

Certainly part of the secret to the exceptionally healthy aging found in Abkhasia, Vilcabamba, Hunza, and Okinawa is the extraordinary amount of regular exercise built into the routines of daily life. In each of these cultures, a high level of physical fitness is both required by and produced by the way in which people live and work.
No one is sedentary. Everyone, at every age, is continually engaged in physical activity. The elderly still chop wood and haul water, and even the oldest of the old still work in the orchards and gardens.

The vast amount of regular physical exercise incorporated into their daily lives is one of the reasons that elders in these cultures typically experience levels of physical fitness that are superior to those typically found in much younger people in the West. When it comes to strength, coordination, flexibility, reaction time, stamina, and other measures of fitness, ninety-year-olds in these societies very often surpass sixty-year-olds in the modern industrialized world.

Not very long ago, many experts thought vigorous exercise might be okay for younger people, but it was dangerous for people over fifty. Such was the prevailing belief in the 1960s, when the epidemiologist and physician Ralph Paffenbarger embarked on the landmark College Alumni Health Study, investigating the exercise habits of more than fifty thousand University of Pennsylvania and Harvard College alumni. Dr. Paffenbarger and his associates tracked their subjects’ health and activity levels for four decades and found that participants’ death rates fell in direct proportion to the number of calories they burned each week. Almost invariably, the more active they were, the longer they lived.

The College Study, representing more than two million person-years of observation, is one of the largest data sets ever compiled on the subject of activity, health, and longevity. In 1996, Dr. Paffen-barger summarized the lessons learned from the College Study about the benefits of an active and fit way of life:

The data clearly show that if you become and remain physically active, you will live longer. And the study has also provided heartening news.…It’s never too late to change from a sedentary to an active lifestyle, nor to benefit from that change. Findings from the College Study show quite clearly that it’s possible for even the most determined couch spud to become and remain active and vital well into old age, largely free of all those so-called diseases of
civilization that leave too many of us worn out by life in our later years.…If you become and remain active, you will not only live longer, you’ll live better, look better, and feel better about yourself. You will have more vitality, you’ll think more clearly, and you’ll sleep better. You’ll function better, and be more productive, creative and joyful.
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Dr. Paffenbarger was so convinced by the initial data that in 1967, at the age of forty-five, he took up jogging. Now in his eighties, with more than 150 marathons and ultramarathons to his credit, he still jogs regularly, and still teaches at both the Harvard School of Public Health and Stanford University Medical School.

Dr. Paffenbarger is far from the only physician whose study of the effects of exercise on aging has changed his life. Walter M. Bortz, M.D., is one of America’s most respected authorities on aging. The former president of the American Geriatrics Society, he is a professor at Stanford University Medical School and cochaired the American Medical Association Task Force on Aging.

Dr. Bortz coined the term “disuse syndrome” to describe how a lack of physical activity can destroy health and lead to rapid premature aging. It is a well-known principle in physiology that any part of the body that falls into disuse will begin to atrophy. Bortz discovered that this effect is actually true for the body as a whole. When people become sedentary, they essentially invite their entire physiology to atrophy. As a result, a constellation of problems appears: the heart, arteries, and other parts of the cardiovascular system become more vulnerable; the muscles and skeleton become more fragile; obesity becomes a high risk; depression sets in; and systemic signs of premature aging develop.
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Currently in his mid-seventies, Dr. Bortz still regularly runs marathons, as does his wife. “For me,” he says, “exercise is the sacrament of the commitment to living life fully.”
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It is now widely recognized that there are benefits to all types of exercise. Aerobic exercise (such as jogging) is particularly good for preserving
the heart, lungs, and brain. Stretching (such as yoga) enhances circulation, increases range of motion, and provides greater body awareness. And weight lifting improves bone density while increasing muscle strength, balance, and overall fitness, something that can be even more important for the elderly than for high school jocks. When Dr. Maria Fiatarone of Tufts University got chronically ill nursing-home residents to lift weights three times a week for two months, the results were dramatic. The participants’ average walking speed nearly tripled, and their balance improved by half. Many no longer needed their canes. Their self-confidence soared.
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Other Tufts University researchers have shown that simple strength training exercises can help keep women from needing canes in the first place. Twenty volunteers, all past menopause and none taking estrogen, were randomly divided into two groups. Half continued life as usual, while the other half lifted weights twice a week. After a year, it was found that the women who had not done any strength training had (predictably) lost bone density, while the bone density of the weight lifters had actually increased. The women who had adopted the exercise regimen also lost fat, and many ended up measurably stronger than their daughters who were twenty or thirty years younger. Dorothy Barron, a participant who was sixty-four at the outset of the study, said the exercises gave her more energy and confidence than she had had since her youth.
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Can exercise prevent diabetes? A landmark study published in
The New England Journal of Medicine
in 2002 sought to find out.
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It is widely known that an epidemic of diabetes is wreaking havoc on the health of the 18 million Americans who have the disease. But it’s less well known that another 41 million Americans are living with prediabetes, a condition defined by elevated blood sugar levels that typically precedes the full-blown disease. The study, known as the Diabetes Prevention Program, took 3,234 people with prediabetes and divided them into three groups. One group took the diabetes drug metformin, another group took a placebo, and those in the third group were asked to eat less fat and reduce calories while following a regular program of moderate exercise.

The results were spectacular—so spectacular, in fact, that the researchers stopped the trial early in order that everyone in the study
could take up the lifestyle program. Compared to that in the placebo group, the incidence of diabetes in the diet-and-exercise group was a whopping 58 percent lower. (Those taking the drug also reduced their risk of diabetes, but only by about half as much as did those making the lifestyle changes.) Those over the age of sixty in the diet-and-exercise group experienced the greatest improvement, lowering their risk of diabetes by a staggering 71 percent. Stunningly, nearly one-third of the people in the diet-and-exercise group actually reversed their prediabetes, seeing their blood glucose levels come down into the normal range.

How much exercise did it take to obtain these remarkable results? Participants in the diet-and-exercise group started with just ten minutes of brisk walking, five days a week, gradually moving up to thirty minutes a day. While even modest levels of exercise brought huge payoffs, researchers believe that if people were able to exercise for an hour a day, the results would be even better.

And exercise promotes better sleep, too. In a study published in
The Journal of the American Medical Association
in 1997, epidemiologist Abby C. King and her colleagues at the Stanford University School of Medicine found that people who exercised regularly slept almost an hour longer each night and fell asleep in half the time it took others.
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Given what we now know to be the great value of regular exercise, it’s sad that many people in the industrialized world say they can’t find time for it. One contemporary comedian quipped that if it weren’t for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn’t get any exercise at all.