HEALTHY AT 100 (27 page)

Based on an extraordinary body of careful scientific research, Drs. Rosenberg and Evans have come to the same conclusion as Jack LaLanne. Exercise and a good diet are the keys to a healthy and rewarding old age, and it’s never too late to start. They write:

You do have a second chance to right the wrongs you’ve committed against your body. Your body can be rejuvenated. You can regain vigor, vitality, muscular strength, and aerobic endurance you thought were gone forever.…This is possible whether you’re middle-aged or pushing 80. The “markers” of biological aging can be more than altered: in the case of specific physiological functions, they can be reversed.
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As people age in the modern world, we tend to lose calcium from our bones, making our skeletons weaker, less dense, and more brittle. Placing stress on a bone repeatedly, however, causes it to get stronger. This is why people who play tennis have stronger bones in the arm they use to swing their racket than in their other arm. Similarly, many studies have shown that weight-bearing exercise (such as walking, running, cycling, and weight lifting), if continued over time, can effectively reduce the rate of bone loss, even in the population most at risk—postmenopausal women.

One ingenious study at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging examined the bone health of older women before and after a one-year exercise training program.
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The women were divided into four groups:

• Group 1 walked at a brisk pace for 45 minutes, four days a week. They also took a calcium supplement, raising their total daily calcium intake to 1,200 milligrams.
  

• Group 2 walked exactly as much as Group 1, but took a placebo, so their daily calcium intake was only 600 milligrams.
  

• Group 3 did no added exercise, but took the same calcium supplement as Group 1.
  

• Group 4 did no added exercise, and took the placebo.
  

As it turned out, the exercise program made all the difference, while the calcium supplement had virtually no effect. The active women, even those with lower calcium intake, not only stopped losing bone, but actually increased their bone mineral content. The women who did not undertake the exercise, even those who consumed the extra calcium, experienced demineralization.

And this study was not an anomaly. Similar studies at other institutions have come to exactly the same conclusion. When Dr. Everett Smith at the University of Wisconsin performed a similar study over a three-year period, his results were essentially identical. The only difference was that because his study went on for three years rather
than one, the amount of bone gained by those who exercised and the amount of bone lost by those who did not was magnified.
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How about for younger women? We now know that much of a female’s bone mass is built between the ages of twelve and twenty-two and then slowly lost in the remaining decades of her life. Is exercise the key to bone strength in young women, too?

Yes. As part of the longitudinal Penn State Young Women’s Health Study, Professor Tom Lloyd and his colleagues conducted a ten-year study of 80 females who were twelve years old when the study began.
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When these young women reached the age of twenty-two, it was determined that although their daily calcium intake had varied nearly fourfold, there was almost no relationship between calcium consumption and bone strength. Exercise, on the other hand, was found to be of major significance. When the study was published in
The Journal of Pediatrics
in 2004, Professor Lloyd said that “although calcium is often cited as the most important factor for healthy bones, our study suggests that exercise is really the predominant lifestyle determinant of bone strength in young women.”
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In 1990, a researcher at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Daniel Rudman, M.D., published an article in
The New England Journal of Medicine
that has given birth to an entire industry touting human growth hormone (HGH) as a virtual fountain of youth.
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Rudman’s study, though very small, was impressive. He gave twelve healthy older men (aged 61 to 81) injections of HGH three times a week for six months. Compared to a control group of healthy men of similar age, the men receiving the HGH experienced a substantial increase in lean body mass, a major decrease in adipose tissue mass, and a significant increase in bone density. In short, their muscles became substantially larger, they lost major body fat, and their bones became notably stronger. Based on this study, there are now thousands of Internet sites touting the benefits of HGH and promising that their products will increase muscle mass, decrease fat, and retard aging. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the Internet sites selling HGH
products are not what they claim to be. For one thing, they aren’t selling actual HGH, but rather remedies that are said to promote the release of HGH from the pituitary gland (where it is naturally made in the human body). Most of these agents are in fact entirely ineffective at causing any significant HGH release. Some contain glutamine, which has been shown to temporarily increase plasma HGH levels.
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Supplemental glutamine may be of benefit to people undertaking prolonged vigorous exercise, undergoing surgery, or being treated for burns or infectious disease (all of which deplete the body’s glutamine levels). But the short-lived spike of HGH you can get from consuming oral glutamine in no way approximates the natural episodic waves of HGH released by your pituitary gland. (The pituitary secretes HGH every ninety minutes or so, with increases during sleep.)

What about injections of actual HGH, such as were used by Rudman in his study? There is no doubt that such injections do in fact increase muscle mass and decrease body fat, but at a considerable cost. For one thing, the injections require a prescription, are seldom covered by health insurance, and cost more than a thousand dollars a month. Further, they commonly have disagreeable side effects, including joint pain and carpal tunnel syndrome. Plus, there is a real possibility of increased cancer risk. And besides, injected HGH does not come close to replicating the natural cycle of secretion, and any benefits are lost as soon as you stop taking it. All in all, I would say it is definitely not worth it.

The wonderful reality is that regular exercise, particularly resistance training and other weight-bearing forms of exercise, produces the same beneficial changes in the body as human growth hormone—increased muscle mass, decreased body fat, and stronger bones. Although there may be something superficially appealing about swallowing a pill or receiving an injection, the advantages of actual exercise are many, while the claims made for most HGH products are hyperbole at best, and in many cases instances of outright fraud and deception.

Exercise is tremendously important, but sometimes people try to accomplish with exercise alone what can be achieved only with a combination of exercise and nutrition. Those who believe that exercise can compensate for a high-fat diet, excess sugar consumption, or other dietary transgressions could learn from what happened to a remarkable man named Jim Fixx.

Fixx was the author of one of the most influential and successful books on exercise ever written,
The Complete Book of Running.
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His book topped the bestseller lists for nearly two years in the late 1970s and is widely credited for helping start the fitness revolution in the Western world.

Jim Fixx had not always been a runner. Up until his mid-thirties, he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, loved his burgers and shakes, and weighed 220 pounds. But at age thirty-five, he stopped smoking and began running. Within a short time he was running eighty miles a week and racing marathons, and had lost all his excess weight. His belief in the healing powers of running was so great, though, that he did not think he had to change his diet much. In his bestselling book, Fixx repeatedly quoted Thomas Bassler, M.D., who was then claiming that any nonsmoker fit enough to run a complete marathon in under four hours would never suffer a fatal heart attack.

Fixx knew that his father had died of a heart attack at age forty-three. But he believed that exercise (and the improved circulation it generates) would protect him. He thought that as long as he ran daily and didn’t smoke, he would stay healthy and avoid his father’s fate.

Jim didn’t just ignore expert advice that he needed to eat more healthfully. On at least one occasion, he went out of his way to criticize those who offered such advice. At the time, probably the world’s foremost advocate of a low-fat diet as a means to open and heal clogged arteries was Nathan Pritikin. In his book titled
Diet for Runners
, Pritikin described a conversation he had with Jim Fixx that took place in January 1984:

Jim Fixx phoned me and criticized the chapter “Run and Die on the American Diet” in my book
The Pritikin Promise.
In that chapter, I said that many runners on the average American diet have died and will continue to drop dead during or shortly after long-distance events or training sessions. Jim thought the chapter was hysterical in tone and would frighten a lot of runners. I told him that was my intention. I hoped it would frighten them into changing their diets. I explained that I think it is better to be hysterical before someone dies than after. Too many men, I told Jim, had already died because they believed that anyone who could run a marathon in under four hours and who was a nonsmoker had absolute immunity from having a heart attack.
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Sadly, only six months after this conversation, a passing motorcyclist discovered a man lying dead beside a road in northern Vermont. He was clad only in shorts and running shoes. The man was Jim Fixx.

Jim Fixx, the nation’s leading spokesperson on the health benefits of running, had tragically died of a massive heart attack while running alone on that country road. Only fifty-two years old, he paid a terrible price for his belief that he didn’t have to pay much attention to nutrition, for thinking that exercise alone would protect him. An autopsy revealed that three of his coronary arteries were more than 70 percent blocked, and one was 99 percent obstructed.

You may have heard the Jim Fixx story before. He became the butt of late-night jokes as overweight comedians made fun of the fact that the running guru had died of a heart attack. Sedentary people often want to believe that exercise isn’t that important. They comfort themselves by telling and retelling the Jim Fixx story, as if the moral was that there’s no harm in being a couch potato. But to do that is to miss the point entirely.

The real moral of Jim Fixx’s tragic death is that while exercise is wonderful and necessary for a healthy life, it cannot make up for poor eating habits.

In May, 2005, a major study published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
found that regular exercise reduces the death rate among women who have already had breast cancer. These findings were particularly striking because the benefits were found to occur regardless of whether women were diagnosed early or after their cancer had spread. The study found that breast cancer patients who walk or do other forms of exercise for three to five hours a week are about 50 percent less likely to die from the disease than sedentary women.

None of this would surprise a friend of mine, Ruth Heidrich, who has led an extraordinary life and come to know a great deal about the healing power of both running and nutrition. She’s the author of
Senior Fitness: The Diet and Exercise Program for Maximum Health and Longevity.
I find her story dramatic and moving; here it is in her own words:

Breast cancer. These two words, this cold clinical diagnosis, were to shatter my life, then transform it. The words stirred a cauldron of red-hot emotions: rage, fear, hatred. I remember the day and moment of the dreaded diagnosis as starkly as if it happened yesterday.

It’s 1982 and I’m forty-seven years old. I hate it when I feel sorry for myself. I’m a strong, self-reliant female—the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force. I’ve raised two dynamic, smart and successful children, largely on my own after the breakup of two tough marriages. I’ve put myself through college up to and including my doctorate.
“I am woman, I am strong, hear me roar!”
In the vernacular, I am one tough broad. Then why am I so frightened? Why am I crying? My value system, my identity, my whole worldview is shaking under the assault of this terrible revelation. And I’m really, really scared. How much time do I have left?

Infiltrating ductal carcinoma—a moderately fastmetastasizing cancer. The doctors had been following it for the three years since I had first reported a suspicious lump in my right breast. Now
it had grown to the size of a golf ball. I know because I saw it. I had insisted on watching the surgery when they removed the large, red, ugly mass of deadly tissue. But because the cancer had spread through the whole breast, the surgeons told me that they needed to perform a modified radical mastectomy. As soon as I recovered from
that
surgery, they would then have to remove the other breast due to its high risk of being cancerous as well. Worse yet, the cancer had spread to my bones and left lung.

Devastated, feeling betrayed by the medical system and by my body, I enrolled in a breast cancer research study conducted by author and physician John McDougall, that required me to follow a vegan diet. I would have tried anything to help save my life. I talked to my then-husband. He thought I was crazy to think that diet had anything to do with breast cancer, and he believed I had fallen into the hands of a quack.

Around the time of my diagnosis, I saw a sporting event on television called the “Ironman Triathlon.” I was captivated as I watched these superb young athletes race through a 2.4-mile swim, followed immediately by a 112-mile bike ride, then a full 26.2-mile marathon.
“I want to do that,”
I thought. Then I remembered:
“Hold on, Lady, you’re a cancer patient and you’re forty-seven years old
—
way too old to do such an event.”
This wasn’t just negative self-talk; it was the voice of reason. After all, no woman that old had yet attempted the Ironman. But the idea just wouldn’t go away. With my new diet, I could swear I was feeling stronger, lighter, more energetic, faster, and healthier.

Of course, the doctors thought I was absolutely insane.
“You should be resting,”
they said.
“All that stress on your body isn’t good for it. Running marathons (much less endurance swims and 100-mile bike rides) will depress your immune system.”
That’s when I stopped relying solely on the doctors for advice.

Back in those days, before most people had even heard of triathlons, there was little guidance on how to train for such grueling endurance races. So I just got out there and swam until I couldn’t lift my arms, biked until I couldn’t pedal anymore, ran until I couldn’t run another step and lifted as many pounds as I could without injuring myself. To simulate actual racing conditions,
I entered every race I could find. If there were two on the same day, so much the better, because that would force me to race when tired, a condition I knew I’d face doing the Ironman. I entered “The Run to the Sun,” a 37-mile run up to the top of Haleakala, a 10,000-foot-high mountain on the island of Maui, Hawaii. I remember reaching the twenty-six-mile point and looking back at the ocean far, far, below, not believing that these two legs had already carried me the equivalent of a full marathon, straight uphill. Then I turned back toward the mountaintop, still more than ten miles beyond. My internal response was
I don’t have it in me; I just can’t do it.
My next thought was,
Listen, Lady, if you think this is rough, just wait until you get in the Iron-man!
That technique served me well in the coming months. And competing in and winning first-place trophies in my age-group events added to the post-race highs.

I found myself getting stronger and developing muscles I never knew I had. I was passing my cancer checkups as well: The hot spots in my bones—once a source of despair because they indicated cancer—were disappearing, and the tumor in my lung stayed the same size.

The only real reminder of the cancer were the two postsurgi-cal, angry red gashes, which left a chest that resembled a prepu-bescent male’s. Because of all my training, I was having to shower and change clothes several times a day, so the reminders of the cancer were constant. I wanted so much to have a normal body again. Enter the plastic surgeons, who gave me a fabulous choice; I could now pick my new size.
You want a “C”?
they said.
We can do that.
I told them I wouldn’t be greedy—Just give me what I had before, a nice, average “B.” They also gave me something else I never thought possible: breasts that will never sag. I believe you have to look at the positive side of life, and now, at seventy years old, I can really appreciate this benefit.

Today, there’s no sign of cancer in my body. I’ve continued my vegan, low-fat diet now for more than twenty years, and I have never been healthier or more fit in my life. To date, I have raced the Ironman Triathlon six times, plus over a hundred shorter triathlons, a total of sixty-seven marathons, plus hundreds of
shorter races. In 1998, at the age of sixty-three, I was named one of the Ten Fittest Women in America by
Living Fit
magazine (the other nine were all under thirty-five years of age). My bone density has increased through my fifties and sixties, which is supposed to be ‘impossible’ since most people are told they will lose bone density as part of the ‘natural’ aging process. My VO2max, which is the measure of my body’s ability to process oxygen, is one of the highest ever recorded at the Tripler Army General Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, where I live. My blood pressure runs 90/60, which means that my arteries are very elastic and essentially wide open. My cholesterol is under 150; I have 15 percent body fat, and my hemoglobin—the test for iron in the blood—is at the top of the charts.

I do not share this information about my physical condition to boast (although I admit I’m proud of it), but to show what can be accomplished through dedication and discipline.

Perhaps I’m an anomaly by most medical standards. And maybe a vegan diet and endurance exercise won’t be a magical answer for everyone, but I stand as an example of a lifestyle change that might be worth exploring.

When will this awesome journey end? Will I have to slow down gradually, let go, cut back to walking laps around a retirement community? I really can’t say. But I know this: I had cancer and it had spread; I might have folded my cards back then, but I chose life, and I’m going to live as long as I can and run the good race. Maybe only a few will take the path I’ve chosen, but if sharing my story helps a few more to step forward and in their own way race for life, it will have been all the more worthwhile.”
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