Archive for year: 2019

“Life is a fatal disease. Once contracted, there is no hope for survival”

Dr. Walter Bortz, retired Stanford geriatric physician and one my heroes, made that statement in his 1984 book “Dare To Be 100”. It forms a backdrop for his message about our potential to live longer, healthier and more meaningful lives.

Dr. Bortz knows a thing or two (about growing old) because he’s seen a thing or two (thanks, J.K. Simmons).  What better source than someone who has 50+ years of observing life, death, and survival?

A Google search today didn’t produce an obit on Dr. Bortz so I’m assuming he is still continuing to set a very active pace, at 89, taking a longevity message to audiences globally.  Watch this two-minute video to get a taste of Dr. Bortz’s commitment to full-life potential.

I discovered Dr. Bortz and his book “Dare to Be 100” in 2013. Dr. Bortz was saying three decades ago what we now realize is the truth about what it takes to age successfully.

His seven books were a catalyst for me, providing a sensible “roadmap” to late-life health with facts and advice unencumbered by political or corporate influence.

I find that most of us are repulsed by his claim that there is no reason we shouldn’t live to 100 or beyond. I get it – I carry the same images of extreme, prolonged frailty that we associate with growing old. We don’t want to be like those images in our head.

It’s a deeply ingrained attitude – but it’s naïve. I’ll stake that claim on the fact that we choose not to understand our biology. And because we don’t understand it, we do things that result in us “living too short and dying too long” and robbing ourselves of our full life potential – really the core of Dr. Bortz message.

I started this weekly printed pontification 20 months ago in an attempt to manifest a deepening desire to help people who have passed the 50-year milestone to pivot their attitudes regarding aging and to “Make Aging Work” by thinking and living bigger while slowing the aging process.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said “Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it time runs out.“

With boosts from the likes of Dr. Bortz and others that I’ve studied and followed, my hope is to help others live their whole life, sing all their song and to live longer, live better and finish out with vitality and a strong sense of purpose.

Been there – – – –

I passed the over-50 threshold some time ago – I’m a “pre-boomer” by four years, born in 1942. My life experiences and professional experiences as an executive recruiter and career transition coach, coupled with two decades of intense reading and study on human development and the aging process, has led me to two conclusions about how we age in this country.

1. We don’t live long enough to truly die of old age because we choose not to understand how our bodies and minds function and thus subject them to repeated, long-term abuse and disuse.
2. We allow myths, misconceptions, outdated models, dangerous cultural portals, deceptive advertising, deplorable government policies, and just plain complacency guide us to a premature demise.

Gap analysis

A prominent Yale physician, Dr. David Katz, founder of the school’s Prevention Research Center, got my attention a few years ago when I heard him say:

“We know all that we need to know to reduce, by 80%, the five major killing diseases in our culture – heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and dementia. We don’t need more new fancy drugs or expensive new equipment and technology or more Nobel prizes. We already know what we need to know.”

I believe Dr. Katz’ position extends logically to aging: we know all we need to know to live healthier, longer and more productively.

We have a 35-40 year gap between our 80-year average life span and the length of time our bodies appear to be designed to last.  The benchmark of 122 ½  years supposedly set by Ms. Jeanne Calment of Paris is currently being debunked by some.  So if it turns out to be a myth, that cedes the record to another confirmed record holder at 116 – hardly a difference to get wrapped around the axle about.

Why the gap between our potential and our average, between what we already know and what we do to stay healthy and live longer? Take #2 above and stir in ignorance (as in ignoring best practices), instant gratification, comparison, stress, lack of purpose and I believe we are close to the answer.

Feel free to add your own thoughts to this toxic brew.

Quixotic as it may seem, I’m choosing to join the voices of those who are working to dilute this brew and close this gap.

Granted, this journey may be like “tilting at windmills” but I’m venturing forth nonetheless with my crusade-like mission, sharing what I hope will be valuable, meaningful information and resources.

I’m grateful for the readers that have remained with me and with the growth in readership that is taking place.  I’m especially grateful for the feedback readers have been sharing with me, validating my message.

Despite what our society would have us to believe, we can truly make our second-half of life work for us in a big way rather than against us.

Life to 100 and beyond with energy, enthusiasm, and purpose is now one of the fastest growing realities of our age. Centenarians are growing at 8X the rate of any other population demographic in our country. We are learning what it takes to “live longer, die shorter” or “die young, as late as possible” and finish out with a purpose having left a footprint.

I’ve become a fan of neuropsychologist Dr. Mario Martinez.  His two books, “The Mindbody Code” and “The Mindbody Self” are challenging projects that are transformational in revealing how our view of the aging process is distorted, demeaning, and destructive.

In “The Mindbody Code”, he says:

“Growing older is a natural process we all experience.  Aging, on the other hand, is a dysfunctional concept, an assimilation of cultural portals that define how our biology ‘should’ respond to the passage of time.” 

He challenges us to step out of the portals imposed on us by our culture in order to achieve our full life potential, saying:

“- – you can modify ‘aging consciousness’ in a society that does not support growing older for what it is: an opportunity to increase your value and competence.”

Makes a lot of sense to this septuagenarian.  How about you?

I invite you to join the conversation and the crusade. Please share your thoughts, insights, experiences – and pin my ears back if you disagree or if you feel I’ve slipped over into hyperbole.

I look forward to your feedback. Please leave a comment below.

P.S. Here’s a link to a very poignant one-minute video from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada that will make you stop and think.  Enjoy

Welcome to Part 3 of this series on avoiding extended late life frailty.

In Part 1, we looked at frailty with the intent of establishing that it isn’t synonymous with aging and that it is not a disease but rather a condition related to disuse. I also introduced a clinical term often associated with this condition – sarcopenia – which the dictionary defines as “loss of muscle tissue as a natural part of the aging process.”

In Part 2, I took the position that debilitating loss of muscle mass as we age is a major contributor to our loss of independence but is, for most, an insidiously debilitating lifestyle choice.  And that our medical community is doing little to raise our awareness of how we can reduce the effects of sarcopenia.

What I hope to accomplish with the series is to elevate awareness and motivate and persuade readers to take a new understanding of this self-inflicted malady and make changes that will enable them to dodge some bullets later in life.

In other words, avoid the “frail trail”.

Really our choices are to confront it or let it continue to take us slowly, gradually, to an extended and miserable, costly late life – “living too short and dying too long.”

There are few givens when it comes to what happens to us in this second half/third stage of life –loss of muscle mass is one of them.  We cannot predict with certainty what other maladies may befall us in these later stages – and it’s likely some will.

But this one we can predict and proactively make some allowances for.

And we must because it is the most prevalent condition that robs us of the vitality we deserve to live an active, fulfilling late life.

We don’t need more Nobel prizes

In the words of Dr. David Katz, a physician at the Yale School of Medicine, and founder of an organization called the Academy of Lifestyle Medicine:

“We already know all that we need to know to reduce, by 80%, the five major killers in our country.  We don’t need more fancy drugs or equipment or more Nobel Prizes.  We know all we need to know today.”

 The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reminds us that four risky behaviors – lack of physical activity, poor nutrition, smoking, and excess alcohol consumption – are responsible for much of the suffering and early death related to chronic diseases.  These chronic diseases are also among the most preventable and regular physical exercise is one of the most important remedies.

The CDC also informs us that, in 2012, only 7.9 percent of those 75 or older engaged in aerobic and strength-training that met the 2008 federal physical activity guidelines for that age group. Yikes!!

By allowing our musculoskeletal resources to decline, we practically guarantee the onset of any of a number of potential calamities.

 

 

 

Here are just a few from a long list of conditions that medical professionals have observed that result from sarcopenia:

1. Decreased strength
2. Mobility and balance problems
3. Falls
4. Weak bones and fractures
5. Weight gain/obesity
6. Diabetes
7. Decreased visual acuity
8. Declining sensory perception
9. Slowed reflexes
10. Inability to cope with stressful conditions

Stop the death spiral

All of these contribute to the mountain of demoralizing statistics about where this is taking us in terms of living conditions and health care costs.  There are some who predict that the care of the elderly, as the ranks swell, could bankrupt our economy.

We can each do our part to stop this death spiral and take advantage of the longevity bonus that most of us will experience.

So, let’s cut through it all and get to a solution.

I’ll stand by my claim in Part 2 that sarcopenia is reversible and that the solution is:

Simple

Lift weights.  If you haven’t lifted a weight since Apollo 13, consult with your physician, start small and build up.  Learn proper techniques early to avoid injury as you proceed.

Inexpensive

Join a local gym.  If you are over 65 and have a Medicare Advantage plan, you are probably eligible for the very popular Silver Sneakers program.  I frequent a 24-hour Fitness facility six days a week under this program and don’t spend a nickel.

Immediate

With a consistent, disciplined strength training routine, you will feel and see significant results as soon as two weeks.  You’ll feel better, have more energy, sleep better and may even look better almost immediately.  It’s not about weight loss but, depending on your starting point, that may be a serendipitous result.

Drug-free

Aside from an occasional Advil early on as your muscles respond and grow from the new stress, there are no drugs needed to reverse this condition.

It really is that simple.  So why do so few of us do it?  Why is it so difficult?

The answer to that is simple also.  Attitude and habits.

The biggest battle is mental, not physical. Attacking and reversing a condition like sarcopenia requires a commitment to hard physical work.  It requires a commitment to an activity that most in the middle-age group and beyond don’t care for, think about or relate to.

This simple plan requires an attitude that accepts and understands the downside of inaction and commits to doing something about it.  But it must go beyond willpower because willpower alone doesn’t work.  We have broken New Year’s resolutions as ongoing proof of that.  Without a total commitment to reversal, this effort too will fail.

Our lives are driven by habits.  Many of the habits we’ve adopted directly contribute to the decline of our musculoskeletal resources (need I mention TV, snow blowers, electric knives, elevators, etc.?) An effective battle against sarcopenia will mean replacing some deeply entrenched lifestyle habits with habits that are, for most, uncomfortable and unfamiliar in the short term.

Notice I said replace.  We really can’t effectively change habits.   We must replace them.

My own sarcopenia battle

I think I’ve mentioned in previous articles that I’ve been a gym rat for over 30 years.  When I cold-turkeyed off of cigarettes on June 6, 1979, I took up running.  Then, in 1987, I joined a new athletic club and began a 17-year run of pickup basketball five days a week. I also began taking advantage of the weight room at the same time and thus put in place an aerobic and strength-training habit that I haven’t broken since.

Although my knees don’t permit basketball, at age 77 I still do 45 minutes of aerobic (upright bike, elliptical or treadmill) six days a week with three of those days including 30-40 minutes of weight training.

Nothing gets in the way of my dedication of 3-4% of my week to this habit.  If I can’t stay with it because of calendar issues or illness, I’m difficult to be around.

A resource to get you started

Recently I stumbled across Fred Bartlit, 87-year old attorney, West Pointer/Army Ranger, strength trainer extraordinaire.  I’ve referred to Fred’s campaign against sarcopenia in Part 1 and 2 of this series.

Time, space and your attention span prevents me from laying out a detailed sarcopenia reversal plan in a single article.  So, I’m going to leave that to Fred and his co-writers and recommend an investment in his book: “Choosing the Strong Path: Reversing the Downward Spiral of Aging”.  (Note: I have no affiliate arrangement with Fred.  He doesn’t know I exist – yet.)

Fred’s book will do two things:

1. Provide a clear understanding of sarcopenia and its impact, physically, emotionally and financially.
2. Provide a safe, sensible roadmap for incorporating strength-training into your life at a pace and level appropriate for your situation.

You will also find excellent resources at his website www.strongpath.com including some really outstanding brief videos demonstrating proper techniques for starting exercises.

This book and website can get you started right with a new motivational understanding of why you should be doing it.  We don’t need to be a part of the depressing statistics of what is happening to our demographic.

When we take this seriously, we can, in fact, “die young, as late as possible.”

I hope this series has been helpful.  It’s a huge topic to which one can’t do justice in 3,000 words.  Fred’s resources can.

We’d love to hear your story about your journey in this area.  Leave a comment for us below.

Fred Bartlit really lit me up!!

Fred’s story showed up in a recent Sunday issue of our local newspaper.  My wife found it, brought it to me and said: “This guy is singing your song!”.

She was absolutely right.  Fred is an 86-year old West Point grad, former Army Ranger, founder and practicing attorney in a hugely successful law firm, back-bowl skier, a golfer who shoots his age in summer, and a strength-trainer extraordinaire.

All that is impressive and inspiring in its own right, but what lit me up most is Fred’s vigorous campaign against one of the most damaging myths of aging that we allow to penetrate our psyche.

That myth?  That we are all destined to get frail as we get old. To that, Fred says “horsefeathers” – or a more pejorative version of the word.  He’s chosen to walk his talk.

He’s taking his message to the masses, not only by example but by speaking out publicly and co-authoring a book “Choosing the StrongPath: Reversing the Downward Spiral of Aging”.  He’s not shy about holding our healthcare industry responsible for perpetuating the myth through their inaction and not educating patients on the ways to avoid early and long-term frailty.

Our two greatest fears

Research has shown that the two greatest fears we face as we age are:

1. Fear of outliving our money.
2. Fear of losing our independence

Frailty is how we lose our independence.

But what is frailty?

Six years ago, I stumbled into a book entitled “Dare to Be 100”, one of seven books written by Dr. Walter Bortz, 88-year-old retired Stanford geriatric physician and one of my heroes in this battle against the mythical stigmas of aging.  Dr. Bortz put frailty into perspective for me and helped me make some needed changes in my lifestyle.

Dr. Bortz points out that frailty has lacked a conceptual framework.  He poses interesting questions like:

• Is frailty a disease? Is so, where do we look for it in our medical classroom or textbooks?
• Is it a legitimate entry on a death certificate? Cause of death: he/she was frail. Not gonna happen.
• Can we admit someone to a hospital with the diagnosis of frailty and have a prayer of insurance covering anything?
• Is frailty aging? One would tend to think so since it shows up mostly with older people.  But, at the same time, we can identify younger people who are frail due to any number of causes.  If I put my leg in a cast for six months, it becomes frail.

So his position is that frailty is NOT synonymous with aging.  Rather, “it is the reciprocal of vitality, robustness, and healthiness.  It is a predisposition to failure.  It is a disconnectedness, a weakness, an infirmity.”  So an 86-year old Fred Bartlit can be totally unfrail while your 57-year old neighbor can be near totally frail.

More explicitly, and more profoundly, Dr. Bortz goes on to say:

“—frailty is a downward drift of matter from a more highly organized state of order, structure, and function to a state of increased disorder, instability, and susceptibility.  The cause of this total decay is the loss of contact of the system from its environment, with its ordering capacity.”

Did I lose you there?  Sorry.  He finally drops the formal classroom jargon and says bluntly: “Frailty is not aging. Frailty results from disuse – even more than it does from aging.  It is not a disease.  It is a condition.”

And it’s reversible – NO MATTER THE AGE!

Dr. Bortz helped me understand that a body, or an organ within it, reaches clinical frailty when it reaches 70% loss of functionality.  Falling below that 30% threshold is almost certain death of the organ or the body.

We have a “health space” with 70% to work with.  Graphically, it would look like the graph below.  Our mission should be to stay as high in the 70% space for as long as we can.  We have much we can do to make that happen, far much more than we are showing the drive to do in our culture.

I’ve borrowed another one of Dr. Bortz’s graphs to illustrate further how frailty works if intervention doesn’t take place.  If we just let life take its sedentary, convenience and comfort-seeking way without the intervention of proper diet and exercise, we are going to decline at a rate of about 2% /year after age 30, which is when our bodily decline begins to accelerate.  By 65 or 70, at that rate, we are in trouble.

On the other hand, if we were to “intervene” with appropriate health-inducing activities and reduced that decline rate to, say, 1% or 0.5%, perhaps that 100 year threshold I profess would easily be in reach – at least theoretically, notwithstanding the possibility of some form of disease or event that changes that decline rate.

And that’s where Fred Bartlit comes into the picture. I haven’t spoken with Fred but I think he would agree with all this.  I’ve asked for the opportunity to interview him so I can feature him in a future personal-interest article, but I suspect he is too busy to bother with that right now.  Regardless, Fred and I are very much on the same wavelength – and mission – in terms of crusading for the avoidance and/or reversal of frailty.

I have witnessed too many friends, relatives, neighbors – as I’m sure you have – who are stooped, immobile and old before their time. Some may be disease related, but most of it is due to inactivity.

There is a rampant, but undiscussed, condition with a big, scary-sounding name associated with that.  It’s called “sarcopenia”.  Fred is on a campaign against sarcopenia – as I am.  Because it doesn’t have to develop – and it is reversible.

I’m going to dedicate next week’s article to fleshing out and flushing out sarcopenia.   Because somebody needs to – our medical community isn’t.

Stayed tuned – hang with me next week.

Well, Nebraska is angry.

That probably doesn’t tip your attention meter unless you are into college football and/or John Deere mega-tractors.

Seems that Nebraska has its knickers in knots over people considering as meat anything other than muscle, gristle, and fat that has been extracted above four legs.

Our recent Sunday paper Business Section gave the story front-page position complete with color photos of a “real meat” and a “fake meat” burger.

For the record, the fake-meat patty is wheat protein, coconut oil, potato protein plus other plant-based ingredients.

I hope you meat-lovers can contain the nausea

It’s easy to see why Nebraska is upset.  The state led the nation in commercial red meat production in 2017, had the most feed cows as of last year and realized $12.1 billion in “livestock and livestock product related sales” in 2016.

I’d be upset too if I saw a wheat protein/coconut oil assault coming.  It must feel like the music industry did when the I-pod emerged, or like the publishing world watching Jeff Bezos and his troops.

OK, that may be a bit of stretch.  However, I believe that the meat industry has more to fear from the growing global awareness of the health- and environment-destroying nature of their product than from fake meat.

Before you tag me as a tree-hugger/environmental whacko, please know that I have a love-hate relationship with meat.

I grew up on it. My taste buds remain captive to the taste of a burger or a brat although they pass through my gullet very rarely these days.

I knew nothing of the ill effects of a meat-based diet growing up in the ’40s and ’50s.   No one that I knew did either. In the tiny, rural, agrarian Wyoming community I grew up in (which was one-half mile from the Nebraska state line), slaughtering and butchering a cow and/or hog was an annual or semi-annual ritual for many families.

Meat and potatoes were truly the normal dinner fare.

But this was also an era when doctors were advertising the health benefits of cigarettes.

We were more than a little short on important biological data back then.

If you’ve hung with me through my many rants over the last year or so, you know that, at 73, a routine heart scan (my first ever) revealed significant artery blockage, putting me, at least on paper, in the high-risk category for cardiovascular disease.

My 50+ years of meat and dairy consumption carried a price – it had clogged my pipes.  Just as it does for most of us.

Heart disease remains our biggest killer, and a meat- and dairy-based diet plays a big role in that.

Fortunately, subsequent echo and treadmill stress tests indicate that my blockage is distributed and blood flow is near normal.  So I proceed with my six-times-a-week aerobic and three-times-a-week weight lifting routine as if nothing is wrong.

So far, so good.

And I’ve become a “flexitarian”, meaning I’m mostly a vegetarian with an occasional blunder into a burger or brat.  I’m pleased to say that I haven’t set foot in a fast-food joint or received a meal through the side-window of my car in three years.

Meat deserves a double rap

Helping us die early isn’t the only rap on meat.  There’s another, even bigger, issue with meat.

It’s killing our planet.

The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest, most prestigious, and best known peer-reviewed general medical journals, published the following on 11/24/18:

 “The emotionally charged debate over the ethical suitability of meat consumption may never reach a conclusion, but it is only comparatively recently that the climate impact of livestock rearing and the nutritional and health issues caused by meat have become a pressing concern.

 The global ecological sustainability of farming habits has not been a major topic of conversation until the last few decades. It’s only now that we’re beginning to have a conversation about the role of meat in both of these debates, and the evidence suggests a reckoning with our habits is long overdue.

Meat production doesn’t just affect the ecosystem by production of gases, and studies now question the system of production’s direct effect on global freshwater use, change in land use, and ocean acidification. A recent paper in Science claims that even the lowest-impact meat causes “much more” environmental impact than the least sustainable forms of plant and vegetable production.”

Hey, I know that’s a mouthful. But then these are serious considerations. Since my heartscan scare, I’ve become a bit of a student of the role of meat in our overall health.  In that discovery process, I was shocked to learn of the depths of the ecological impact of the livestock industry.  It’s pretty shocking – both in magnitude and how little is ever said about it.

The negative impact on our health is a given and well-publicized so no need to go there.  But I want to share some snippets of what I’ve read and learned about the silent side of the destructive power of the livestock industry.

Here are a few eye-openers to consider:

• Global meat production has quadrupled over the last 50 years. We’ve transported our western diet of burgers and steaks to the likes of China where per capita meat consumption has increased six-fold since 1965
• The calories lost by feeding cereals (not their natural food) to animals instead of using them directly as human food could feed an extra 3.5 billion people. It takes 7 kilos of grain to produce one kilo of beef.
• Pasture and arable land dedicated to the production of feed represent almost 80% of the total agricultural land. One-third of global arable land is used to grow feed, while 26% of the Earth’s ice-free terrestrial surface is used for grazing.
• U.S. corn eaten by people: 2%; U.S. corn eaten by cattle: 70%. (NOTE: cows are ruminants, designed to eat grass.  Corn is not a natural food for cattle).
• Over 75% of pharmaceuticals used in the U.S. are used on livestock, primarily to keep them alive long enough on an unnatural diet to get to slaughter weight.
• U.S. farmland producing vegetables: 4 million acres; U.S. farmland producing hay for livestock: 56 million acres.
• As we face major global overfishing, half of the world’s fish catch is fed to livestock.
• Considering that water may become the next “oil”, swim in these staggering numbers, courtesy of a study by Soil and Water Specialists at the Unversity of California Agricultural Extension. Water required to produce:
  • 1 pound of lettuce:              23 gallons
  • 1 pound of tomatoes:         23 gallons
  • 1 pound of potatoes:          24 gallons
  • 1 pound of wheat:               25 gallons
  • 1 pound of carrots:             33 gallons
  • 1 pound of apples:              49 gallons
  • 1 pound of chicken:           815 gallons
  • 1 pound of pork:             1,630 gallons
  • 1 pound of beef:              5,214 gallons

If you are a Californian, you can save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you can by not showering for six months.  Do both, and you fully qualify as a whacko.

Well, I’ve stepped on the toes of a lot of hard-working farm folks – people that made up my heritage.  Sorry, but at some point, don’t we need to get real?  Our planet can’t continue to sustain this type of imbalance.

That’s the intent of this article/rant.  This information is never going to be revealed by the powerful livestock industry.  Do me a favor and share some or all – and maybe start reconsidering what ends up on your dinner plate.

For your health’s sake – and for my grandchildren’s planet.