Archive for category: Health and Wellness

Self-euthanasia?  That’s a conversation starter, wouldn’t you say?

I came across the term in a recent Fortune magazine article about mattresses.  Well, actually, the article starts off talking about the severe sleep deficiency that exists in the developed world but morphs into a long commercial for luxury mattresses and new high-tech sleep aids.

Who knew that you can sleep on a hand-stitched mattress made with horsetail hair for which you can pay between $10,500 and $125,000?  If you do, would you drop me an email and tell me about the experience (and put me in your will while you are at it?)

If you sleep on that mattress then you probably are also all over the $500 ergonomic headband, Dreem, that “works with electroencephalography sensors to monitor brain wave, heart rate and breathing during sleep” along with “bone-conduction technology to play sounds to help its users fall asleep.”

Honestly, speaking as a mere peasant, I feel sorry for you – with all this help, you probably have few waking hours in which to check in with your financial advisor.

Well, here’s support for your grand commitment to sleep.  The all-knowing, all-seeing World Health Organization (WHO) found time in their cramped schedules to officially declare sleep deficiency a public health epidemic.

But self-euthanasia?  Sleep scientist Matthew Walker at U. of California, Berkeley apparently believes it and coined the term in his book “Why We Sleep”, saying “Our lack of sleep is a slow form of self-euthanasia.”

Apparently, according to the WHO, the majority of the world’s population regularly clocks six or fewer hours a night, thus putting our health in jeopardy.  According to this collection of experts, lack of sleep increases the risk of obesity, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

I like another description used in the article:  “sleep has become an elusive luxury of our own making” by which we tag “busyness, long hours, and early rising as badges of honor.”  Apparently, we’ve become an “underslept” and “underperforming” world population, and proud of it.

Well, alas, it’s all true and they are painfully accurate.  We are killing ourselves early by not sleeping enough.  Self- euthanasia seems an appropriate term.

But, there’s more.

I’d like to suggest that lack of sleep shouldn’t claim exclusive title to the phrase.

I can think of two other shortfalls that we could safely put in this category:  diet and exercise. In fact, I lean toward these two as having greater self-euthanasia capabilities than lack of sleep.

Perhaps you missed my 5/26 blog where I shared these facts:

• Two-thirds of the American population is overweight; one-third of American men are obese.
• Type 2 diabetes, which is largely attributable to dietary habits and was virtually unheard of 40 years ago, has now reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. and is now showing up in children.  According to our own American Medical Association, half of our American population is either diabetic or pre-diabetic and 70% don’t know it. 
• The five major killer diseases in our country remain unchanged: heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and dementia – all highly attributable to what we put in our mouths.

So, we’re pretty good at self-euthanasia.  We can put together a pretty good trifecta for killing ourselves early: poor sleep, Western diet, and immobility.

I think we can euthanize ourselves quicker by being 40 pounds overweight and watching 49 hours of TV a week (the average for the retired American male) while getting 8 hours of sleep than we will if we are thin, active and getting six hours of sleep.

But that’s just the opinion of a thin (175 and holding, down from 190 a year ago), active (six days a week, 45 minutes a day), plant-eating septuagenarian who sleeps about 6-6 ½ hours (20-year old non-horsetail hair mattress).  I tend to make up the sleep shortfall with mini-naps throughout the day, especially when I’m stretching my brain trying to come up with something of value for this blog.  (Note: 10-minute power nap between the opening and this paragraph).

So I’m beholden to Matthew Walker for giving me a new term to use in my arsenal of diatribes about living to our full potential by being the CEO of our own health.  Our food industry, pharma industry, and healthcare system are doing little to prevent our self-euthanasia.  It’s on us to make it happen.

Don’t fall asleep and miss the opportunity.

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I’m a long-time fan of Michael Pollan, author, journalist, food activist and professor of journalism at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His books “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food” played a major role in raising my awareness of the unhealthy nature of our food industry.

His clever, simple and straightforward book, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual”, is one of the best $15 investments one can make toward developing a healthy lifestyle through dietary habits.  Eighty-three simple rules for eating better.

All of them simple – but simply overlooked in our corporate-dominated food-supply environment.

Here are a couple of rules from the book:

Rule # 20:  Don’t Ingest Foods Made in Places Where Everyone Is Required to Wear a Surgical Cap.

Rule # 21:  If It Came from a Plant, Eat It; If It Was Made in a Plant, Don’t.

Pollan has not strayed from his quest to get the truth out about the dark side of our food industry.  Click on this  Pollan Youtube video to get a sampling of some of the behind-the-scenes deception that goes on in big corporate food.

How ’bout the comment toward the end of the video: “Evidence shows that poor women who cook have healthier diets than wealthy women who don’t”.

Ouch!

Convenience at the expense of health

We look to and expect corporations to do more and more things for us in the name of convenience and saving time.  And generally, they continue to do a good job.  One can hardly argue against Alexa, self-propelled lawnmowers, GPS, Google, fast food – oops.  We have to stop there.

Fast food tilts the wrong way on the risk-reward scale of convenience.  Definite time-saver; definite health risk.

I’m sure you get tired of hearing it:

• Two-thirds of the American population is overweight; one-third of American men are obese.
• Type 2 diabetes, which is largely attributable to dietary habits and was virtually unheard of 40 years ago, has now reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. and is now showing up in children.  According to our own American Medical Association, half of our American population is either diabetic or pre-diabetic and 70% don’t know it. 
•  The five major killer diseases in our country remain unchanged: heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and dementia – all highly attributable to what we put in our mouths.

You’d think maybe we’d start paying attention at some point before individual health crises hit.  But it doesn’t appear that we really care – or know enough to really care.

Our taste buds have been hijacked by the food industry.

Pollan refers to the research that the industry does to determine and then feed our “craveabilty”.  We know it centers around clever manipulation of sugar, salt and fat. Once we are hooked on that deadly combination, so cleverly baked (pun, yes) into processed foods, it’s hard to break away.

I’ll attest to it.  My diet is now 95% plant and whole-grain based.  At a recent family gathering, I succumbed to eating a cheeseburger and a brat.  With the brat, it was like I had died and gone to heaven!!  My taste buds were reveling in my sin!

That evening, and into the next day, I felt like crap!  My taste bud cells had loved it – the rest of my cells apparently felt assaulted.

Corporate cooking vs home cooking

Pollan confirms big food manufacturer’s focus on profitability at the expense of our health.  The same holds true for most restaurant food, especially the fast-food type, themselves the purveyors of much of this manufactured, processed food.  Research has shown that restaurant food generally is as much as 26% higher in calories than food cooked at home.  And the food is often calorie-dense and high-glycemic because that’s what people crave, contributing to blood sugar spikes.

Nonetheless, as I pointed out in a previous blog,  we love the convenience (and taste bud gratification) of eating out.  2015 was the first year that Americans spent more eating-out than they did cooking at home.

Actions have consequences.  We’re getting bigger, but not any taller.

So, I guess it’s not rocket science to tie most of this together. We’re getting fatter, less healthy and dying way too early while corporate and restaurant cooking increase their share of our diet.

Pollan says it beautifully in “Food Rules”, p.9: “What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick.”

Enough rant, already – solution, please!

Again, Pollan makes it simple with the phrase for which he is best known:

“Eat food, not too much.  Mostly plants”. 

So, the solution, thus described, is really quite simple.  Easy?  Not so much.

Following the discovery in 2016 that I have some cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the form of fairly significant arterial calcification, I’ve eliminated meat and dairy (OK – 99% of it – the brat exposed me), eat very little chicken (may be worse for me than meat) and drastically reduced my intake of anything made with white flour (fiberless and non-nutritional).  A sugared drink hasn’t passed my lips in years (including fruit juice, energy drinks).  And I’ve worked harder at staying hydrated.

Easy for me?  Not really, but probably easier than for most.  Why?  Three reasons:

1. A minor health scare when the heart scan report came back.  The heart scan informed me that a price is being paid for six decades of inattention to a healthy diet and that rocked my world enough to want to understand why and what can be done about it.
2. A mindset reinforced by knowledge.  My research into documented proof of heart disease reversal helped me develop a mindset dedicated to habit changes that will enable me to, at a minimum, stop the calcification and possibly even reverse it.
3. I sleep with a fantastic “gatekeeper”.  My wife controls what leaves the grocery store and goes into our fridge and pantry.  She’s been ahead of me for years on the importance of keeping our food stock devoid of what we know is unhealthy and full of what we’ve learned is healthy.

But, don’t do what I did – please!  Don’t wait for some health scare before you educate yourself and adopt better eating and other health habits.  Begin now to exercise “self-efficacy” and take control of your health and become knowledgeable how your body works and what it takes to make it work optimally.  And, if possible, get on the same page with your spouse or partner on what is good for you.  If that won’t work, take charge and become your own gatekeeper.

Your life depends on it.

You can find deeper content on all this in my free e-book entitled “Achieving Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier and With More Purpose”.  Access it here www.makeagingwork.com

Also, scroll down and leave us a comment or your thoughts on this topic.  We love your feedback.

I suspect you caught what I just did with that headline.  I appealed for help in combating ageism by committing it.

So easy to let words that are ageist slip off our tongues – like “old-timer.” We’ll use it to describe ourselves.  We’ll casually, playfully tag friends with that monicker not realizing we are contributing to ageism.

It’s just one of a gazillion ways that we use words and phrases that prop up ageism.  It’s almost as if using ageist words and phrases is an expected part of the “rite of passage” as we pass that 50-year threshold.  Little do we realize how damaging it is, not only to the effort to eliminate ageism but also to our own self-esteem and, ultimately, to our aging process.

Words count. 

Holly Lawrence, freelance writer, in an article “How Would We Live If We Forgot We Were Over 50” written for Next Avenue, quotes a 61-year old bank vice president who admits: “One thing I say that I should not say is ‘Oh yeah, a senior moment’ or ‘Forgive me, I’m an old man, so I forget these things.’ I say things like that and I know that some people may find it, you know, humorous. On the other hand, it does depreciate my value as a professional.”

Ashton Applewhite, acclaimed writer and activist, has stepped boldly into the breach in the battle against ageism.  Her excellent book  “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism” takes it on and the prejudice and the damage it does.  She refers to ageism as the last “-ism” that isn’t being addressed in our culture.   Some have termed it the  “last acceptable prejudice.”

Applewhite is not the only one that views this “-ism” as a problem.  The World Health Organization (WHO) agrees.  From their website, WHO offers up a couple of perspectives:

• Research suggests that ageism may now be even more pervasive than sexism and racism. This has serious consequences both for older people and society at large. For example, ageism limits the questions that are asked and the way problems are conceptualized and is hence a major barrier to developing good policies.
• Ageism has harmful effects on the health of older adults. Research by Levy et al shows that older adults with negative attitudes about aging may live 7.5 years less than those with positive attitudes.
• Socially ingrained ageism can become self-fulfilling by promoting in older people stereotypes of social isolation, physical and cognitive decline, lack of physical activity and economic burden.

My takeaway from these and other sources is that there are two major culprits in the proliferation and embedding of ageism: (1) ourselves and (2) people and organizations of influence who stand to gain by the continuation and deepening of the “-ism”.

The exploitation of the aging is a topic for another article but we need to look no further than the proliferation of advertising for “fix it” drugs and the latest senior-living iteration to realize that we are a big, naive and highly-exploitable market.  But I digress

Each of us a big part of the problem.

Until I spent some time in Ashton Applewhite’s book, I hadn’t really considered how my own use of certain words or phrases are ageist and could subtly contribute to ageism.   Maybe you hadn’t considered it either.

Think about how often you’ve used or heard these:

• I just had a senior moment.
• This aging thing is for the birds/is no picnic/sucks!
• What do you expect at your age? (If this comes from your doctor, change doctors!)
• You certainly don’t look your age.
• You’re not retired yet?
• When are you going to retire?
• How’s it going, gramps?
• Whaasup, old timer?
• “Young lady” when addressing an older woman
• Old dogs can’t learn new tricks.
• Can you believe she’s 60 years old?
• He is 80 going on 60.
• You shouldn’t be doing that.
• You could pass for much younger.
• Good to see you are still up and around.
• You’re still working?
• You have a smartphone?

Then we have jokes and birthday cards that contribute, thinking they are innocent and all in good fun.   Here’s the card my daughter gave me for my 75^th birthday (I got over it!)

You just think you are being funny!

Ever heard jokes like these?

“At four, success is not needing diapers. At 12, success is having friends. At 17, success is having a driver’s license. At 20, success is having sex. At 35, success is having money. At 50, success is having money. At 60, success is having sex. At 70, success is having a driver’s license. At 75, success is having friends. At 85, success is not needing diapers.”

 “Grandma is so wrinkled she needs a bookmark to find her mouth.”

“My old Uncle Ed still whistles at girls but can’t remember why.”

Whether directed at myself or someone else, when I use this type of phraseology or jokes, I am practicing ageism, plain and simple.  And I continue to engender its use in others.

William Sadler, in his excellent book ‘The Third Age: Six Principles for Personal Growth and Rejuvenation After Forty”, underscores the importance of tending to our own thoughts about aging:

“Our unwitting acceptance of negative stereotypes about age and growing older threatens the development of a rich, vital, creatively unfolding identity. This is why we should free ourselves from myths of aging well before it becomes irrevocably embedded in our neurons.”

“The stereotype of aging embedded in our neurons shapes our attitude and contributes to our decline and eventual placement in a nursing home where we spend a period of prolonged dying.”

Who would have thought that our own use of words could accelerate our trip to an “elder warehouse?”

Let’s start a revolution!

We can start our own individual campaign against ageism by being more attentive to the words we use which in turn help us turn the attitudes of our own aging more to the positive and away from the prevailing negative.

From Seniorliving.org, we find some thoughts on ways to wage your own battle against this entrenched discriminatory attitude:

1.    Give it back to them. If someone says “I’m glad you’re still up and around”, cordially respond, “I’m glad you’re still up and around too”. If a younger people ask you “Let us know if you need anything,” offer the same as well and say, “Let us know if you need anything too.”

2.    Flaunt your age when someone says you’re young. Be cheerful and say, “I earned my wrinkles,” or “I’m proud of my age,” or “You know I’m old and I like it.”

3.    What do you mean? If you encounter some complement –slash-awkward ageist comment, you can always ask them with a straight face and genuine puzzlement, “What do you mean?”  This way, you wouldn’t be burdened to explain why the comment is ageist and offensive. It works all the time.

We have enough challenges in our fight against ageism without contributing to it with our own language and attitudes.   Let’s start an anti-ageism revolution and clean up our own act.  There are still societies where the elderly are venerated but it ain’t gonna happen in our culture.  But we don’t need to deepen the offense.

How are you battling ageism?  Have you experienced it?  Scroll down and leave us your thoughts about this issue.

News alert!!

You’re going to die.  Get used to it!

But don’t get so used to it that you make it happen faster than it needs to.

One hundred years ago, we accepted our short life-spans as fate, God’s will.  Until the last half-century or so, death was largely random and immutable.  It was not that long ago that practitioners conceded conditions such as tuberculosis, hardening of the arteries, Alzheimer’s to be totally due to aging.  Thus, fate ruled and what happened wasn’t challenged.  Thankfully, we now know that fatalism is wrong.

Dr. Walter Bortz in his book “Dare To Be 100” says “Sure, aging and the passage of time play a role, but not nearly to the extent that has been presumed until now.  This is great news.  For conditions of old people not to be due to the passage of time gives hope that counterstrategies can be derived to prevent or reverse at least a major part of them.”

Given that we have a longevity benchmark set for us by Madame Jeanne Louise Calment of Paris, France, who lived to 122 years and 164 days, we can then ask why do we, especially as Americans with our average 80-year lifespan, fall so woefully short of that benchmark.

Now that we know that genetics play a minor role (perhaps 20-30%) in our longevity, and virtually none after age 65, we can then zero in on what do we do, or don’t do, that may be determining our longevity or lack thereof.

Here’s my selection for a “dirty dozen” life shorteners.

1. No exercise. I know, you’re tired of hearing it.  And I know it’s likely you will buck it up at some point and renew that gym membership and just as likely you will fall off again six weeks later.  It’s just not built into your lifestyle and it won’t sustain until you do.  Think of it this way.  Can you find 2.6% of your week that is going to unhealthy activities (TV, barstools, Facebook, et.al.) and convert that to 45 minutes of combined aerobic and strength training six days of the week?  That’s only 10% of the time the average American male spends each week watching TV (49 hours). The potential ROI:  living longer, dying shorter; more vitality longer; look better, feel better; amaze your overweight, sedentary, deteriorating friends; lower healthcare costs.  Perhaps this admonition from Dr. Henry Lodge in the book “Younger Next Year” will help:  “Aerobic exercise will give you life; strength-training will make it worth living.”
2. Diet heavy in animal products. Heart disease remains the number one killer in our culture.  The link between heart disease and a diet heavy in animal products i.e. meat and dairy is indisputable despite all the claims to the contrary by those industries.  A whole-food, plant-heavy diet brings with it a long list of benefits, only one of which is the reduced likelihood of heart disease.  It also reduces the possibility of cancer, stroke, diabetes, and dementia which round out the rest of the top five killers in our culture.
3. Mindset.  It’s amazing and disturbing to me how many of my generation are still of the mindset that senescence and frailty are automatic when we have so much evidence and knowledge to the contrary and many weapons against both.  Any personal move to add years to your life and life to your years has to start with a mindset that doesn’t accept this old thinking.
4. Healthcare illiteracy. We’ve allowed our personal healthcare to become a $35 co-pay experience with a physician who is entrenched in a disease-care system focused on cure and not on prevention. As such we put our self-care in a reactive mode versus a proactive mode.  We think health only when something skids off the rails and then face a system that only knows drug it or cut it out.  One of the major keys to longevity is “self-efficacy” i.e. taking control of your own health destiny by understanding how your biology works, knowing where you stand against the key biomarkers of good health (see Key Step #2 in my free downloadable e-book Achieve_Your_FULL_Potential (2)), and taking charge of your own health through increased knowledge and proactive action.
5. Conformity. Sir Walter Scott said he would trade whole years filled with mindless conformity for “one hour of life crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks.”  When dying people in a hospice are asked about any regrets they had about their lives, by far the most common regret is “I wish I had pursued my dreams and aspirations, and not the life others expected of me.”  ‘Nough said.  Conformity involves comparison.  Comparison is one of the biggest killers of happiness.
6. Suppressing courage. In the same hospice study, the second most common regret was “I wish I had the courage to express my feelings and speak my mind.” The author of the study, an Australian palliative care nurse by the name of Bronnie Ware learned that “many of her dying patients believed they suppressed their true feelings and didn’t speak their mind when they should have because they wanted to keep peace with others.”  Most of them chose not to confront difficult situations and people, even when it offended them. By suppressing their anger, they built up a lot of bitterness and resentment which ultimately affected their health.  See the complete article here.
7. Toxic relationships. Jim Rohn, the renowned businessman and motivational speaker, famously said that “we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with.”  Relationships with toxic people steal away life-giving energy while being around positive, encouraging, supportive people who are continuing to grow can restore energy.  Choose your relationships wisely and dissolve those that are harmful.
8. Stopping learning. Historian Peter Laslett emphasizes that only by living into our natural lifespan are we able to exploit our true potential. As we age, our brain cells can become intimately connected with new and emerging realities.  A lifelong strategy of learning is a potent force for good.  Smart people live longer.
9. Isolation. According to the AARP Foundation, the health risk of prolonged isolation is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Research has shown a 26 percent increased risk of death due to the subjective feelings of loneliness.
10. Not working. Evidence has been in for a long time.  Work is necessary for longer, healthier living. Polls of centenarians have revealed that an astonishingly high percentage of them continue to work and that they rank working alongside being able to walk as one of the keys to their longevity.
11. Narrowed comfort zones. As we age, we may tend to narrow our comfort zones.  For example “I’ve never done that” or “I don’t know anything about computers” or “I’m too old to start that”. These responses are indicators that the fossilization process is underway. The fact that you hear 50-year olds making these statements is proof that “old” can start at any age.  Source: The New Retirementality.
12. Traditional retirement. Going over the cliff from labor-to-leisure, vocation-to-vacation retirement can erode sense of purpose and identity.  Without purpose, many of the life-shortening elements of retirement begin to creep in – boredom, increased isolation, declining social engagement, reduced physical activity, depression.  One in five of Americans over 65 suffer from some level of depression.  Men aged 75 and older have the highest annual suicide rate of any group.

In the final pages of his book “Roadmap to 100”, Dr. Bortz leaves us with this poignant thought: “Our ripples, the energy signature of our life, remain and endure.  Rippling exalts Mozart, Buddha, Aristotle, Christ, Einstein, Darwin, to name a few, whose lives’ energies persist and penetrate today in a larger way than they did while alive.  Similarly, even the most modest among us leaves ripples behind.”

“Once we confront our own mortality, we find it vastly easier to re-arrange our priorities, communicate more deeply with those we love, appreciate more keenly the beauty of life, and increase our willingness to take the risks necessary for personal fulfillment.  And imprint our ripples on the cosmos forever.”