Dr. Jonny Bowden

Tag: longevity

Top Five Healthy Habits for Extending Your Life
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Let’s be honest- if you could find the recipe for a long, robust life of optimal health and vibrant energy, you’d probably discover that it has a lot more than five ingredients. People who maintain phenomenal health well into their ninth and tenth decades probably do a whole lot of things differently than the average person. That said, you can’t go wrong cultivating the following five habits. Every one has been shown to have a significant connection to either a longer or a healthier life- sometimes both.
1. Stay connected. Study after study demonstrates that people who maintain strong personal and social connections have better health outcomes than people who don’t. Stay involved. Even caring for an inanimate object can actually extend your life and boost immunity. In one study, a group of nursing home residents who were given a plant to take care of had significantly better health outcomes (and less deaths) than those who weren’t. There’s a reason married men live longer than single men!
2. Walk every day for 30 minutes. We can debate whether walking is the ultimate complete exercise (it’s not), but the fact is that 30 minutes a day of aerobic exercise protects the brain and may stave off nasty degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline. Evidence from the National Weight Control Registry shows that walking is one of the main habits of people who successfully keep weight off. And massive evidence shows the cardioprotective effects of even moderate aerobic exercise.
3. Take fish oil daily. If there’s one supplement that could benefit just about everyone on the planet it’s fish oil. The omega-3 fats in fish lower triglycerides, protect the heart and brain, help regulate mood, fight depression and may impact memory and cognition. Best of all, fish oil is one of the strongest natural anti-inflammatories there is, and inflammation- “the silent killer”- is a component of virtually every degenerative disease from obesity to heart disease to Alzheimer’s.
4. Eat a high fiber diet. High fiber diets have been associated with just about every positive health outcome you can imagine. Health organizations recommend 25-35 grams of fiber a day– the average American gets a paltry 8-11 grams. Fiber helps with weight loss, helps regulate blood sugar, and may protect against some forms of cancer. Best of all, the only way to get it is by cultivating yet another life-extending habit: eating real foods, namely vegetables, vegetables and more vegetables. Plus fruit and beans.
5. Destress your life: Sure, it’s easier said than done but consider this: a consistently high level of the stress hormone cortisol kills cells in the hippocampus, an important area of the brain needed for memory and learning. While some stress is actually beneficial, most of us have way too much, much too often. Destressing- and it’s companion activity, restful sleep- restores valuable balance to the body’s systems and probably extends life. Maybe it’s no coincidence that the ever mellow Tibetian monks are among the longest lived people on the planet.
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And hey, while you’re on a roll, it wouldn’t hurt to add a few more healthy habits to the list. Drinking green tea and red wine would be a real good idea, as would eating fish a couple of times a week. Reducing calories (you don’t need nearly as many as you think) has been shown in animal studies to extend life- give it a try. Add eight glasses a day of clean water, a little sunshine and a healthy dose of gratitude- I’m willing to bet you’ll be around to watch your grandkids graduate college.

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_empty_space height=”22px”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
August 22, 2015
Stress Management Increases Longevity in the Lab

Guest article from The Economist, April 9, 2011

Telomeres are to chromosomes what plastic caps are to shoelaces- they stop them from fraying at the ends.

Unlike shoelaces, though, chromosomes replicate themselves from time to time as the cells they are in divide. This shortens the telomere, and, after 50-70 such divisions (a number known as the Hayflick limit, after its discoverer), a chromosome can grow no shorter and the cell it is in can divide no more.

That provides a backstop against cancer. The rapidly dividing cells in a tumour soon hit the Hayflick limit and the process is brought to a screeching halt. Which is a good thing.

The bad thing is that reaching the limit is one of the markers of old age. You do not want it happening too quickly, particularly in tissues that have to do a lot of dividing in order to work properly, such as those in the immune system.

It has been known for some time that chronic stress (caring for a child with a protracted illness, for example) causes premature shortening of the telomeres. What has not been clear is whether this is a one-way trip, with each stressful period turning the telomeric ratchet irreversibly.

This week, though, at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Orlando, Florida, a group of researchers led by Edward Nelson of the University of California, showed that it isn’t.

Their research suggests that stress management not only stops telomeres from shortening, it actually promotes their repair.

Dr. Nelson drew this welcome conclusion from a previous study that measured the impact of telephone counseling on women who had been treated for cervical cancer. The study found that such counseling worked, both mentally and physically. Women who had been counseled reported that the quality of their lives had improved, compared with those of a control group who had not been counseled. They also showed improvements in the strength of their immune systems.

Given those benefits, Dr. Nelson wondered if he could find others. So he reexamined the participants’ samples this time looking at the lengths of their telomeres.

What he found surprised him.

Not only did counseling stop telomere shrinkage, it actually promoted telomere growth!

Those women for whom counseling had worked (i.e. those who reported a decrease in emotional stress) had longer telomeres at the end than they did at the beginning!

Their Hayflick countdowns were being reset!

A single such result must, of course, be treated with caution. But another study reported at the meeting, by Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco (who shared the Nobel prize for the discovery of the enzyme that repairs telomeres), gave some support. Her study showed that exercise has a similar effect to counseling on the telomeres of the stressed.

If Dr. Nelson’s work is successfully replicated, it will shine more light on the ill-understood relationship between the health of the mind and the health of the body.

For, as he points out, nothing actually changed in the lives of the women in question.

They still had cancer, albeit under treatment, and they were still under stress.

Nothing changed—that is—except their attitude.

Dr. Jonny comments: I’ve long maintained that stress makes everything- including diseases- worse. In my book, “The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer”. I call stress one of the “Four Horsemen of Aging”

While stress doesn’t necessarily cause diseases, it makes recovery harder (or impossible), and can exacerbate symptoms and destroy well-being. It can also bring on outbreaks of conditions as wide ranging as herpes and asthma. And stress contributes to inflammation which itself is a major factor in every degenerative disease of aging known to humankind.

In my book, “The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth” I recommended a four minute breathing technique that almost anyone can do. This technique will go a long way towards bringing down stress levels.

You simply sit quietly in a chair or lie on a couch, palms facing upwards, hands and legs uncrossed. Set a timer for four (or five) minutes. Then breathe in deeply on a count of four, hold the breath for the count of four and exhale slowly on the count of four, emptying the lungs completely. Repeat till the timer goes off.

Try to do the four-minute deep breathing exercise several times a day. It’s like hitting the “reset” button on your stress levels.

April 23, 2011
The Four Horsemen of Aging
Did you know that the life expectancy the United States is lower than 49 other countries? (We’re ranked number 50 out of 195 countries in the CIA World Factbook, 2009!)

Or worse, that the vast majority of our medical expenses occur in the last three to five years of life, and that those years are frequently plagued by memory loss, disability and general ill health?

Enter “The Four Horsemen of Aging”.

When I was doing research for my latest book, “The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer”, I looked at all the ways our bodies break down. Specifically, I investigated what the research showed about the heart, the brain, the muscles, the joints, the bones, the hormone system and the immune system.

What I found was fascinating.

No matter what organ or system in the body that I looked at, the same four processes kept showing up.

I named these “The Four Horsemen of Aging” because their effects on the body were so systemic, so profound and so far-reaching that they literally were at the bottom of the iceberg of individual diseases. Conquer these four horsemen and you might literally wipe out- or at least significantly diminish- most of the disease we now associate with “aging”.

My good friend Mark Hyman, MD, explains it very well. He says:

“The way we think about disease, mental illness, and our brain aging, actually has nothing, nothing to do with how our body actually works … The way we think about disease is all wrong … the name of the disease tells us nothing about the real reason or the causes of them. Diseases don’t exist.“

Now Mark might be using a bit of poetic license here; certainly “diseases” exist as diagnostic categories. But what he means- and what I talk about in “The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer”—is that what we call “diseases” are actually just specific manifestations of systemic problems, the same basic problems I call the “Four Horsemen of Aging”.

What are those “Four Horsemen of Aging”?

Glad you asked.

They are: Inflammation, Glycation, Oxidative Damage and Stress.
- Inflammation is associated with every major degenerative disease on earth, from Alzheimer’s to diabetes, from obesity to cancer. It’s also a big factor in less “life-threatening” diseases like asthma, acne, migraines and arthritis.
- Glycation is the process by which excess sugar (from the diet) “gums up the works”, causing circulation problems that- in extreme cases- are the cause of so many diabetes-related issues including amputations. The “thickened” blood can’t get through small blood vessels in the eye and foot, not to mention the kidneys.
- Oxidative damage is what happens when nasty rogue molecules called “free radicals” attack your cells and DNA, damaging the body and aging you from within.
- Stress hormones wreck havoc on the body and its systems. They cause extra weight around the abdominal region, and shrink an important part of the brain called the hippocampus that’s central to thinking and memory. (No wonder you can’t remember anything when you’re under stress!)
There is not a disease on earth that doesn’t involve one or more (usually all four) of these issues.

Getting at the heart of how to prevent them can go a long way towards helping us age in the most healthful, robust way possible, so that we can live a life of vibrant good health, optimism, joy, well-being and vitality.
April 2, 2011