LiveLongAgeWell

When a new patient walked into my office I would occasionally test myself, and try to guess just by looking at her face if she was a smoker or not. Usually I was right, and I could tell by looking for vertical wrinkles around the mouth, typically much more pronounced in a smoker. Why is that? Why should smokers have more wrinkles?

For skin to look good and alive, it needs to be nourished by the blood vessels that feed it. These vessels are the pipes that send fresh blood, oxygen, and nutrients to the skin, and then carry away the bad stuff. But in a smoker, the small blood vessels that feed the skin get irritated and inflamed from the cigarette toxins, and when the vessel walls get irritated, cholesterol can more easily stick to the inflamed surface. So like a pipe filled with any sort of crud, the flow of oxygen and nutrients decreases, and the skin basically loses its elasticity and slowly dies.

The same thing is happening to the smoker’s blood vessels that feed the heart and the brain, and everywhere else in the body. We just don’t see the pipe build-up problem like we do in the skin. In the heart the smoker can experience angina (heart pain) or a heart attack. In the brain, the smoker loses brain cells faster, and are more prone to a stroke. In the penis, since a firm erection depends on good blood flow to your organ, even if you aren’t impotent, your erections won’t be as good.

Besides wrinkles, a few more reasons smokers tend to age much faster:

•    The smoke slowly kills your lung capacity, so if you DO manage to get to an old age as a smoker (note that smokers live an average of 13 to 14 years less than non-smokers), you won’t be able to handle athletic activities well; even climbing stairs might become a chore. Bad lungs severely limit your ability for fun, and there’s no cure at all. Carrying an oxygen tank is a big hassle.

•    Smoking ruins your breath, stains and loosens your teeth.

•    Smokers have a much higher rate of osteoporosis and bone fracture.

•    The risk of that much advertised affliction, ED, or erectile dysfunction, is about 50% greater in smokers.

•    Smokers are twice as likely to get macular degeneration, a common form of blindness, as well as cataracts.

•    Many plastic surgeons will refuse to operate on smokers, because they heal from surgery so much worse, and have a much higher complication rate.

•    Yes, smoking can keep your weight down somewhat, but there are better ways, and is being a little thinner worth all the negatives, and let us include: a higher risk of baldness for men and for women, increased breast cancer and a two times higher risk of cervical cancer?

There’s a good chance many of you will be traveling and spending time with relatives during the coming days, giving you a great opportunity to make a last minute gift. It’s something inexpensive, valuable, and doesn’t even require shopping.

I was inspired by several recent reports showing that computer use by middle-aged and older people—either for general web searching or strategic video games—is good for the brain. It only makes sense, and hence the booming industry devoted to computer games and programs for baby boomers (and older) to keep brains young and flexible.

Think for a moment of those older folks you know who are truly computer-proficient. Most likely they also have active, flexible, competent minds and attitudes.

I’m not suggesting you buy some anti-aging brain program. Rather, for your relatives who already have a computer but don’t know its potential, show them how to really use it. Plenty of adults own computers, but their competence level is stuck at email. Maybe they manage some basic (aol usually) navigation, but using it as the wonderful people-connecting, information gathering, brain-expanding tool that it is, doesn’t happen. They may lack computer savviness, but often it’s a lack of confidence; some even think they might break something.

Now since you, dear blog reader, likely have a decent command of computers, I suggest the gift of your knowledge and time. Gift wrap a small card granting a couple hours of your undivided attention as computer tutor. Set a time and do it. Collect your patience, sit with them preferably at their own computer, and have them first demonstrate what they can do. Then, again patiently, help them expand.

Find topics that interest them and see that they can search and bookmark (you might bookmark LiveLongAgeWell, which has plenty of interesting, safe links on the sidebar). Or show them how to find recipes, or poetry, or sport scores, or shop, or pay bills. Demonstrate that many books can be found online, free.

Check their software versions and anti-virus software, and see they know how to update. Since there are online financial predators, check their firewalls. Teach them how to stay safe, not to click on suspicious links, and about phishing. If they are more adventuresome, demonstrate social networking—help them connect with lost friends. There is so much to learn that this gift can be renewed for many occasions over many years…You can’t do it all at once.

Not only will all this be good for the brain, but will help them keep current and yes, younger, as computer-competence becomes ever more necessary to connect with modern life.

Imagine if print newspapers and magazines go the way of film cameras, and most reading goes online—those who are computer-comfortable will be way ahead.  And for people who become disabled or home bound, those who can navigate a computer will still have much of the world available. So consider this gift, this year. I’ve done it. It can work for you as well as for your student, and might even make the two of you closer…Next post Monday…Happy Holidays!

Last Wednesday I presented some information about average weight gain during the holidays, and while the problem may be exaggerated in the media, none of us wants to arrive at New Year’s needing to make a weight loss resolution. More significant, the data indicates that whatever weight you gain during the holidays is especially difficult to lose and keep off, and that year after year, many people’s weight may creep up because of the those cumulative gains.

When we think of high calories, we might think more about what we eat, and less about what we drink, but beverages could be a big part of the problem. There was an interesting WebMD feature last week regarding the best and worst beverages for weight loss. You can watch the slide show here, or if you don’t want to slog through fifteen pages (and see lots of ads), you can read my summary below. I have added my own spin on their recommendations.

Let’s start with the drinks BAD for your diet:

SODA: The single biggest source of calories in the American diet, and switching to diet soda is of questionable help (paradoxically, may just induce you to eat other sweet foods). Best to avoid.

FANCY COFFEES: The ones you buy at coffeeshops with the fancy names that cost $3 to $6. May have close to 600 calories in a large. I detailed these in a recent post.

WINE COOLERS: A 12 oz. bottle may have 190 calories and 22 gm. of carbs. Regular wine or a mix of wine and sparkling water much healthier.

FANCY COCKTAILS: If add sugary syrups, chocolate, or cream watch out. For example, a white Russian has over 700 calories, and a super-size margarita more than 1000. Yikes!

Here are the QUESTIONABLE drinks:

FRUIT JUICE: May have as many calories as soda, but at least has nutritional value. Look for “100% Fruit Juice” on label, and note the calories per 8 oz. serving. Mix with water or sparkling water to cut calories.

SMOOTHIES: If someone else makes for you, probably full of calories. Make your own with low-fat milk and fresh fruit.

Now, the GOOD beverages:

WATER: May fill you up so you eat less. Pass on the bottled water and go for filtered tap water.

VEGETABLE JUICE: Lower in calories than fruit juice and usually more nutritious (look for ones with more fiber, which helps control hunger). Try to find “Low Sodium” versions, as regular often full of salt.

COFFEE: If black, calorie-free. Full of great anti-oxidants, and caffeine is healthy for most people. Again, see my recent post for details.

GREEN TEA: WebMD says it helps with weight loss but that effect is small. Still, it has some caffeine and is full of great phytonutrients, so drink up.

LIGHT BEER: About 50% less calories than regular beer.

LOWER-CALORIE ALCOHOL DRINKS: Not on the WebMD list, but for some people, can be both healthy and low-calorie. This is the topic for next Monday, just in time for New Year’s.

This Wednesday “A Simple, Inexpensive, And Valuable Last-Minute Gift”. In the meantime, enjoy your Holidays!

About the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, several Berlin universities joined with several U.S. institutions and launched the Berlin Aging Study (BASE), with the goal of closely following, over many years, a group of more than 500 men and women aged 70 to over 100 years old. Over time this group has been put through extensive testing to asses their physical and mental health and their social and economic well-being. While the “subjects” in BASE were Berliners only, most likely the results generalize across cultures. The ultimate purpose of BASE is to find keys to aging better, and the study is ongoing.

Here are some of the results to date…which gives encouragement that when we hit middle age and beyond, our lives should continue to be happy and satisfying:

1. On average, the people in the study felt about 13 years younger than their actual age, and felt that they looked about 10 years younger than they actually were.

2. The men believed they looked younger than the women, by about 4 years. (I wonder if the men in this study might be well, slightly delusional, because in the U.S., it seems like the women take better care of themselves, and look younger. I’m really curious what the LLAW readers think about this. Please leave a comment with your opinion!)

3. Most in the group had a high level of satisfaction with their own aging; they weren’t depressed or discouraged about being older.

4. Some people, seemingly those in the best health, seemed to feel even younger as they got older.

5. Finally, referring back to “self-perceived age” discussed in Monday’s post: when BASE studied various groups of older people of the same age and physical health, the ones who just felt younger had better vitality, health, and longevity than those who felt their “real” age. Thinking and feeling younger seemed to give people more resilience to face the challenges of getting older.

I recently read two examples in the New York Times of older people doing amazing things (and from their pictures, they look pretty good too). First, a 73 year-old who 50 years ago played college basketball. He recently started community college in Tennessee, tried out for the college team again, and yes, he’s on the team and doing well as college basketball’s oldest player.

Second story was the 100th birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall for the composer Elliot Carter. Since turning 90, he’s published over 40 compositions; six in the past year alone. James Levine, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra says about Elliot Carter “He’s still writing at the top of his form…every time he writes a piece he has new ideas he’s trying.”

This concept of “trying new ideas”—always being willing to experiment—not sticking to a rigid self, is one great secret to exceptional aging.

I’ve seen several stories in the media recently regarding the average holiday season weight gain, and the various reports claim from one to ten pounds. I was curious about why such a wide range, and decided to look at the research. I found that probably the more accurate weight gain is closer to one pound than ten. However—and this is important whenever evaluating how good the research is—it’s good to know: who were the group of people (“subjects”) that the researchers studied to reach their conclusions?

When I read some of these studies on holiday weight gain, the researchers in the most prominent studies seemingly did not look at a cross-section of average Americans. In one highly quoted study the subjects were 94 Oklahoma college students, studied only over the short Thanksgiving holiday; not much of a time period. And since the students knew they were being monitored for a weight gain study, they may well have moderated their normal eating habits to not look “bad” when weighed at the end. Whatever, the result was an average gain of only one pound (0.5 kg).

The other highly quoted study recruited 200 people from the campus at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Only in the detail of the study do you see that 88% of the subjects worked at the NIH. I suspect this group was not representative of typical Americans; they were probably (hopefully) more health conscious—they worked at the National Institutes of Health! The conclusion again was an average gain of only one pound. They followed the subjects longer, into the next fall, and found, disturbingly, that the weight people gained during the holidays was usually not lost later in the year.

So you can see that the subjects studied in each of these reports were not typical Americans. Many studies, including important ones testing for possible side effects in new drugs, are done by recruiting otherwise healthy college students, and the results might not apply to the average older person who might actually need that drug someday. Medical centers often recruit students for their studies because the hospitals are located on campuses and it’s easy to find willing student subjects, especially if they can earn a few dollars  participating.

Enough today about studies….now what can you do to prevent your own weight gain this year-end? Look at this link from the Cleveland Clinic: 8 Steps to Surviving Holiday Weight Gain. My favorite of their hints: don’t forget to keep up aerobic activity during the holidays, and never go to a party hungry! Next week I’ll post my take on the 12 Best And Worst Beverages For Weight Loss.

This quiz is to get you thinking about your different “ages”, as my Friday post will be about some encouraging results from the Berlin Aging Study. Like all quizzes here on the LLAW blog, there’s no pressure and no one checks the answers; it’s only to spark some thought.

When someone asks “how old are you?”, you probably think about your chronologic age (after perhaps first considering: should I even tell this person, and if so, should I lie?) But this quiz is about your five different ages:

1.    What’s your chronologic age? The easy one, your real age. The only age you can’t control, it just ticks upward, but the good news is that the rest of your ages you have lots of control over.

Regarding lying about your actual age, I think it’s generally not a good strategy. If you take care of yourself well, you hopefully won’t be shy about telling. If you don’t want to say, better to deflect the question than lie. Besides, forcing yourself to be honest is a great stimulus to take good care of yourself!

2.    What’s your physiologic age? How well is your body functioning? You might be 32 and have the physiology of a 45 year-old or 75 and have the inner works of a 59 year-old. So take a guess—where do you think you are at?

Your goal of course is to have a physiologic age no greater than your real age. Fortunately, this is more controlled by how you live your life than by your genes.

3.    Your apparent age? Assuming other people don’t know your real age, it’s how old someone thinks you are when they see how you look and act. It’s a complex issue involving not only how you look, but how you talk and walk and how you are dressed and much more…

You have lots of control over this age, but typically, it’s hard to know what people are thinking.  Most people won’t tell you, and if they do, they could be lying either up or down. (An embarrassing situation I have experienced is when a proud older person asked “how old do you think I am?”, and I guessed too high. Next time when someone asks this awful question, you might consider, as I have, well…adjusting what you say.)

4.    Your self-perceived age? In your own mind, and when you look in the mirror, the age you feel or think you are.

Often changes day to day of course, but in general, as we will see from the Berlin Aging Study, it’s healthy to think of yourself as younger than your chronologic age. So don’t worry if you don’t “feel your age”. It’s a good thing.

5.    Your desired or fantasy age? The age you’d like to be if you could choose. Nice if it’s approximately your real age, and again, if you do a really good job with yourself, it just might be.

Funny that when you’re very young, usually it’s more than your real age, then sometime in your twenties, when you feel the sting of responsibility, you want to be younger.

Now next time someone asks you your age, you might be a little snappy and say “which age are you referring to exactly?”. Or, if you really feel the need to fudge your actual chronologic age, try picking one of your other ages, like your fantasy age, and watch their reaction!

Pop Quiz! At what age does the typical person’s brain begin to “shrink”? At 20…30…or 35?

The correct answer is 20, and that might cause you some concern, and indeed, until about ten years ago, most neuroscientists believed that once you entered young adulthood, your brain inevitably began going downhill, with no potential for new brain cell growth. But fortunately, it’s clear now that your brain, even though it does shrink in size over time, can retain most of its functional capacity, and even form new cells.

It turns out the shrinking brain issue is really not such a problem after all, because if we treat our brains right, the loss in brain volume can be compensated by new connections (called synapses) between brain cells, and in many cases these synapses—the connections—are more important than the number of brain cells. At least in some areas of the brain, new tissue can be formed. This ability of the brain to change and develop in positive ways is called brain plasticity (“plastic” as in the ability to re-shape itself as needed).

One of the best ways to age better is to encourage this brain plasticity, which is done by: 1) maximizing physical health; and 2) continuing to exercise our brains after age 20! You undoubtedly know the classic advice to “do crossword puzzles”, but there are so many other activities that you can do that are just as good. You can have a wonderfully functioning brain in your 80s without doing one crossword puzzle, ever.

But to keep a good brain, you need to exercise it or the new connections, the synapses, will not form well, and your brain will deteriorate just like muscles that sit unused. In LLAW, I will devote many posts regarding ways to keep our brains working well, and today I hope you read this Psychology Today blog post from Stanton Peele, Ph.D. Taking life seriously: How to preserve your mind, raise intellectual children, be a constructive citizen, and get laid more. He gives lots of ideas about how to stimulate your brain and improve your relationships at the same time.

Last week I wrote about how a major research study showed that vitamin C and E supplements were ineffective for reducing the risk of heart disease and cancer. In general, these two vitamins, particularly vitamin E, are falling out of favor in the medical literature. But several others, particularly vitamins D and B12, are gaining more positive reviews in recent research. An interesting study from Oxford University, published in the journal Neurology, showed that individuals with a higher B12 level in their blood had significantly less brain shrinkage as they got older, than people with a lower B12 blood level. (Brain size was measured by serial MRI scans.)

B12 in the diet comes only from animal sources such as meat, including chicken; fish; milk; and eggs. (Strict vegetarians—vegans—require B12 supplements.) Many nutritional experts believe that especially as people are eating less meat, there is a growing crisis of B12 deficiency, and that middle-agers and above need to pay much more attention to B12 intake, either through diet or supplements. I will take up supplements in a later post, but the concern about B12 deficiency is another great reason to regularly eat fish! Salmon in particular is rich in B12. (For much more detail on this vitamin, go to the Nutrition section in the LLAW right sidebar, then click Linus Pauling Institute>Vitamins>Vitamin B12.)

In the next week I will discuss some other ways to help prevent brain shrinkage, at any age, and not through diet or supplements.

A main goal of this blog is to give you practical hints so you can live healthier and longer, but just as important is to give you information so you can live happier. There doesn’t seem to be too much point trying to live a super-long life if you aren’t reasonably happy. Now especially during these tough economic times, when I find information on ways you can increase your level of happiness, I will pass it along…

Earlier this year (before I started this LLAW blog), two reputable research reports appeared regarding, first, how quitting smoking, and then how obesity could be “contagious”. Yes, a team of researchers—from Harvard and UC San Diego—concluded that you are significantly more likely to lose or gain weight or quit smoking if you become aware of friends or relatives who recently lost or gained weight, or quit smoking, even if they live across the country. Just knowing about others who have changed in these ways seems to profoundly influence your own behavior. The influence of your friends spreads almost like a social virus, in a seemingly contagious manner.

Just last week the same researchers showed a similar type of effect with happiness: if you become aware of friends or even neighbors (who aren’t friends but just acquaintances), then YOU are more likely to also become happier. The effect is greater if these people actually are your friends, and the closer they live to you the greater the effect. There seems to be a larger effect from people your own gender who become happy. More surprising is that they found even “third degree” friends had some influence on your own happiness, meaning if a friend of one of your friend’s friends switched to becoming happy for some reason, then their happiness in a small way rubbed off onto you. If true, this truly speaks of an amazing strength of social networks.

When these researchers earlier this year released their studies on contagious obesity and smoking behavior, other scientists seemed to be surprised, but generally supportive that it all made sense. But this current study on happiness—even though it came from good institutions—has raised more skepticism.  Some have said that perhaps there is something in the statistical analysis that has lead to erroneous conclusions, particularly since they concluded that if your next-door friend suddenly became happy, that the effect on you was greater than if your own spouse became happy.

I suspect it will take a couple years for the various social scientists to argue all this out. Typically what happens when a study is controversial is that either another group of scientists will be able to repeat the first study and confirm the findings, or will conclude with their new research that the first study was wrong, or only partially right.

In the meantime however, we might take the conclusions of this happiness study at face value, and to maximize our own happiness, try to form bonds with people, or at least become aware of others who are doing positive things with their lives. It just might just rub off on us.

One question that stumps U.S. public health officials is why—despite all the good health information and media attention—Americans are becoming more and more fat. It’s a question you might be asking yourself if you are trying to lose weight but having limited success, despite looking for “low fat” or “trans-fat free” food. Some nutritional researchers feel the problem, in part, could be due to the so-called “health halo” effect. Another name for this could be the “Nabisco SnackWell” effect.

Back in the 1990s, the Nabisco company made a tremendous marketing coup by introducing the SnackWell brand, the first really great-tasting fat-free cookie. The most popular flavor was the SnackWell Devil’s Food Cookie Cake. When they first came out, I tried to buy them many times, but since I usually worked late, by the time I got to the store, the SnackWells were gone. Dieters had already had emptied the shelves. Some people were almost camping at the store waiting for the SnackWell shipment to arrive. It was a crazy scene.

Fortunately (or not) about a year later I started noticing some SnackWells on the shelves, even late at night, because the mania had died down. By then, dieters realized that each little beautifully-formed chocolaty SnackWell (how could anything so small be bad?) represented 50 calories, and they added up. Some well-meaning dieters were gobbling them up by the boxful, like popcorn, because they were “fat-free”. The front of the box said nothing about calories, only that they were “fat-free”. Consumers were seduced by the label; SnackWells were protected by the “health halo”… they were fat-free, they must be healthy. Finally though people got smart and realized the little addicting devils were adding hundreds of calories to their diet each day, sales plummeted, and I was finally able to buy them.

Read this New York Times article for the full story, but basically a French nutritional researcher (the French know food much better than Americans) studied New Yorkers, and found that when they saw a “trans-fat free” label, they got reckless, and consistently under-estimated the calorie content, and ate too much of whatever it was. Interestingly, this calorie-amnesia effect was more pronounced in people who were already overweight. They just lost control.

Here is how you can guard against this happening to you:

Be cautious when you see “Non-Fat”, “Trans-Fat Free”, or even “Organic” on a label. If it doesn’t have fat, what does it have instead? “Organic” says nothing about calories. The main function of the label is to get you to buy, not to give competent nutritional information. Most important, look at the calorie count per serving.  What is the serving size for the calories quoted, and how many servings are you eating?