For the past ten years I’ve been deep diving into senior health and the challenges of aging. Thanks to the internet and books, we can understand a lot more about how to stay alive, well, and happy as we enter into the final stretches. But unfortunately, my quest for answers to aging has turned up a lot of not-so-healthy senior health trends.
My husband Rob and I are strongly motivated to avoid the “diseases of aging,” and we manage existing conditions such as back pain, heart irregularities, and energy deficits. We are exercise fans and also face frequent joint pain. But besides regular exercise and low carbohydrate nutrition, what should we be doing?
Longevity genes aren’t my strong suit, everyone in my family passed away in their 50s and 60s. I am taking this as a “kick in the ass” to do everything possible to fight the War on Aging.
Recently, I ran across these wise words from Dr. David Perlmutter, in the forward to Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilizations, by John Ratey and Richard Manning:
It has become clear that our lifestyle choices—including food, sleep, exercise, relationships, and even acts of compassion—feed back a constant flow of information to our DNA and actually modify the expression of what had been considered an immutable code.
Epigenetics: How to Tell Your Genes What to Do
Dr. Perlmutter is talking about epigenetics, the science that investigates how our lifestyle choices trigger the expression of genes or not. It’s probably why I’m still alive and kickin’.
I may not have longevity genes, but the message I send to my cells when working out is “Wake up! Time to go to work, we need to build muscle and stimulate metabolic pathways.” The cells respond just as if they would if I had longevity genes.
What Ails Us: Bad Senior Health Fads
As handy as the internet is as a source of information, it also provides a lot of wrong senior health information. For example, if you want to eat better for health and longevity, research the web and you will end up so confused you might think you’ve entered states of dementia.
Where is common sense and truth? Even scientific investigations are often nothing more than studies funded by Big Pharma and skewed to boost sales of medications. We may be missing the best guidelines of all: doing what our ancestors did that resulted in the development of DNA evolutionary advantages.
What did our primitive ancestors do to survive the challenges of the wild? The same basic lifestyle activities are available to us today. We can:
Move, eat, rest, play, enjoy each other, and use our brains to create new things.
Aging well isn’t rocket science, it’s a matter of not giving in to misinformation, stereotyped “oldism,” and not following unsubstantiated anti-aging fads.
Human Growth Hormone: HGH Injections
An interesting example of anti-aging senior health trends is the use of synthetic HGH injections. It is popular among people to get human growth hormone injections to build muscle and boost youthful energy. This supplementation may actually have the opposite effect, according to the National Institute on Aging (NIA), which summarized the research:
At least one epidemiological study suggests that people who have high levels of naturally produced growth hormone are more apt to die at younger ages than those with lower levels of the hormone. It’s been tentatively associated with an increased risk of cancer.
As we age, we produce less HGH in the body, so it seems smart to provide more of it to preserve muscle mass. Besides the high cost of injections, there is not much evidence that synthetic injections actually work as an anti-aging strategy. There is even less proof that oral medications work. The scientific research hasn’t provided any definitive evidence.
There is considerable scientific proof, however, that exercise itself does boost natural growth hormone production in the body.
Common Sense Solutions to Aging
I would be the last person to say “Just accept you’re growing older and age gracefully.” I believe in fighting back. If cosmetic surgery can lift ten years off my face, I go for it. If cutting down on carbs protects my metabolism from insulin resistance and metabolic disease, I say yes.
If working out in a gym means I can maintain my balance, build stronger bones, and lift groceries out of my car, then I say okay even if it means sweating, grunting, and fatigue.
I’m not going down the aging road gracefully. There’s no magic diet, injections, face cream, or yoga pose that is going to be the fountain of youth. There is, however, a little hard work and some discipline necessary. The fact is, I never feel as good after binging on sugar-laden food as I do after a sweaty workout.
I can’t remember ever feeling great after an unhealthy meal or snack. The instant gratification (probably a squirt of dopamine to the reward center in my brain) only leaves me craving more, like a mosquito bite, an itch that can’t be scratched.
On the other hand, nothing satisfies like hard exercise. Think about it next time you’re tempted by an “easy way out.” There is no injection that can replace a natural solution to aging well.
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