Living To 100

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Scientific and medical advances have made real the possibility of living up to 100.

PEOPLE are now encouraged to plan until they reach 100, something that was not done before. Our life expectancy is about 75 years (actually, slightly less for men). For the Japanese, it is 80 years. As such, most insurance companies only plan to help you until you are 65, or at the most, 70 years old.  

But living into a ripe old age is meaningless, if it is not accompanied by good health. Unfortunately, for the most part, the increase in life expectancy in the developed world is achieved through better survival of diseased people. That is, people with cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease and many other chronic diseases are surviving courtesy of modern medical treatments, and not because they are healthy and live longer.  

It is estimated that over 60% of those above 40 have at least one chronic medical problem that requires treatment. By the age of 60, at least 60% are already on some regular drug medication. 

The aim should be to increase the duration of healthy life. Even if you do not live long, if you live life to the fullest, made possible with good health as a key requirement, then it is better than living day-to-day as a burden to yourself, your spouse and family, and to society, which would be the case if you have a chronic disease.  

Becoming old, lazy and fat  

The main problem with people growing old is the inability to control their diet to prevent becoming overweight (or even obese), and the lack of exercise. For smokers, that habit is their biggest mistake, as far as health is concerned.  

The hormonal changes that occur after the age of 20 make the body more prone to lose muscle and gain fat. So eating the same amount of food still makes you less healthy than before.  

Unfortunately, lifestyle changes with less physical work and less exercise worsen the trend. If you do not actively fight this trend, you will be on your way to poor health and disease.  

Our body is programmed to slow down and eventually die. But we are actually programmed to live up to 120 years, and should therefore be expected to be healthy for the most part of it.  

All the documented cases of the oldest human beings in recent times (as recorded in The Guinness Book of World Records) showed that they lived to around 120 years. And they all died of “old age” or heart failure. None were overweight, and all led healthy, active lives in their younger days. They also had healthy diets. 

The Okinawans, who have a high number of centenarians, are a good example of what a healthy, active lifestyle with a healthy diet could do to a community. Unfortunately, the younger generation of Okinawans have fallen prey to the fast-foods and sedentary lifestyles of modern living, and are not expected to have healthy, long lives like their parents.   

You’re not lazy – it’s your hormones!  

So where do we start in trying to correct our insatiable appetites, and our overweight, fat-laden and lazy bodies? Some of you do want to reduce your weight and exercise, but find it impossible to curb your appetite, and do not have the energy to start exercising. Even if you did, you find it increasingly difficult to lose the stubborn fat.  

The answer lies in understanding your hormones. Hormones are the chemicals or peptides that act like thermostats that instruct your cells to accelerate certain metabolic activities. 

Andropause, menopause and somatopause  

For example, HGH (human growth hormone) oversees all the activities important for growth, and maintaining the state of youthfulness. So the levels are high in children, but after the growth peaks, it starts to decline rapidly.   

After age 20, it declines about 15% every decade, leaving only about 50% at age 50. Because of the wide range of metabolic activities affected, this state of deficit associated with rapid ageing is called somatopause. 

The rapid decline in HGH precedes the decline in testosterone (male sex hormone) and oestrogen (female sex hormones), which cause andropause and menopause, respectively.  

If you delay the onset of somatopause, you can delay the onset of andropause and menopause. If you are obese, diabetic, or do not exercise regularly, you are also likely to have low HGH levels.  

In men, testosterone levels decline more slowly after the age of 20. Combined with the lower HGH level, by age 40, already over 40% of men have some degree of sexual dysfunction as result. This includes loss of libido, erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation. They also have varying degrees of decline in memory and mental acuity, muscle weakness and thinning of bones.   

In women, the level of oestrogens ( there are three of them – estrone, estrodial, and estriol) and progesterone (the “balancing” female sex hormone) may start becoming erratic after age 35, more so after age 45, and decline rapidly after 50 (the average age for menopause).   

All the health problems associated with menopause appear thereafter. However, all these happen with somatopause already in place, thus the rate of ageing and degeneration of tissues and organs become doubly rapid.   

So if you want to slow down ageing and stay younger and healthier longer, you must make sure that your HGH level is good. If it is low, you can improve by building muscles, by supplementation or by medical therapy. If your sex hormones are also low, you should consider bio-identical hormone replacement therapy under medical supervision.  

The thyroid hormones are directly responsible for controlling your rate of metabolism. Although many other hormones are also involved, it is the thyroid hormones that have the greatest influence on your BMR (basal metabolic rate, which is the amount of calories you burn just staying alive doing normal activities). The higher it is, the less likely you are to gain weight.  

Insulin is also crucial in the body’s metabolism and energy production. Insulin is necessary to allow glucose (and in certain circumstances, certain lipids) to enter the cells, to be used as fuel for energy. It also instructs fat cells to take in the excess fats for storage.   

Type 1 diabetics who have in-born deficiency of insulin are usually not fat, because of poor fat storage. On the other hand, type 2 diabetics, who become diabetic because they develop resistance to insulin (ie. the insulin becomes less effective on the cells), are often fat, though not always so. 

Steroid hormones are another group that influences the metabolism significantly. Cortisol, for example, has been shown to be the underlying reason for weight problems in many people who are stressed.  

Many people suffer from weight problems and lack of energy because the body has problems trying to burn the stored glycogen and fat. Since we eat at intervals, each meal carries excess calories to support the needs of the next few hours. These are stored as glycogen and fat. But once converted, if your hormones are haywire, the body has problems reversing it for energy production. It has no choice but to give out hunger signals and you eat again, while the glycogen storage (which has limited capacity) and fat storage (unlimited capacity) continue. 

 

This is why extremely obese people still feel hungry again two to four hours after a huge meal, even though they have enough calories stored to last several months. Their system is a one-way street due to hormonal problems. If the hormonal levels are optimised, they can start losing weight more easily. 

If your hormones are optimal, you will feel hungry only when it craves for the nutrients, not the calories, because it knows it can burn the stored calories for energy. And if you also eat nutrient-dense low-calorie meals, you can maintain or lose weight easily.  

When your body is able to burn the stored energy, not only will you lose weight, you will also feel more “alive” and not feel drained and tired all the time. And you can actually start exercising!  

When you start exercising, you are on your way to recovering the healthier, fitter body that you once had! And if you exercise regularly, eat nutrient-dense low-calorie foods, manage your stress well and have a healthy lifestyle, you can hope to live long, and to live life to the fullest. See you at 100!

(Written by Dr Amir Farid Isahak) 

Raw Energy For Health

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THE following exercise will help you build up qi energy and physical fitness. Following that you will learn about the healing power of raw foods.

You can start your  day by doing this simple exercise that combines aerobics, muscle-building and qigong.

Start by standing in the basic qigong stance (stand with arms akimbo and knees slightly bent), then bring up both arms forward (hands in front, at shoulder level) and straighten your knees.

Now swing both arms downwards and backwards as far as you can, bending your knees and breathing in at the same time.  Next swing your arms forward to the original position as you straighten your knees and breathe out. This completes one cycle. You can repeat as many times as you like.

Doing it slowly is qigong. Doing it faster adds aerobic exercise. By bending the knees more, you strengthen the leg (thigh) muscles. You can try going down gradually to a low as a squatting position.

This is excellent exercise to energise yourself upon waking up, or as a warm-up exercise before starting a proper qigong or other exercise routine.

Healing with raw foods

Qigong and other healing arts are effective in maintaining health and reversing many disease by supplying the healing energy (qi, or its many other names) that the cells need for their reparative mechanisms to work. This energy is different from the caloric energy (that comes in cakes, candy, meat and fatty meal) that we are all familiar with.

The food that we eat is meant to provide us with energy and nutrients. Apart from providing caloric energy, food is also an important source of qi. But qi can only come from raw foods.

The different nutritional values of food are affected differently after the food item is separated from the living source, and further handled or treated in various ways. The food is denatured in some way or other by heat. Thus, enzymes and some the vitamins, antioxidants and phytochemicals are destroyed by heating and cooking, The best way to retain the nutritional value of food is to eat it fresh and raw. Food, taken as a whole, contains many nutrients (many as yet unidentified), and no supplements can hope to reproduce this.

Realising this, many health enthusiasts have promoted raw-food diets. The traditional Japanese diet is, in fact, rich in raw foods, and must be one of the reason why the Japanese live the longest. The Japanese also popularised the macrobiotic diet, which emphasise eating raw grains, greens, grasses, beans, roots, shoots, and so on. There have been many testimonies of people benefiting from this diet, including many cancer survivors.

While those who are dedicated followers of macrobiotic and organic diets diligently plant their own macrobiotic and organic foods, these are easily available, even in supermarkets. However, for many of us, our modern lifestyles exclude the routine preparation and cooking of such healthy meals on a regular basis. So, apart from frequenting restaurants serving organic or macrobiotic food, it is difficult to have sufficient intake of a wide range or raw food nutrients.

The only raw foods most of us get are fruits, and only some vegetables, since most of our vegetables are also cooked, and therefore, lose much of their nutritious value.

A German-trained Korean cancer specialist, Dr James Hwang, observed that his cancer patients tolerated the severe side-effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy better if they were given raw foods. They also recovered better. Seeing this, he started including raw foods as part of his treatment for their cancers, and not just to treat the side-effects they suffered as a result of their medical treatments. The results he achieved so amazed him that he resigned from his post in the hospital so that he could concentrate more on this raw food-based therapy. He extended the use of raw food to treat other degenerative diseases as well.

To include the wide range of nutrients necessary for recovery from these diseases, he used many different foods, including cereals, grains, herbs,beans, legumes, mushrooms, probiotics (foods that contain friendly bacteria, for example, yoghurt), green algae, ginseng and even royal jelly. To make it convenient for his patients to consume enough regularly these foods are prepared in powdered form for them to drink, mixed with water, milk or fruit juice.   

The benefits of raw foods can be formidable if combined with the healing power of qigong. Cancer patients, especially, stand to benefit a lot from this synergy. For the healthy, you well be reminded that our lifetime risk of getting cancer is one in four. The benefits of raw foods also extend to preventing most degenerative and diet-related diseases.

Getting fat with food

Excess intake of caloric energy is one of the main health problems of modern society. All forms of food (carbohydrates, proteins or fats ) can be broken down to their building blocks by the body, and be utilised for energy. As energy sources, fats are the richest since they provide twice the calories of carbohydrates or proteins.

In a normal situation, the body uses glucose as its energy source. This can be regarded as the body’s “current account”, available for immediate spending. Indeed the brain uses only glucose.

Excess glucose is converted to glycogen, most of which is stored in the liver and muscles. This is the body’s “cash reserves”, energy which  can be withdrawn once the glucose supply is depleted. But the body is mindful that this standby energy should always be adequate and ready for use in emergencies. Therefore, the response to glucose depletion is hunger so that more energy is brought in through eating food, and the reserves are not touched.

However, for most of us, the excess energy input is more than sufficient to fill up our glycogen stores to the maximum, so that we start building up our “fixed deposit,” that is, our fat stores. Although fat is important and plays a major role in all cells and certain organs, especially the brain, what is bad is excess unhealthy fats.

Like fixed deposit in a bank, fat stores are difficult to lose because you have chronically deplete your  glucose and glycogen stores before the body starts burning the fats for energy.  That is why the fat person is as hungry as the thin person, even though the former may have fat stores equivalent to 50 meals, in calories. He finds it very difficult to skip meals as he gets hungry despite his huge reserves.

When the excess fat accumulates in the organs (visceral fat), the risk of heart attacks is higher. Since there is a correlation with external abdominal fat (central obesity), measuring the waist-hip ratio is an important risk indicator. There are now gadgets that can measure the total body fat percentage, as well as visceral fat distribution.

Persistently high carbohydrate (especially simple carbohydrates which rapidly increase glucose levels ) and fat intakes will cause the insulin level in the blood to increase to cope with the load. After some time, the cells become less responsive to insulin, which then loses its ability to efficiently regulate glucose and fats. This condition of insulin-resistance is now recognised as the underlying factor for a group of health problems – hypertension, dyslipidemia (high levels of bad cholesterol and triglycerides), and low levels of good cholesterol, hyperglycaemia (high glucose) and obesity (especially central obesity).   

This “Metabolic Syndrome X” in turn leads to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancers, many other degenerative diseases, as well as premature ageing. An excessive carbohydrate and fat intake is probably the mother of all diseases.

My prescription is to take plenty of fresh raw fruits and vegetables (preferably organic, and limit starchy vegetables, like potatoes) so that there is not much room left for the excess carbohydrates and fats to creep in. So you have to eat your fruits and veggies first!

However, our real problem is not that we overeat, but that we under-exercise, As a result, the calories that come with the nutrients we really need get stored as excess fat. So get moving!

(Written By Dr Amir Farid Isahak)