Category Archives: Life-Span

Post #50 – How to optimize your health by maximizing your telomeres?

21 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by in Aging, Life-Span, Living to 120, Nutrition, Optimal Health, Uncategorized

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What in the world is Telomeres? – you say

Well, if you have not heard of the word Telomeres, I will explain it here, since it is likely that you will be hearing about it more and more.  Especially, if you are interested in optimal health, living long and living health.

So, first here are some useful terms.

What is Telomere?

Telomeres are disposable buffers at the ends of chromosomes which are truncated during cell division. Their presence protects the genes before them on the chromosome from being truncated. During the process of each cell division, the telomere ends become shorter.

Hayflick Limit

An American scientist Leonard Hayflick established limits to cell replication what is now called Haflick Limit. The Hayflick limit is the number of times a normal human cell population will divide until cell division stops. Empirical evidence shows that the telomeres associated with each cell’s DNA will get slightly shorter with each new cell division until they shorten to a critical length.

Most cells will divide between 50 to 70 times before they cannot divide any more.

Role of Telomeres in Cellular Aging

As Hayflick first demonstrated, human cells have an inborn “counting mechanism” that tells them when to senesce, or stop dividing: Each time a cell replicates, the ends of each chromosome, i.e., telomeres, get shorter, and once the telomeres get too short, they trigger a “senescence program” that arrests the cell’s growth.

In short, telomeres represent body’s clock that determines our life-span and our health span.

Telomerase to the Rescue!

Telomerase is an enzyme that adds length back to the end of telomeres.  In a simple leap of logic, you can quickly figure that telomerase enzyme is an antidote to shortening of the telomeres.

As you can also guess things are probably not that simple.  They never are when it comes to human biology. But for this brief blog post, I will keep it simple.

So, with this premise of telomeres determining when cells say “uncle”.  And, Telomerase offering an antidote, race is on for researchers and entrepreneurs on many fronts.  Numerous questions are being asked and some have even been answered:

  • How do you measure telomeres inexpensively?
  • Do telomeres really correlate with one’s biological age?
  • Does telomere length account for life styles that have been known to determine one’s health span and lifespan?
  • What factors stimulate telomerase activity? Can we measure that?
  • What about the role of telomerase in cancer, where cell replication goes on without any limit?
  • And, so on and so on..

Some hard answers have emerged, well-rooted in hard science.  On the other hand, other answers are preliminary and people are making wild leaps of logic to get to the market first with commercial products and services.

Measuring Telomeres

Several companies now offer services to measure telomeres. For example, Titanovo, Inc., SpectraCell Laboratories, Telome Health, Inc.,  Telome Home.  Basically, you send them blood or swab and they will  send you your telomere measurements.

My experience

I recently got my telomeres measured by Titanovo, Inc.

I signed up online. They sent me a kit.  I swabbed inside of my cheeks and mailed it back.  I also filled in a lifestyle survey on their website they use to correlate the results with lifestyle.

Few weeks later, they posted my results on their website.  The following pictures represent result I received.  (You can click on these to enlarge and make them readable)

Titanovo profile 3-2016_Page_1

Titanovo profile 3-2016_Page_2

What do my results mean?

Here is my take away.  My relative telomere length is 0.62, which if you interpolate on one of the charts that means my telomere corresponds to a 48 year old male. 13 year younger biologically sound pretty good to me!

I reported my diet as vegetarian.  If I were to change my diet to vegan, according to the last chart, my telomere length could be 0.67. That represents an additional opportunity for 8% advantage in terms of biological age.  8% increase in lifestyle is pretty significant to me.

Since I just started experimenting with a vegan diet about 3 week ago, I will be interested in retesting the telomere length in a year to see if the results correspond to what Titanovo is forecasting.

Titanovo sells bundles of multiple kits, so people can play with their lifestyles choices and then see the impact, in say 3 months at a time.

Bottom Line

  • This area of telomere and measuring impact of lifestyle choices through measuring telomere is quite exciting.
  • A lot of research is going on in both gaining fundamental understanding as well designing interventions that could potentially defeat body’s lifespan clock.
  • Sound like pretty cool stuff to me, if this works as advertised.
  • I bet we will be hearing a lot about this topic, so stay tuned.

What is your perspective of this topic?

I would love to hear and learn from you.

Please click on the “Comments” link to share you thoughts.

 

 

 

 

 

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Post #41 – So, how to measure how close to optimal is your health? Or, how quickly are you aging?

19 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by in Aging, Dying, Life-Span, Living to 120, Mental Health, Nutrition, Optimal Exercise, Puposely Living, Vitality, wellness

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“How old are you?” someone asks. Number of years since birth is the generally the answer – that is your Chronological Age or CA.

But how hold do you feel? How old do you act? How old do you look? That is your Biological Age or BA.

Wouldn’t it be nice to actually be able to measure your biological age?

CA and BA is the difference between being 40 year old and going on 60. Or, may be being 60 year old and going on 40.

Wouldn’t it be more useful to have a single number like BA, than understanding individual factors like your total cholesterol, HDL, A1c, VO2 Max, etc?

Recently, in the media there has been a buzz about a recent research published by scientists led by Duke University School of Medicine about measuring biological age. For example, see the article in WSJ: How Quickly Are You Growing Old?

Now there are a quite a few websites, where you answer a bunch of question and they will tell you, your biological age as compared to your chronological age.

For example, here are three such sites, I tried (my CA is 60.9 years):

http://www.biological-age.com/ calculated my biological age as 36

https://www.sharecare.com told me my BA was 53.6.

http://www.growyouthful.com/gettestinfo.php said my BA was 46.

Each of the sites followed up with advice and helpful hints on what I could start or stop doing to further increase my expected health and lifespan.

Unfortunately, none of these websites show exactly what they do with the information you provide and how they arrive at the number they call Biological Age.

But this recent study, “Quantification of biological aging in young adults”, by Daniel W. Belsky et al, is very rigorous treatment of this subject and gives you all the details behind the curtain. And, for me, these details are not only fascinating but actually quite useful to understand what matters for biological age to start diverging from chronological age. In other words, what slows down or speed up aging.

The study calculated the aging rate of 954 men and women—taking various measurements of their bodies’ health—when they were each 26, 32 and 38 in chronological years. By analyzing how these measures changed over time, the researchers were able to see who aged faster and who slower than normal.

To measure the pace of biological aging, which the study defined as the declining integrity of multiple organ systems, the researchers relied on 18 separate biomarkers, summarized in figure below.

These ranged from common measures such as HDL-cholesterol levels and mean arterial blood pressure to more obscure ones like the length of telomeres—the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that shorten with age.

Go on in Years

Chronological age of all participants was 38 years. However, researchers found that the biological ages varied from 26 years to 60 years.

For measuring how fast people aged, they calculated aging over 12 years. About 30 percent aged biologically one year for every calendar year. There were those who aged as much as 3 years for every calendar year. And, there were four members of the group who aged not at all or actually got biologically younger during the 12 year period.

BOTTOMLINE:

Finding one’s Biological Age is a fascinating concept and can be very useful in optimizing health and life span. However, this is not an exact science just yet, although good strides are being made in research.

However, if you want to focus on living optimally, you can focus on changing your lifestyle to optimize the basic 18 or so biomarkers used in this study. Most of these can be impacted by lifestyle choices. Only 20% depend upon genetics.

Proper food, hydration, exercise, supplements and medical care are the key methods to managing these primary biomarkers.

Websites that compute biological ages also suggest additional actionable items that seem to strongly correlate to optimal health span and life span. These include:

  1. Optimal sleep (7 to 9 hours)
  2. Reduced stress (meditation, perspective management)
  3. Reduced exposure to toxins (organic food, reduced use of chemicals, clean water)
  4. Increased social contact (having friends, family, living with a life partner)
  5. Purposeful living (satisfying work, hobbies, social endeavors)

What is your take on this subject?

Please feel free to leave comment to share your perspective.

Post #36 – What is most important for Optimal Health – Body, Mind or Spirit?

15 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in Functional Medicine, Life-Span, Living to 120, meditation, Mental Health, Optimal Health, Reversing Chronic Diseases, Stress

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Let me first define each of these three terms. Starting point could be our handy-dandy Merriam Webster dictionary.

Body, it says, is “A person’s or animal’s whole physical self.” So, that is straightforward – Arms, legs, heart, head, arteries, liver, hands, toes, and so on, make up the Body.

Mind, again according to the dictionary, is “the part of a person that thinks, reasons, feels, and remembers.”

Spirit per the dictionary is the force within a person that is believed to give the body life, energy, and power.

So, which one is most important for optimal health?

Or, in other words, if I were to focus on living the longest possible and the healthiest possible which one should I focus on first?

Writing this blog post, at this point I got stuck. I did not know where to go with this topic.   I took a long break and when I returned to my writing I found website for The Bravewell Collaborative, which has been doing pioneering work in Integrative Medicine as a catalyst of change in healthcare.

When I read the article The Connection Between Mind and Body on their site, I felt it perfectly captured my sentiments and thoughts on this topic, albeit from a much more authoritative source. So, here I share this article verbatim. Bold highlights are mine. There is, of course, a lot of additional good stuff on the The Bravewell Collaborative website.

Modern scientific research supports this age-old tenet of medical wisdom [of mind-body connection]. It began in the 1920s, when Harvard scientist Walter Cannon, MD, identified the fight-or-flight response through which the body secretes hormones called catecholamines, such as epinephrine and nonepinephrine. When they enter the blood stream, these hormones produce changes in the body—i.e. a quickened heart or increased breathing rate—that put the person in a better physical state to escape or confront danger.

In the following decade, Hungarian-born scientist Hans Selye, MD, pioneered the field of stress research by describing how the wear-and-tear of constant stress could affect us biologically. Since then, scores of scientific breakthroughs have illuminated the mind-body connection in health.

Experimental psychologist Neal Miller, PhD, discovered that we can be trained to control certain physical responses, such as blood pressure, that were previously considered to be involuntary. This discovery gave birth to biofeedback, which has now been found to be effective in the treatment of anxiety, attention deficit disorder, headache, hypertension, and urinary incontinence.

Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson, MD, identified the flip side of the stress response, which he called the “relaxation response.” Benson demonstrated that meditation, yoga, and other relaxation techniques can bring about physiological changes including a lower heart rate, lower breathing rate, and decreased muscle tension along with positive changes in brain waves. Mind-body techniques that elicit this relaxation response have been successful in treating many stress-related disorders.

Research by psychologist Robert Ader, PhD, at the University of Rochester provided a link between the brain, behavior and immune function, and founded the new field of psychoneuroimmunology, which researches ways to increase immune function through the use of the mind.

Based on a Buddhist meditation practice, Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, at the University of Massachusetts, developed Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), a mediation technique that has successfully reduced physical and psychological symptoms in many medical conditions, including pain syndromes.

“When we are on automatic pilot, trying to get someplace else all the time without being attentive to where we already are, we can leave a wake of disaster behind us in terms of our own health and wellbeing, because we’re not listening to the body. We’re not paying attention to its messages; we’re not even in our bodies much of the time,” explains Kabat-Zinn. “Mindfulness—paying attention on purpose in the present moment nonjudgmentally—immediately restores us to our wholeness, to that right inward measure that’s at the root of both meditation and medicine.”

Guided imagery, which utilizes the power of imagination to heal, has been shown to reduce anxiety and pain in people with a wide range of medical conditions, including asthma, back pain, and headache, and to help patients better tolerate medical procedures and treatments. “Imagery utilizes the natural language of the unconscious mind to help a person connect with the deeper resources available to them at cognitive, affective and somatic levels,” explains Martin L. Rossman, MD.

Innovative research by Dean Ornish, MD, and his colleagues found that a program integrating mind-body techniques such as yoga, meditation, stress management, and group support with diet and exercise reversed coronary artery disease. “What we are finding is that comprehensive lifestyle changes may ‘turn on’ the beneficial parts of the genome and ‘turn off’ the more harmful parts,” says Dr. Ornish.

Today, these breakthroughs in our understanding of the mind-body connection have translated into effective therapies that support a patient’s journey through illnesses and trauma. Virtually every major medical center now has a stress management or mind-body clinic, and practices such as meditation, yoga, and group support are woven into the medical treatment of heart disease, cancer, and other serious illnesses.

James Gordon, Director and Founder, Center for Mind-Body Medicine, has conducted mind-body skills trainings for patients and health care practitioners around the world. Gordon has said, “Mind-body medicine requires that we ground information about the science of mind-body approaches in practical, personal experience; that we appreciate the centrality of meditation to these practices; and that we understand—experientially as well as scientifically—that the health of our minds and the health of our bodies are inextricably connected to the transformation of the spirit.”

So, looks like to me that Body, Mind and Spirit are all EQUALLY important to Optimal Health. These three are inter-connected. And, we need to focus on all three of these in an integrative fashion for Optimal Health.

What do you think?

What is your experience on this topic?

I would love to hear about your thoughts.

Post #28 – Eating for Optimal Health Part VII – Best beverage to drink is pure water

16 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in Ideal Body Weight, Lean Mass, Life-Span, Living to 120, meditation, Nutrition, Optimal Health, Optimal Nutrition, Reversing Chronic Diseases, Vitality

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In blog post of 9/29/2014: So, what should you eat for optimal health?, I listed the seven basic principles I have extracted from the many diet books and resources I have studied. These principles are:

  1. What you eat, how much you eat and when you eat, all matter
  2. Eat clean
  3. Eat lots of vegetables and fruits
  4. Use only healthy fats and fat sources
  5. Incorporate sufficient proteins in your diet
  6. Best beverage to drink is pure water
  7. Add or subtract specific foods based on your personal needs

In the last posts, we discussed the first five of these principles. Today, let’s focus on the fifth principle: Best beverage to drink is pure water. And, as usual without any fluff stuff, let’s get to it.

I am sure by now you have heard over and over again, “Keep yourself hydrated.” Or “Drink plenty of water”. But why do we need to keep hydrated?

Water is the solvent for biochemical reactions and has unique physical properties (e.g., high specific heat) to absorb metabolic heat within the body.

Water is also essential for maintaining vascular volume and serves as the medium for transport within the body by supplying nutrients and removing waste. In addition, cell hydration has been has been suggested to be an important signal to regulate cell metabolism and gene expression.

Water is the largest component of human bodies. About 70% of our body weight is water. To maintain homeostasis, i.e., equilibrium in our biology, we need to replenish the daily water loss. Water loss comes from breathing out, sweating, urination and excretion.

You may have noticed feeling sluggish if you are dehydrated. In fact dehydration can bring on a variety of symptoms:

Mild to moderate dehydration is likely to cause:

  • Dry, sticky mouth
  • Sleepiness or tiredness — children are likely to be less active than usual
  • Thirst
  • Decreased urine output
  • No wet diapers for three hours for infants
  • Few or no tears when crying
  • Dry skin
  • Headache
  • Constipation
  • Dizziness or lightheadedness

Severe dehydration, a medical emergency, can cause:

  • Extreme thirst
  • Extreme fussiness or sleepiness in infants and children; irritability and confusion in adults
  • Very dry mouth, skin and mucous membranes
  • Little or no urination — any urine that is produced will be darker than normal
  • Sunken eyes
  • Shriveled and dry skin that lacks elasticity and doesn’t “bounce back” when pinched into a fold
  • In infants, sunken fontanels — the soft spots on the top of a baby’s head
  • Low blood pressure
  • Rapid heartbeat
  • Rapid breathing
  • No tears when crying
  • Fever
  • In the most serious cases, delirium or unconsciousness

Many diseases are linked to dehydration. These include kidney stones, gall stones, bladder, colon and other cancers, arrhythmias, blood clots, Mitral Valve Prolapse, and Osteoporosis.

How much water do we need?

So, given that we need to keep body hydrated, that is, replace the H2O we lose daily with equivalent amount of H2O, how much water do we need everyday?

Institute of Medicine of the National Academies report on Dietary Reference Intake for Water, Potassium, Sodium, Chloride and Sulfate recommends the following DAILY Recommended intakes for water for different age groups:

For Children

1–3 years         1.3 L total; 0.9 L (4 cups) as beverages

4–8 years         1.7 L total; 1.2 L (5 cups) as beverages

For Males

9–13 years       2.4 L total; 1.8 L (8 cups) as beverages

14–18 years     3.3 L total; 2.6 L (11 cups) as beverages

Over 19 years   3.7 L total; 3.0 L (13 cups) as beverages

 For Females

9–13 years       2.1 L/day of total water; 1.6 L (7 cups)

14–18 years     2.3 L/day of total water; 1.8 L (8 cups)

Over 19 years   2.7 L total; 2.2 L (9 cups) as beverages

Pregnant and Lactating women are exception and will need even more for each respective age group.

Can you drink too much water?

In very unusual circumstances, excess consumption of water and low sodium intake may lead to excess body water, resulting in hyponatremia and cellular edema. This condition comes from body getting too low in sodium rather than too much water.

What are the sources for water?

So, given that we need to keep body hydrated, that is replace the H2O we lose daily with equivalent amount of H2O, where do we get it from and where should we get it from?

Well first of all we do get a little bit of it when the body oxidizes hydrogen-containing substances during metabolism or energy production cycle. This water, called Metabolic Water is generally enough to offset the water we breathe out as vapors.

Rest of the water comes from what we consume, i.e., the stuff that crosses our lips. Of course, if you are taking nutrients intravenously (as saline solution or glucose solution in a hospital) that also counts.

All foods, especially, fruits and vegetables contain water. Beverages Coffees, tea, ice tea, milk, sodas, juices, beer all contain water. Institute of Medicine of the National Academies report on Dietary Reference Intake for Water, Potassium, Sodium, Chloride and Sulfate has the following table on daily water intake from a 2,200 calories daily diet. (Please click on the graphic below if it is not readable)

Table

NOTE: This diet meets the Adequate Intake or the Recommended Dietary Allowance for adult men and women for all nutrients for which one has been established (for fiber, it meets the ratio of 14 g/1,000 kcal) and provides energy nutrients within the acceptable macronutrient distribution ranges. Nutrient totals may not equal the sum of the parts, due to rounding. Vegetables prepared without salt.

Food composition data: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 16.

DATA SOURCE: ENVIRON International

So, what is the optimal source of hydration?

When I came to the US, 37 years ago, I somehow created associations that beer is the only drink that really goes with pizza and at McDonald’s you always ate hamburger with French fries and Coke. I don’t know how those associations happened, since I did not eat pizzas or McDonald’s’ hamburgers before coming to the US. I guess it was from watching all those TV commercials or just mimicking what everyone else around me was doing.   In fact, it was four years later that watching a friend of mine, I learned that you could actually ask for water at McDonalds.

Fruits and vegetables are definitely good sources for water. Other than getting water from food, what about beverages? Are all beverages, coffees, tea, ice tea, milk, sodas, juices, beer, and wine as good a source of water?

Given the western culture, the answer could be quite confusing.

In research literature, there seems to be some controversy about whether coffee and alcohol are only transitional diuretics or permanent diuretics. Some say that caffeine and alcohol actually cause dehydration. Others disagree.

And, the citrus industry convinced us over two decades ago that “orange juice is not just for breakfast anymore”, so we should be  drinking that all day long.

Coke and Pepsi, of course, promise us sex and happiness.

“Got Milk” teaches us that all the hip people drink milk and it is a fun drink and of course, it is the only source of calcium out there.

Beer is the real beverage to quench thirst, besides it gets us sex and popularity.

Wine is definitely one for sophisticated people and of course makes us live longer.

All this just to get people to drink their stuff to get hydrated! So, what is one to do?

I tend to agree with Joe Dillon, who likes to say, “Just because it is wet, does not mean it will hydrate you.”

Bottom Line

My take on all this is to ask the basic question: when I drink a beverage for hydration, do I want the collateral stuff?

Whether it is caffeine, or alcohol, or sugars or artificial sweeteners, or artificial colors, or whatever else,  if I do want the collateral stuff, then the particular beverage at that moment is an acceptable, desirable or even a good source of hydration. If not, I rather just drink water.

And, in most of the situations, when I am looking to hydrate myself, I rather go directly to the source of hydration that my body is ultimately looking for, which, of course, is Water.

What do you think of this approach?

Do you feel that this simplifies the confusion about water and hydration?

Do you see a hole in this approach? What would you do differently?

Post #20 – So, how much muscle can you gain in a short period and why you may want to?

10 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by in Aging, Bikram Yoga, Biomarkers for Stress, Ideal Body Weight, Lean Mass, Life-Span, Living to 120, Optimal Health, Percent Body Fat, Vitality, wellness, Yoga

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In most health literature, one thing I find repeated over and over again is that muscle or lean body mass is a very important factor for health and longevity.

When I heard from Joe Dillon about 15 months ago a concrete technique to lose body fat and gain muscle mass, I got inspired. Although, I had generally been keeping track of my weight, up until then I had never really thought of tracking or targeting body fat and lean mass directly.

More I studied this topic, the more it all made sense. Weight and Body Mass Index (BMI) are just proxy for tracking body fat and lean mass, which are what really count. It is the body fat that is harmful and it is the lean mass that is helpful – and both in so many different ways. And, at times BMI and body fat can be very poor approximation of body fat and lean mass.

If in the process of losing weight, you lose muscle mass rather than fat, that is not a good thing at all. In fact, that can be very harmful to your health. Mark Hyman, MD talks about a term call skinny fat to describe someone who looks quite skinning, has good weight, but the weight is very disproportionately fat mass.

William Evans, Ph.D. and Irwin Rosenberg, MD in their seminal work, Biomarkers, The 10 Determinants of Aging You Can Control,” coined the term Sarcopenia, to describe a “disease” when someone lacks adequate lean body mass.

Jim Karas, in his book, The Business Plan for the Body”, calls lean mass the net worth. When he talks to business people, who understand financials, he explains weight, muscle and fat this way: weight is your total assets, fat is total debt and lean muscle mass is your equity or net worth. And, if you do nothing, starting with age 30, you lose muscle mass, about 7 lbs. per decade for men and women, and accelerating to one pound per year after menopause for women. So, if you do nothing to counteract, by the age of 60, you will have lost 21 lbs. of muscle mass and replaced with 21 plus your weight gained, since the age of 30, in body fat. Is that 31 lbs. or 41 lbs. or more of additional body fat? Yikes!

You get the idea.

Through all this studying, I found a new way to articulate that object of the game (or obsession) of weight loss, i.e., to simply target and measure percent body fat. And, Joe Dillon provided ideal targets. He feels that for optimal health men should have no more than 15% body fat, while woman should have no more than 22%. Further, he says, that the world class male athletes have body fat percent in the range of 6 to 12% and female athletes in the range of 12% to 18%.

So, instead of looking up on the BMI tables to estimate what ideal body weight should be, a precise method is:

Ideal weight = Body Fat Weight/0.15 for 15% body fat target.

Where, Body Fat Weight = Current Weight * Current % body fat

Current % body fat is measureable by taking seven different measurements with calipers and them plugging into calculator.

With all this knowledge in hand, I started my journey. On May 17, 2013, started with these measurements:

Table 4

Notice that in May 2013, at 23.9% body fat, my ideal weight was150.0 lbs. And, as it generally happens if I were to lose 17.5 lbs to get to 150.0, it will prTable 1obably not all be body fat. So, as more weight I lost lower my ideal body weight would need to be. No wonder this is a sucker’s game (or obsession)!

My goal was to lose body fat, while at the same time gain lean mass!

I changed my diet per Joe Dillon’s recommendations. Basically, took breads and sweets totally out of my meals and all processed foods, added more raw fruits and vegetables, decreased quantity of what I would eat and added about 150 grams of proteins through Whey concentrate and isolate shakes. I kept to my then most recent routine of one fitness/resistance training workout and two to three Bikram Yoga sessions a week.

I progressed along pretty well as you can see in the table below, especially through the end of the year.

Table 5

Every month I was losing about a pound of fat and gaining a pound of lean mass. That seemed very encouraging. After a few months of watching that trend, I even raised my target. I started to ask, “Wouldn’t it be cool to get six-pack at sixty?” I have never had six-pack abs before. Why not? May be 12% body fat would do it.

And, then starting beginning of year, the progress sort of plateaued. In April, I added to my weekly workout routine Joe Dillon’s power walks with weights about three days a week. And, I started to make a very gentle progress again.

About then, I did some blood work and found out that my testosterone was low. Aha, may be that was the reason my progress had stalled! I theorized. Low-T and elevated estradiol wreaks havoc on lean mass for muscle. “Man boobs” are signs of low-T and elevated estradiol in men. Health literature is quite sure about this, e.g., check out, Testosterone for Life: Recharge Your Vitality, Sex Drive, Muscle Mass, and Overall Health by Abraham Morgentaler, MD.

So, I started to work on that through herbal supplements, which is still work-in-progress and another story for another day. Joe Dillon recommends getting that test up-front, which I did not do, so I did not really have any baseline numbers to compare.

About a month ago, I saw an exercise program by Shawn Phillips, who is a world class body sculptor. He called this program, Muscle Mania – a program made up of intense workouts, one muscle a day, every single day for 21 days. His promise was add 4 pound of muscle mass in 21 days.

I talked to our trainer Saleem and my wife Kimberly. Both were encouraging and we went for it. Starting July 16th, for the next 21 mornings, under Saleem’s coaching Kimberly and I worked out. (Actually on day 20, I did not feel well, so we skipped a day and finished the program in 22 days). For 21 days, we bombed one muscle group every morning: chest, biceps/triceps, legs, back, shoulders in whatever order and with whatever exercises the program recommended. Some days, I felt totally exhausted, some days very energized. But we pushed through it and finished the program as intended.

My right shoulder stiffened up a little during one of the bench press exercises. So, I started using the foam roller for rolling. Found it to be incredible beneficial. From then on, I incorporated about 10 minute of rolling as part of the warm up routine. Jeffry S. Life, MD Ph.D. in his book, “The Life Plan: How Any Man Can Achieve Lasting Health, Great Sex, and a Stronger, Leaner Body” recommends rolling for warm-ups and flexibility by working on the fascia.

So, here is the result.

Table 6

As of August 9, if I am measuring, it correctly (Kimberly did the measuring wherever I can’t reach), I have achieved 15.1% body fat! And, as the table shows my weight of 161.0 is the same as ideal weight of 160.9 at 15% body fat.

I did not really do the measurements before and after the 21-day program. But no doubt, I made most of this progress between May and August during the 21-day program. During this period, I lost 4 lbs. of body fat and gained 2 lbs. lean mass.

And, I can see hints of my six-pack! It seems like 12% body fat will surely make my abs visible.

So, there you have it – the story of my chase for 15% body fat and in turn for my ideal weight.

I definitely, feel more energized. This has also brought my cholesterol in line. I quit taking Lipitor last year in May, the same time I started this journey. And, the most recent blood work showed total cholesterol of 145, LDL of 88, HDL 43 and Triglycerides of 69. That is the best it has been even with Lipitor!

To continue the progress, for the near future, Kimberly and I are planning on two days of strength/resistance training, two days of some aerobics including power walks and two days of Bikram Yoga for flexibility, balance and cleansing the internal organs.

What are your thoughts or comments on this whole endeavor?

If any of this helps you or inspires you to take on some health challenge, I would love to hear about it and/or answer any questions you may have.

Post #16 – What is stress really and why is it bad for longevity and health?

22 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by in Aging, Biomarkers for Stress, Life-Span, Optimal Health, Stress

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Stress has become such a common buzz word. We all talk about it. We generally know it is bad for us. It is constantly in the news.

There are exceptions though. Some believe that stress is good, arguing that if you take away the stress you take away the motivation and drive.

But whenever I get into conversation with someone and start to dig a little deeper with questions like, “So, what do you think is stress?” “Why do you think that stress is bad?” Why do you think it is good?” Or, “How do you deal with stress?” The subject becomes very squishy, very quickly.

Even Hans Selye, the person who originally coined the term stress in 1936 in the context of health and spent life-time studying it, at one time threw up his hands and declared, “Everyone knows what stress is, but no one really knows.”

So, let us take the first question first, what is stress, any ways.

Webster’s Dictionary defines Stress as “a state of mental or worry caused by problems in your life, work, etc.”; or, “something that causes strong feelings of worry or anxiety”

According to the American Institute of Stress, another popular definition of stress is, “a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.”

Few useful concepts, while talking about stress are:

Acute Stress: Fight or flight. The body prepares to defend itself. It takes about 90 minutes for the metabolism to return to normal when the response is over.

Chronic Stress: The cost of daily living: bills, kids, jobs…This is the stress we tend to ignore or push down. Left uncontrolled this stress affects our health- our body and our immune system. This is the type of stress that causes wear and tear on our bodies and can impact health and longevity.

Eustress: “Good stress” in daily life that has positive connotations, e.g., marriage, promotion, child birth, winning money, new friends, graduation

Distress: “Bad stress” in daily life that has negative connotations, e.g., divorce, punishment, injury, negative feelings, financial problems, work difficulties.

So, from  the point of view of theses definitions, the stress is really a subjective concept, based on how we perceive a thing or an event. The same event or activity, say a roller coaster ride, could be a eustress (good stress) for one person and distress for another. This is why psychologists or mental health practitioners often get involved in diagnosing and helping cope with chronic stress.

Although stress is a subjective concept, the impact on our bodies is often very objective and real. We have all experienced the rising of hairs on the back of the neck, the sweats, tension in our gut, racing of heart, dilating of pupils, and pumping of blood in our face, arms and legs.

As the following figure shows, stress starting in mind, causes, a chain reaction of neurological, chemical and biological processes. (Figure is taken from a presentation,Why Stress Is A Far More Important Cause Of Coronary Disease Than Cholesterol, by Paul J. Rosch, M.D., F.A.C.P. President, The American Institute of Stress)

Effects of Stress

Physiological effects of most acute stress events subside about 90 minutes after the conclusion of the stress event. Body returns to normal homeostasis or biological equilibrium.

However, it is the repeated acute stress events or chronic stress that are real cause for concern and take toll on our bodies. The results of such chronic stress can be objectively measured from a host of biomarkers that include (from Biomarkers of Chronic Stress, by Laalithya Konduru):

  • Metabolic Biomarkers: Cholesterol, Albumin, Waist-to-Hip Ratio, Glycosylated Hemoglobin
  • Immunological Biomarkers: IL-6, TNF-α, CRP, IGF-1
  • Neuroendocrine Biomarkers: Cortisol, DHEA, Adrenaline, Noradrenaline, Dopamine, Aldosterone
  • Certain Metabolites, chemical figure prints of cellular processes
  • Modifications in Mitochondria
  • Induction in the Brain of DRR1, a tumor suppressor gene

Most of us recognize some of these biomarkers. Others are quite esoteric. In any case, from this list, it does not take a neuroscientist to figure out that chronic stress can mess with a number of things that are key to our health: insulin, cholesterol, hormones, our immune system, can cause inflammation, reduce energy level in the body and impact working of our brain.

Looks like a real important subject to me, if we want to live healthy life free of chronic diseases for an optimal life span.

What do you think? How do you fee about stress?

In a future post, I would like to explore some anti-dotes to chronic stress

Post #7 – Can biomarkers help in the quest for vitality and longevity?

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Aging, Life-Span, Living to 120, Vigor, Vitality

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How do we die and how do we lose vitality questions so far have focused my attention on the hurdles to overcome. Some of these have to do with challenges that shorten or bring end to our lifespan. Other items are “diseases” that can decrease our vitality and vigor.

All of these items are, of course, important. For the moment, however, let me step away from these hurdles and reframe the questions.

Let us say, I don’t really have any disease, but I want to live a lifestyle to achieve the optimal health and lifespan. How can I objectively assess where I am presently and then either maintain or improve from here? In other words, how to pursue living an optimal health and vitality, not merely trying to be disease free?

Study of Biomarkers has been an area of aggressive research and pursuit in vitality and aging since the 1980’s.

Biomarkers (short for biological markers) are biological measures of a biological state. By definition, a biomarker is a characteristic that is objectively measured and evaluated as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes or pharmacological responses to a therapeutic intervention.

In the context of aging, an important focus for biomarkers has been on finding “the clock” that potentially ticks away our lifespan. Discovery of telomere as a potentially genetic clock is one example of a biomarker that won Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California San Francisco a Nobel Prize. More recently, Steve Horvath of UCLA has introduced another important biomarker to measure human aging through epigenetic signatures.

Both of these works have sparked fascinating research into areas of aging and extending lifespans. I would like to explore these topics in future blog posts.

On the other hand, for vitality, William Evans, PhD, and Irwin H. Rosenberg, MD, professors of nutrition and medicine, respectively, at Tufts University introduced a concept of biomarkers back in 1991 through their book Biomarkers (Simon and Schuster, 1991), updated in their book, BIOMARKERS: The 10 Keys to Prolonged Vitality (Simon and Schuster, 1992) and more recently updated in the Tufts University Health and Nutrition Letter.

In these publications, Evans and Rosenberg isolated the following signposts of vitality that can be altered for the better by changes in lifestyle:

  1. Muscle Mass
  2. Strength
  3. Basal Metabolic Rate
  4. Body Fat Percentage
  5. Aerobic Capacity
  6. Blood-sugar Tolerance
  7. Cholesterol/HDL Ratio
  8. Blood Pressure
  9. Bone density
  10. Ability to regulate Internal Temperature

These same 10 biomarkers keep showing up everywhere in preventative care, in strength training, in other training programs, in nutrition/diet plans and so on.

Additionally, other important biomarkers I have seen show up in various medical and scientific literature and studies on health, vitality and longevity are:

  1. Stress
  2. Inflammation
  3. Sleep
  4. Body’s pH
  5. Flexibility
  6. Balance
  7. Musculoskeletal alignment
  8. Physical and mental reaction time

So, the way I see it is this: the goal of achieving optimal health and lifespan should focus on developing lifestyle that optimizes these objectively measureable / observable biomarkers.

Any exercise plan, nutrition plan, lifestyle adaptations, and any medical program for achieving optimal vitality and lifespan thus must be measured against these criteria.

What do you think?

Do you know of other biomarkers that we can impact that are important for attaining optimal vitality and lifespan?

Post #5 – Why do I want to live to 120?

31 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in Aging, Life-Span, Living to 120, Uncategorized

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As I start this conversation of purposely living to 120, I usually get a wide variety of reaction from people. Frankly, the one that took me by surprise the first time I heard, and, to some extent, still does is, “Why would you want to live to 120 even if you could?”

Now, I have to admit, before I started to get into such conversations, I just naively assumed that most people wanted to live as long as possible. After all, just look at the heroic efforts doctors, hospitals and patients put up to extend life just by few years, months and often even days.

When I was discussing this topic with my father-in-law recently, he remarked, “I will be happy to die at 90.” Then he quickly calculated and figured out that that was only 13 years away. So, he immediately added, “Wait a minute. That seems too soon. Scratch that thought. Let us make it 95.”

My mother-in-law on the other hand queried, “I’m wondering if anyone has interviewed those very old people to determine if they would have chosen to live to 120 or more, had there been a choice. Also curious to know why you would make that choice [of living to 120], since the possibility of your peers and loved ones not being with you seems to be very real. Or do you anticipate the “community” being a replacement for others?”

According to a detailed survey Pew Research Center conducted last year, comments of my in-laws are well represented in the mainstream of views across the US. As the following figures show, only 38% of people in the US would want to live to 120 and most Americans expect to live to between 85 to 90 years.

Figure 5-1

Figure 5-2

Only about 4% feel that ideal lifespan is between 100 and 120 and another 4% think it is over 120.

Figure 5-3

A majority of people think that living to 120 will be a bad thing for society.

Figure 5-4

A surprising result survey researchers noted is that most of these measures are fairly constant across various religions, gender, education or political party affiliations in America.

In my conversations, I have found that three reasons come up most often when people mull over if they personally want to live to 120:

  1. What would be the condition of their personal health? Will it be joyful living or a painful living?
  2. Will they have financial means to sustain themselves? Being broke is not much fun.
  3. Will their peers and loved ones be around? If not, will it be worth living?

As for myself personally, I feel that there are two major objectives of life: Growth and Contribution.

Thus my rationale for wanting to live to 120 is to simply maximize the time I have available to grow and contribute. Additionally, purposely living to 120, learning some things along the way, sharing with others as I learn, seem to fit in with my personal growth and contribution model of life.

In this sort of context, I see the three common objections cited above, as challenges to overcome as I pursue the goal of purposely living to 120. Moreover, not only I want to live to 120, but I wish to do it healthfully, purposefully and joyfully.

Looking at it another way, I feel, if it is okay to expect to get to 90 healthfully, purposefully and joyfully, why not to 120?

And, of course, as my mother-in-laws suspected, a key purpose for me to write this blog and engage in conversations with family, friends, loved ones is to motivate them and along the way find others who would want to share this journey together.

How do you feel about living to 120?

What do you think it would take to live to 120 healthfully, purposefully, and joyfully?

Please leave comments to this post. I and others following this blog would love to hear your perspective!

Post #4 – Is it even possible to live to 120? – Part II

23 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Dying, Life-Span, Living to 120

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In the last post on this topic, I concluded that

“As an optimist, when I look at this data, it looks very encouraging to me. First, it is definitely viable to live to 120. It has already been done! Like the four-minute mile, someone has already shown the way.

Second, an increasing number of people are approaching that age with an increasing rate. So, at this rate, I expect by the time my time arrives, dying at 120 will be as routine as dying at 100 today! It might not be very common, but it might not be that rare.”

While I make this informal and what seems like a rather obvious deduction from the data, some folks disagree.

James F. Fries and Lawrence M. Crapo in their book on Vitality and Aging make a compelling argument: while life expectancy has been increasing over the last many decades life-span has been fixed (for all practical purposes – increasing only by 0.1 year per century).

So, intuitively, the chart below may be how one would be tempted to guess the shape of life expectancy curves.

Figure 1
However, they argue, that it is the chart below that corresponds to the reality.

Figure 2

Thus according to their conclusion, while on an average humans are living longer and longer, we are still stuck at dying by the age of 100.

Presenting the data from another perspective in the chart below, as we graph number of deaths against age of death, we observe a normal or Gaussian distribution around certain age at which number of deaths peak. As the life expectancy keeps increasing the curve would look like the IDEAL curve below.

Figure 3

And, as that happens, graph of percent survial rate against age will become “rectanguar” as shown below.

Figure 4

This implies that as we conquer chronic diseases, we will live a healthy long life after which we will succumb very quickly to the forces of nature, within the bounds of a very few years. And, that will define an ideal “natural” death. As we hit certain time limit, all of the cells in the body may burst together like soap bubbles.

Fries and Crapo wrote their book in 1981. So I thought, with all the new research in the last 30+ years, maybe they have changed their mind.

In a more recent review article in the Journal of Aging Research, Compression of Morbidity 1980–2011: A Focused Review of Paradigms and Progress, James F. Fries, Bonnie Bruce, and Eliza Chakravarty reassert the same conclusion and buttress it with more recent studies.

I really like most everything else they assert, derive or conclude in that book- which I would like to talk about in a different post. However, I am personally not sold on this idea of fixed life-span.

It makes me quite uncomfortable. Yeah, you guessed it. After all, my goal is to purposely live to 120!

What do you think?

Have you seen any data, studies or analysis that contradicts this theory about fixed life-span?

Post #3 – Is it even possible to live to 120?

16 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Dying, Life-Span, Living to 120

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When I bring it up to friends and family members that I am planning to live to 120 years, the kinds of questions and/or comments I get are:

“Wow, that is pretty gutsy to think that you can live to 120.”

“Why do you want to live that long?”

“I would probably not be around past 85.”

“I would not want to be around that long. It would be no fun. All
my contemporaries would all be gone.”

“My money won’t last that long.”

“What is the longest any one has lived?”

“How many people have lived over 100, 110, or 115?”

As I started wondering about these, I thought maybe I would start from the bottom of the list. Those questions certainly look easier.

So, what is the recent record of longevity for humans?

Wikipedia has some real good pages summarizing this information, for example, you can start with Oldest People and  Super Centenarian.

1500 supercentenarians (those over 110) have been documented in history. There are 30 verified over 115 year olds.

The oldest ever lived was Jeanne Calment from France who died on 4 August 1997 at the age of 122 years, 164 days. Sarah Knauss from the United States came closest to 120; she died on 30 December 1999 at the age of 119 years and 97 days. Two died at 117 years, and five at 116 years.

The oldest currently living is Misao Okawa in Japan at the age of 116 years and 11 days. She is the 10th oldest so far.

In 2012, the UN estimated there to be 316,600 centenarians (over 100) living worldwide. The US has the highest number (53,364 per the 2010 Centenarian Special Report ). Per the report:

“In the period from 1980 to 2010, the centenarian population experienced a larger percentage increase than did the total population. The number of centenarians increased from 32,194 to 53,364, resulting in a 65.8% increase, while the total population increased 36.3 percent. Consequently, the centenarian population increased from 1.42 per 10,000 in 1980 to 1.73 per 10,000 in 2010.”

As an optimist, when I look at this data, it looks very encouraging to me. First, it is definitely viable to live to 120. It has already been done! Like the four-minute mile, someone has already shown the way.

Second, an increasing number of people are approaching that age with an increasing rate. So, at this rate, by the time my time arrives, dying at 120 will be as routine as dying at 100 today! It might not be very common, but it might not be that rare.

What do you think? How do you see these statistics?