Five Great Longevity Quotes

Quotes:
Health and Nutrition
Longevity
Doctors and Medicine

"Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing."
~Redd Foxx






"If I'd known I was going to live so long, I'd have taken better care of myself."
~Leon Eldred

I enjoy the ironic paradox of this one, since living longer is something one instinctively associates with taking care of oneself whereas this highlights that it's possible to live a long time but not be as well as one would like. Interestingly, I can’t find out who this guy is. His quote is everywhere, but Wikipedia brings up nothing and Google is not much more help. Anyone know?


"In order to change we must be sick and tired of being sick and tired."
~Author Unknown


"Health is merely the slowest way someone can die."
~Author Unknown


"When it comes to eating right and exercising, there is no I'll start tomorrow. Tomorrow is disease."
~V.L. Allineare

I can't find out who this guy is either - anyone know?

Quotes:
Health and Nutrition
Longevity
Doctors and Medicine... Read more

Food Truth Leaks into Mainstream Media

This is happening slowly but surely.

This Sunday Times article will surely convince a wider audience of the validity of theories of nutrition hitherto dismissed as 'fad'. My only objection to this article would be that by using the word 'diet' in the title and by showing a picture of a tape measure, Appleyard perpetuates the belief that controlling body composition is something necessarily done at intervals. Devany and others advocate a lifestyle, not a diet, and until this point is understood people will continue to view nutrition and exercise as something to be applied when their 'normal' lifestyle has made it necessary.

See Also:
You’re on that Funny Diet, Right?
... Read more

The Professor Diet Part Three: No Shortcuts any Time Soon!

The Series:
The Professor Diet - Eat as much Junk as you like
The Professor Diet Part Two: Healthy Junk Food
The Professor Diet Part Three: No Shortcuts any Time Soon!

In my post, The Professor Diet Part 2: Healthy Junk Food I asked whether in the future we would be able to eat one food and have it taste like another. For example, we might eat what looks like a slice of chocolate cake from the Nintendo range of foods but is actually a healthy meal. By wearing the Wii ‘sense’ headset at the same time, we would fool our brains into thinking the healthy meal tasted like chocolate cake.

Something I failed to consider in that discussion was that when we eat food, the body does more than tell us how it tastes. Ironically, this point is clear from the article on obesity and artificial sweeteners I cited in my original The Professor Diet: Eat as Much Junk as you Like post. The article suggests that the taste of sweetness causes ‘digestive reflexes [to] gear up for that intake.’

So although I do still think this is an area that will be explored by science soon, it will not necessarily herald the new age in which the meddling of scientists with our food and taste does not have unintended consequences. Perhaps eventually they will become such skilled manipulators of the brain and food that we will be able to enjoy virtual junk food without any adverse affects on our bodies – but I cannot see that being anytime soon. For that to happen they would need to understand nutrition first, and as Natural Messiah points out here, there is some way to go on that score.

Thanks to Jimmy Moore from Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb for reminding me that what we taste affects our bodies too!

The Series:
The Professor Diet - Eat as much Junk as you like
The Professor Diet Part Two: Healthy Junk Food
The Professor Diet Part Three: No Shortcuts any Time Soon!... Read more

Five Great Health and Nutrition Quotes

Quotes:
Health and Nutrition
Longevity
Doctors and Medicine

"I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward." ~John Mortimer I like this one because although witty, it illustrates one misconception around health. Mortimer assumes that being healthy means living longer whilst incapacitated when in fact remaining healthy may be one of the best ways to avoid spending any time at all in a geriatric ward.

	"Just because you're not sick doesn't mean you're healthy." ~Author Unknown
	"Health is so necessary to all the duties, as well as pleasures of life, that the crime of squandering it is equal to folly." ~Samuel Johnson
	"Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws." ~Charles Simmons
	"Life is not merely to be alive, but to be well." ~Marcus Valerius Martial

If you have any favourites of your own you'd like to share, go ahead and leave a comment...

Quotes:
Health and Nutrition
Longevity
Doctors and Medicine... Read more

The Professor Diet Part Two: Healthy Junk Food

The Series:
The Professor Diet - Eat as much Junk as you like
The Professor Diet Part Two: Healthy Junk Food
The Professor Diet Part Three: No Shortcuts any Time Soon!

Imagine this: you eat a piece of chocolate cake. It looks like chocolate cake, tastes like chocolate cake and has the texture of chocolate cake. Yet when you have finished eating it, you are not left with that wired, sugar-loaded feeling, and more to the point, do not experience the sugar low 30 minutes later.

The reason these expected feelings did not transpire is that it was not chocolate cake – at least not as we currently understand it. For reasons I will come onto, what you have just eaten was nutritionally equivalent to a steak of grass-fed beef, servings of carrot, broccoli and zucchini, and a handful of wild-growing berries and nuts.

What led me to consider this scenario was this article about research being conducted into the mechanisms governing our sense of taste. Whilst I have no specific knowledge in the area, it seems likely that there are billions of research dollars being pumped into this sort of thing, given the potential for commercial applications.

In The Professor Diet Part 1, I decry the fact that we are taught by the news flowing out of research labs to look to science for answers to problems that a healthy diet would solve. Yet when I follow this research to its logical conclusion – the scenario I describe above – I find myself wondering whether things are as clear-cut.

What I mean is this: if at some point, scientists are genuinely able to create the cake described above, and if it genuinely has precisely the same impact on our bodies as the steak, vegetables, berries and nuts, would any of us still want to eat healthy food? Would the doctrine of self-discipline that is so important to me and many others lose all its meaning? If we could choose what we thought we were eating but ensure that what our bodies were getting was, let’s say, a hunter gatherer diet, then getting the right nutrition would be too easy.

“Can I get a slice of chocolate cake?”

“Sure - Paleo, Zone, Atkins or regular, sir?”

How might the scientists achieve this? What follows is educated speculation. I stress again that I have no specific knowledge in the area – if any of you have such expertise, please comment. Also, for the purposes simplifying the discussion I talk about food as if it were made up of a homogenous mass of the same molecule.

One possibility, and the one we are most familiar with today, is trying to find molecules that taste like one thing but are in fact another – just as we have done with artificial sweeteners. Yet the problems with this approach became evident soon after well-intentioned but deeply misguided regulatory bodies allowed them to be included in our foods.

Until now we have been less interested in what a molecule does once it has passed the taste test. Imposter molecules like Aspartame have successfully made things taste sweet, but then had other, undesirable effects. Finding a molecule that tastes like one thing but digests like another strikes me as an approach doomed to failure. After all, our bodies are used to dealing with molecules that occur naturally in food – so unless the molecule that is digesting really is the naturally occurring one, we are back in the Aspartame situation where there are potential side effects.

Yet maybe there is a way in which the molecule of real food could be cloaked by another molecule, only to be released by the digestion process. The cloaking molecule has one taste, but when digestion begins it releases the molecule of genuine food. Of course for this to work, the cloaking molecule would have to be a harmless by-product. Not only that, but by changing the digestion process it’s highly likely that however harmless the by-product of de-cloaking, something will be different. You can’t fool millions of years of evolution that easily.

If there is a way this can be achieved, I think it is by going straight to the brain. We are already close to commercially available game controllers that use brain signals (Brain control headset for gamers); and Sony clearly thinks there might be a future in sending signals the other way so that our senses can be controlled externally (Sony patent takes first step towards real-life Matrix.) This is another area into which billions of research dollars must be being poured. Might the two areas of well-funded research meet?

If we can fool the brain into thinking the food has the right taste and texture then all we have to do now is make it look like the food we like – much easier. In 10 years, when the Wii comes with a standard headset for controlling games with your mind and receiving feedback from the game, could there be a ‘Wii Taste’ game which has an accompanying range of Nintendo foods?

So back to my original question – if this happens in our lifetime, what does it mean for us? Should we be glad that we can now eat junk but still have a healthy diet? Personally I get a lot of pleasure out of exercising the kind of self-control that is necessary to eat a completely healthy diet – would there be a hole in my life? Perhaps I would find other outlets for this need.

And what about our palettes? These would still face ruination with the constant barrage of junk taste, regardless of the nutritional value behind it. Yet would this matter if we are free to eat junk all the time anyway? We might no longer need a sensitive palette.

I would be interested in your thoughts on this.

The Series:
The Professor Diet - Eat as much Junk as you like
The Professor Diet Part Two: Healthy Junk Food
The Professor Diet Part Three: No Shortcuts any Time Soon!... Read more

The Professor Diet - Eat as much Junk as you like

The Series:
The Professor Diet - Eat as much Junk as you like
The Professor Diet Part Two: Healthy Junk Food
The Professor Diet Part Three: No Shortcuts any Time Soon!

Whenever I hear about some new drug or technique to tackle obesity or protect us from diet-related disease I always think of the professor from Futurama. For non-Futurama fans: the professor typically begins “Good news everybody!” before announcing some incredibly sophisticated, yet crazily inappropriate invention which has either fundamentally missed some basic point or is ludicrously over-engineered.

In a recent post, You’re on that Funny Diet, Right?, I mentioned society’s apparent belief that we are entitled to derive pleasure from everything we do and how because of this, many people don’t get the idea of permanently giving up foods they like.

Meanwhile, scientists work hard to find professor-like solutions to what they see as the problem. “Good news everybody! Using my digesta-block-a-tron I can stop fat from being metabolised. I just install this dial in your chest and you can choose how much fat from a meal gets digested!”

The basic point apparently being missed – the elephant in the room, if you like – is that if we all stopped eating junk, we would start enjoying the basic food we currently think we are not able to enjoy and the medical problems we are spending billions trying to resolve would begin to diminish in the population.Don’t get me wrong, I accept the near-impossibility of this - I still daydream about cakes thanks to my latent sugar addiction. We have been led by the nose into a mire of confused cravings and unclear directives from organisations with misguided and dubious agendas.

Yet it's by no means clear the scientists' intentions are quite so innocent. A cynic would say that their ‘solutions’ are not driven by the desire to uphold our right to enjoy our food, but by the desire for money - for them, their employers, or both. A cynic would say they are not missing the point at all – they simply don’t care.

The rest of us are missing the point precisely because of the scientists and what they tell us:

Well hey, the scientists have found the problem - we just to turn off those genes! (The obesity gene) ...or maybe we all just need to take some drugs to prevent us getting heart disease! (Statins for kids!) ...and it's not that we shouldn't eat so much sweet food - we were just sweetening it the wrong way! (except that oops, this may not work after all: Artificial sweeteners and obesity) ...and it's not that we should eat less starchy food - we just have to remember to block its digestion! (Blocking starch digestion)

The list is potentially long, so I will stop here. Feel free to add your own.

As the diagram shows, this is a vicious cycle. How to we get out of it? This is a question for a future post.

The Series:
The Professor Diet - Eat as much Junk as you like
The Professor Diet Part Two: Healthy Junk Food
The Professor Diet Part Three: No Shortcuts any Time Soon!
... Read more

Cone Theory and the Mystery Doctor

Barry Austin - heroicI once got talking to a doctor on a train about health, nutrition and longevity and was fascinated to learn about something called ‘Cone Theory.’ Apparently, at any given time, a person’s physiology can be defined according to its current level of resource and the level to which the resource must drop for him or her to die. As we age, the current resource level slowly drops and the death threshold slowly rises, creating a graph of two slowly converging lines. When the lines join and you reach the tip of the cone, it’s curtains. Most people, he said, were not aware of the size of their gap at any given time.

Recently, after several years, I remembered the conversation and decided to look into Cone Theory for myself; but I was surprised to find that Google returned no hits for anything meaningful. If such a theory officially exists, it’s certainly not called ‘Cone Theory’. Maybe I just got the name wrong – or perhaps the man was not a doctor but a pathological liar. We are unlikely to find out unless he happens to read this blog and is gripped with a desire to come clean.

Thinking about it now it just seems like another way of saying that when you get unhealthy you die and that susceptibility for an individual varies with time and also varies between individuals. In other words, common sense.

Yet it got me thinking about something else that has bugged me for years – the fact that some people appear to have a totally different discomfort threshold from me.

Some years back my Dad had a friend he cycled with. His friend showed up each Saturday without fail, despite having invariably drunk half a litre of scotch the night before – and the night before that. In fact this guy was Jack Daniels’ best customer. Yet he was able to keep up with, and often out-perform my Dad, a pretty fit guy. We were astounded by his ability to function happily in this way in spite of his drinking habits.

Similarly, I have friends who in years gone by were able to drink for most of the night, get perhaps 3 hours sleep, go to a football match and then continue to drink for the rest of the day, perhaps rolling into bed in the early hours of the following morning. I’m pretty sure I could have done the same thing if you’d offered me enough money, but I would have hated it – my body would have been screaming at me in all kinds of ways, urging me to go home to bed. My friends were offered no such incentive and they loved every minute.

I can think of a few reasons for this apparent disparity.

My friends may simply have been built of sturdier stuff. There is a documentary that has aired on UK TV called ‘Inside Britain’s Fattest Man’, about a guy called Barry Austin. When the program was made, Barry had been eating and drinking to heroic excess for several years and achieved a weight of around 50 stone. The narrator asserts (with no real evidence I should say) that Barry was able to do this and remain in apparent good health because he had incredibly well lubricated intestines and an uncommonly strong liver. Needless to say, it was mentioned that even Barry’s top drawer organs would begin to feel the strain if he continued with his lifestyle. Clearly in Barry’s case, one of the reasons he was not currently feeling the strain was that he had a better body.

On the other hand, it could equally be that my friends were no sturdier, but simply had a different attitude to discomfort. As children they may have learned to associate the body’s signals about wear and tear with opportunities for enjoyment. The whole framework of their perception could have been skewed towards decreased sensitivity – or conversely mine towards increased sensitivity for some other reason.

Finally, I wonder whether as well as varying genetically in our robustness, we also vary in the strength of the signals our bodies send to our brains? Perhaps my friends were simply getting weaker signals from their bodies and therefore genuinely didn’t feel as bad as me even though they were in the same shape.

A word you hear a lot in this context is “constitution.” I once heard Rod Stewart being interviewed about his partying experiences with Elton John. On one occasion, says Rod, when Elton was at the peak of this cocaine use, they stayed up all night, drinking and doing, as Rod calls it ‘How’s your father’. Abruptly, at 8am Elton stood up and announced they would go and watch Watford play football. I can’t find the interview on YouTube, but I recall the phrase “He’s got an incredible constitution.”

The word ‘constitution’ seems to encapsulate the three explanations perfectly. However, my experience is people tend to assume it’s the first one that applies – in other words, they feel okay, therefore they are.

In my wanderings around the blogosphere I often call in on Arthur Devany’s blog. He likes to talk about the difference between the most you can do and the least you can do, saying that “When the two are equal, you are dead.” There is clearly resonance with the phantom Cone Theory here, and Devany’s arguments for this and other theories of longevity are compellingly made.

So in spite of the fact that I have apparently been hoodwinked by a pretend doctor with a pretend theory (I have been confidently telling people about Cone Theory for years) I find myself warming to its theme.

For me, the main takeaway is that no one can really be sure whether they are getting the full story from their brain. Rather like the president or prime minister, they only have their advisors’ word for how things are looking outside the office. Do I have a congenitally weak body and will therefore hit the peak of my cone at the same time as my hard-drinking friends in spite of all those nights I went home?

Or am I blessed with a set of uncommonly honest advisors, whose candour will ultimately add years to my life? Another roll of the dice, I guess.

See Also:
When it comes to Nutrition, the Glass is Half Empty
Roll the Dice
... Read more

When it comes to Nutrition, the Glass is Half Empty

Being the sanctimonious type, I find my friends volunteering information about their diet without prompting. It comes with the territory. You only have to harangue someone about their diet a couple of times and are forever thereafter assumed to be interested in what healthy food they have been eating.

“I had some broccoli with my dinner on Wednesday and a salad yesterday for lunch,” was the statement proudly and cheerfully sent my way recently, apropos of nothing. When I hear this sort of thing, depending on my mood at the time, I either offer congratulations and change the subject or tell them a version of what follows.

Nutrition does not work like a distance learning qualification or a bank account, where you can contribute positively when it suits, make progress each time you do and yet during the periods you are not contributing see no erosion in value.

If you eat nothing but lard, your health will deteriorate to the point where you eventually die. Your bank account will be closed with a zero balance - even if you had built it up to a five figure sum with daily broccoli and salad in the preceding 30 years.

It is primarily the lack of vitamins and minerals that lead to the decline in health. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the absence of vitamins and minerals in your diet for several meals in succession will also affect your health, albeit that it may be imperceptible. It could be the difference between catching a cold and not catching a cold – not that you will never know for sure. Over several years, the effect will no longer be imperceptible, but again, you won’t know for sure what caused what.

What else was my friend eating during the 48 hour period her ‘story’ spanned? I dread to think. Even if the rest of her diet was not composed of junk, one has to conclude that it also did not include fruit or vegetables of any kind, or she would have included them in her story.

The fact is that where nutrition is concerned, the glass is always half empty. Long term, optimism will not serve you well.

See Also:
Cone Theory and the Mystery Doctor
Roll the Dice
... Read more

Why (Refined) Sugar is Bad: Some References

In my post We're all Junkies I ask the reader to go to Google and find the evidence for why sugar is bad.

I did some digging myself this morning, and found a couple of sites which appear to be reliable sources.

On Sugar Addiction: Society for Neuroscience [link removed] - this seems to be an organisation with a good reputation. Update, 3rd Oct 2010: this link was removed because it no longer works - however, this article summarises the content of the paper that was published in 2003.

On the damage sugar does: Mercola.com - whilst Dr Mercola is selling products, the references he gives in this article are from respected medical journals. Note that one or two of the articles he cites refer to the consumption of high concentrations of simple sugars, not specifically refined sugar.

See Also:
We’re all Junkies
Cigarettes, Sugar and our Innate Short-Termism
The Worst Sugar Pushers of all - Health Food Stores
... Read more

Role the Dice

So what am I afraid of? In a word, regret.

I picture myself at the age of 60, having recently learned I have a condition that will see my quality of life deteriorate too quickly for me to come to terms with my death or its implications for those around me. I have never lost someone close to me or had to witness the deterioration of a loved-one’s health - but I know people who have and know that one day, I will too. Despite this, at times I can quite vividly imagine how I might feel if it were me. I envision a strange mix of vertigo and claustrophobia as I see my timeline stretching backwards into infinity, yet in front concertinaed into a few months. I imagine panic and regret tightening my chest for weeks as I reflect on the choices I made that may have led to my condition, whilst trying to focus and stay chipper for others.

Or not. Maybe I’d just take it all in my stride and shrug philosophically with the knowledge that I’d had a good innings. The trouble is, right now I don’t know which it would be. Do you?

Just to hammer home this point, indulge me in an analogy. I took part in a running event recently. The event was due to start at midday, so being someone who suffers badly from stitches, I was careful to avoid eating a large breakfast and resolved to have lunch after the race, not before. Unfortunately for me, I had the opportunity at 11am to eat a bowl of fresh fruit with lashings of coconut cream. Here are the rationales I employed:

If I get a stitch I’ll just tolerate the pain and take it easy until it passes

I don’t care too much about this race anyway so what the hell

So I ate the fruit and the coconut cream, then proceeded to drink the remainder if the tin of cream on the basis that I’d already messed the whole deal up.

During the race, I did indeed develop a stitch, but my rationales broke down in two ways. First, I discovered that I did care about the race after all, something that I must surely have known deep down, being the competitive creature I am. Second, the pain of the stitch was much worse than I expected and was made doubly bad by my determination not to let it ruin my performance.

So, for the final 10 minutes of the race I found myself deeply regretting the pre-race binge and cursing my lack of discipline and foresight.

My point is this: you don’t know how you are going to feel.

In my story, the stakes were low. In life, they are not.

The impression I have is that as a general rule, the older you get, the more ready for death you become. If this is true there may be many reasons for it, but I would offer two here. First, you have had longer to understand death and contemplate the meaning of life. You will have watched more people die and spoken to more people who are dying. Second, you have seen more of life and, depending on your disposition, perhaps grown weary of what it has to offer.

I have also noticed that with increasing age comes increasing bitterness. An unfair stereotype? Perhaps – but stereotypes are often rooted in trends, and trends can legitimately form the basis for decisions. The classicists amongst you will recognise this line from Oedipus the King, by Sophocles.

Alas, alas, what misery to be wise when wisdom profits nothing!

I am only 36, but already I am aware of the profoundly shifting sands of my own perception of the world. Roughly every 5 years for the last 15 I have looked back to my self of 5 years before and thought “Shit, I really knew nothing about the world then.” I can only assume that this incremental wisdom continues in many people throughout their lives.

I would not be saying anything original if I pointed out that the decline of our powers in conjunction with the rise of our wisdom is one of the tragedies of the human condition and that this is one of the key drivers for age-related bitterness.

To get to the point, what I want is this:

- to live long enough to come to terms with dying
- to have the power to act on my wisdom while I am alive

How can I make sure this happens? The short answer is, I cannot. I have to roll the dice like everyone else; but I do get to choose the dice - and so do you.

See Also:
When it comes to Nutrition, the Glass is Half Empty
Cone Theory and the Mystery Doctor
... Read more