INTRODUCTION
Never too Late to Seek Better Health, Longevity & A Vibrant Libido
If you’re seeking better health, longevity, abundant cellular energy and a vibrant libido, it’s never too late. Regardless of your age, medical history or circumstances you can learn better strategies for reducing the effect of damaging hormones and environmental toxins. Premature aging, chronic disease and early death can be caused by hormones and toxins triggering the release of free radicals. These free radicals cause oxidative stress and low-grade chronic inflammation, destroying healthy cells, genes, lipids (fats) proteins and cell membranes.
Your body overproduces free radicals when it doesn’t have enough antioxidants and phytonutrients. A large amount of free radicals in your body causes oxidative stress and low-grade chronic inflammation – which are the underlying causes of chronic diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, obesity, and loss of energy, libido and premature aging. The best defense against this insult to your body are the powerful antioxidants and phytonutrients found in organically grown foods from soil unpolluted by pesticides, industrial waste, and are allowed to ripen naturally.
Unfortunately, food production in Westernized industrial societies is deficient in nutrients because our soils are depleted of many of the trace minerals and other compounds essential for plant growth. At the same time, the soil may be laden with poisonous chemicals like commercial fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides, which are absorbed by the growing plants. When you eat the plant, the environmental poisons enter your body and cause the production of damaging free radicals and oxidative stress. To make matters worse, we often overcook vegetables, removing many of their nutrients. Even the fruits available in many supermarkets may not provide a benefit if they are excessively sweet and low in essential nutrients. Although many people think they eat properly, they may not be getting the selection and quality of antioxidants and phytonutrients. The lack of essential nutrients may be one reason so many chronic degenerative diseases exist today, even among people trying to eat a healthy diet.
Our busy lifestyles often do not permit many of us the opportunity to eat well-balanced healthy meals at home. Instead, we eat frequently highly processed foods served in restaurants or convenient fast foods heated and served. These foods are more likely to be contaminated with chemical toxins like trans fats and high fructose corn syrup poisonous to healthy cells. Overall, the average food supply today has inferior quality when compared to foods produced twenty to thirty years ago. There is a direct correlation between the prevalence of chronic degenerative diseases, accelerating aging, and the poor quality of the food supply in our society today. Toxins and the lack of nutrients in food also explain why adult-onset diseases like type 2 diabetes are seen in large number in young children.
How Can You Protect your Healthy Cells and DNA?
Are you getting five or more daily servings of the highest quality vegetables and fruits? If you’re not. Why not? The U.S. National Research Council recommends that we eat at least five to nine servings (5 to 9 cups) of vegetables and fruits per day to obtain enough antioxidants and phytonutrients for cellular protection against damaging free radicals and oxidative stress. Recently, these recommendations have been updated to 5 to 13 servings (5 to 13 cups raw or 2 ½ to 6 ½ cups cooked) of vegetables and fruits daily. In spite of these recommendations, research reveals that less than 10% of the U.S. population consumes five servings of vegetables and fruits per day. Research also indicates that when we do eat vegetables and fruits, they are varieties lacking sufficient antioxidants, such as corn, iceberg lettuce, peas, bananas, oranges, apples, grapes, and processed vegetable foods such as French fries, ketchup, and pizza sauce.
Nutritionists recommend we get about 5000 ORAC units per day from vegetables and fruits to have adequate antioxidant protection. The term ORAC is an acronym for Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity, which is a test tube analysis measuring the total antioxidant activity of foods and other chemical substances. However, most people get only approximately 1500 units per day, resulting in a deficit of about 3500 units per day.
Because of the large amounts of toxic environmental products we ingest from food, water or air, and because we have a stressful and sedentary lifestyle, it’s necessary to supplement your diet with high quality nutritional supplements with powerful anti-inflammatory properties: variety of herbs and spices like cloves, oregano, tumeric, lemon grass and cinnamon or juice enriched with acai berry or equivalent. Simply relying on traditional fruits and vegetables may not be enough to prevent free radicals from oxidizing sensitive biological molecules, particularly, cholesterol, DNA and cell membranes. Making sure you have enough appropriate antioxidants effectively inhibiting the most dangerous free radicals will reduce oxidative stress – slowing the aging process and preventing chronic disease, low libido and low energy.
What are the Implications of Remaining Passive?
Can you imagine your life ten or twenty years from now if you’re carrying excess abdominal fat with a bulging waistline? Or living a sedentary lifestyle? Or dealing with chronic stress each day? What will be your quality of life? Imagine the outcome if you ignore a problem you may have at the present time.
Unfortunately, many Americans find themselves in a dilemma by choosing a poor diet, physical inactivity and lifestyle causing chronic stress. While the diet and activity level may meet current needs, it will have long-term negative consequences for health and well being. The average American is living longer today than in prior generations, but the quality of health is poorer. Approximately, one in three American adults is overweight or obese, particularly in the abdominal area. Carrying toxic abdominal fat is like a loaded gun waiting to explode. It contributes to major diseases like diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer, which may be silent for decades while the damage to healthy cells and vital organs takes place without any symptoms. These diseases also result in premature aging and premature death, as well as the loss of energy and libido.
When people become ill with a chronic disease, they usually rely only on medications for treatment, and don’t treat the root cause. Treating a chronic disease only with medication is equivalent to applying a bandage on a wound needing more extensive and specific treatment to heal successfully. You should realize that medications may mask the underlying cause and progression of disease, and give you the false hope that your health is not in danger. On the other hand, addressing the root cause of disease can help minimize complications you may encounter later in life.
The extremely high rate of insulin resistance is another reason to be proactive with disease prevention through diet, exercise and stress control. Approximately 100 million American adults have insulin resistance, a condition programming your body to develop chronic disease a decade or more in the future. Many apparently healthy people may have insulin resistance without knowing it, and you could be one of them. Almost all people with type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and including people who are obese in the abdominal area have insulin resistance.
Insulin resistance predisposes you to develop chronic diseases like Alzheimer's disease in the future by triggering destructive oxidative stress and low-grade silent inflammation. If you understand the damage insulin resistance causes to your body, you have an opportunity to reduce the chance you will get diabetes or other chronic disease like Alzheimer's even if it runs in your family. All you have to do is reduce the toxic free radicals and inflammation damaging your body by eating healthy foods rich in antioxidants and phytonutrients, get regular physical activity, and keep your stress level to a minimum. If you already have a chronic disease like diabetes, you can still reduce your risk of complications such as stroke, heart attack, or damage to your nerves, eyes, and kidneys.
Physical Inactivity Accelerates Aging & DNA Shortening
Chronic physical inactivity increases telomere shrinkage and loss of DNA function leading to premature aging, accelerated deterioration of tissues, low energy production, and decrease libido. The telomere is the end of the chromosome preventing the chromosomes in the cell from accidentally becoming attached to each other. When you are physically inactive, your body produces more damaging free radicals and oxidative stress triggering chronic inflammation. Physical inactivity increases your health risk for major chronic degenerative diseases like diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, cancer, and premature wrinkling and aging. And when you get sick as an older person, it can affect the quality of your life more so than as a younger person. Even if you live longer, as the average American today is expected to, the quality of your life will be poorer and challenging if you’ve failed to take care of yourself with enough physical activity. Becoming physically active after you’ve been sedentary for a long time can be a major challenge, but you can succeed by learning to tailor your food consumption to your level of physical activity on a meal-to-meal basis. Increasing your physical activity should be done gradually, one day at a time, until it becomes part of your lifestyle.
Stress Accelerates Aging & DNA Shortening
Chronic stress also damages your healthy cells and their components including DNA, the blueprint of life. Stress is also a major factor producing telomere shrinkage. It can produce rapid aging, wrinkling, deterioration of skin and internal tissues, and shorter lifespan. Stress can also rob you of energy, happiness, and libido. Most people who are apparently healthy can become severely sick and unhappy because they fail to control the stress in their daily lives. Chronic stress raises the levels of the cortisol hormone, which weakens your immune system making you more vulnerable to disease that may adversely affect the quality of your life. Simple strategies like thinking positively, relaxing, and getting adequate rest and sleep could save your life.
What if We Live Longer? Are We Better Off?
We are living longer than ever in history, yet the quality of our health is substantially lower than previous generations. Instead of enjoying our fruit of labor in our retirement years, we’re spending a considerable amount of our wealth trying to hold on to health. Most people are not educated or prepared to take care of their health, especially as they get older.
As these generations of Americans live longer than their ancestors, the question arises if it is really worth living at the expense of using up all your financial resources. More and more people are faced with the agonizing thought of spending their life saving to buy some little time, perhaps, few months of life at best. Some of the treatments and therapies, such as those designed for people with cancer and heart disease are incredibly expensive, and only the wealthy can afford them in most cases.
The healthcare cost for patients with heart disease or advanced cancer treatment can be astronomical. The trouble with most of these treatments is that the average patient gains only several more months with a poor or undesirable quality of life. For example, a late-stage colon cancer drug may cost up to $50,000 a year, and it is proven to extend average life by only up to five months.
Likewise, the mechanical heart pump can cost up to $250,000 (insurance may only cover 2/3 of this)—but the average patient in the best medical facility so far has lived less than nine more months with the device. While many patients may gain a few more months of life, they often spend most of that time in the hospital with a drug resistant infection or some complications from the treatment itself.
Nonetheless, with proper education, you can change that by learning the best strategies for fighting chronic disease, premature aging, and the loss of vital energy, and libido. Our hope is that what you will learn in this book will change your whole outlook to health and longevity, and will give you a new perspective and approach to live and enjoy abundant health and improved quality of life and vitality over the long-term no matter what your current circumstances are.
Coming Soon:
Excerpted from “New Anti-Aging & Longevity: Better Health, Longevity, Vibrant Energy & Libido”. Billy C. Johnson MD, Ph.D., Kurt Jones MD, FACOG, & Peter Cherici
March, 2009
