Is aging a disease?
Current understanding is that 25% of lifespan is determined by heredity (genetics) and 75% is determined by the environment (epigenetics). By environment we mean what nutrients you consume, how you exercise, sleep, exposure to toxins, etc.
Minutes will slip by, days will pass on the calendar, but is chronological age an excuse for poor health and not enjoying your life?
Misinformation seems to be convincing people that they don’t want to live a long life because they think their elder years will be full of poor health and disability.
Personally I think much of our aging is to blame on being lazy and on corporate greed. We love convenience so corporations happily sell us unhealthy things and encourage us to live an unhealthy life. Worse yet is Industrial Medicine which has fine tuned profiting off our being unhealthy.
So enough philosophy…. What can you do to maintain health and enjoy a longer life? I’ll go into some more advanced concepts in other articles, but for now let’s touch on some simple and inexpensive things.
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Free but critical: drink plenty of good purified water and stay active!
Naturally, eating well is the foundation. My basics are to avoid sugar and grains since sugars do an incredible amount of damage to our bodies. It’s now well established that eating organic is far healthier (now if only it was easier to buy organic food!).
As far as supplements go, Vitamin C is “old news” but still amazing! (see my previous article on Vitamin C) Magnesium is also very inexpensive and delivers great benefits. A good trace mineral complex is also well worth a few pennies a day. Cell membranes are incredibly important and virtually overlooked, so lots of fats such as choline, phosphatidylserine, EPA and DHA will do wonders to keep you young and healthy.
Should you spend a ton of money on expensive “miracle pills”? We’ll address some of those in future articles. Feel free to comment or send me a message if there is anything specific you’d like me to comment on.
What should your target lifespan be? Off hand, my recommendation would be to aim to live to 120 (in decent health). Most of us won’t make it but we should plan for it. The average life expectancy of 80 years is for the birds! We can do much better! Who wants to be average?
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