The secrets of longevity – Part 3

We have journeyed to the Japanese island of Okinawa and the Sardinian village of Ovodda, but now we are off to what can seem like the natural home of those seeking eternal life – California. Certainly no other nation spends so much time, money and effort in trying to look younger and live longer, but strangely enough their longest lived community subscribes to none of those ideas.

Loma Linda, in California, is a town that is home of a large community of Seventh Day Adventists and they are proving anyone can increase their chances of living a longer, healthier life – and it has nothing to do with your genetic inheritance.

On average, Seventh Day Adventists in the town live between five and 10 years longer than fellow citizens, and it makes them the longest living people in the US.

What is making the difference? For many of those living in Loma Lindo long life is a matter of their faith, and the simple explanation would be that the Church advocates no tobacco or alcohol and promotes a vegetarian diet. All of these are factors that will definitely improve health and prolong life, however,not all members follow this code and even they live significantly longer than average.

Research has previously shown that people that go to church regularly – whatever faith they have – live longer, and that fact has been known for the last 30 years. But why? According to Dr Gary Fraser, who is researching the community, it seems that regular churchgoers have significantly lower levels of stress hormones and so may be better equipped to cope with life’s upsets and challenges.

Dr Kerry Morton, who is involved in a longer-term study on Adventist health, certainly seems to agree. “Religion and connection to something higher than oneself, connection to the sacred,connection to a tight-knit religious community allows you to modulate your reactions and your emotions to believe there is a broader purpose. Therefore your body can stay in balance and not be destroyed by those stressors and traumas over time”.

Well there you have it, the three longest-lived communities in the world, and all with a different answer. Whether it’s faith, food, or family I think it comes down to attitude and how you feel about yourself and your life – whichever route you take make it a positive one.

Asthma spikes after thunder

Some interesting research has just come in from the University of Georgia Atlanta, and is worth passing on if you know someone with asthma. Apparently hospital emergency room data shows that there is about a 3% increase in asthmas cases coming for treatment the day after a thunderstorm.

The data was collected over the entire 20-county Atlanta region, and was studied initially because asthma is prevalent in the region so that even such a small relative increase could have a significant public health impact in the population.

It is certainly interesting and worth keeping an eye if you are susceptible to asthma attacks, but exactly why thunderstorms might have this effect remains unclear. However, one leading hypothesis is that pollen grains break up by osmotic shock in rainwater, releasing allergens, which are then spread by the gusty winds of the storm.

Oh really?!

Sometimes I really despair about the people who hand out research grants – then again sometimes I wish they would just give me the money because in a 30 second phone call I could give them the same conclusions for a lot less money – and so could you. This week’s prize goes to Aryeh D. Stein, M.P.H., Ph.D., of Emory University, Atlanta who has discovered that the if a baby is well fed for the first few years of life, they will be smarter as they grow up. No really? His study was based on children from poor and disadvantaged Guatemalan villages and he discovered that when said children were given a proper diet with sufficient protein and adequate nutrition they were able to think better – on average it related to the equivalent of 1.6 years of schooling, Having an inadequate diet has an effect on virtually every function of the body and certainly impacts the ability to think clearly – hunger can do that to you as you would have imagined the researchers could have guessed at for themselves. What really annoyed and upset me however was they based their trial on the children being provided twice daily with either fresco, a sugar-sweetened drink that provided 330 kcal/L but no fat or protein, or the dietary supplement atole — a traditional hot drink made with vegetable protein, dry skimmed milk, and sugar — that provided 6.4 g/100 mL protein and 900 kcal/L.

How do you justify giving deprived kids a sugar loaded drink with no benefit to them just to test a theory that anyone with half a brain could have predicted the results of? The supplemented kids who got atole showed improved growth and less stunting at age three years as well as better cognitive ability. Great, but what about the rest? This is research for its own sake and how it was justified is a mystery to me but presumably it made sense to the people who paid for it; namely the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Thrasher Fund and the Nestle Foundation. The latter was set up to provide initiates and supports research in human nutrition with public health relevance in low – and lower middle-income countries, and presumably to sell more of their products from coffee to baby milk – wonder if they also make fresco?

The researchers did not report any conflicts of interest.

Primary source: Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine

Source reference: Stein AD, et al “Nutritional supplementation in early childhood, schooling, and intellectual functioning in adulthood: a prospective study in Guatemala” Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 2008; 162: 612-618.

The secrets of longevity – Part 2

If you found last week’s item on the longevity of the Okinawans of Japan, then hopefully this week’s contribution will give you even more ideas on how to prolong your life as healthily and actively as possible. To do that we are heading off to Ovodda in Sardinia. In stark contrast to the Okinawans, the residents of Ovodda don’t count calories and meat is very firmly on the menu, while tofu and soya are not. That may seem like a more typical western diet, but this small town of just over 1,700 residents boasts five centenarians and even more remarkably, as many men live to 100 as women and that certainly bucks the statistical norm. The benefits of a Mediterranean diet are well known, and certainly the consumption of olive oil, more fruit, vegetables and fish is well-accepted as being a health basis for longevity, but this still does not account for the number in Ovodda and other parts of Sardinia. It apparently still applies when residents have actually emigrated between the ages of 20-40 as they still regularly get to be 100 years of age, according to the researchers. Chiefly responsible for this information is Professor Luca Deiana who has tested every single Sardinian centenarian and has come up with a surprising theory about why there are so many.

For hundreds of years families in Ovodda have lived in relative isolation from the rest of the living in the town today are descended from only a few original settlers. “Marriage among relatives is not the rule but there are some cases of this taking place,” says Professor Deiana. “From a genetic point of view, when this happens, there’s a higher probability of having genetic diseases, but also of having positive results like centenarians”. In Ovodda, this interbreeding actually seems to have enabled people to live longer. The limited gene pool has provided a unique opportunity to discover specific genes that are associated with long life. Professor Deiana has detected a number of unusual genetic characteristics that seem to link the centenarians of Ovodda. “One particular gene on the X chromosome seems to be faulty, failing to produce an enzyme known as G6PD. This can often have a negative impact on health, but in Ovodda it may well have had a positive effect. The role G6PD may play in living longer is now being researched further, but the professor is convinced the genetic elixir of life lies with the families of Ovodda. I am not suggesting you start thinking of marrying your cousin, but marrying into the Ovodda gene pool might not be a bad idea.

Statins – Children next?

Last week I raised concerns about the routine prescribing of statins, and now from the USA comes news that the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee has recommended routine screening of children, from 2 years old, for “high cholesterol”. Given the deterioration in children’s’ diets you may think that a good idea, but not when it is accompanied by the news that they are also recommending giving children as young as eight years old statin drugs. These drugs have never even been tested on children, never mind approved for their use – in fact not one single safety test has ever been conducted with children taking these powerful chemicals.

I am not going to repeat the side effects that I gave last week, but if they have such an impact on adults, can you imagine what they will do to children? Schools are having enough disciplinary problems as it is, without adding in children on drugs that can cause homicidal impulses and mental confusion. No one denies that more children are now presenting with high cholesterol levels, but surely the answer lies in controlling their diet and ensuring enough exercise? The main ‘culprits’ if a child is diagnosed with high cholesterol at the age of eight are the consumption of too great a quantity of these:

* Milk and dairy products
* Fried foods and trans fatty acids
* Processed meats and animal products

Nutritionists believe that virtually any child can be cured of high cholesterol in a matter of weeks by being fed a 100% plant-based diet, comprised entirely of non-processed foods, and including fresh, raw vegetable and fruit juices along with numerous superfoods such as apples, broccoli, wholemeal bread, salmon, bananas and brazil nuts. Simple, yes, and certainly better than putting a child on a drug regime that they could be kept on for years.

Progesterone use for endometriosis

Last week I talked about progesterone and mental health, and just like buses along comes another story about this key female hormone. I have myself written for the endometriosis society in the past about how progesterone can help with endometriosis, and now a study on female rhesus macaques monkeys at the the Oregon National Primate Research Center has brought more proof of the hormone’s effectiveness.

Apparently, female macaques in captivity are prone to endometriosis – a painful, debilitating condition where bits of tissue scattered around the pelvic cavity behave like uterine (endometrial) tissue, filling with blood and then releasing it. Conventional medicine hasn’t had much success in treating endometriosis safely and effectively, but Dr.John Lee, noting that women with endometriosis often get better when they are pregnant, recommended using high doses of natural progesterone and indeed, many of his patients found relief, though not a cure, by doing this.

In the Center’s study, seven monkeys with advanced endometriosis were injected with capsules that released progesterone continuously for up to 20 months. All of the monkeys showed significant benefit within the first two weeks and although two monkeys then got no further benefit, the other five continued to do well. If you know someone suffering from this painful condition it would be worth suggesting they talk to their doctor about obtaining natural progesterone in cream or sub- lingual form – don’t treat it with yam cream which converts insufficient progesterone in the body to be of use.

Natural progesterone cannot be obtained in the UK without a doctor’s prescription, but you can buy it over the internet and import it for your own use with no restrictions.

The secrets of longevity – Part 1

I imagine that you, like me, want to live as long as possible – but, I want to have a healthy, active life too. How to achieve that has been the subject of much research and debate, and I have found evidence of three different communities who seem to have achieved this. People on the remote Japanese island of Okinawa, in the small Sardinian mountain town of Ovodda and at Loma Linda in the USA live longer in these three places than anywhere else on earth.

At an age when the average Briton is predicted to die (77 years for men and 81 for women) – inhabitants of these three places are looking forward to many more years of good health. Often they’re still working in jobs as demanding as heart surgery.

Their reasons are not all the same, so I thought I would share their secrets with you over the next three weeks.

Let’s start with the Japanese island of Okinawa. With a population of one million, they have 900 centenarians, four times higher than the average in Britain or America. Even more remarkably, the region of Ovodda is the only place in the world where as many men as women live to be 100 years of age, which goes against the global trend of women outliving men.

There is one remarkable scientific fact that sets Okinawans apart from the rest of us, they actually age more slowly than almost anyone else on earth.

“The calendar may say they’re 70 but their body says they’re 50,” says Bradley Willcox, a scientist who is researching the extraordinary phenomenon. “The most impressive part of it is that a good lot of them are healthy until the very end.”

Finding the cause of their exceptional longevity is not simple but the spotlight has fallen on one hormone – DHEA. It’s a precursor of both oestrogen and testosterone and produced in the adrenal glands. While scientists don’t know what it does, they do know that the hormone decreases with age and levels decline at a much slower rate among the Okinawans.

Explanations for this seem most likely to be found in their diet as they not only eat more tofu and soya products than any other population in the world, but have what scientists refer to it as a rainbow diet. That is one that also includes a wide range of different vegetables and fruit, all rich in anti-oxidants.

That sounds familiar enough, but it’s what they don’t eat that may be at the heart of their exceptionally long lives.

The Okinawan’s most significant cultural tradition is known as hara hachi bu, which translated means eat until you’re only 80% full. In a typical day they only consume around 1,200 calories, about 20% less than most people in the UK. The ‘all you can eat’ buffet is not something that would appear in Okinawa, and this voluntary calorie restriction is not fully understood by scientists call it caloric restriction, but they think it works by sending a signal to the body that there is going to be a impending famine, sending it into a more protective, self-preservation mode.

“It’s this ability to trick their bodies into starvation that may be keeping Okinawans physiologically so young. It’s a stark contrast with the cultural habits that drive food consumption in other parts of the world,” says Mr Willcox – and he has studied them long enough, so he should know.

So, if you want to live longer, eat less. Start with smaller portions on a smaller plate, your body will thank you for it. If your family have expectations of an early pay out from your will, then they may of course not be quite so pleased!

Natural baby products

As you saw in last week’s item about shampoo, products for babies and children are not always as pure as we imagine them to be. If you do want to have an entirely natural, organic range of products then specialist online company Bebeco would be a good place to look.

They produce a nappy balm that is super sensitive on baby’s skin and contains only organic sunflower oil, cocoa butter, carrot oil, coconut oil, olive oil, and local beeswax. If your baby has a real problem with dry skin and eczema, then their problem skin cream helps soothe it with all-natural ingredients of organic sunflower oil, organic calendula petals, local beeswax, and lavender essential oil. If cradle cap is the problem then try their treatment oil with organic jojoba oil, organic calendula, marshmallow root, and almond oil. It also makes a lovely massage oil for baby, and presumably Mum too. www.bebeco.co.uk for details.

Oh, and by the way, on the subject of babies, it has always been know that breastfeeding gives much greater protection against infection and helps build the immune system, but now it turns out there is another good reason to keep off the bottle where possible.

A massive survey carried out by doctors of 13,889 children and their mothers has revealed that breastfed babies are more intelligent than those weaned on formula milk.

Of those mothers, around half had attended clinics promoting breastfeeding and 43% of them fed their babies only on breast milk until the age of three months, compared with 6.4% of women at other clinics that didn’t promote breastfeeding. At the age of six and a half, children who had been exclusively breastfed scored 7.5 points higher in verbal intelligence tests and 5.9 points higher in overall IQ tests.

As a significant number of babies are actually allergic to cow’s milk, this is another reason to add to the file of pluses for breastfeeding, where that is possible for mother and baby.

Statins – Saint or sinner?

Many of you will have heard of Patrick Holford, the UK’s leading nutrition expert, and I have known him for many years. Indeed I edited his Optimum Nutrition magazine for a while and always find what he has to say of interest.

The topic of statins has come up a lot recently, particularly when I have been giving talks on natural health, and there seems to be a lot of confusion. This is not surprising because every year there is always a ‘new’ wonder thing that will help us stay health without much willpower on our part, but will bring fairly large profits to the people manufacturing it.

Cynical? Maybe, but when you have written about health for as long as I have you see the cycle of celebration, doubt, debunking and then quietly disappearing for many so called ‘miracle’ cures.

New health guidelines issued recently say all adults aged 40 to 75 should be assessed for risks, including smoking, weight and blood pressure and those with at least a 20 per cent increased chance of a heart attack over the next 10 years should be offered treatment, usually statins. Patrick Holford takes a different view and completely disagrees with the routine prescribing of these drugs. I think what he has to say is important so I am quoting him directly here, and leaving you to make up your own mind.

“Statins work by blocking the production of cholesterol, which is a perfectly normal substance, and in the process, stops the body producing Co-Q10, a vital heart nutrient, causing harmful side effects. This was confirmed in research published last month in the journal Nature. As a consequence, statins are far from harmless.

The notion that cholesterol is linked with heart disease goes back over fifty years, along with the idea of bringing cholesterol levels down with a low fat diet to protect the heart. But both of these ideas have been strongly challenged. For example, plenty of studies show that only 50% of people who develop heart problems have high cholesterol, while a study in the BMJ in 2001 found no link between changing fat in the diet and heart disease.

The best known side-effect of statins involves muscles problems. The probable reason for this is that they stop the production of Co-Q10 which is found in all cells (especially those of the heart muscle) and is vital to energy production. In one study of 14 healthy people, 10 developed heart rhythm abnormalities when given statins. This, say some researchers, could explain the muscle weakness and also the memory loss some people experience.

Some practitioners recommend that anyone taking statins should also supplement with Co-Q10 and a warning on statin packets is now mandatory in Canada, saying that CoQ10 reduction ‘could lead to impaired cardiac function’.

In fact the closer you look, the more questionable the benefits become. You might assume that taking prophylactic statins would mean that you would live longer overall. But that isn’t what the studies show. The total number of heart attacks drops slightly but then the risk of dying from other things goes up slightly, so overall life expectancy stays the same.

How can you avoid statins? By doing everything you can to keep your heart healthy. You do that by the well- known – but little enough practiced – regime of eating well with plenty of fruit, vegetables and wholegrains in your everyday diet. Make sure you also include foods that are high in heart-protective Vitamin E, such as beans, olive oil and eggs and reduce the amount of sugary foods, refined carbohydrates and keep your stress levels as low as you can.

Instead of an expensive drug, try lowering your cholesterol levels and heart disease risk by raising your ‘good’ HDL cholesterol and lowering ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol. A simple, inexpensive way to do that is take a supplement of niacin (vitamin B3), and to further help prevent cardiovascular disease it is suggested that you include a CoQ10 supplement of around 90mg a day. The COQ10 will also help those who are already on statin drugs and wish to stay on them.

If you would like to know more about Patrick Holford’s work, his new book ‘Food is Better Medicine Than Drugs’ would be a good place to start. You can read about it here: Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs: Your Prescription for Drug-free Health

Progesterone’s role in mental health

Last week I talked about testosterone and this week there is more news on the hormone front – but this time about progesterone. This is one of the key reproductive hormones in women, but it also has a host of other functions; one of the most important being it’s effect on brain chemistry and function. Dr. John Lee, the American pioneer of natural progesterone usage for osteoporosis, once was quoted as saying famously said that if anyone in his family had a brain injury, he would slather them with progesterone cream. He said that over ten years ago, and as ever he was ahead of his time, as new research has vindicated what must have seemed a completely lunatic idea.

Sadly Dr Lee was not given the respect of his peers, but I was privileged to host several seminars for him in London and he was certainly one of the most generous and compassionate of men, as the many thousands of women who benefited from his research have proved. He has been vindicated on the brain chemistry front by a fellow doctor working in an ER department and who saw a lot of saw a lot of head injuries. He was curious about why brain injuries were worse in men than in women, and got approval to do a study in which brain injury patients were given injections of progesterone when they arrived in the ER. His research showed that those who received the progesterone did significantly better than those who didn’t and later studies have also shown the same result.

Around the same time, researchers discovered that progesterone was a key component of the myelin sheath that protects or insulates the nerves-so important in fact that progesterone is made in the myelin sheath. Other research showed that progesterone stimulates the brain’s GABA receptors, those feel-good, calming neurotransmitters. Now we know, according to this review paper, that “…progesterone has multiple non- reproductive functions in the central nervous system to regulate cognition, mood, inflammation, mitochondrial function, neurogenesis and regeneration, myelination and recovery from traumatic brain injury.” Furthermore, progesterone is everywhere in the brain: “Remarkably, PRs [progesterone receptors] are broadly expressed throughout the brain and can be detected in every neural cell type.”

Those who have experienced the mental fog of hormone imbalances – otherwise known as the ‘what did I come into this room for ‘syndrome – can now point to their brain and say, “It’s not me that’s confused, it’s my brain!”

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